Caffeine is the daily content & community platform for New Zealand’s startup ecosystem, created with founders for founders.
Our mission is to be the way our community connects and shares - to accelerate Aotearoa New Zealand toward outperforming the world at creating, scaling and exiting extraordinary startups. We are a champion of our community, working to celebrate and uplift our founders of today and inspire our founders of tomorrow.
Our definition of a startup is an independent founder-led company that has created an innovative product and whose strategy is to rapidly scale their company. Startups are generally, but not exclusively, VC-backed, early-stage and globally-focused.
Our definition of a founder is a person who played a role in the creation of their startup company and whose responsibility it is to play a part in leading that company as it grows and scales.
We welcome offers of content, Op-Eds, content partnerships, and any support that will allow us to grow our engagement with startups. If you have something that you feel is genuinely useful for founders, please get in touch with us at hello@caffeinedaily.co
Our Editorial Charter
Caffeine is created ‘with founders, for founders’. As opposed to reporting ‘on’ our startup community to a broader public and business audience, we report ‘to’ founders by capturing, distilling and sharing the lessons learned and knowledge gained by kiwi startup leaders.
We are champions of startups, not their critics. Unlike other business news media, Caffeine’s mandate is not to ‘dig dirt on’ companies to drive audience engagement and advertiser revenue. Our mandate is to facilitate connection and knowledge sharing among founders in order to help them grow and thrive.
We believe New Zealand will benefit from changing its relationship with failure. In startup, failure is an essential stepping stone to success, and should be valued, as opposed to being viewed as a negative indictment. We will celebrate the failures, through the lens of what’s been learned from a failure and how it led to subsequent success.
We will actively promote under-represented groups to help the New Zealand startup ecosystem become more diverse and inclusive, through showing their faces, telling their stories and sharing their knowledge and views.
Our journalism will follow the standard principles of independence, balance, and fairness and our stories will be knowledge-based.
Where content is supplied or financially supported by third parties such as sponsors or advertisers, it will be noted. Where we supply links to information from other providers, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of that external content.
We fact check all editorial content to the best of our abilities, but do not share content for approval prior to publication other than in case of paid content partnerships.
We encourage founders and others in the ecosystem to have a voice on the site, including through comments. However, we reserve the right to delete or edit offensive, racist or sexist comments, or those that don’t follow our simple policy: play the ball, not the person. If you’re angry, kick a ball.