2024 Annual Letter

To the supporters and friends of NextGen Ventures:

When we founded NextGen in 2023, there was a firm belief that student-founders were massively underrepresented in Australia. A study Mitch later did validated this – only 8% of VCs somewhat believed the industry adequately met the needs of student-founders (Student Startup Funding Report ‘23).

Looking into Australia’s future, we also believed that student-founders held massively untapped potential that, if nurtured, could propel our ecosystem to new heights. The ongoing success of student-founded startups such as Atlassian, Immutable, and Harrison.ai provides a strong foundation for this vision. Two years later, that belief has only gotten stronger.

For me, 2024 was a continuation of the foundations we had set in our maiden year where we, truthfully, were stumbling around wondering if we were getting better at finding new ways to be confused about how to build a venture capital fund.

Since then, our work has impacted the full span of a student-founders journey. From serving as the first meaningful touch-point with the world of venture capital and startups, to normalising ambition within our grassroots community, and finally capitalising on high-growth student-led startups as they approach exit velocity.

We’ve also intentionally strived towards doing more than just allocating capital. We want to create a cultural shift across all Australian universities, empowering more students to start building while challenging the bias against youth-related inexperience.

This is our first annual letter through which I will share our reflections, key observations, and learnings over the past year. To those who have been with us on this journey, thank you for your support. And to those just joining, we’re only getting started.

What’s happening at NextGen?

Finding special people

I shared this meme with Mitch early in 2024 during one of our Sunday morning strategy meetings. There was initial confusion about how a graphic inspired by early 2000s 4chan culture could have any real impact on our approach to execution or investing. Today, it couldn’t be clearer.

Special people do special things.

First, we had to find special people to join the NextGen team.

When we first started in 2023, our limited presence meant we only had 15 applications – not ideal. Today, it’s the complete opposite. Our most recent recruitment cycle for 2025 received 167 applications.

But to win as a fund, we knew we had to work with winners. In hindsight, our team has achieved remarkable success beyond NextGen in 2024: Donald hustles at Heffron.ai, Shae starts 2025 as a software developer at Apple, Emily and Quianna are about to begin internships at SF-based startups, and Jamal took a courageous one-way flight to SF to chase his dream startup, and he landed it. There are many such stories, and we look forward to playing a small role in that journey for many of the future students who join us.

Mitch and I were blessed to work with an extraordinary team of 25 students in 2024 who generously offered their time to help champion our vision on university campuses. Together, we were able to achieve great success this year in uncovering special founders.

We uncovered 475 new startups, an effort that was spearheaded by our ultra-competitive Head of Investments, Varad. But one story remains front-of-mind, and that was Will from Phonely.

Mitch first met Will in February at a pitch night – they were immediately drawn to each other as the youngest in a room of grey hair (respectfully). What stood out to us was Will’s outstanding clarity about the space he was building in, voice AI. Over the following months, we got to know him even better including during a private catch-up we held for student-founders in April. Mitch and I were excited to learn that Will was then accepted into Y-Combinator the following month in May.

There have been many such stories: Mitch met Linus of Lyrebird in March of 2023 on literally Day 1 of their journey, while Vishaak met Daniel of Edexia in September of 2023, far ahead of their own acceptance into Y-Combinator in November 2024.

These special founders don’t just randomly appear. Mitch and I continue to have strong conviction in the unique ability of our team to source through close proximity to grassroots communities while following founder journeys over many months. We have seen student founders on the boundary of greatness many times before others.

As a young team, we take great pride in our ability to connect authentically with other ambitious youth who are seeking their tribe. We believe we can grow this unique community far further than anyone else, and in a way that no one else in the Australian startup ecosystem can.

This brings me to our thesis on community and culture.

Growing a garden of tall poppies

Over the course of the year, we defined several core values that now serve as our North Star, guiding our culture as a team. The one I believe worth highlighting the most is this:

We are growing a garden of tall poppies

At NextGen, we believe it is time to change the narrative in Australia that silences ambition among our youth – tall poppy syndrome. We’re building a tribe where exceptional people thrive and achieve greatness together. We encourage innovation, and we pay it forward, sharing knowledge and wisdom with others. In our garden of tall poppies, we honour both success and failure, and turn the impossible into reality, believing that our successes are intertwined.

Over the past decade, it has become increasingly common for brilliant students to leave for the US, where the unapologetic pursuit to find what one cares about is celebrated, regardless of the status quo. Granted, there is wider functional merit to this – the opportunities and available capital pool in the US is significantly larger than Australia’s. But we do need to look inward and ask how we can develop our own culture to encourage fearless ambition at the grassroots.

It’s our belief at NextGen that it starts with combatting this culture of tall poppy syndrome.

