Tom Smalley

Many Aussie/Kiwi founders eventually face the decision of: what market should I go to next? Often, the answer they land on is the US. The key decision points then become: 1) when should I enter the US? 2) how should I break in? I spent the last 2 weeks with US VCs in San Francisco and New York, exploring those two questions and understanding what they've seen work and what they've seen fail. If you're in the early stages of building a venture scale business, I wrote the below as a simplified guide for thinking through those two decision points: https://lnkd.in/gY2JzByV

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Join me at our next course June 6 & 7 as we delve into the changing Angel Investment landscape and what it takes to build a successful Angel Investment Portfolio.

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[HIRING] Help me out here LinkedIn - looking for a legend who will help hundreds of founders ❤️ 💥 FOUNDERS ASSOCIATE #1 Find the most ambitious early-stage founders to invest in ANZ #2 Your tools: run Launch Club and Buildmate to help hundreds of founders start and grow their startups every year >> which feeds back into #1 Link in the comments! Give this a like or tag a legend 🔥

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Well done Capital Brief and Andrew Cornell. Good interview. Hits all the points. For all the Australian #SaaS #BaaS #FinTech #InsurTech #PropTech #StartUp #Founders out there ... I don't know about you but after chatting with more than a few Australian banking venture capital funds you get the vibe that they're are generally more cautious than traditional VCs due to their ties to financial institutions and regulatory requirements. They favor investments in later-stage companies with proven business models. In other words, only founders with an A series or above need apply. That being said; comparitavely to the other Australian Banking VC Managing Directors/Partners, Amanda brings a genuine no BS, I'll give you quick no and let me tell you why or yeah that'll work, NYC vibe to the table. #BankingVC #VentureCapital #VCInvesting #InvestmentStrategy #FinTechInvestment #VCFunding #BankingInvestments #VCPortfolio #StartupFunding #VentureFunding #FinancialInvestments #VCPartners #InvestmentApproach #TechInvestments #VCStrategy #FundingRounds #EarlyStageInvesting #VCInsights #InvestmentFunds #VCDeals #InvestmentTrends #BankingInnovation #VCNetwork #TechStartups #VCAdvisors #InvestmentOpportunities #VCFinance #CapitalAllocation #InvestmentManagement #VentureCapitalists NAB Ventures Amanda Angelini

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After six years of bootstrapping - I’m excited to share that Slice has raised a $17.5 million equity and debt round led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA) and Roadnight Capital. Our journey began over a decade ago - when I met my co-founder Yannick D. while working in a big bank's Collections and Hardship department. We spoke to numerous customers who had used credit cards to pay for a trip overseas - often for a family reunion or a cultural event. These customers wanted to be financially responsible, but because they had used a product with such a high interest rate, they were falling behind and feeling powerless. We wanted to create a product that would allow customers to book their flights, and then repay in manageable instalments before their trip. Our vision was to help customers access travel - while also helping them to budget sensibly and avoid financial hardship. In 2018, we launched our first product - PayLater Travel. In the beginning, we spoke to every customer on the phone - we manually made bookings, and paid upfront with our own credit cards (the irony!). Despite the janky product, our customers loved being able to lock in flight prices and having the ability to pay it off before they travel. We knew we were onto something! But behind the scenes, there have been plenty of unglamorous moments. When the pandemic hit in 2020, we lost 95% of our revenue overnight. We were terrified - but we were also too busy to feel sorry for ourselves. We hunkered down, made hundreds of calls to airlines, and ensured maximum refunds and credits for our customers. To survive COVID, we had to dig deep. Limping along wasn’t an option - unless we did something decisive, we’d slowly run out of cash.  With our backs against the wall, we decided to launch in the US. I had to sell my car and Yannick refinanced his home. In other words - we bet the farm. What happened next is… too long for a LinkedIN post! I’ve shared an expanded version of the story in our blog, Instalments by Slice (link in comments). Fast forward to 2024 - I feel deeply fortunate to have secured an additional $10 million debt facility from Roadnight Capital alongside a Seed investment led by Peak XV Partners. What's more - I feel blessed with a wonderful team, supportive friends, and to have helped 70,000 customers go on wonderful trips and create core memories. The best part - we’re only getting started! There are still millions of customers worldwide, falling into unsustainable debt and we’re here to do our part to change that! To read more about Slice and our first round of external funding, check out this article in The Australian Financial Review - #venturecapital #startup #fintech #funding #slice

