How to Build Startups: Lessons from Atto Office Hours with Female Founders

Oct 3

Throughout 2022, the Atto team ran regular one-hour drop-in sessions featuring leading female founders.

First we start of with their founder story - a 5min summary of what’s often multiple decades of work and steps to get to this point.

We started this event series as we wanted to share insights with our community of emerging female founders about the realities of building a startup. In an intimate setting, it’s a chance for emerging female founders to learn what it’s really like building a startup right now.

Throughout 2022, we’ve had some really impressive founders share with us:

what getting started looked like
what was important in the first years
what it was really like raising funding
tips from building and leading teams,
and so much more.

We discussed getting started, building a team, sourcing capital, finding customers and global scale.

Once of the Atto founders tweeted about the informative sessions and said:

“Highly recommend these events by Atto. They’re intimate online events with fascinating women speakers. Real talk.” - Katrina, Copysmiths

Below we’ve included out top quotes and lessons from these sessions with successful founders.

We’ve got one more Office Hours session scheduled for this year with Sarah Agboola from mtime. Join us for an insightful and intimate session for emerging female founders.

How to Build Startups: Lessons from Atto Office Hours with Female Founders

Shahirah Gardner - Finch
Lisa Miller - Wedgetail
Heidi Holmes - Mentorloop
Gemma Lloyd - WORK180
Alex Sinickas - Milkdrop
Sarah Agboola - mtime

Shahirah Gardner - Finch

Founder: Shahirah Gardner
Company: Finch
Description: Finch is the next-gen data intelligence and financial technology company.

Lessons from Office Hours with Shahirah Gardner:

“High performance requires rest.”

About Shahirah Gardner:

Shahirah is cofounder of Finch, a next-gen data intelligence and financial technology company.

She is one of Australia’s leading names in fintech and women in tech, recognised as Australia’s “Rising fintech Star” in 2018 after Finch received numerous awards across multiple categories: including “Best Personal Finance app” and “Best Digital Wallet”. Shahirah has presented at several conferences including Money 20/20, Women In Payments & Australian Banking Summit, PauseFest, Yeah Nah, and CeBIT. She's a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion as a board member of Girls in Tech Australia and Inclusion Advisory Panel at Rampersand VC.

Prior to Finch, Shahirah has over 10 years experience in Tech Marketing & Strategy with companies such as Splunk and CCP Games. Most, recently Shahirah had her own digital consulting agency (Launchcode PR) - advising tech startups in Australia.

Lisa Miller - Wedgetail

Founder: Lisa Miller
Company: Wedgetail VC, ex-Puppy Tails, ex-Canva
Description: An organisation devoted to conserving and restoring biodiversity through sustainable investment

Lessons from Office Hours with Lisa Miller:

"One of the main skills founders need is to know enough to ask the right questions."
"You've got to talk to the mission itself before you talk about the product."
"Women often work better in a community. Often they're critical of or set limits on themselves. Being around others can support you and push you further."

About Lisa Miller

Lisa Miller has spent the last 15 years working with software development teams and helping them scale into successful customer-focused companies. Her experiences include everything from digital agencies to hyper-growth at Canva, where she founded the product growth team while helping the company grow from 100 to 1,000 employees.

Lisa is now the CEO and Founder of Wedgetail.vc – an organisation devoted to conserving and restoring biodiversity through sustainable investment. This new endeavour weaves together her background in zoology and evolutionary biology, with her years at the forefront of high-growth technology. Using this unique combination she hopes to accelerate the UN’s herculean task of conserving 30% of the world’s biodiversity by 2030.

Heidi Holmes - Mentorloop

Founder: Heidi Holmes
Company: Mentorloop
Description: Mentorloop software makes mentoring programs easy to start, run, and participate in.

Lessons from Office Hours with Heidi Holmes:

"What you need early on is blind optimism. You've got to believe in yourself and that it's going to happen. Then you need to complement that with intellectual honesty." View on IG

About Heidi Holmes:

Heidi is an accountant and marketer by trade and spent the first years of her career in various roles for the financial services giant, KPMG. A founder at heart, Heidi's first startup was a mature age job board called Adage, which was successfully acquired in 2014. Personally frustrated with trying to find the right connection outside her network, Heidi joined forces with her co-founder Lucy Lloyd to launch Mentorloop in 2016, with a mission to make mentoring more accessible for more people.

Today, Mentorloop has over 50,000 life-changing connections happening across 170 countries, supporting companies such as Woolworths, REA Group and Xero. Mentorloop is a proud certified B Corporation.

