Having the wind knocked out of us

Last year, very shortly after we launched Caffeine into the world, my co-founder and CEO Julie Gill was diagnosed with cancer.

The timing couldn’t have been more heartbreaking. We’d worked together for the better part of a year conceiving, planning, designing and creating Caffeine.

We hadn’t wanted to waste time. The feedback we’d had to the idea of a daily content and community site for kiwi founders was unanimously fervent. Everyone in our community felt the deep sense that it was missing and couldn’t come soon enough.

So we worked our asses off to get Caffeine live by the deadline we’d set ourselves of 5 September.

And not some thin blog with a couple of stories on it. Alongside our editor Fiona Rotherham and her editorial team, we launched with wide-ranging content, an ecosystem directory, events board, podcasts, jobs marketplaces and everything else we could possibly pack in.

And then, completely out of the blue, the results from a routine screening that knocked the wind out of us all.

In the final months of last year, Julie was a massive trooper. Quickly thrown onto a course of chemotherapy, she nevertheless continued to commit every ounce of energy she had to getting our fledgling venture off the ground.

But early in the new year, a severe reaction to her treatment forced us all to face the reality that Julie’s health and recovery was even more important than Caffeine.

And with that reality came the miserable decision for Julie to step back from Caffeine at the end of February this year.

There were knock-on effects too, as Julie was not only our publisher and CEO, but also the member of our team with commercial media sales experience and ability to bring revenue into the business.

We had built a team reliant on that income, and needed to make the very difficult decision to slim the team down to an affordable level so that we could keep Caffeine alive while we chart a new course.

This has meant disestablishing the role of editor. Fiona will be continuing her excellent reporting elsewhere with our gratitude for the role she played in establishing Caffeine, and our best wishes for the future.

For the next few weeks we’ll be rebasing, taking stock and finding a new path forward.

Our irrepressible journalist Mary Hurley will be continuing to produce daily content for Caffeine. And although there won’t be quite so much of it, we’ll be focused on the daily updates most useful to you.

I remain committed to Caffeine’s mission 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.

On behalf of Julie, Fiona, Mary and myself, thank you to all those who have supported us through this challenging first few months – and please stick with us as we chart a new course forward.

Ngā mihi,

James Hurman

Co-founder, acting CEO and publisher

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