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🥅 Ted Lasso: The Lasso Way. Manager of AFC Richmond. Empathetic leadership. A fictional interview.
🌟 Unfiltered: How Do Chiefs Of Staff Measure Success? Chiefs of Staff give us the juicy inside scoop on their success criteria.
🫡 So, What Does A Chief Of Staff Actually Do. The Pandora's Box of startup roles. We deep dive into the Chief of Staff.

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LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Michael Batko CEO at Startmate

Michael started his career in corporate (AMEX, PwC, KPMG) before he worked at two of the largest Australian marketplaces MadPaws, a marketplace for pet sitters, and Expert360, a marketplace for independent consultants. After taking Expert360 through a 14m Series B he joined Startmate, Australia’s most ambitious accelerator, as Head of Operations where he ran the program for the past 2 years and is now leading the organisation as CEO.

He has been the lead man in building Startmate into a powerhouse commonly referred to as one of the top 5 accelerators in the world. Sounds like a bit of a legend right?

Tell us about the problem Startmate solves? Why this?

The world is divided between talkers and doers. 99% of the world are talkers, justifying their inaction by ‘if I only had X’ or ‘I could totally do this’ or ‘wouldn’t it be great if X existed’ and worst of all often shooting down others’ ideas.

Startmate is for the 1% of doers. The people who dream big, who are wildly ambitious and desire to change the world against all odds and naysayers. We are the average of the five people we spend most time with. The community with the ambitious, the dreamers—who imagine new world and bring it to life.

Life is too short to be a bystander and much more fun if you surround yourself with eh people who crave change and make it happen.

What is your main day-to-day job as CEO?

When I was promoted to the CEO role 4 years ago, I felt equally excited and scary. As I thought about the role and the associated responsibility, my mind started spiralling into a deep, dark hole. I also pretty quickly realised that I had no idea what ‘being a CEO’ even meant. Fortunately, I have great mentors who helped me on my journey, especially Nick Crocker, Niki Scevak, Rachael Neumann and Robyn Denholm. They guided me on the CEO path, but frankly half the time I still don’t know what I’m doing.

For all CEOs out there, after reading lots and lots of blogposts about what CEOs do, here is my daily reminder on my own to-do list.

Firstly, setting the vision and strategy is your core responsibility—how are you changing the world? What are your building blocks to build strength along the way to get there?

However, even the best strategy will only work as long as you have the money to pay for it. It’s the CEO’s job to make sure the strategy brings in the required revenue or fundraise to support the strategy.

Then comes hiring—there’s nothing more important than hiring the right team. Making sure they not only fit but add to your culture, are technical superstars and complement the rest of the team.

The emotionally hardest part of the job is to keep yourself and the team focused and accountable to results. This is the hardest, loneliest and can be the most energy-draining part of the job. The only way to make this easier for yourself is to hire and develop absolute superstars and believe in them.

Lastly, communicate and over-communicate your vision so often that you feel sick that you keep repeating the same phrases over and over again. Spread your vision internally with the team and externally with customers, suppliers, investors and frankly anyone who will listen. Practice your one-liner and all the hard questions you inevitably receive every time as you keep repeating yourself.

Remember that even though you’ve said the same sentence a million times, your audience is hearing it for the first time. Evangelise as if it’s Day 1, every day.

💡 Note: If this framework sounds familiar it’s because I stole it from Batko, who stole if from another guy. And my mate stole it from me just this week.

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

I’m all about hiring the hungry not the proven and giving them all the autonomy to grow. My leadership style is very hands-off, providing lots of opportunities to take on more responsibility and grow, but that requires the right culture. We operate in a very high-trust, high-feedback environment with high psychological safety. The team holds each other accountable because we all know the goals we’re working towards and nobody wants to disappoint anyone else. The big pros are a sense of freedom over your work, your work hours and the how to get to the desired outcome.

The cons are that because it is such a high autonomy culture, decisions are made on the go which leads to problems if you’re not aligned. Another con is that people push themselves hard to achieve stretch goals, which is why it is important to be a strong advocate for work-life boundaries to balance that out.

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

Startmate has grown from a team of two to eighteen over the past four years. We’re roughly split across three customer groups; founders, investors and operators. And the supporting horizontals of finance, people, marketing and ops.

With such a small team, the delineation isn’t perfect, but that’s where our culture comes in. We all work towards the same mission and our common goals. My number of direct reporting sweet spot is four leaders, who I can support and develop well. More than that drains my energy quickly and I feel like I don’t do justice to each individual.

My direct reports are Phoebe our COO. She handles people, marketing, and ops. Maisy is our Head of Platform and handles founders and talent. Head of Investments Brady is also in my team. He takes everything investors and investments and lastly, Jason our Head of Finance and FundOps. Jason is finance and fund management.

They are a dream team of leaders where I’ve worked with each one of them for one to three years and established a real feedback culture with a lot of autonomy.

What is your North Star Metric inside of your company and how are you trying to improve it?

