Status Quo
- 🏡 Location — Live in Australia, Sydney, Coogee
- 👩🍼 Wife/ 🆕 (soon) Mother — Gabby, lawyer @ Square Peg
- 🧳 Work — building the Startmate Nation
- ✈️ Travel — 3 weeks in Bali (SM offsite), 1 week sailing on the Whitsundays, 2x tiny home long weekends
- 🏃♂️ Sports — Runs (~3x week = 5k Startup Striders every Saturday), Beach Volleyball (training 2x week in Q1)
- 📺 Hobbies — Series (Ted Lasso, The Wire, White Lotus, Succession) + Anime (One Piece, Solo Leveling, Kaiju, Windbreaker, Bleach, Tower of God, Boku No Hero, Wistoria, TTIGRAS, I Parry Everything, Demon Slayer, Re:Monster, Parasyte, Mashle, Frieren, Chainsaw Man, Fire Force, Made in Abyss, SpyxFamily)
- 💥 Things I do — Read, Puddle Pod, write on Substack (personal) + productivity tips, government board committee for the IGP
Update vs Last Year
- 🏡 We (almost) renovated our flat in Coogee.
- 🐣 We‘re expecting a baby in 4 weeks!
- 🌇 Startmate raised $17m, 1,000 fellows, team of 17 FTE.
- ✈️ Stunning sailing on the Whitsundays + 3 weeks in Bali.
- 🏃♂️ Steady year on the sports front, started strong with Beach Volleyball Training and most of the year steady running — Startup Striders great to keep accountable.
- 📝 After 4 years and 523 Puddle Pod alumni found buyers for Puddle Pod and will be sold by end of Jan.
Family & Friends
🐣 The event of the year: we‘re expecting a baby in 4 weeks. We’ve been incredibly lucky that the pregnancy is going very smoothly so far.
Due to renovations, we moved in with Gabby’s parents for the past 4 months and it has been great spending lots of time with Gabby’s family.
True to my #1 2024 goal, this year was incredibly social and we created so many special memories.
- Karo (my sister) visited us for both Xmas’!
- Flat-teardown party — we had all of our friends/family over to paint our walls before we demolished the flat for the renovations.
- Progressive dinner — I organised a “fridge to fridge / running dinner / progressive dinner” for 18 of us in Coogee, every couple met 2 new couples at different homes for starters, mains and deserts, and then we all met up in the Coogee Bay Hotel — so good!
- and so so much more — Legends weekends, Allegra’s wedding, Anna’s wedding, cultural dinners with Michael Tan+fam, Yemi in Bali, and importantly way more regular catchups with our Sydney and Melbourne friends.
Travel
Two big trips, two tiny home weekends and a lot of travelling between Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle and Canberra.
🙌 3 weeks in Bali
Epic, epic week in Bali for a whole team offsite — white water rafting, sound healing, strategy work, werewolves and great food. So many core memories. I arrived a week early and stayed a week longer exploring a bit more.
⛵️ Sailing in the Whitsundays
Complete serenity for a week sailing with friends with no phone reception. Whales, swims, SUPs, turtles, board games and near-death experiences.
🏡 Tiny Homes + Local Travel
Lots of local travel this year, the standout was two long weekends in the Australian bush in tiny homes.
Health & Sports
🩸 The least fun part of this year was stepping on a Stingray, going back for two operations which happened in the same week as my wisdom tooth extraction. A week of eating mushed eggs and avocado, no walking, no talking. A good couple of weeks of foot recovery before I could walk.
All the travelling was pretty disruptive, so the only stable sport I’ve been able to maintain is running
🏐 Beach Volleyball — was able to play as part of a squad + trainer early in the year, but sadly because of too much travel, I had to stop.
🏃♂️ Running — the only consistent sport I’ve been able to do.
- Saturdays 5k — Startup Striders — going for two years now with 1k+ striders across 12+ cities, loved getting to know the Sydney and Newcastle striders.
- Mondays 9k — with Chris.
- Sundays 10k — with the Coogee Run Club.
- only race this year was the City2Surf + a little challenge I set myself to run +1km every run I did, so I got up to 24k (until I realised I would have to bring gels with me as they were getting too strenuous to continue).
🏋️ Gym — a fun joint activity was joining Gabby for personal training twice a week.
Professional
Another big year. Full year in review here.
