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⚡️ How Sidebar Went From Zero To One. Launching a startup from scratch is hard. Here is the breakdown of how Sidebar went about it.
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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

We are close to passing 35k subs now with the newsletter, which is reason to celebrate. But I also know that things have been getting loose lately. I love writing content about anything and everything; deep dives, interviews, zero to one, Ted Lasso, Game of Thrones etc..

But next week I will be sending out a survey to make sure this newsletter is the newsletter you want as the reader. So stand by for that. In unrelated news, check out this tweet. This is easily the great fundraising announcement I’ve seen.

Things at Athyna are going great. Really strange that we are growing really fast in two areas: engineering roles for enterprise tech, and Content Assistant roles for small business and early stage founders. If either of these roles sound like a fit give me a shout and we’ll hook you up. Anyway, here is Elicia.

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Elicia McDonald - Partner at Airtree

Elicia is a Partner at Airtree, a venture capital firm backing Aussie and Kiwi founders building the iconic technology companies of tomorrow. As one of the largest and most active early-stage investors in Australia and New Zealand, Airtree’s 105+ portfolio features the region’s breakout tech companies, including Canva, Go1, Employment Hero, Pet Circle, Immutable and Linktree.

Before Airtree, Elicia worked in enterprise sales at LinkedIn and a B2B SaaS start-up in Sydney. Elicia started her career in investment banking and has a Bachelor of Laws (First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) from the University of Sydney.

What is your main day to day job as Partner at Airtree?

My job as an investor is to meet with founders, make investment decisions, and support our existing portfolio companies as they scale. I also have broader leadership responsibilities across Airtree as one of seven Partners. I love that there's a lot of context-switching in my day-to-day job. It’s impossible to get bored. Technology is ever-changing, and our portfolio and Airtree ourselves are constantly growing and evolving.

I have a few set meetings every week, including our Partner meeting on Monday to discuss firm-wide leadership matters and our Investment Committee meeting on Tuesdays to discuss potential investments. I'll generally meet a couple of new prospective founders each day while also running diligence processes alongside an Investment Manager for any startups progressing through the investment pipeline. We work as a deal team to write an investment memo, which includes everything from customer calls to an analysis of a startup's financial model. Once we decide to invest, we work alongside those founders for up to 10 years, so my day-to-day job often involves supporting my portfolio companies. This is a mixture of board meetings, regular catch-ups, and generally being available for any ad-hoc support they may need.

What does your team look like? Who are your direct reports?

On the leadership front, I'm one of seven Partners at Airtree and we've got ~40 people overall, split across our investment, platform, finance and operations teams. I sit within our investment team and work closely with our Investment Managers to form a deal team when we're working through an investment process.

I have one direct report, Dave Nemes, who is Airtree's Head of Platform. Our Platform team spans Talent, Marketing, PR, Community, Events, and Portfolio Success. They're tasked with growing and supporting our portfolio and the broader ecosystem through networks, resources, and programs that give founders an unfair advantage. We've invested a lot in this function, and it's been great to see it grow and evolve over time—it didn't even exist when I first started at Airtree.

Explain your philosophy around leadership? How do you think about it?

I'm a big believer in leading by example, demonstrating empathy and vulnerability and being authentic. I hate the idea of ‘this is how it was for me, so others need to experience it too.’ I saw that a lot when I was in banking, and it means things never change, and you never make progress. As a leader, I reflect on how I wanted to be treated in my early career and what made me feel valued, motivated and engaged. I aspire to create the kind of work environment that draws out the best in people and helps them achieve their full potential.

I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the book The Fives Dysfunctions of a Team which made me think a lot about how you cultivate relationships and teams with a high level of trust, accountability, commitment and care for collective goals.

I love working with hard-working, capable people with a great attitude. I put a lot of trust in my colleagues and give them autonomy to decide the best way to achieve an outcome. I have zero desire—and frankly, time—to micromanage! I would prefer to hold people accountable to their outputs vs trying to manipulate the inputs.

What is your North Star metric inside of your company and why?

We have two key stakeholders in our business; the founders we invest in and the investors who trust us to deliver great returns on their capital. Delivering best in class returns to our investors is ultimately how we're measured as a fund manager. We achieve that north star by winning the right to partner with the most ambitious Aussie and Kiwi founders and helping them build iconic technology companies. The ultimate success for us means building a generational investment company that outlasts us all, creates fun and fulfilling careers for exceptional talent and, along the way, helps to make our world a better place. 

