Melbourne’s entrepreneur advocacy body Startup Victoria is on the hunt for a new chief executive officer after Georgie Beattie left the organisation to start a new role as executive manager of Spacely, a new property website by REA Group.
Ms Beattie joined Startup Victoria in July 2016, after founding and running a series of her own startup initiatives, including launching her own wine and packaging business Lupe and Beattie Wines straight out of university, where she studied entrepreneurship. The business expanded into six countries in five years.
“Georgia has driven a lot of good initiatives and also really raised the profile of Startup Victoria,” Scott Handsaker, Startup Victoria co-founder and board member, told InnovationAus.com.
“She’s been really effective at a lot of things but her two strong points from her time as CEO were driving brand awareness of startups and Startup Victoria and getting the organisation in a state that is financially sustainable,” he said.
Startup Victoria is a non-profit dedicated to building and supporting Victoria’s startup ecosystem. It organises some of the biggest technology start-up events in Melbourne.
With a 20,000-plus membership base that is steadily increasing, Startup Victoria has grown to become one of the largest entrepreneurship groups in Australia.
Mr Handsaker said he hoped the next chief executive would also have an existing “affinity with the startup community”.
“Startup Victoria is very much a grassroots, bottom-up community-driven organisation, so we’re looking for someone who understands community building, and who is focused on the grassroots community.
“Startup Victoria is very much a founder first organisation. Our mission is more founders, better founders, as we try to get more people into startup entrepreneurship and we do that by focusing on founders.
“At the same time, we’re a not-for-profit [the new CEO] also needs to have the ability to focus on revenue and drive, so we have what is a pretty decent revenue model that we can hand to this person and they can go do it.”