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Why GP Carry Economics for Syndicates are Superior to Venture Funds Sharing #2 of 5 learnings Zachary Ginsburg posted via Last Money In Media yesterday on reflecting back after 500 SPVs completed. 500 SPVs is not a typo :) – “The carry economics are arguably far superior for Syndicate GPs than the carry economics for fund GPs. We previously put out an article discussing the economics of venture, and the reality is that while venture can be the best performing major asset class the returns are skewed to the top funds with the average fund barely returning 1x capital back. There is no major asset class that has dispersion of returns quite as high as venture capital. This underscores the benefits for Syndicate GPs. For one, it means the time to actually receive carry income can be extremely quickly. Despite starting Calm Ventures in 2020, we had one nice exit in 2021 (~10x outcome in 12 months). While the returns from that investment were only ~10% of the capital deployed to that point, we still received carry (over a half million dollars). In a traditional fund if you returned only ~10% of capital back, you would not be seeing a dollar in carry from that sale. To further underscore the GP benefit, as mentioned, around half of funds return <1x DPI. Meaning half of GPs aren’t seeing a dollar in carry from their funds. You can have a <1x fund in SPVs and still receive an enormous amount of carry distributions. To take the extreme case, let’s say we invest $1M each into 100 investments via SPVs over the course of 3 years - so $100M invested total. 99 of those investments go to zero and one 100x’s or returns $100M. While LPs in aggregate didn’t make any money (we received $100M in distributions and invested $100M), the GP actually makes almost $20M dollars (20% carry x $99M in returns on the single performing investment). It’s worth pointing out that while the carry economics are superior, the fee economics are substantially worse for Syndicate GPs, who often aren’t drawing any consistent income or salary.” Link to full post w/4 other key learning in comments. -- Powered by Sydecar and Forge, Last Money In Media is the most actionable venture capital newsletter. Written by Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis, global syndicate leaders with 800+ SPVs closed.

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Which international VC has invested most actively in NZ? Here's the slide we prepared recently for our Investor Masterclass. Let me know who I'm missing. Four more sessions coming up including: Valuation, Terms, Governance, and War Stories. Join the fun by registering here: https://lnkd.in/ghJJpdR4

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Ecstatic to announce Titanium Ventures' investment in Samsara Eco, the climate tech innovator enabling infinite plastic recycling, as part of their US$65M Series A+! Global emissions from plastic production could triple to account for one-fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget. Plastic creation generated 2.24 gigatons of planet-heating pollution in 2019, or as much as 600 coal-fired power plants - 5% of all global carbon emissions. Samsara Eco has led world-first innovations in infinite recycling, pioneering the ability to recycle plastics including nylon 6,6 and polyester. Earlier this year, in partnership with its first textile partner, Samsara Eco unveiled the world’s first enzymatically recycled nylon 6,6 product (sweet jackets which we bought online!) and also helped to introduce lululemon’s first product made from enzymatically recycled polyester. Whilst I write this, I am wearing one of the first jackets in the world that has been recycled! We’re excited to see the impact they will have in the years to come. Other impressive investors include: Temasek, Main Sequence, lululemon, DCVC, Hitachi Ventures and Wollemi Capital. https://lnkd.in/gKkg2mS3

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Happy Wednesday everyone! 🎥 Trailer Alert 🎥 In our next episode of Unlocking Venture Capital, Sydney speaks with Michaela Gordon, former VC at The Westly Group, a firm with an AUM of $800M. Michaela is also the founder of The Early, a must-read newsletter for early-career founders and investors, providing them with actionable insights and valuable resources to navigate the startup world. 🚀 In this upcoming episode, hear from Michaela as she will: 🌟 Discuss the evolution of her newsletter, The Early, from a simple job board to a handy resource for early-career VCs, and how her position at the helm of this newsletter gave her an unparalleled overview of the Venture Capital space, with insights that go far beyond what a regular analyst would be able to see. 🌟 Reveal lesser-known aspects of VC recruiting, emphasizing the importance of sourcing abilities over traditional financial skills. 🌟 Highlight emerging trends in venture capital, including her focus on innovating antiquated industries like hardware design. 🌟 Provide valuable advice for aspiring VCs on building relationships, creating content, and navigating the self-directed nature of analyst roles. 🌟 Share her inspiring journey from the world of professional tennis to that of venture capital, highlighting her unique perspective as a young VC who pursued two seemingly disparate dream careers and managed to excel in both. 🌟 Explore the growing trend of angel investing. Michaela discusses at length the reasons for its growing appeal and why it serves as a way for people who are eager to take control of their financial future and create wealth by investing earlier in their careers. 🌟 Offer insight into the changing VC landscape, comparing the booming job market of two years ago to today's more competitive environment. This upcoming episode will be a must-listen for anyone looking to break into venture capital or gain insights into the industry from an early-career perspective. Michaela's unique journey and fresh outlook offer invaluable lessons for both newcomers and seasoned professionals in the VC world. The full episode will be available on our YouTube and Spotify this upcoming Monday. 📅📺 You can find the link to Michaela's newsletter in the comments down below 📰😇 #VentureCapital #AngelInvesting #WomeninVC #Startups #Entrepreneurship #VCTrends #Investing #Tech

