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Side Stage Ventures

About

We've been founders, operators, and investors.

We’ve experienced success and we’ve experienced failure but most importantly… we deeply understand the struggle of building a business from the ground up.

We write the first cheque into the best early stage companies. Then we lean in to help the founders build & scale.

We back people.

We’re comfortable investing across all sectors and business models.

And our goal is simple:

To be the most valued early-stage partner for the top 1% of founders in Australia.

How we invest

We typically invest up to $500k in pre-seed or seed rounds.

We are super collaborative and enjoy investing alongside other great investors both in Australia and around the world.

We are sector agnostic but looking for the best surfers riding the biggest waves - outlier founders, building in big markets.

We are early stage specialists - we focus on solving the challenges of 0–1.

It’s never too early. We’re comfortable backing companies very early, often pre-revenue.

Why founders work with us

We are founders and we behave like founders - with passion, enthusiasm and belief.

We are flexible on valuation and ownership. We think what’s best for the founder is best for us.

We offer active and collaborative support focussed on the earliest stages of building a business - such as hiring, fundraising and getting to product market fit.

We have a high Helpfulness to Cheque Size ratio (H:CS)

We’re building a unique community of founders who want to contribute.

We are an global team with a global network.

We feel fortunate to be here and absolutely LOVE what we do.

What we look for

Outlier Founders: First and foremost, we back people. We look for outlier founders who have proven hustle, a compelling, global vision, the hunger and drive to build a billion dollar business and the capability to sell their vision to employees, partners and future investors.

Differentiated Product: We look for products that are solving real and meaningful problems, with passionate first customers and that have the potential to be orders of magnitude better than their nearest competitor. This could be demonstrated through sticky initial customers, accessing an underserved market or through a compelling and non-consensus product insight.

Big Markets: Our focus is sector agnostic but with a bias towards big markets that have either billions of potential customers or billions of dollars in accessible revenue capacity.

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