Giants

We run two 10x week cohorts a year, if successful in your application you’ll be able to start booking mentors the week before official cohort kicks off. To be the first to hear about upcoming dates, join the waitlist above.

Back in 2012, at the very beginning of the Blackbird journey, we invested in Canva’s very first round, before there was a product. The investment we made in Canva was possible because of our first investors - many of whom were founders themselves.

The very beginning of a startup is a magic time. It’s a time of possibility, of question-asking, of rapid fire ideas. But it can also be lonely, daunting, and confusing, particularly for first-time founders. There are many brilliant places for founders to scale and grow their startup in ANZ, but few for founders that don’t fit neatly into the investment box, who haven’t found their co-founder, who have the ambition but are still working on the idea.

Giants exists to plug this gap by bringing together the interests and passions of people who want to form companies. Through Giants, we can bring more ambitious people together and create new pathways for access into the ecosystem. From this very beginning, founders can go on to Startmate or other accelerators, begin their investment journey or start building their team - whatever their first giant leap forward might be.

If you’re at the very beginning of your founder journey, or you want to help someone on theirs, I hope you’ll join us.

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For founders: Giants is specifically for aspiring and early-stage founders, so if you've got an idea - or even just the beginnings of one- you're exactly who we're looking for. You do not need a fully-fledged product or an MVP; you only need an initial idea you're exploring and hoping to validate. 

Beyond that, to be eligible for Giants, 

• At least one person in the founding team must have a relationship with Australia and New Zealand. i.e., either are based here or from Australia and New Zealand and live remotely. Please note that most of the workshop times and mentor sessions cater to Australian-New Zealand timezones,
• The startup idea and its founders are not part of an intrapreneurship project,
• The startup idea is no more than two years old in operations,
• The founding team are all over 18, 
• You are building a startup, and
• Founders are eligible to do Giants twice every five years.

For mentors: On the mentoring side, if you're a founder, investor, operator or subject matter expert who wants to give back to the startup community and help shape tomorrow's best ANZ founders, we'd love to have you.

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Nope! We don’t charge a program fee and we don’t ask for any equity.

We designed Giants to be as self-serve as possible. Once you’re in the build community, you can find and connect with other founders and request to book mentors for your 1;1 sessions each month. At the core of Giants is goal-setting; you’re much more likely to achieve something you’ve committed to publicly. The Masterclass content and the resource library are designed to be consumed at a pace that works for you.
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The Idea Stage course is roughly 2 hours of content per week, plus additional time on desktop research and customer validation at your will.
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For mentors, we ask that you commit to two x 30-minute monthly mentoring sessions - these can be in a block or two blocks, either at a recurring monthly time or you can nominate different times monthly.

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We review applications about a month out of the cohort starting, we’ll let everyone know about two weeks out from the cohort starting with onboarding info on how to be prepared.

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The Giants community is for that -1 - zero space, we define validation in two steps. First Customer Validation or understanding how others relate to the problem space, and second Product Validation or testing the solution. While more established founders and operators are welcome to become a mentor through Giants, those later stage companies are unlikely to benefit from Giants programming.

With that said, if you really want to be part of the program and have a new idea or want to ask for more info, get in touch with us so we can put you on the right path.

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In the Build Stage, each startup will get access to 10 unique mentor sessions per startup for the cohort; this means you can choose you you meet with. You can book a new mentor each time or book three different mentors and see if there's someone you want to follow up with for a second booking. Mentors are based on a first-come, first-served basis, with mentors adding their availability at the beginning of the cohort or monthly. You'll get a walk-through on booking these sessions as part of your founder onboarding to Giants.

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While we will send you and your mentor a post-meeting survey, it is up to you and your mentor to set the terms of any follow-up correspondence or actions from your session. This can be done in the session or via the Giants Slack to see if they would like to receive further updates. Please be respectful and mindful of the mentor's time in any communications.

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Giants is generational peer support. Part of our goal with Giants is to connect founders at a similar stage or with a similar challenge; finding a co-founder, building MVP etc.  You’ll be able to see these founders, however any outreach will be self-directed via our slack channel. We ask that you use common sense, don’t be spammy and respect others’ time when reaching out to the community. Outside of the online community we host regular meet ups in most capital cities.

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Giants is a community for aspiring and early-stage founders and those helping them to succeed. We’ve created a place for this community to come together through mentoring, founder knowledge-sharing, education and accountability tracking. Our initial MVP launched in January and we now run two bespoke experiences to validate your startup idea.

The first is the idea stage, a self-paced learning module to help you understand how to build conviction and gain customer validation, the second is a 10x week mentoring program to connect with over 150 mentors from Australia and New Zealand's best founders, operators and investors to test your solution and understand what sort of start up are building, and how!

Everything is virtual, on-demand and free.

We all want to be the first person to give someone their shot, and our community has put their hand up many times to help support next generation talent. Our hope is that Giants will also help more founders turn their ideas into reality, while providing a place for more of our best founders, operators and leaders to be part of that journey in a simple, meaningful way.

Our goal is to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars right at the beginning of a company’s life before there is product or revenue. We want to earn a courtside seat to the best companies by building a great relationship with them and then invest hundreds of millions over their lifetimes. For our first checks to a company, we have invested as little as $30,000 in a pre-seed round or up to $5M in a Series A.

As part of the Giants program, we partner with the Startmate First Believers angel syndicate to host a pitch night where you might be able to score a $25,000 cheque and your first investors. Giants founders also make up an large proportion of the companies that make it into various accelerators such as the Startmate accelerator and USyd Genesis accelerator.