It has been an epic, stable year for Team Startmate.
- Invested in 59 companies — 32 new and 27 follow-ons.
- Raised $17m — includes $5m Accelerator and $12m Continuity fund, which had its final close.
- 1,000 fellows — who went through our women, student, climate fellowships and Laydmates.
- Team of 17 — team of legends.
- Fun Offsites — 2x for Demo Day and big Bali offsite.
- BIG demo days — 1,000+ people at Sunrise, 1,500+ at the State Theatre.
🏛️ Joined my first board / committee for a $400m national government initiative called the Industry Growth Program.
Intellectual
📚 Read 18 books —mostly fantasy books, the standout was the “The Everything Store” (Amazon story) and “Will of Many” (epic fantasy)
🤖 Puddle Pod had another 4 cohorts with dozens of alumni. The journey is coming to an end for me as I want to claw back some time to spend with my family. I had 16 people interested in buying the business. 7 people made an offer (including an ASX-listed company) and I hope to finalise a deal by end of Jan (just before the baby is born).
🎙️ Listened to lots of podcasts whilst running and started a Whatsapp group with now 100+ people sharing their favourite podcasts and lessons.
📝 I wrote a couple more blog posts, but not quite as much as I would have loved to.
- Puddle Pod Substack
- BatkoOS Substack — wrote the “how to Exec Coach series” and “real-life startup post-mortems” — for the first time also sponsored by Vanta
⚡️ LinkedIn was a whole experience this year — I got a Top Voice badge, 30k followers and went viral with 1.7m impressions.
Social & Hobbies
🏡 Renovations — 4 months and still going, but we’re at the finish line. We’re excited to move into our freshly renovated apartment in Jan :)
💅 Stylist — at the start of the year I booked myself in with a Stylist at David Jones (it is free!), fun experience, that I can recommend, and got a whole new outfit.
👾 Games — every couple of months I get my Nintendo Switch out and get obsessed the games of this year were: Zelda, Witcher and Wyldercraft.
🎥 Movies — two cinema visits! Inside Out 2 (amazing!) and Gladiator 2 (not so great 😢).
🤣 Seinfeld — we saw him live and it was hilarious.
🏍️ Motorbike license — I passed it, which was a whole story in itself, but I probably will never buy a motorbike anyway.
2024 Goals
1. Social Circle ✅❌
We have finally settled into Coogee. The goal for this year will be to meet awesome, ambitious, fun people on the same wavelength.
- in Sydney — in particular closeby in Coogee ✅
- at work — specifically a CEO group around me ❌
Really lived this goal. So many regular friend catchups, new connections and special moments we created.
2. Stories ✅❌
Tell the Startmate and Puddle Pod story as it deserves to be shared much more widely.
- write blog posts, record videos, speak at large events ✅
- get a Puddle Pod intern ✅
The goal is to do this internationally. ❌
The stretch goal is TV, Radio or TED talk. ❌
Built lots of connections with journalists who shared the Startmate stories. Puddle Pod went well this year.
3. Speed ✅❌
Keep fit, keep running.
- 5k = 19 mins 30 seconds (3:53mins pace) ✅
- 21k = 100mins (4:44mins pace) ❌
Got to 19:38mins for the 5k, then stepped on a stingray, so I’ll let that count. For the long-distance run I was just happy to run a lot rather than run to a time.
2025 Goals
1. 🐣 Nestify — Baby in Our World
Welcome the baby in our world, rather than us living in the baby world.
I have no idea what is coming our way, but the intent is to integrate the baby in our lives, rather than completely give up to only live in the baby’s world.
- find great parents group
- friend catchups
- startup striders — keep catching up
- spend time in Newcastle with the fam
- send monthly family/friends updates
- travel to Europe for 2 months
Stretch goal: organise another Coogee Progressive Dinner
2. ▶️ Netify — Intentional Networking
Build my network intentionally.
- Outbound — weekly goal of meeting the right people for the future of Startmate (founders, investors, government) by cold/warm outreach
- Inbound — post once a week about something I care about professionally to attract the right people to the mission
3. 🏃♂️ Actify — Exercise
Not sure how we’ll make it work yet, but I don’t want Gabby and my health to suffer. Goal is to exercise twice a week.
- Running — ie startup striders
Stretch Goal: rejoin a Beach Volleyball Squad.
