Week 2 of Kindling!

Welcome to Edition II of the Kindling Weekly!

A Behind The Scenes of two best friends building their dream company and sharing highlights from our podcast.

This week was chaos! We filmed our Build In Public podcast, released an episode with Elicia McDonald, filmed one with David Booth, and did all the other things that entail running a company (people, sales, ops etc etc etc)

— Adam & Sachin

(Podcasting With) Elicia McDonald

This week’s episode release was with Elicia McDonald, a partner at Airtree, one of the biggest VC funds in Australia.

Elicia has been a partner at Airtree for nearly 8 years, meaning she has witnessed the massive growth of the technology ecosystem in Australia. Before her work in venture capital, she was an investment banker and worked in sales.

A recurring thought we had during this episode was how is this person real? It seemed like Elicia ticked every box there was to be had: smart, hard-working, kind, emotionally intelligent, work-life balanced, etc.

Watch the podcast on Youtube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Airtree has invested in many unicorns including Canva, Pet Circle, Immutable, Employment Hero, and Linktree.

And there's a lot to admire about Elicia. She's hyper-intelligent, analytical, emotionally intelligent, focuses on actions rather than words, and has a sharp awareness of what's important in life.

We talked to Elicia about drivers, the effect of her mum’s sickness, learning sales as a VC, personality traits, and much more.

Time Poor? Here are our Top 10 Insights!

1. When you are in a competitive deal, position yourself to win by taking the investor's “hat” off and thinking through the problems you would encounter as a founder. You don’t always want to be a “one-size-fits-all” investor.

2. Entering into highly structured environments can create the feeling of an organised life, but it can also restrict your freedom. The benefit of seeking out new opportunities and giving them your best shot can be amazing for creating more opportunities later.

3. Empathy can be hard to practice when chasing after goals or “being competitive”, but taking the time to think through impacts on others and winning as a team can bring a feeling of satisfaction that goal achievement might not.

4. As a venture capitalist, brand and reputation are everything. For Elicia, creating “noise” is helpful, but as the saying goes, “actions speak louder than words”, and it’s the motto that underlies her brand.

5. There is finance in venture capital, but also a lot of sales internally and externally. Being clear on the value-add is important, especially for AirTree as a brand and as a fund.

6. If we look in the same places, for the same founders, we won’t see much change in this industry as investors. Elicia advocates investing outside of the “cookie-cutter” founders and doesn’t care about who you know. Her inbox is open to all.

7. For first meetings, passion that you can’t fake needs to come through the loudest and most clearly. Investors can tell when you have thought an idea through to make money rather than because you are passionate about solving a problem.

8. Elicia’s keys to navigating love and relationships include a shared journey, a solid foundation based on friendship, values alignment, and similar qualities. Elicia describes her husband as the male version of her. Taking the time to come back to long-term values also helps.

9. Elicia’s advice to young women in their 20s is to find a company that supports their ambition and a life outside of work. Find what you love to do and then have children.

10. Tips for startup founders: hire great people, trust them to do a good job, measure their outputs, and the rest — such as working hours, days in office, and starting times — will take care of itself.

On Building: Week 2

First thing Monday morning, we filmed a Build in Public Podcast. This podcast isn’t out yet, but we’ll be releasing episodes starting next week. There we will speak about the reality of building a company and what’s happening behind the scenes in our lives.

In addition to the Build in Public podcast, our Friends to Founders Film Trailer was launched bright and early Friday morning to kickstart our vlogging of the ups and downs we experience as we take on this journey. You can come watch it here.

This trailer is us sharing who we are with the world. The things that drive us, make us scared and ultimately why we quit our jobs at 25 to build a company.

We also had the pleasure of being featured in LinkedIn posts such as this one:

Business Ops!

This week outside of filming was a busy one. A few things we focused on were:

• Sales: We spent a lot of time chatting to potential sponsors and even met in our sauna (as seen above)! We love to vary how a meeting is done. Some ideas included a walking meeting, running meeting, or sauna meeting.

• Social media: We’ve been firing up our social media strategy, and began to post for the first itme on mainstream socials like Instagram, Tiktok and Youtube Shorts. Let us know what you think!

• Packaging: There are two parts to content: the actual substance of the content and the packaging (thumbnail, titles, attention-grabbing etc). We have always ignored the latter and are focusing on how to be world-class at it.

More On Filming

On Wednesday we filmed an episode with co-founder of On Deck, David Booth.

On Deck has a crazy story. In what seemed like overnight, they became a sensation in the US as an education and community company for people working in technology.

They raised capital from prolific investors at the time (*cough* Tiger Global *cough*) but ultimately scaled down as the technology boom puttered out. We are huge fans of On Deck and what they did for the world (1000+ companies would not be here today if it wasn’t for On Deck).

Since then, David has moved back to NZ to work for Blackbird.

What We’re Listening To

1. Chris Williamson/Gary Vee: I (Adam) stopped listening to Chris W because he got a bit too ‘bro-ey’ for me. But I returned to this episode and forgot how good his production and questions were. This is a must-listen for learning about social media.

2. Cleo Abhrams: She is currently the GOAT of YouTube. She has one of the fastest-growing accounts in history and makes wonderful video’s about tech. We are learning a lot from her.

3. Marqus Brownlee: This guy makes fantastic tech videos and he’s making waves with piercing reviews of subpar products. His success is the product of compounding over time and forever improving.

What’s Up Next Week?

Liked what you read? We’ll spend more time on it. Help us grow by sharing!

Next week we have an interview with a mega guest: Katherine Boyle. She is a partner at a16z, the largest venture capital fund in the world. She leads their American Dynamism practice.

We also have exciting new content out next week: vlogs. No joke, these will be the best videos we’ve ever produced. You’ll have to subscribe if you want to see them!

P.S. We 😍 feedback. Comment your thoughts below or DM us if you have points on how we could improve this newsletter! 🙏