ason is a prinipal at Partners for Growth (PFG), a specialty lending company from Silicon Valley with an active presence in Australia. When it comes to financing high-growth companies, we tend to focus on equity deals – ie sell a percentage of your company shares to an investor. Debt is an instrument that is much less common.

We took the “studio” on the road with us to Hobart in Tasmania. Caught up James MacGregor, the founder and CEO of video animation startup Biteable.

Amanda Price is the head of KPMG’s High Growth Ventures team. Their aim is to help founders build successful startups by helping them with access to capital, customers and international connections.

Flavia is my favourite rocket scientist. Passionate, driven, intelligent and with unbelievable amounts of tenacity, it seems there is nothing that Flavia can’t do if she puts her mind (and talents) to it.

Karen is the CEO of corporate startup accelerator Slingshot. She has spent most of her career in various tech roles, most recently as CEO of News-owned job site Career One. Slingshot has delivered programs for several major Australian corporates over the last 3 years, including NRMA, HCF, Qantas and Lion. It’s an interesting model which seems to have carved out a good spot in a relatively competitive market.

Niki Scevak is the founder of Australian accelerator program Startmate as well as a founding partner at VC Blackbird. He’s been passionately involved in the Australian startup sector since 2008 when he returned home from the USA.

Nico Chu is a very accomplished senior executive from the global IT corporate ranks. He has held senior global roles with companies like Expedia and Orbitz. His last corporate role was successfully helping to navigate Orbitz through their $1.5bn acquisition by Expedia. 

Gen is a remarkable young woman. Smart, driven, humble. She has demonstrated a remarkable ability in her short career so far to (ahem) “get shit done”. 

Rob is the CEO and founder of podcasting platform Whooshkaa. An accountant by background, Rob was formerly the CEO at Macquarie Radio Network before he left and threw himself into the startup world with Whooshkaa a couple of years ago. Whooshkaa as well as being the publishing platform for Open the Pod Bay Doors is also one of the best startups in Australia right now. Commercially and technically it is doing an amazing job. Rob is intelligent, focused, talented and super-humble. 

Jennifer Tejada is the CEO of Pagerduty, a company that provides (I’m quoting from their web site) – “full-stack visibility and actionable insights for better software and better customer experiences. ” It might sound niche, but this is a huge and growing area, especially with the way software is currently being developed, deployed and managed. 

We held an Innovation Bay event in Melbourne recently where we hosted Partners from three of the country’s best VCs (Airtree, Reinventure and Squarepeg). Between them they represent almost $750m of Venture Capital and have made around 60 investments between them. 

Terry Gold is the Managing Directors of Techstars in Adelaide. I don’t think he would mind being described as a “veteran” of this industry, having founded, run, sold, mentored many many companies over his “several” years in the sector.