Well hello there, world!

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About a year ago we were reflecting on how far our community of startup founders, and those who support them, had come in the past decade.

In 2013 we had a handful of founders and globally-focused startups, supported by an even smaller handful of angel groups and early stage investors, serviced by some early attempts at co-working spaces and accelerator programmes. It was exciting, for sure. But it was nascent, and felt tentative. We were, of course, ‘figuring it out’.

Today, we have an industry. There are, by Startup Genome’s calculation, 2,400 New Zealand companies that fit the definition of a startup – early-stage companies building globally focused businesses around novel products and technologies.

They’re supported by a growing number of experienced venture capital firms with funds big enough to underwrite their early stages of development. And they’re surrounded by an ecosystem of mentors and service providers in most key business disciplines who ‘get’ startup and can add meaningful value.

Most importantly of all, they now have so many more to learn from. Back then, if you could get a few minutes with Rod Drury, Sharon Hunter or Vaughan Rowsell (as he was known then), you were doing pretty well.

Today we have dozens of founders who have built, or are building, companies that have achieved incredible success on the world stage, $100M+ valuations, or equally impressive exits. And with them, hundreds of people in leadership positions in those companies who have learned what it takes and how to pull it off.

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The reason that’s so important is that building an innovation into a valuable company is extremely hard. And it’s hard in an endless multitude of ways. Anyone can have a great idea. But executing well enough to earn that idea a place in the world verges on impossibly difficult.

Even so, we’re learning how.

Yet one thing we haven’t learned to do quite as well is share those learnings around.

When we first began talking about what would develop into Caffeine, we felt that our industry had grown to a point worthy of having a dedicated news media. The ecosystem had grown, and with that came natural fragmentation and opacity. Unless you have the time to have a hundred coffees a day with all the different parts of the community, it’s become challenging to understand what’s going on and who’s doing what. The benefit of news to any community is that it solves that problem. It keeps us informed about the world around us, and it brings the most important developments into the light for everyone to see.

So that’s one of the problems Caffeine solves.

But as we’ve canvassed the industry over the past year, we’ve learned that, as helpful as it is, there’s a greater need than just ‘news’. There’s also a more important audience than ‘everyone in the startup ecosystem’.

That audience is founders.

It doesn’t matter how great our ecosystem is if we’re not producing incredible founders building, scaling and exiting incredible companies.

So as much as we love all of you out there in the ecosystem, when it comes to developing our content, Caffeine has a singular focus on founders.

What founders need isn’t just news. Sure, news is nice. But what they really need is insight and knowledge on how to build their company. And not just from consultants and pundits and government departments. From each other. From the other people like them, at home and abroad, in the trenches, solving the problems, and learning how to build incredible companies.

So we have a mantra: ‘With founders, for founders’.

What does that mean? 

It means we’re reporting ‘with’ founders, not ‘on’ founders. We’re getting founders to interview one another. We’re getting founders to share what they’re learning. We’re not telling you what a founder has done. We’re letting them tell you how they’ve done it and what they’ve learned from it.

We’ll capture and distil the lessons founders have learnt and share those with other founders, so they benefit from the successes, failures and hacks of those who’ve gone before them.

And it means we’re ‘for’ founders, first and foremost. We believe that this focus will result in content that is actually more interesting and more valuable for everyone else in the ecosystem too.

We will be the champion of our community, working to celebrate and uplift our founders of today, and inspire our founders of tomorrow.

As we’ve been preparing the content for our launch – the stories you see on Caffeine today – we’ve continually asked ‘what about this is genuinely useful to founders?’ Our mission isn’t just to report on what’s going on – it’s to do it in a way that gives founders and their teams proper, useful insight. 

We see a future where our founders are far better connected and networked – to each other, to what’s being discovered about how to build incredible companies, to those who can help them, and to their peers around the world.

Where this has helped accelerate Aotearoa New Zealand toward outperforming the world at creating, scaling and exiting extraordinary startups.

That’s our mission, and we hope you’ll embrace it, contribute to it, and hold us accountable to achieving it.

And for now, we hope you enjoy these early days of Caffeine.

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Fiona Rotherham, Editor

Julie Gill, Co-founder, Publisher and CEO

James Hurman, Co-founder and Director

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