I joined Glitch Capital to build the Platform because I believe the hardest-won lessons in venture rarely reach the people who need them. Changing that is the job, and Imperfect Company, the new content platform by Glitch Capital, is where we begin.
Today, I’m proud to announce the launch of Imperfect Company, our platform. It’s a newsletter, podcast and events series where we leverage our team and network to share as much as possible about building a world-changing business.
This is perhaps most exemplified by the launch of the Imperfect Company podcast hosted by Leigh Jasper and Sam Kroonenburg. Both have built unicorn companies previously (Aconex and A Cloud Guru), are partners at Glitch Capital and are founders building again with Firmable and Cuttable, respectively.
The Imperfect Company podcast will publish every fortnight with episodes featuring topic deep-dives and interviews with scale-up founders and operators about their imperfect journey.
In the weeks in between podcasts, Imperfect Company will share an article written by our partners, founder-investor LPs or portfolio companies featuring tactical advice on scaling startups.
Investing in content and platform
Glitch Capital is Australia and New Zealand’s first founders’ fund. We invest alongside top-tier VCs in high-growth, globally focused technology companies with product-market fit looking to scale.
Our fund is an aggregation of founders who want to invest in and help the next generation of startups. This limited partner base is our differentiator.
We have 70+ founder investors, including 20+ unicorn founders, who have collectively generated more than $10B in exit value across 20+ industries, with many still building their companies. They’re operators with deep experience building companies from $0 to $100M+ ARR globally.
Glitch exists to concentrate that experience and make it accessible to the next generation of founders.
This fund was created to solve three problems our partners and LPs identified on their own journeys:
Scaling a technology company to $100M ARR is hard. Globally, less than 3% of venture backed companies get there.
Accessing the help from people who’ve scaled before is fragmented and difficult.
And for successful founders who want to invest in venture, doing it well requires infrastructure, process, and patience that most don’t have time to build alone.
Glitch aims to solve these by giving portfolio founders access to world-class operating experience, giving founder-investors a platform to deploy capital alongside top-tier VCs, and creating a compounding network where everyone benefits.
Founder problems
Before I get to how we plan to help, I want to share the three-horizon framework we use to identify the problems Glitch wants to help founders solve.
Level one problems are the ones we see repeatedly across startups and can be solved with resources and templates. They’re common questions with known answers. Things like; How to set up your cap table, what a good board deck looks like, how to write a monthly investor update.
Level two problems are when you need specialist support or a door opened. They’re the requests you see monthly investor update email founders send out. They sound like introductions to great people for your growing team, an introduction to a decision-maker at a potential customer, help with your fundraise, or a warm path into the network.
Level three problems are where Glitch operates best. This is when the question doesn’t have an answer yet. It’s more than likely that the question, in your specific context, has never been asked before. Level three problems need time and space to sit down, pull out a whiteboard, and think through. Strip it back to first principles and build it up again.
Level three problems can't be solved with a template, and they're rarely cracked in a single meeting. But they can be made smaller with help. The fastest way through a question no one has answered yet is to find someone who's faced a version of it, and to understand how they thought it through, the attempts to solve it that worked and the ones that didn’t.
That's what Imperfect Company is built to do at scale.
What is our platform, Imperfect Company?
Building a startup is an imperfect journey.
It's messy, non-linear, and full of wrong turns and scaling one to real size only compounds all of these.
Most founder-facing content pretends otherwise. We're doing the opposite by being honest about how hard it actually is, founder-to-founder, because that honesty is where the useful stuff lives. It's also an authentic mindset fitting our team of founder-investors who are still building, still learning, still occasionally getting it wrong.
"Winning is one thing, but out of losing I always learned more for the future. So I got stronger from losing."
The name carries two meanings. Company as in the businesses we're building. And company as in the companionship the work demands.
This isn't a broadcast from an ivory tower. It's us in it with you: working through the questions, bringing the right people together, hosting the rooms, making the introductions, and letting the network compound.
Put together, Imperfect Company is a promise about how we show up: honest about the difficulty of being a founder, and present as dependable companions through it — across the dinners with exceptional groups, the podcast featuring founders sharing their worst day in the office, and the newsletter with strategic advice on scaling.
That shows up in three ways. The podcast is where founders and operators talk honestly about their imperfect journey. The worst days in the office, the calls they'd make different, the thinking behind the decisions. The writing is where our fund partners, LPs and portfolio founders and their teams share tactical, hard-won advice on scaling. And the dinners are where relationships are built and ideas can be debated.
The venture industry and innovation are evolving at a faster rate than ever before. What doesn't change is the value of hearing the truth from someone who's been in your seat. That's what we're investing in.
Who this is for
We’ve built this platform to reach the founders building with the ambition and tenacity to scale to $100M in revenue.
It’s for the operators working in startups who will found the next generation of companies. It should serve the exited founders, the angels investors and family offices thinking carefully about the Australian startup ecosystem, and investing globally.
My measure of success isn't based in vanity metrics.
It's this: are founders citing something our network wrote or shared when they reach out? Are we creating space for our founder-investor LP’s to build fruitful relationships with our portfolio teams?
If the answer is yes, the rest takes care of itself.
Glitch was built by people who built companies before they became investors. They know the difference between advice that sounds right from the outside and advice that survives contact with the market.
My job is to make sure that knowledge actually reaches the founders who need it.
That's what Imperfect Company is for.
This is issue one.