Gemma Lloyd - WORK180

Founder: Gemma Lloyd
Company: WORK180
Description: WORK180 endorse great employers for women. So when you see the WORK180 badge, you know you’ve found a company committed to raising workplace standards for all women.

Lessons from Office Hours with Gemma Lloyd:

"In the beginning, you're everything. Try to be agile, keep learning, network, ask for help, and don't be afraid to try new things." View on IG
"Looking back? I wish I considered the big picture more often - usually stressors don't matter down the track. And I wish I was kinder to myself."

About Gemma Lloyd:

Gemma Lloyd spent the first decade of her tech career dealing with regular sexism and discrimination. Meanwhile, Valeria Ignatieva was struggling to find a workplace that would offer the flexibility she needed as a single parent to a son with a disability.

They knew they weren’t the only ones feeling unwelcome in the working world. But they also knew there were employers out there that would value and nurture their talents — they just needed a way to find them! And so, in 2015, they created WORK180.

Today, WORK180 is trusted by millions of women around the world. Our endorsement is synonymous with employers committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we keep them all accountable. We’ve caught the attention of the likes of Vogue, ABC and the Financial Times. We’re also backed by investors, including Startmate, Skip Capital, Ashpeak Investments, Investible, Giant Leap and Blackbird VC.

Our global team is growing and big brands are on board, but our mission will always remain the same: To raise organizational standards so that all women can choose workplaces where they can thrive.

Alex Sinickas - Milkdrop

Founder: Alex Sinickas
Company: Milkdrop
Description: Milkdrop are changing the way women feel about breast pumps, by redesigning the pump from the nipple up. Our first product is an ultra-soft silicone cushion that stretches over existing breast pumps heads making them softer, more natural-feeling and far more comfortable.

Lessons from Office Hours with Alex Sinickas:

"Early-stage founders need to have a lot of flexibility and quick thinking." View on IG
"We tried to get as much feedback as early as we could."
"We did design by text book - prototype early, test, fail and iterate as you go."
"You can learn something from anywhere - it does not have to come from someone with an identical experience to yours."
"Quantitative data helps you to make a case, and the rich qualitative insight helps you establish why it’s important."

About Alex Sinickas:

Alex Sinickas is the Founder & CEO at Milkdrop, a company creating breast pump cushions that change the way women feel about pumping.

Milkdrop is a medical product design company, focused on creating beautiful products and experiences for women.

Starting with a stint in investment banking, then working as a civil engineer in Australia and Canada; Alex later specialised in commercialising research before founding Milkdrop in March 2019.

Alex struggled with pumping. In the days, weeks and months that followed the birth of her daughter, Alex began to realise she was not alone. There are many, many women who share her problem.

As many of us unfortunately know from firsthand experience - pumping can cause damage, pain and discomfort, and can make you feel like a cow.

Being an engineer, Alex founded Milkdrop to find ways pumping could be easier, more enjoyable and empowering for women.

Sarah Agboola - mtime

Founders: Sarah Agboola
Company: mtime
Description: mtime is a social enterprise creating a supportive community of parents and moncierges.

Lessons from Office Hours with Sarah Agboola:

"Failure is what helps you learn.
"Often the hardest part of anything is just getting started."
"My advice for emerging female founders? Back yourself. Get better at setting boundaries. And try not to have a scarcity mindset."
"A key skill early-stage founders need to learn is emotional resilience. Your ability to keep pushing is what keeps you going. Most hard skills you can learn, but soft skills really need to be developed."
"When you're looking for investors, be really specific about who you're pitching to, find investors who really get your business, and build a human connection with them."

Sarah Agboola is founder and CEO of mtime, a business dedicated to giving busy families their time back by matching them with family assistants. As a for purpose business, mtime not only helps busy families manage their home lives, but also helps women new or returning to the workforce gain meaningful employment through their assistant roles.

In addition to mtime, Sarah is an Advisory Board Member of the Australian Government's National Careers Institute (established as part of the National Skills Commission). For her work with mtime, Sarah was included in the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list for the social impact category in 2022.

Want to join a supportive community of female founders?

Submit an expression of interest to join the Atto community. We’re all about supporting women to build startups in a scalable, sustainable and independent way.

Submit an EOI

Meet all the Atto Startups here

Want to join the Atto community to connect with like-minded ambitious female founders?

Submit an EOI here.

Lana Weal

How to Build Startups: Lessons from Atto Office Hours with Female Founders