Over the past 90 days, my team has been searching high and low across Australia to find and recruit VR/AR and real estate startups to the Village Xperience and Charter Hall PropTech corporate accelerator programs respectively.

It all began when we sat down with Jon Satterly (Chief Digital Officer at Village) and Aidan Coleman (CIO/CTO at Charter Hall) to better understand these organisations and their objectives.

Both wanted to partner with startups to gain more exposure to emerging tech and talent and to foster new, strategically aligned and commercially viable relationships. Partnering with startups was also seen as an opportunity to learn from ‘how the other half lives’ and to embed some of that thinking and doing back into the mothership.

Recruitment

We leveraged our extended networks, various marketing channels growth hacks to spread the word to as many aligned startups as possible, reaching over 300 in the process. When all was said and done, we received 96 applications across the two programs. These applications came from Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth with several coming from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and India.

Business Model Alignment

The value of any corporate startup partnership is amplified considerably when there is some form of synergy between the two.

Read: How to Identify Synergies between Corporates and Startups

We sat down with senior leadership from both companies to better understand their business models, not only today, but where they saw them going tomorrow. Gaining an appreciation for their corporate strategy, value chain, target customer segments and overarching value proposition helped us to better evaluate the startups.

We were stoked with the response but then realised that we had 96 applications to review. 😱

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