Angelique Mentis, founder of thatsmyspot.com.au and angel investor, shares how she transitioned from a career in corporate finance law to startups, her passion for smart cities and advice for prospective angel investors.

What is your background?

My journey in life has been a very fortuitous one, for which I am incredibly grateful. From my migrant Greek father who came to Australia as a teenager in the 1950s to the “land of opportunity” to create a better life for himself, I have learned two powerful values:

1. The importance of work ethic, or what in the startup world is referred to as grit and perseverance

2. Respect

Sydney has been home for the majority of my life — childhood, school and university. After a Masters Degree…

Justin’s family history & background

My family’s Australian agricultural heritage stretches back to free settlement in the late 19th century. In the 1890s Harry Webb, a long-time pastoral inspector for the Bank of Australasia, purchased and lived with his wife on “Comongin” near Quilpie which, at over a million acres, was one of the early broad grazing properties. The Webb family pastoral portfolio waxed and waned through generations that followed including ownership of “Babbiloora” (1m acres) “Wandsworth” (300k acres), “Cowley” (500k acres), “Big Creek” (400k acres) and other formative Australian grazing properties.

My Father, born in 1939 in Deniliquin, lived an Australian story-book childhood in…

After a bit of a rest and recharge in the wake of a very disruptive yet rewarding 2020, the Innovation Bay team and I are geared up for a year full of new, exciting challenges. As my cofounder Phaedon explained in our 2020 Year in Review post, Innovation Bay is shifting much of our focus to memberships in 2021. …

As we wrap up another year, I wanted to share some of our insights on 2020. First of all, who the hell saw COVID coming? Someone much smarter than us… I’ll start by sharing my key impressions of this year and then dive deeper into what happened in different areas of the business. Let’s jump into it.

What really amazed us about COVID and this year in general is:

1. How everyone in the tech community came together.

There was no state rivalry, everyone connected via Zoom and got on with it. We were amazed and humbled by the number of people who joined our webstreams and from all across the country.

2. The resilience and resourcefulness of the ecosystem.

We were especially impressed by how well the vast…

About the angel

Andrew Sypkes began his career with McKinsey & Company and then worked with start-up technology businesses before completing an MBA at Stanford University. He now based in Hobart where he manages his family’s investment business, family office and foundation, and is a co-founder and Director of several private companies and charitable organizations. Andrew was an early investor in Aconex, Canva, and Redbubble and is a partner at SecondQuarter Ventures, Australia’s first venture secondaries fund.

Why angel investing?

My journey into angel investing had two major influences. Firstly, I blame my family. From an early age, I thought I was going to be an…

At the start of 2020, Innovation Bay had grand plans for a year full of exciting retreats, community breakfasts, founder dinners, pitch events, community coffee programs and lots more engaging, interactive in-person events. Just as we were ramping up at the start of the year, the pandemic hit and our schedule was practically wiped clean.

Much like the scrappy, resourceful startup founders we exist to support, we rethought our strategy and took the whole show online. Since March, we’ve hosted 30 virtual Innovation Bay events for nearly 5,000 attendees! A large chunk of these attendees are founders and many are…

By far the best part of running our podcast Open the Pod Bay Doors is learning more about the journeys and mindsets of our ecosystem’s most talented founders and investors. Another perk? An endless supply of recommendations of what to read and listen to from the quickfire rounds! At the end of each episode, our hosts Ian and Phaedon ask our guests to share their favourite book, podcast, productivity tool and more.

Since Open the Pod Bay Doors just released our 100th episode special, that means our podcast has quite literally hundreds of recommendations of books, podcasts, productivity tools, and…

I’ve been lucky enough to work with and invest in founders for the last twenty years, but let me preface this article by saying that I do and always will consider myself a founder first. I started investing via Startmate, then Blackbird, then directly into companies who I had a personal relationship with or who came referred via my network. My view is also heavily influenced by working with founders over the last 20 years and helping them build their companies, as I did my own and building networks that support founders. …