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INTERVIEW 🎙️

Phoebe Pincus, CEO at Startmate

Phoebe Pincus is the CEO of Startmate, the Australian Accelerator and fund that writes A$120,000 first checks at a A$1.5 million post-money valuation and runs founders through a 12-week program ending in a Demo Day and a week in San Francisco. She joined in 2021 as Chief of Staff, became COO two years later, and took the top job in December 2025 when Michael Batko stepped down after eight years at the helm. Before Startmate, she was General Manager at Elevate Education, where she ran a team of more than 350 people across five product lines. Startmate has now backed over 220 companies with first checks, raised more than $50M across its funds, and built an alumni network of more than 300 founders. The Summer '26 cohort, the first announced under her leadership, split $2.28M across 19 companies and 42 founders.

Startmate has spent years being slightly hard to define. It ran an Accelerator, but it also ran fellowships, community programs, and at one point described itself on LinkedIn as a school. Phoebe's answer to that has been to cut. Community programs gone, the follow-on fund shelved, the whole team reorganized around a plain statement that Startmate is a fund and will succeed the way all funds succeed. Those are uncomfortable calls to make in your first year in a job you inherited from someone who held it for eight years, and they make her unusually good at what focus actually costs. She also co-hosts Cheeky Run Club, a running podcast and community she started with her friend Anna Coldham that has passed a million downloads, which says a lot about how she thinks about building something from nothing.

What problem does Startmate solve for founders?

Almost existentially, we're the first people to tell founders that what they're doing is worthwhile and that they're onto something. Think about what that stage actually feels like. You're quitting your job, trying to build something from scratch, trying to solve some big problem that's been bugging you, and you're sticking your neck out to suggest you might be the one to solve it. So the first person who comes back and tells you they agree, thinks you're amazing, and wants to help you get there has such an impact on your confidence. It validates what you've been working on.

Meanwhile, you might have friends and family telling you that you're crazy and that you should stick with your safe job. It's almost a stamp of approval. It's your first yes, your first real validation that there's something here. For founders at the stage we get involved, it's all still a bit theoretical up until that point. They want to do this, but they're also wondering whether they're the right person and whether it's even possible.

Practically, I'd split it into three buckets. The first is first-principles company building, and helping founders avoid the 90% of mistakes early founders make. That means refining and sharpening who your customer is, exactly and specifically. What exact problem you're solving for them. How you're solving it in a way that's differentiated from other people. And if you don't know the answers yet, how do you validate and get the information you need? When we can solve that layer for a founder, they move faster and in the right direction, and they're much more likely to build something that takes off.

The second thing would be connections, which are so important to building a successful startup. That might be founder peers in the cohort, coming together with other people who understand what you're doing and can help you along the way. Mentors, obviously, ex-founders who have done it before you and can share. Even the SF trip, connections in the U.S. Very practically, this is an industry built on relationships and relationship currency, and we can help accelerate that.

Then you're a little bit out of the nest, a bit more on your own, and you can keep going from there.

How does the Accelerator actually work?

The Accelerator happens twice a year, so I will break it into two parts. In the first three months, from a Startmate perspective, we do all the community work we do to unearth and source new founders. Part of that is the actual selection process. Applications are open for a month or so, and then for about three to four weeks we are working to narrow those thousand applications down to the top 20.

This is also where our First Believers cohort gets involved. First Believers is our angel investing program, where people learn the craft of early-stage VC by putting it into practice. They're founders, execs, operators, and people with industry expertise. They learn our investment thesis—our SPIKE framework that we've spent more than 15 years building—and use it to review real startup applications and interview founders, helping us decide who we invest $120,000 in and take through the Accelerator.

Then we enter the Accelerator period. While the program is live, we kick off with Camp Startmate in week zero. This is foundational goal setting and first-principles company building, making sure what you focus on for the next 12 weeks is the right thing to focus on. Week zero is also a setup from a connection perspective. Build relationships with the community, the team, and the mentors, and understand who this new network of people around you is.

Then you get into the first chapter of the Accelerator, which is focused on customers. Everyone has a customer goal, and everyone has a specific validation goal alongside it, so they know exactly what they need to prove over the next three weeks. That might mean speaking to 30 customers a week until they've become a world expert on that exact customer and that exact problem, and they're confident the changes they're making to the product are actually solving it.