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Our team at 1835i do a lot of work to validate potential partnerships before any investment. This 'partner-to-invest' model maximises three critical success factors: 1. For ANZ (our sole LP and sponsor) we only invest in partners that can deliver real value back to ANZ and its customers. 2. For our Investee Partners, they have gone under the hood, engaged key stakeholders and developed conviction towards the ANZ partnership and investment. 3. For 1835i, we have done the work up-front to maximise 'portfolio success' i.e. deliver outcomes successfully and create value for both ANZ and the Partner. Read more about our approach in the recent Capital Brief article featuring our CEO Justin Greenstein.

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A little over five months ago, I wrote a post about the mission behind Electrifi Ventures (see link in comments), a Climate Tech-focused angel syndicate I’m running alongside GrowthStream, an advisory business in the energy transition space. By sharing my time and knowledge with both seasoned and aspiring investors, I aim to amplify our collective climate impact through angel investing. Fast forward to today, I am thrilled to share with you our incredible journey to being one of the largest independent Angel Syndicates, with over 250 Angel Investors / LP’s across ANZ! In less than a year since starting Electrifi Ventures, we are proud to have invested in seven industry-transforming climate startups, and we are backing these companies with conviction: Sicona Battery Technologies: a game changer for the uptake of Electric Vehicles, is a deep tech company creating advanced materials that improves the overall performance of lithium-ion batteries. Sicona believes it is able to increase charging speed by 40% and deliver 20% more range on EVs.  GOTERRA: an autonomous circular food waste management infrastructure that is integrated with existing systems to create enduring industry solutions.  Harvest B: a food technology business that develops and manufactures plant proteins with animal protein-like textures that are easier to consume and more affordable for everyone.  NRN - National Renewable Network: a connected network of solar and storage systems that radically changes the way renewable energy is delivered for energy retailers. Stealth DAC Innovator: an innovative technology that is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, at scale, in a cost-effective way, via Direct Air Capture (DAC). Threadlet: an energy efficiency platform that aims to automatically identify SME energy usage and switch business energy accounts to the best energy rate provider for every venue, every month. 📣 Would love to invite anyone interested to learn more (or invest) in innovative solutions tackling the climate crisis to join the Electrifi Ventures angel syndicate (link in comments).

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What's Hot in 2024? 🚀 Later Stage VC Investment in Australia and New Zealand. While Artificial Intelligence 🤖 is no doubt the current "buzz" for 2024, I was curious to dive deeper into which sectors are trending this year and where later-stage VCs are focusing their investments to date in 2024. 📊 Based on publicly available data, later-stage VCs are showing renewed interest in Australian and New Zealand companies, particularly in fintech 💳, healthtech 🏥, and cleantech 🌱. 🔍 While not a full picture, as some notable transactions are missing from this analysis (due to confidentiality), it’s clear that the sector is bouncing back and poised for strong growth. 📈 NB: The Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning segment reflects a duplication and consolidation across all sectors for comparative purposes. Source: Pitchbook

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Warwick D. raises an old chestnut in his post below we hear all too often often. But is it fair? I have now personally met with over 200 founders in the past year and spent considerable time with each of them. 195 of them fall short in some or all of the following typical areas: 1) validated market opportunity. Is it a problem paying customers actually want fixed and what compelling evidence do you have to support this. 2) either poorly constructed, untested or non existent Commercialisation strategy. That is, the GTM strategy, pricing, product roadmap that supported the GTM. Most are generic unfocused strategies. 3) they have built what should be correctly called a POC and not an MVP. 4) and worse in my view, few can articulate what core metrics will drive accelerated growth for their business and why. I could go on, but the fact that so many are weak in these areas doesn’t help with their prospects for raising capital from investors. While I can’t speak for other VC’s, we build conviction by weighing in on those opportunities we like and where we think we can help in these key areas. It’s also a chance to see how well we might work with a founder prior to any possible investment. My own experience is that all too often little value is provided in meetings by investors to founders. We seek to be different by trying to impart value in each meeting, including asking the hard questions or pointing out our view of the likely challenges that lay ahead that their strategy should address. Being a founder is tough and being challenged isn’t always welcomed. But as I have been saying for decades to my teams, we can’t do anything with praise but we can with negative or challenging feedback. This is all to often where the pots of gold can be found! What do you think? #founders #capitalraising #venturecapital

