Open The Pod Bay Doors

This week, we ‘Open The Pod Bay Doors’ with Craig Blair, cofounder and managing partner of AirTree Ventures – a startup venture fund on a mission to invest in ambitious founders who are looking to transform industry’s with software.AirTree like to be on the journey with founder from the beginning, often writing the first cheque. The first fund in 2014 was $60M which they deployed in 2 years, making 24 investments; this included early cheques in some of Australia’s startup darlings, like Prospa and Canva. The fund is tracking well with all 24 businesses still operating.The second fund increased five-times to an incredible $250M in 2016, with 15 investments made so far. The larger fund has given AirTree more operating capital to deploy into support services like a talent function to service their portfolio companies to help them build great teams for growth. This model is common in the US and UK, but in Australia it’s still a novel concept due to the limited number of funds and their size. 60% of fund two has b