Mick Reflects On The Past Four Years

Mick Reflects On The Past Four Years (or 40 years in startups) of muru-D

Author: Mick Liubinskas

October 2017 marked four years in the life of muru-D. It’s been hard work, with more hard work to go. I was there at the start and here are a few highlights from me.

“What success rate have you had?”
Startups are hard. Many, if not most will ‘fail’. The numbers are roughly, 1 in 1,000 companies actually started will achieve their full vision. Ouch. Who would play that game?

As a glass is completely full (half full of water, half full of air) kind of guy, I really wanted to make sure we didn’t just live and die off these early stage, super ambitious companies winning over a twenty year period. Yes, that’s how long it takes.

So what else do you focus on that makes the investment of energy, time and money worthwhile? The people. The founders and their teams. You focus on them, and that is what we did. From the start we had a goal to make better entrepreneurs. This has a few big benefits (other than my emotional well being).

Firstly, it should be about them. muru-D is not about Telstra or the team. It’s about the companies and companies are people. They should be the focus.
Secondly, when you help them become better entrepreneurs first, you stop yourself (and hopefully others) from trying to take over and tell them what to do. Coaching and mentoring should be about asking questions, sharing experiences and giving suggested activities to help entrepreneurs work out the answer themselves. It should not be “Here is what you need to do,” which always sounds like “I’m the mentor so I know better, so you should listen to me and just do this, though you have to do the hard work and bear all the consequences.”
Thirdly, if the company doesn’t succeed, then it’s not a total failure. The founders are better equipped to do another business and have a much greater chance of success. They take with them all of their experiences, connections, harsh lessons and very often an increased feeling of hunger. Often they have picked up the entrepreneur bug and will hopefully have a long and successful career building companies. Atlassian is Mike Cannon-Brookes’ second business. Canva is Melanie Perkin’s second business. Spreets was Dean McEvoy’s second business. Yes, it sucks for the investors in the first company if it doesn’t work, but it’s actually a good idea to invest in these founders again.

At muru-D, after four years and over 100 companies, we have a few that haven’t made it. Some have joined other startups – awesome. Some have taken roles in industry groups – great. And some have started new companies – amazing. The investment in them as people will produce results for the industry for years to come. The program may only go for six months, but compound interest is a powerful force.

So what is the success rate of muru-D?
I personally believe we are at 95% plus in terms of positive impact on entrepreneurs. One of my favourite moments of a cohort is pitch night. Not the actual pitch, but afterwards, when an industry veteran is grilling the founders on their business and the founders are smacking back responses with all the precision of Bruce Lee. Could that person have done that six months ago? No way. They may not even have understood the question. I love the progress.

Some of my most memorable moments:
-Telling people they are in the program. Liz Kaelin crying with joy, Sebastian Chaoui jumping up and down and yelling “Yes”, Cate Hull getting a ‘No’ in SYD1 and coming back for SYD2 with a strong team and getting in.
-Nathan Feiglin at 16 coming to the launch party as a media representative due to his blog and networking like a veteran.
-Steve Fanale, an actual veteran, completely blowing a pitch early in the program and owning it. Steve of course nailed every other pitch from then on in and Yello is growing well.
-The first US trip and Safesite getting an introduction to a possible US client which lead them to move to the US and grow a venture backed company with strong growth.
-Annie, Ben, Liz and Aron singing a farewell song to me.

Okay, so that’s a bit soft and fluffy. What else have we achieved? Well, here are some of our numbers;

Companies
100+ companies across 12 cohorts
14 companies with over $1m a year in revenue
15 companies raised $1m in capital
90% survival rate 1 year after muru-D
65% raise capital post program within a year of muru-D

Geography
Sydney, Singapore, Melbourne
Partner programs in Brisbane and Perth
Trips with startups to San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai

People
266 founders
600+ employees
500+ mentors
1,000+ visitors from Telstra and other corporates
300+ community events

I’m also proud that muru-D has raised the bar of what should be expected from a program. We have consistently been founder-focused and founder-friendly with our terms and behaviour, pushing investors to do the same. We’ve created amazing content and participated in the ecosystem with consistency and integrity.

Despite this great progress and achievement, we can’t rest. We’ve had big changes in our team and we still have work to do to build this up to the strength we want to achieve. This is a part of the nature of the constantly moving tech world. Every year there are new teams building new technology for new customers in new ways. Everything changes, always. Think, test, adjust, go, repeat.

The pace of change is one of the best and hardest parts of the program. It’s exacerbated by collision of entrepreneurs building companies and entrepreneurs helping them. The determination that drives them also makes them hard work. Never satisfied, always moving forward.

It is on that note that I need to thank and show my deep respect for Annie Parker, co-founder and previous head of muru-D and the new leader, Julie Trell. Managing this melting pot and putting up with prima-donnas like me who walk about yelling ‘Focus’, looking scruffy in t-shirts and being a media pain isn’t easy. They also do the hard work being an API between the big Telstra machine and fast startup world. Annie and Julie – thank you!
To the rest of the muru-D team including the legal and media folks from Telstra, thanks for putting in so much hard work and care into this program.
Running a program is much harder than anyone thinks and the team is critical to make sure the 1,000 things that need to happen happen.

Thanks to Telstra’s leaders for having the vision and gumption to get muru-D off the ground and continuing to support it.

A massive thanks to the network of mentors who have committed countless hours of energy, made thousands of introductions and often invested their hard earned money on very high risk ventures. An entrepreneur-in-residence can never be enough to deal with 10 companies – all with different tech, in different verticals going into different markets. The mentors are critical to the success of muru-D, and they are the ones that don’t get paid to turn up – they just do – so, thank you!

Most of all thanks to the founders. Without you there wouldn’t be ideas that turn into products, that turn into teams, that turn into companies that can and do change the world.

I’ve been in Silicon Valley for nearly eighteen months now and whilst I love being immersed in tech nearly 24×7 I do miss the wonderful feeling of a cohort coming together.

We enter the fifth year of muru-D with a new batch of 30-40 companies coming into muru-D. I invite people with experience building tech companies globally to reach out and get involved. Your investment of time will have an impact that lasts forever. Here’s to the next 4 (or 40 years) of successful founders through muru-D.