The next chapter is traction. This is all about demonstrating product-market fit and showing that you've built something that solves a meaningful problem. Test all your go-to-markets, learn to sell, and get as much traction as you can so that, by the end, you have a real signal that what you built actually works. That takes up the bulk of the accelerator. The last chapter is fundraising: getting your pitch deck ready, building your data room, building your investor list, and talking through the art and science of fundraising. We obviously help with all of that. It culminates in demo day, where you get up on stage and pitch, effectively launching your company to the startup world in front of a thousand people. It's a huge moment for those founders.

That leads us into the final in-person week in San Francisco. The goal of that week is for any founders who want customers or investors, or who are thinking about moving to the U.S. We're essentially setting them up for success there. We get them in front of as many VCs as possible, take them to as many events as possible, and intro them to as many potential customers as possible. There's still some support after SF, particularly on fundraising, because that process keeps going, but that's effectively the end of the six-month cycle. Then at Startmate we kick off again, looking at marketing and selecting the next cohort.

How do founders start building their ‘relationship currency?’

The first is warm introductions, which are the most powerful way to start building a relationship. There's an art to getting one, and I say art, but it's also a science. It's being able to identify who in your network can introduce you, write the copy that makes it easy for them to reach out, and then close the loop once you've met that person and thank whoever made the intro. Good hygiene around that warm intro. That's the first step of building your relationship currency.

A core tenet of everything we teach our founders is that during the accelerator everyone does weekly updates, and after the accelerator it's monthly updates for as long as the company still exists. Everyone you care about should be on that list, whether that's customers or investors. How consistently can you show up every month, set a goal, and show that you either hit it or learned something from it? Each one of those is another piece of trust being built. So I don't think you can hack this and suddenly have thousands of connections on LinkedIn. Who cares? The equation is basically how many people, multiplied by how many times you've shown up and proved you'll do what you say you'll do.

What makes a great mentor?

Every cohort, we do mentor rankings and get feedback on all of them. The most consistent feedback the best mentors get is about showing up. Giving your time and your energy really matters. Then there's a piece around having empathy for what founders are going through. Mentors who have been founders themselves can cut through in a way that few operator mentors can. Some operator mentors are great, but they tend to be strongest in specific areas. If you want to work on positioning, go-to-market, or strategy, they're the person for it. Founder mentors have a much more intuitive understanding of how to help you focus on the one thing that matters most. So there's an art to matching mentors with founders.

To make it more practical, a mentor who helps you separate the signal from the noise is giving you almost the most value a mentor can give. It's less about specific advice or guidance and more about continually helping you see what's important and what's a distraction right now, and letting you let go of what isn't. That's probably specific to early-stage startups, but the biggest thing that kills an early-stage company is losing that focus and pouring everything into something that isn't the most critical thing for the business. A great mentor will be ruthlessly honest with you about what's getting in your way and what actually matters.

What do the best companies get right when they raise after the Accelerator?

I'm going to steal an analogy from Chris and Alex from Mindset Health, who ran a session with the founders on this that I absolutely loved. They said fundraising is like selling a car. You can either become a really good salesperson, or you can have a really good car. The worse your car is, the more you'll have to lean on sales strategies and tactics to put a raise together. And there's a huge role for how successfully you create a sense of FOMO, urgency, and scarcity. Those things genuinely shape the mechanics of the raise, what you end up raising at, and who you bring on board.

_{*Note: See below the Startmate historical returns, most of which dwarf the top quartile VC returns globally. Wow!}

But if you have a really great car, it isn't hard to raise. If you can show you've built something robust that clearly solves a problem for people, and you have a clear mechanism for getting it to market and finding those people, the other questions and all the hype fall away, because what you've got is obviously powerful and it obviously works. It comes down to how good your car is.

What does your week actually look like as CEO?

A quarter of my time is fundraising. That's anything from building relationships and getting in the room with people we think would be good targets to raise from, to the actual meetings, the pitching, the following up, and everything that sits around that. The strategy of it too, thinking about the story we're telling, who we're targeting, who our LP persona is. And then investor relations, how we're making sure we keep our current investors happy, what those comms look like. I probably want it to be 50%, but a few other things are pulling me away from it right now.

The next 25% is the actual investment decision-making. I'm on the IC at Startmate, and I'm heavily involved in the selection process, our follow-on decisions, all of it. Practically, you can almost split it by time of year. During selection, it'll be 100% of my time, trying to bring those founders in, getting applications, referrals, and then reviewing the hundreds and hundreds of pitch decks that come through, doing wildcard interviews, leading in-depth interviews, having the follow-up conversations, negotiating with the team to land on the final cohort. That part is extremely fun.

