My Journey After Startmate

...and what I'm up to now

Mar 29, 2026

Gabby went back to work on the 2nd of Feb - Monday.

Her first day back after 12-months of parental leave. She kissed Raph goodbye handing him to our nanny, walked out the door, and just like that - the house was quiet.

I sat down. Opened my laptop. And stared at it.

No Slack notifications. No board deck due. No team standup. No founder calls booked. No north star to chase.

For the first time in eight years, I had absolutely nothing to do.

And the only thought in my head was:

What am I gonna do with my life?

💌 Leaving Wasn’t About Identity. It Was About Responsibility.

The hardest part of leaving was the sense of responsibility.

A team I’d built. 240 companies I’d invested in. Investors who’d backed funds every 6 months. A community that trusted me.

Walking away felt like quitting on people.

That was the thing I had to disentangle myself from - not the title, but the belief that leaving meant letting people down. Because the reality is: I didn’t let anyone down. I set Startmate up for an incredible continuation. Phoebe and the team are absolutely going to dominate.

🏆 The CEO Interviews

At the same time, I started interviewing for CEO roles.

A couple of companies hit me up. Others I reached out to, just to see - is being a CEO somewhere else even what I want?

Pretty quickly, I saw that my energy wasn’t there.

It wasn’t a dramatic realisation. It was more like trying on a jacket that used to fit and noticing it doesn’t sit right anymore. The role was familiar, but the pull was gone. “Being CEO” was never the goal; building something epic was.

So I stopped looking.

And those 240 companies? They didn’t lose a CEO. They gained a founder in the trenches, building products for them.

🪩 The Reflection

I did what I always do when I’m lost. I ask questions and write it all down.

I sat with a blank page and started asking myself questions:

What gives me energy?
What drains my energy?
What are my values?
What kind of impact do I want to have?
What am I uniquely well-placed to do?
How is the world shifting - and how can I be part of it?

It took a couple of days to work through all of it. But the most important question - the one that kept coming back - was this:

What feels like fun to me and work to others?

That single question cut through everything. Because when I looked back at eight years at Startmate, the parts I loved most were always the founder parts.

The sitting-with-someone-and-pulling-apart-their-pitch parts.
The building-something-from-nothing parts.
The figuring-it-out parts.

The parts I didn’t love? People problems. Politics. Saying the same thing for the fifth time because nobody read the doc.

Well - at least, now, I had a starting point!

🤝 Coaching: Where It All Started

To generate some cash flow while I figured things out, I built a quick website - batko.ai and put up a coaching page.

I got inundated.

Turns out, people noticed.

But this time, coaching felt completely different.

Previously at Startmate, I was mostly mentoring. Short conversations. Connecting founders to my network. A nudge here, a framework there.

Now? I ask founders what hat they want me to wear. If they want me to go practical, I go *super* deep. Into the details. Into the operations. Sometimes I literally jump in and build things myself.

It’s not advice from the sidelines anymore. It’s shortcutting the speed to action.

I coach on Tuesdays now. A handful of founders and VC funds at a time. And every single session, the same thing happens - founders tell me their problems. The exact same problems I’ve been hearing for eight years across thousands of founders at Startmate.

That’s when coaching stopped being just coaching. It became the input for something much bigger.

🍬 The Candy Store Moment

Shoutout to Jeff Deutsch.

Jeff is the one who got me properly set up with AI tools. I remember sitting next to him and a coworker, watching them talk to their laptops and build things in real time.

I felt so slow.

They were creating, deploying, iterating - and I was just sitting there trying to figure out where to start.

But once Jeff got me set up, once I had Vercel connected and could actually deploy a website - honestly, within the day, something clicked.

I’m a visual person. But a shocking designer. And suddenly I could create websites, tools, entire product experiences - beautifully, and *so incredibly fast.*

That was probably the moment when I just went:

Imagination is your limit.

Not money. Not team size. Not technical skill. Imagination. If you can describe what you want to build, you can build it.

And suddenly, I had two things colliding: eight years of knowing exactly what founders need and the ability to build it, alone, in hours.

💥 What Came Out The Other Side

Two things emerged from that collision. Both still early. Both moving fast.

