

An Aussie startup mentor network - neckbeard
http://pushstart.com.au/

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boyter
I can only comment on 3 of the mentors (only 3 I have met or can remember) but
Bart Jellema is the real deal, and quite a nice bloke to boot. Catherine
Eibner is pleasant and friendly (runs the BizSpark stuff), and Nikki Durkin
seems to have a great deal of talent towards business ideas marketed towards
women (if you are looking at that demographic go talk to her).

Its nice to see something geared towards Aussies though, as frankly software
houses are ignored by our governments (grants and tax breaks) and by the
online press. Only Atlassian springs to mind as a hot Aussie software company
and even they get very little coverage as far as I can see.

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kim-pushstart
Hey everyone - Kim from PushStart here.

We're really glad we're able to add PushStart to the Aussie tech startup
ecosystem.

To answer some of your questions

\- Mentor Connect, the mentor matching service, will be national. It's heavily
Sydney focused at the moment because that's where I, and the other co-
founders, are from. That having been said, we have already started adding
mentors from QLD, VIC and ACT and as @GVRV rightly says, more will no doubt
sign up from all over the country when we open up applications in the next few
weeks.

\- The startup accelerator will be based in Sydney later on in the year.

\- @mwill - A couple of years ago WA was the driving force in the local
startup scene but most of the good people from those days have moved to the
east coast or dropped out of the scene. You should jump on the Silicon Beach
Google Group, the online hub of the Australian tech startup scene ATM, and ask
your question there.

Any more questions, feel free to ask below or to send me an email at
OOOkim@pushstart.com.auOOO (remove the O's)

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mwill
Clicking around the site I see no mention of physical location, I'm based in
Perth, and as far as I've seen there isn't much of a community here. Anyone
know if any of these mentors (Or anyone interested in startup culture) call
Perth/Western Aus their home?

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anthonyb
No, it seems to be Sydney only so far, which is a little disappointing (I'm in
Melbourne). However, they do seem to be keen to expand their reach:
<http://twitter.com/#!/pushstartau/status/53295477621399553>

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ahrjay
This is fantastic, this mentoring network along with the startmate incubator
will make for some great startups coming out Australia.

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justinkelly
startmate and pushstart both seem to be sydney based

anyone know if there is anything like this in melbourne

