Mentors Australian startups should get to know: Sydney Edition (2014)

Claudia Barriga-Larriviere (featured image)

Another Pollenizer alumni, Claudia Barriga-Larriviere is a surgeon when it comes to startup strategy and hiring the right team in the early stages of a business. Barriga-Larriviere is a team intelligence and change management expert and works with a lot of startup founders in the B2B space.

Barriga-Larriviere is also a huge supporter of the SocEnt space having been heavily involved in Project Futures and TedX Sydney. When it comes to technology her expertise is working with startups and businesses on how they can cut through the noise and dominate the online space.

Phil Morle and Mick Luibinskas | image afr.com.au

Phil Morle and Mick Liubinskas

Known for founding Pollenizer together Phil Morle and Mick Liubinskas are veterans of the Aussie startup space. They understand technology startups and mentoring founders of them at the most intimate level, and together developed a complete business model around this.

Morle is still actively CEO of Pollenizer and mentors many startups directly, but in addition to this, his contributions to the Pollenizer blog on various methodologies and frameworks for startups are starting to gain massive traction and play a role indirectly mentoring an entire generation of startup founders across the country.

Liubinskas at the end of last year has taken on the role of heading up Telstra’s Muru -D accelerator program where he is currently in the middle of the intense day to day mentoring of a group of technology based startups that have global markets in their sites.

Sebastien Eckersley Maslin and Catherine Eibner | image Global Sanctuary

 Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin and Catherine Eibner

Sebastien Eckersley Maslin is the founder of venture technology firm Bluechilli. Catherine Eibner is the Lead Startup Advisor there. Considering the 5 year goal at Bluechilli has been to launch 100 startups, both of them are up to their necks mentoring startups at the moment.

Eckersley-Maslin is a big picture thinker that loves and understands technology at a level that is revered by the startups he gives guidance to, this has also positioned him as a thought leader at an industry, government and media level on the topic of Australia’s eco-system.

Eibner in other than her role with Bluechilli has spent her previous years mentoring startups as the head of the Microsoft Bizspark program in Australia, she assists startups in the areas of growth, connections, networking, structure and marketing.