🚀 1. batko.ai - The Entire Founder Journey, as a Platform

It started with one tool. PitchMaster - an AI-powered pitch deck review. Upload your deck, get narrative + structure + tactical feedback in about 3 hours. Built from my own real VC pattern recognition after reviewing hundreds of decks. The feedback has been incredible.

Then came Founder Signal - a platform where verified founders review accountants, lawyers, VCs, coworking spaces, and newsletters. Signal over noise. No pay-to-play. Just real founder experiences.

Then NorthStar AI — helping founders define the one metric that actually matters for their business, with a radiating flowchart that connects it to everything they should be measuring.

And then I just thought:

I know ALL the problems founders have. They’ve been asking me about these problems for eight years. I’m still coaching founders every Tuesday - and every single session, they tell me about all their problems.

Why don’t I just build the entire product suite?

From idea validation to fundraising to operations to exit - every stage of the founder journey, as a platform. One place. Every tool connecting to the next.

That’s what batko.ai is becoming.

Discovery → Build → Raise → Operate → Signal → Exit.

Each individual tool only takes me a couple of hours to build. But the insight behind each one? That took 8 years of sitting with thousands of founders who told me exactly what they needed.

The Exit stage is a good example. I’ve sold two of my own businesses through LinkedIn - no broker, no marketplace, just storytelling and trust. After I shared that story, founders started asking if I could do the same for them. So now Social Exit is part of the platform - helping founders running $50k–$1m businesses get a real outcome when they’re ready to move on. Because the advisory world is built for $50M+ exits. Everyone else gets told to just shut down.

🤖 2. AI for Business - The Unexpected Company

Here’s a fun one. And honestly, it’s been staring me in the face for years.

Before Startmate, I built Puddle Pod - a productivity side hustle I ran for four years, teaching people how to get more done with less. Workflows, systems, habits. I genuinely loved it.

AI is productivity on steroids. It’s the evolution of everything I’ve been teaching and caring about for years - just with 100x the leverage.

As I built more and more with AI, I got curious about how my workflows compared to what other people were doing. So I asked Claude to compare my workflows against the most popular AI productivity workflows out there.

Mine were miles better.

Not because I’m smarter but because they were personalised. Built for me, for Australia, for the startup ecosystem. Not generic “10 ways to use ChatGPT” stuff.

That led to building batko.ai and helping a few friends implement AI tools in their businesses. Which led to more people asking. Which led to a proper company forming - with a friend - helping organisations identify where AI saves the most time and actually building the workflows.

From Puddle Pod to this. Same obsession, wildly different scale. We’re going to make it more official soon. Watch this space.

👀 What Scares Me

I’ll be honest.

What scares me is that this is a limited time window.

Right now, the gap between “people who can build with AI” and “everyone else” is massive. I’m moving fast. I’m shipping every week. I’m building things that would have taken a team of ten people 6 months ago.

But this window won’t last forever. Maybe 6, maybe 12, maybe 24 months. Everyone is going to catch up. The tools will get easier. The advantage will shrink.

So there’s this urgency I feel - not panic, more like a founder’s instinct - to take this window of opportunity and make the absolute most of it.

The Founders Still Call

I get 5 to 10 messages from founders in my network every single day. Asking for coaching. Help. Advice. AI. Introductions. You name it.

They are friends. I work fast. I reply fast. And it’s fun.

Has anything changed now that I’m not CEO?

Not really. If anything, they just see me as one of them now.

Another founder figuring things out.

I love that. ❤️

🚧 This Is All Work in Progress

Everything I just described? It’s about six weeks old.

Six weeks.

The coaching practice, the AI products, the Social Exit deals, the platform vision - all of it has crystallised in just over a month.

Right now, I’m actively ramping down coaching and ramping up the product building and AI building. That ratio will keep shifting. The whole shape of what I’m doing will keep evolving.

I don’t have a polished 5-year plan to share. Life is a journey. Everything is a bridge to the next thing.

What I do know is this: I’ve got a couple more career chapters to write. And this one - this messy, fast, build-everything-from-scratch chapter - feels like exactly the right one to be writing right now.

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If any of this resonates - or you’re going through something similar - I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Hit me up. Reply to this email. DM me on LinkedIn.

Let’s see where this goes :)

Batko OS

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