MitchelLake Events Wrap

15 October 2009

Phaedon wraps up some of the events we have been involved with in recent months including The Innovation Bay Pitch dinner and Coming to America...

Its been an action packed start to the second quarter of the financial year for us. Our second Innovation Bay Angel dinner, www.innovationbay.com attracted a record number of early stage ventures seeking to pitch (26). The format is a closed dinner for 40 experienced technology investors and venture capitalist to review 3 early stage ventures. We heard pitches from www.villagegreenglobal.com , www.photoartgallary.com and http://www.badumna.com/ . The dinner included Mike Cannon Brooks from Atlassian, Bill Bartee from Southern Cross Ventures, Peter Homes a Court, David Kowalski from Greenland Digital, Martin Duursma from Citrix, Cliff Rosenberg, Mike Zimmmeran and Australia’s first ever Astronaut, Dr Paul Skully Power who flew on board the Challenger in June 1984 into space to name just a few. Our dinner event was sponsored again by NICTA, www.nicta.com Australia’s leading and most successful ICT commercialisation centre, with a big thanks to Rob Fizpatrick and Paul Hoff from NICTA.

Our second event was “Coming to America”, where we put together an expert panel of Australia technology entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, including Ben Keighran, who raised $6M from a tier one VC in Palo Alto, Tristen Langley from Southern Cross Venture Partners, Matt Symonds who started Memetrics in Melbourne, took it over to San Francisco and sold it to Accenture and Ryan Junee who upon completion of his Masters in Eng at Sanford, entered y-combinator and sold within 6 months to YouTube for $15.5M. The event has hosted by David Cannington in San Francisco, who’s been living in the valley for 20 years working with Australian start ups and Randal Lee du Toit in Sydney, who has just returned from San Francisco post being CEO of a valley start up. There was a live webstream between San Francisco and Sydney to hear two companies pitch, www.perkler.com and www.interactivetv.tv with an audience of over 90 entrepreneurs and tech insiders. That is right 90 entrepreneurs! The session provided an honest and transparent information download on what it takes to raise money and make it in the worlds leading technology market, where everyone got a chance to interact and ask a question. This was the first time that Ben, Tristen, Matt and Ryan sat on a panel together and Mitchellake was happy to be the party responsible. We would like to provide a big thanks to our events co sponsors, Pollenizer, KPMG, Southern Cross Venture Partners, Jo Balfour | Progressiva | PR and Communications and the biggest thanks to Lee Valentine from Scope Design who organised the seamless video, facilities and so much more, thanks Lee you legend!

Its important to note that all people involved in today’s event have contributed their time and energy purely on their passion for helping fellow entrepreneurs and in expanding the Australian start up scene. So many thanks to everyone who participated and let’s continue to grow a vibrant and ultimately successful technology entrepreneurial market place in our own backyards by helping each other!
We are planning on running another Innovation Bay Angel event in Feb 2010, so get in early and send us a note regarding your interest in pitching.
Some other interesting events and links to review iPitch, Start up Australia, Growth Town and Tech23.

Written by: Phaedon Stough


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