The network effect of bringing together our own team of aligned, ambitious students and connecting them with the wider university community – where these motivated yet often silenced voices live – has returned immense value.

In August, we threw our inaugural hackathon in Melbourne, FoundersHack. This was meticulously organised by Jamal, our Principal at Monash University, who inspired ~200 students to start building.

In November, together with Airwallex we brought ambitious student-founders across Victoria under one roof. These student-founder meetups have become a cornerstone event in our annual calendar – we also fortunately teamed up with 1835i in Melbourne and Rampersand in Sydney to host adjacent gatherings.

I encourage more founders and investors to get among the university community. NextGen is your partner to make this happen.

Putting the money where our mouth is

Raising capital is hard.

We’ve had countless people tell us it’s a ‘nuclear winter’ – the harshest funding environment in decades. It’s even harder when you are two 22 and 23 year olds with no prior track record as fund managers. But our big, hairy goal at the start of 2024 was to finalise our first investment by the end of the year.

To prepare for this, we dedicated the preceding months leading up to 2024 to building a stable foundation that not only showcased the immense potential of the student VC model in Australia, but also established us as the team to execute it. This meant supporting nearly 200 startups, seeking the wisdom of international student-run VCs (Dorm Room Fund, Protege Ventures, Front Row Ventures, etc), establishing our roots in Australia’s leading universities, and much more.

Among our most impactful supporters during our early days was Chris Gillings, our first backer and unofficial advisor, who now serves on our investment committee. Mitch and I are also deeply grateful for the time and advice of Niki Scevak and Paul Naphtali, whose guidance have been instrumental in shaping our journey and avoiding many landmines. Equally invaluable has been Ed Hooper, who has consistently gone above and beyond in supporting the operational establishment of our fund.

We were able to achieve our goal on December 19th with the support of Chris at our first IC meeting. We are yet to formally announce this, so if you’ve somehow read this far, congratulations on getting to the alpha. Mitch and I are extremely excited to be partnering with the founding teams, and look forward to sharing more when ready.

Looking into 2025, we move forward on our mission to back young and hungry Australian ambition working to solve hard and non-obvious problems through an unconditioned view, far before anyone else. Especially those hyper-focused on their product and customer, and then willing to scale this with elite ambition, tenacity, and resilience.

To our new limited partners, thank you for your support and partnership with NextGen.

Closing remarks

Work with us

To date, our initial experience as first-time fund managers has reaffirmed our need to be, if nothing else, candid and approachable. In that spirit, we would be remiss without speaking directly to students that resonate with our mission: we want to meet you.

Mitch and I expect to continue our fundraise with our next big, hairy goal of officially closing the first fund by mid-2025. In that spirit, we would also be remiss without speaking directly to potential partners and investors: we want to meet you.

Presently, we see no reason to not continue scaling most aspects of the fund, ranging from the coverage of our team across the country to the training bootcamp. In terms of programs, we plan to bring our hackathon (FoundersHack) to Sydney, and look forward to developing more student-oriented initiatives alongside Airwallex in our new partnership – shoutout Taylor!

Given consumer consumption is more than 60% of global GDP, we also view the creator economy and content creation as an opportunity that few are meaningfully capitalising on in Australia. We’ll be looking to develop the NextGen brand as an increasingly powerful function not only in our attraction of dealflow but also our reputation and sphere of influence, especially as we press on in our ambitions to create a cultural shift among students.

Finally, we are eager to now foster more direct collaboration with both universities and the government. Mitch and I believe that establishing stronger lines of communication with these key institutions – where our founders are inevitably rooted – will be crucial as we scale our impact. Moreover, it’s in our shared interest that universities and governments are well-informed about the needs of Australia’s ambitious youth, ultimately contributing to the nation’s standing in the global economy.

A note to student-founders

2025 represents a new phase of growth for NextGen as we now become equipped from a capital stand-point to empower you, the student, to do your life’s work.

This inflection point is significant to me on a personal level. I entered university in 2021 primed to follow an orthodox route into medicine. Although aware that it wasn’t for me, I was still encouraged to focus on my grades and seperate my passions from work, however well-meaning. Mitch and I are deeply grateful for the chance to now empower young people who may have faced similar doubts, providing them with the capital to pursue their life’s work and build Australia's next generational startup.

As a final note: The commitment Mitch and I have made to our founders and investors revolves around a 365-day calendar – every day is a business day. This only serves as a means to our fundamental objective to help extraordinary people do extraordinary things. So to the students sitting in the corners of lecture halls, dreaming but unsure where to turn with their ideas, or those who’ve been told their life’s work is out of reach — NextGen is here for you.

Jerry X’Lingson