Aotearoa New Zealand’s Startup Programme

The Founder Catalyst™ programme is designed to help you gain the skills you need to sustain the decade-long journey of running through walls and building a globally successful company.

By the end of this programme, you’ll not only leave with the hard skills (e.g. product development, market validation, financial literacy) required for the next phase of your journey, but the soft skills (e.g. leadership, team management, cultural intelligence) as well.

Key Focus Areas

Everything they do in the programme orbits around three big themes: market, globalisation, and fundraising.

• Market
  • It’s a common pitfall in the startup world: diving into a market without thorough analysis and preparation, only to struggle with acquiring users or customers later on.
  • But what if you could avoid these pitfalls and set yourself up for success from the beginning? The program is designed to help you do just that.
• Globalisation
  • They believe in equipping you with the ambition, confidence, knowledge, and passion needed to take your solution beyond the shores.
  • The mission is to connect you with investors, potential customers, and other capacity-building programs. They’ll also guide you through the intricacies of expanding your presence offshore.
• Funding
  • At the end of the day, innovation thrives on one essential element: money.
  • Whether it flows in from friends and family, private institutions, or public funding sources, the key to securing funding remains constant: mastering the art of storytelling, public speaking, financial expertise, and a solid corporate structure.

Why you should apply?

• Prioritise outcomes to move quickly
• Build your core competencies
• Maximise your chances to fund your venture
• Get strategic help with domain expertise
• Create a culturally intelligent business
• Unlock partner resources & benefits

Criteria To Participate

Founder Catalyst is a continuously-running capability-building programme from the Ministry of Awesome with four cohorts per year. Each cohort is six months long, and to be accepted, a startup founder must apply, interview, and be invited to join. The criteria for a company to be considered for eventual participation is listed below:

• Demonstrated Traction
  • Has a working minimum viable product (MVP)
  • Has an innovative, scalable solution and/or business model
  • Has early signs of market validation in at least one market
  • Has a founding team who possesses the technical or “hard” skills to tackle this particular problem
  • Preferably has at least two founding team members with at least one full-time
• Global Ambition
  • Has ambition to solve a globally relevant problem with a globally relevant solution
  • Has potential for solution to be scalable on a global stage
  • Has a draft plan of expanding into a second market
• Personal Commitment
  • Has a founding team who will (a) be open to learning; (b) collaborate with their cohort, MoA, and the Startup Mentors; (c) hold themselves accountable to goals, metrics, and the programme schedule and requirements; (d) strive for world-class excellence
  • Is committed to working on the problem for the long-term
  • Has a founding team that will agree to MoA’s Code of Conduct
• Revenue & Funding
  • Preferably has not achieved more than NZ$500k in annual revenue
  • Preferably has not raised more than NZ$1M

For more information, visit Founder Catalyst.