How do you set goals?

As a company, we've iterated on this over the years, and we've made some mistakes along the way, which is all part of the journey. One of our values is ‘Making new mistakes’, so we're continually thinking through how we can further improve this process.

We set OKRs at a company and team level each financial year, so we're in the thick of it right now. Some years, our objectives don't change too wildly, but we focus on the key results related to new activities we think will make a material difference rather than just BAU and then check in on these quarterly.

Outside of work, I don't have a super structured goal-setting framework in my personal life. The closest thing is an anniversary book that my husband and I fill out each year on our wedding anniversary. It looks back on the highs and lows of the previous year and the top 3 goals we want to achieve together over the next year. This is actually a good reminder that we need to fill it out for this year.

How do you build culture?

Culture is so important. You cannot build culture by simply writing a set of values; you have to consistently make decisions against those values and use them as guiding principles. Leaders must demonstrate culture and lead by example.

At Airtree, we build and maintain culture by hiring in line with our values, celebrating behaviour that aligns with our values and calling out behaviour that doesn't. Tactically, our performance reviews have two scores: one for performance and one for culture. You cannot be a top performer at Airtree by simply doing your job if the way you go about doing it has a negative impact on our culture.

In terms of how we created our values, a few years ago, we did an exercise with our team to develop them. This collaborative process made our values so much more than just words written in a document; there was a real sense of shared ownership and alignment. We're going to revisit and potentially refresh our values as part of our 10-year anniversary this year. It's good hygiene to revisit them every so often to make sure they still accurately capture the culture we want to build.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire All-Star talent?

Our strategy varies by the team and role, but a priority across all teams is to make our hiring opportunities as accessible and open to everyone. We don't have a huge volume of open roles but when we do have an opening, we share it far and wide using our network, headhunting, posting on our social channels and jobs board, and sharing in our newsletter and other communities to attract a diverse candidate pool.

From an investment team perspective, the interview process involves a screening call, interview, case study, and meet-and-greets with the team to assess cultural fit. Our case study is a mixture of a take-home and in-person task so we can test someone's deep thinking and analytical skills and how they interact and respond in person.

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

We run hybrid, and you'll find some of the teams are in 2-3 days a week, and others, like the Partners and the investment team, are generally in 4 days a week. We think this is the best way to balance how individuals like to work with sharing knowledge and learning, particularly for those earlier in their careers. A hybrid arrangement also helps us to build culture. We run a catered lunch with the whole team on Tuesdays and a weekly Team Time meeting, plus drinks and nibbles on Thursday afternoons to share updates across the business and bring everyone together.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I maintain a positive perspective. So much of life is about how you frame things. There's a quote I like: "We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses." I'm a glass-half-full person, and I suspect most venture investors and founders are eternal optimists. There is so much that can go wrong in early-stage startups that to dedicate your career to founding one or to build the conviction to invest; you have to be able to see past all the things that could go wrong and instead focus on what could happen if it goes right.

I get the best out of myself when I'm feeling positive, engaged, and valued, and I can put my skills to work to have a genuine impact on others. I also need balance and I'm lucky that one of our core values at Airtree is ‘There's more to life.’ If I work 24/7, I won't get the best out of myself professionally or personally. I don't want to be defined solely by my career; it's important to me to have a full life outside of work.

Is there anything I should have asked you? Something you do uniquely well?

I'm good at compartmentalising things, easily switching contexts, and juggling lots of different things at once. This comes naturally to me, and it's been incredibly helpful in this job where I need to context switch so much! It's also a crucial skill to navigate the transition as I switch between work and home life so I can be present and engaged.

And that's it! You can find Elicia on LinkedIn or, If you're interested in working at Airtree or one of their portfolio companies, check out their jobs board.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

If you’re on the hunt for some real talk on building a high-performance culture at your startup, check out this episode of The Startup Podcast with Patty McCord, the author of Netflix’s famous culture deck.

They cover everything from the famous Netflix 'keeper test' to the importance of ditching 'HR theater.' This episode has great insights on treating employees like adults, giving honest feedback, and fostering a workplace where everyone is geared up to excel.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Want to work together? Here are the ways I can help:

1. Hiring global talent: If you are hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it for up to 80% off check out my startup Athyna. 🌏

2. Want to see my tech stack: See our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna you check them out here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investor and leaders in tech. 👀 

And that’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡 

P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter for more content.