Our North Star is the percentage of companies that raise post-Accelerator. Everything at Startmate supports the North Star, some initiatives directly, others might seem further removed but are just as important to cement our position and long term success.

Our Fellowship programs—women, students, climate—bring thousands of ambitious individuals into the Startmate fold. Over 65% of which join or start a startup. We’re unearthing the truly hungry founders that nobody else is looking at, whilst playing the long game with those not ready to start a company straight away. We bring them into the Startmate community to immerse them in ambition.

When founder pairs are ready we help them get their companies off the ground in our pre-accelerator Launch Club. They get to validate the problem and talk to their first customers. Rapid feedback saves them months if not years of going down the wrong path.

The pathways all end up in the Accelerator selection process, where out of thousands of applications, we get to invest in the top 3%. This is an incredibly impressive bunch of founders with wild ideas and rapid execution. Because of the tight funnel it directly affects our confidence of being able to work towards our North Star metric.

The Accelerator counter-intuitively does not directly start with our North Star though. For the first 10 weeks we tell our founders not to talk to investors—only customers. Customer conversations are really the foundation of whether you have a solid business and will determine whether you can fundraise. Towards the end of the program the North Star comes to a head, as we prepare the founders in an intense, two-week fundraising sprint. We surround them with hundreds of angels and our First Believers program at an exclusive investor demo day, then the big community demo day.

Our work on the North Star starts all the way at the beginning; unearthing, seeing, picking and investing in the most ambitious founders. That’s the majority of our work. And it can be so easily overshadowed with the final much more tangible part of fundraising support.

How do you build culture?

We celebrate weirdness, bringing your whole self to work. I am the first one to bring my idiosyncrasies. You are encouraged to bring your full self to work as it is so much more fun to just be as you are and not put on a fake persona.

We’re fully leaned into a remote-first culture, everything at Startmate is built and designed for it from our tools, systems, meetings to workplace. It gives everyone ultimate flexibility. Our major lesson was that in-person interactions are crucial to build a strong trust culture. So, we’re leaning into that and fly the whole team to the same location every quarter for an offsite. The time in between sessions and unstructured social activities is more important than the strategy sessions. These are the times that the team remembers fondly and allows us to build the deepest cross-team connections.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire all-star talent?

We’re a very transparent organisation, post a lot on socials and publish a monthly company update with all our good, bad and uglies. One of our culture principles is to increase your surface area for luck to strike and we do that all year round, even when we’re not hiring.

That hopefully shows and attracts people who want to be themselves and work hard like us but in a fun environment. We are in a very lucky position in that we run Fellowship programs which are designed to help anyone transition into startup jobs. Throughout these, Fellows experience our culture and way of working, which often inspires. That means we post on mostly our community channels and social media and only rely on inbound applications.

Referrals are always highly appreciated, but we do our first-stage application reviews via Applied, which ensures anonymous screening to avoid any bias in our hiring decision-making.

How do you set goals?

We use a framework called NCTs. First, we set the company-wide direction. Then the leadership team sets the narrative that fits into the company-wide direction. Then finally, we work with the sub-teams to set the commitments and tasks of how to get us closer to our ambition.

Goal setting is highly company and culture-specific. We found our cadence in six-monthly goals. Three months was too short as it feels like you never stop setting goals. Six-months feels natural for us as we run most of our programs twice a year. It breaks the year up nicely and gives the team enough time to remember and go hard after goals.

💡 Note: I really enjoy Batko’s How do you CEO series. You will too I think.

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

We’re a hybrid team. To make it work we’re structured as if we’re running fully remotely. All meetings are Zoom meetings and friendly for timezones from Auckland to Perth. Most of us are based in our three offices though in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

If I were to give one tip here, it would be: don’t try to build a hybrid culture. If you have a remote team, lean into going remote-first. That means that even if we have conversations in the office, we always write them up on Slack for everyone in the team to see. Instead of shoulder tapping we ask questions in publicly visible channels. You never want the team to feel left out and deteriorate the trust. You want everyone to feel included.

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

A heap of reflection really. I reflect weekly about work, using a system called the EdroloOS system. I also reflect on my personal life using another system that I learned from Nick Crocker. I reflect monthly on how I’m tracking towards reaching my goals professionally and personally as part of an email I sent to my closest thirty family members and friends. And lastly, I reflect annually on how I’m tracking towards my 10-year goals as part of a Startmate and my personal annual review.

This will sound excessive to most people, but it is much easier than it sounds. It all starts with the habit of weekly work and personal reflections. Everything after that is roll-up of reflections that become more and more refined and tested against my long term goals, whether I’m working towards what makes me happy and the impact I want to achieve in my life.

And that's it! You can also read more of Michael's thoughts on Batko OS and if you are intro productivity check out his Puddle Pod course.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

I actually found this breakdown of selling via email pretty fascinating.

And shout out to the team at Vow for being the most ambitious startup on the planet. Incredible stuff.

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 Sidebar - a leadership program I use to accelerate my growth as a CEO.

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

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️