The third bucket is strategy and team management—managing the leadership team and Startmate strategy. From a strategy perspective, every 12 months we write our narratives for the team, where the leadership team lands on the three to four things we want to achieve that year. Then every quarter we set commitments underneath those narratives, and everyone on the team sets one. Every month we check in on those commitments as a team and how we're tracking against them, and as a leadership team we check in weekly, so it cascades down. That's the clean version. There's a much messier version in reality, navigating changes and pivots and everything that goes to the board. But at a high level it's the same thing we try to do with our founders. Are we focused on the right things as a team right now? Continually coming back to that, and empowering the leaders and the team to do the same.

We do a lot of events and community work, so getting really involved in that. Basically, how am I helping tell the Startmate story and get Startmate into the right rooms?

What do your goals look like?

The great thing about being exposed to startups is that they run on the most intense operating principles, and I think if every business tried to operate like one, they'd probably all be more effective and get more done. Because we're so close to them, we're very inspired by that and try to hold ourselves to the same standards. I can tell you our three narratives for this year.

The first is around our funds. We were nearing the end of our continuity fund, our follow-on fund, so we needed to make a decision. At a high level, we wanted to define how Startmate actually grows, and the answer is by growing our funds. Previously, we've tried to grow by expanding and adding a bunch of programs that drive revenue. That's worked in some instances and hasn't in others. We're keeping the parts that worked, but we've come back and said that really sustainable growth here will come through the funds. At the start of the year, we knew that's how we want to grow, but we didn't want it to compromise the quality of the founders we invest in, the founder experience, or the returns our investors get. As soon as you grow your funds, you do start having to confront those things. So we had to work out what genuinely effective fund growth looks like at Startmate, and then how we practically go and raise it.

The second narrative is sharpening our edges. Since Startmate started, so many other funds have popped up in Australia, which is amazing. But it does mean we need to be super focused on what we truly believe. Where is our competitive edge when it comes to finding the best founders and supporting them, and how do we get the whole team pointed at building that edge? At the start of the year, we identified what we think our edges are, and we've essentially reorganized the entire team around them.

The Accelerator is a great example. We asked what we do differently from other funds. We have an accelerator, so it needs to be the best in the world. That's what's driven a lot of the changes we've made there. The other one is that the way we source founders is really different, because it's so driven through our community, and we invest a lot earlier, at a $1.5M valuation, which sets us apart from other funds. So how does that inform the way we source and where we build an edge? That second narrative was basically about doing what we already do, but focused on what Startmate uniquely does rather than what every VC fund does.

The final narrative is called Project Bunnings, which comes from the fact that more people work at Bunnings than work in startups in Australia. It's easy to feel like the startup ecosystem is huge, but a big part of our job is growing the broader bucket of it. That comes down to the stories we tell, how we bring in new founders, new operators, and new investors, and how we invigorate the ecosystem generally. So those were the three buckets of goals we're focused on.

What did you keep from Batko (former CEO), and what did you bring that is yours?

One thing I knew coming into the role, and I've always known, is that Batko and I are very different people. Very different leaders and operators, and it’s the reason why we were such a good team together. But when I took the job, I knew that I couldn't just try to be Batko. I had to find my own version of Startmate, my own leadership style, because I knew it wouldn't work if I tried to be him. So I did come in with that mindset.

The other thing is that Batko, as part of the amazing leader he is, had so many conversations with me before he left about what kind of company this should be, what my vision for the future of Startmate was, and how he could help set that up on his way out. So it was something we intentionally thought about. How do we use this as a transition point, and almost as a way of defining a new era for Startmate? Power to him for that. There are very few leaders who would look at their own transition that way, but he really cared about setting me up for success.

If I had to define it in a sentence, it would be coming back to the foundations of what makes us successful and being really true to those before we try to radically grow and expand our breadth. A lot of what we worked on towards the end of last year was exactly that. Where is Startmate positioned in the ecosystem? Where are we uniquely well placed to have an impact? Where do we have true momentum? I can talk through some of the changes that came out of it. We ended up cutting a bunch of our community programs, which were awesome, but were detracting from our ability to make sure our foundations were strong. Can we really, hand on heart, say we're doing everything we can to pull in the best early-stage founders, run a world-class fund, work well with our investors and mentors so they're happy and engaged, and tell that story effectively? We're such a small team that if we try to do too many things, we just do all of them averagely.