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📣 Excited to wrap up 2024 by helping more Australian founders crack the US market - without learning everything the hard way! This Thursday, I'm joining forces with Jason Booth from TaxStudio to share the essentials of US expansion - from flip-ups to tax strategies that help support sustainable growth. It will be a power hour to help founders gain insights that could save years of trial and error. We'll break down the complexities into actionable steps, sharing experiences and practical tips. Join us if you're planning your US journey for 2025. Your future self will thank you! 🚀 Details in comments ⬇️ #Startups #Scaleups #GlobalExpansion #USMarket #2025Growth

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The future of venture capital is...This is the question I was tasked with tackling at Innovation Bay's INSPIRE event today. It's a big topic - Ian Gardiner and I started with some back-of the napkin maths about the next ten years of ANZ VC:  - There's $2.5bn dry powder in the ecosystem - Meaning a return of $7.5bn is required (assuming 3x return) - Which will require ~ $100bn of Enterprise Value (assuming ~5-10%% exit stake) That final number may seem like a lot, but ANZ software has already generated over $300bn of Enterprise Value over the last two decades. And we are seeing 30-40 tech companies hit $100m valuation each year. Some of these will eventually become $1bn+ outcomes These numbers make me excited about what's to come in the next ten years —more Aussie and Kiwi innovation creating tech companies that are making a dent on the global stage. Thanks @Innovation Bay for having me and Phaedon Stough for the photo!  

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Over the next two weeks I'll be interviewing many of Australia's top Investors such as... 🦄 Airtree 🦄Rampersand 🦄Scale Investors Pty Ltd 🦄Tribe Global Ventures and a handful more :) 💯 Off the back of that, I'll be running a virtual workshop about using the benchmarks we find with those Investors to reverse engineer your milestones and set yourself up for successful future fundraising. If you want to come along here's the link (Ideal for early-stage startups thinking of a future raise)!: https://lnkd.in/g7bucad8 🧠 What you'll learn: Discover how to set and achieve key milestones to position yourself for future funding. 📊 Learn to use milestone updates to build gradual, meaningful connections with investors, rather than a high-pressure pitch. 🤝

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How much equity should your company carve out for your people? Equity benchmarking data is notoriously difficult to get, especially for Australian startups, but we take a lot of influence from our US cousins. Carta has showed up with the goods and shared two key pieces of insight on startup equity. 1️⃣ ESOP pool size by stage of company 2️⃣ Pool size change over the last 2 years What are they seeing in 2024? 🌱 Seed companies • 21.8% (75th %ile) • 14.2% (50th %ile) • 10.1% (25th %ile) 🪴 Series A companies • 20.6% (75th %ile) • 15.3% (50th %ile) • 11.1% (25th %ile) 🌿 Series B companies • 21.2% (75th %ile) • 16.8% (50th %ile) • 13.0% (25th %ile) 🌲 Series C companies • 21.8% (75th %ile) • 17.7% (50th %ile) • 14.7% (25th %ile) How has this changed since 2022? Not a lot really. The median has stayed fairly stagnant, with a 1-1.5% variance, meaning total cap table has stayed largely unchanged for the average company. Top quartile Seed startups got way more generous in 2024, jumping from 19.8% of total cap table in 2022 to 21.8% in 2024 📈 Are early/riskier startups having work harder (issue more equity) to lure away talent from secure seeming companies? This trend reverses for more mature companies and the top quartile at Series C dropped from 22.9% of total cap table in 2021 to 21.8% 📉 Maybe this suggests they can get away with outlaying less equity because talent isn't going anywhere. Fascinating stuff. What is your take? — If you like this content, repost this to your network and follow me Matt McFarlane for more.

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This is nuts! Putting a barrier to exit through M&A will have profound downstream implications on startup funding, especially in AgriTech. The Australian Government are proposing that acquisitions by companies with turnover of $200 Million + will require regulatory approval. This policy will put Australia at a disadvantage, as it is yet another reason for the best companies and technologies to seek capital and exits overseas. This approach cuts the capital cycle for new innovation and has the opposite effect on promoting competition, as it creates a barrier for new solutions to access the full life cycle of funding and liquidity. I would argue that the acquisition of technology through M&A is actually what we need to incentivise, to make larger Australian companies more globally competitive.

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Who are the NZ venture capital leaders in 2024? Which New Zealand funds are LEADING investment into pre-seed and seed stage companies? Below, I have provided a summary of these investors. Have I missed any key players? Are there any included that shouldn't be? Note: I have excluded any funds that have not made an investment in the past 12 months, based on available evidence. Blackbird Cure Kids Ventures Even Capital GD1 (Global From Day One) Icehouse Ventures Motion Capital Movac Nuance Connected Capital NZ Growth Capital Partners NZVC Outset Ventures Pacific Channel Phase One Ventures Soul Capital WNT Ventures

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