My guest for Ep185 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Maxine Minter.

Maxine is the Founder & General Partner of CoVentures a $5M pre-seed fund.

Alongside her role at Co Ventures, she is also the Founder of Co Lab, a platform that matches Founders & CEOs with executive coaches.

In this interview we covered a range of topics including, 

• why Maxine decided to launch a dedicated pre-seed fund
• how she assess investment opportunities at that stage
• the importance of effective communication as a leader 
• How to get the most out of an executive coach
• & much more

Timestamps

• 1:40 Maxine’s background
• 14:46 Making the leap to startups
• 21:11 Performance coaching for founders
• 26:52 Leadership mental models
• 30:29 Developing better communication and empathy skills
• 41:12 Common traits of world class performers
• 50:38 Launching a dedicated Pre-Seed fund
• 55:24 The huge opportunity in the Australian ecosystem
• 1:04:16 What Maxine looks for when investing in early stage companies
• 1:22:04 Lessons from previous venture backed startup

Our partners

A big thank you to Chris Bartlett and Jax Vullinghs for their help with this interview!

Also a big shout out to our partners for the show:

Scendar 

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Startup Playbook Podcast listeners get access to an exclusive offer of USD$1000 off their plans. Head over to vanta.com/playbook to get access to this exclusive discount

Links mentioned

Maxine’s links

• LinkedIn
• Co Ventures
• Co Lab

People mentioned

• Dustin Dalganow
• Lawrence Lessig
• Nick Crocker
• Jackie Vullinghs
• Bill Campbell
• Marc Andreessen
• Ben Horowitz
• Sergey Brin
• Larry Page
• Andy Grove – High Output Management
• Carol Dweck
• Janathan Haidt
• Bill Gurley
• Chris Bartlett
• Adir Shiffman
• Simon Sinek – The Infinite Game

Companies mentioned

• Blackbird
• CodeX
• Plaid
• Segment
• Notion
• Whatsapp
• Instagram
• DoorDash
• 43
• Airtree
• intel
• Benchmark
• Playbook Ventures
• Snowflake

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here

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