Part of that was not to raise another continuity fund right now. Previously we had our accelerator funds and our continuity fund, and the continuity fund did all our follow-on investments. It's a great fund, but that's a huge additional workload on top of the core skill of finding and writing those first checks. Doing both of them really well was hard, and a huge distraction for the team. The accelerator fund is where we couldn't have more interest, from investors and from founders alike. The performance is unbelievable. It just felt like we have an opportunity to make some of the best funds in the world and be as focused as we can on being the best first-check investors out there.

How are you using AI operationally at Startmate?

Everyone would have their own individual answer, but as a team, the biggest way we're using it is productizing a lot of what we do on the community side. Building products around things like selection and how we go from a thousand companies down to 20 in three weeks.

So at a team level, it's basically taking the problems we had managing a community at scale and letting us productize some of them.

What is your all-time favorite Startmate cohort company?

One of my favorite stories to tell is Andromeda, and I'm not just saying that because Grace is beyond killing it. She's the coolest example of the role I think Startmate should be playing. Grace was a 22-year-old robotics engineer with an insane vision of building robots inspired by Disney that would go into old people's homes and help them feel less lonely.

I love thinking back to the vigorous internal debates about her. Some people thought it was the stupidest idea they'd heard, that we'd be mad to invest, that she had no evidence anyone actually wanted this. And then there were a few voices in the room who were so positive, who thought she had the makings of a completely generational founder. She has this rare combination where she holds a wild idea about the future and is also unbelievably technically skillful. She did get into the cohort, but there's a world where if a couple of people hadn't banged their fists on the table for her, she wouldn't have.

Then watching her go from that first robot she was building, Abi, to the socially intelligent robots she's built today, and seeing the love customers have for them. The stories are genuinely heartwarming, of people in aged care who hadn't spoken to another human in months talking to Abi, dancing with her, engaging with her. I think it's such a good example of tech for good, and of technology that defies what you expect it to be capable of. And it takes a special founder to get there, someone like Grace, who has the technical ability and the wild idea, but also the resilience and tenacity to keep building through all the nos. She's getting a lot more yeses than nos now, which I just think is a great story.

What’s Cheeky Run Club?

Outside of work, one of my biggest loves in life is running. I've always adored it, and it used to frustrate me that so many people in my life couldn't see how amazing it can be. I'd have the same conversation again and again with people who had these really limiting beliefs about it, particularly women. That running was too hard, that it was only for a certain type of person, that they wouldn't know where to start. I felt like part of the problem was that people didn't have good examples of what amateur running actually looks like, and a few years ago there really weren't any. Running doesn't need to be about performance. It can be for your mental health, for the social side of it, or for managing stress. People run for all kinds of reasons, and I felt like we needed better examples and better education around that.

So one of my best friends, Anna, who is equally obsessed with running, and I started Cheeky Run Club. It's a podcast and community for the everyday amateur runner. We've been doing it for two and a half years now, an episode every week, where we get on and talk shit about running. We've had over a million downloads and built a really engaged listenership and community. We do a lot of events, we've partnered with a lot of interesting brands, and it's been amazing from that perspective.

I also get to live out my dream, which is being sent free running gear all the time, which, as a runner, is about the coolest thing that can happen to you. But it's really just a passion project alongside work where I get to express this other part of myself. I want more women to fall in love with running, and I want to help create a space for that. I truly think we're doing that through Cheeky.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

There are the practical things, like running and so on. But I'll say this, and I want it not to sound pathetic, so tell me if it does. I will never not believe that having a good attitude is the most powerful thing in life.

It doesn't matter how hard things are, how stressful, how much is on my plate, how badly things are going at work, what the curveball is, or how tired I am. The one thing I can control is my attitude. Showing up with a good attitude, staying open, bringing positive energy. I hate that ‘positive energy’ phrase. It feels so pathetic. But there isn't a situation in my life where I haven't come back to the same thing, which is that all you can do here is have a good attitude about it.

What can you take from this? What can you learn? Nothing is ever that bad when you have a good attitude. That's the whole thing. Things look pretty good when you choose to see them that way.

Extra reading

• The AI startups someone should build - August, 2026

• The fine line between inspiring and demotivating - September, 2026

• From $0 to $4.5 Billion: How the Startmate Pay-It-Forward Mentorship Model Built a Startup Powerhouse - October, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Phoebs on LinkedIn, follow Cheeky Run Club, and check out Startmate on their website to keep up with what they’re building.

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