The Startup Playbook Podcast

Insights and lessons from the world's best entrepreneurs and investors

Ep162 – Dan Peters (Managing Director – Clearco) on partnerships, benchmarks and data driven capital

My guest for Ep162 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Dan Peters, the Managing Director of Clearco Australia.

Clearco is the world’s largest Ecommerce investor. They provide revenue based financing options to Ecommerce businesses with their data driven approach to investment decisions providing capital to 8x as many female founders as traditional venture capital funds and 25x as many POC.

In this episode, Dan and I talk about Clearco’s investment approach in market as well as some of his insights as a 2x founder, initially in the early 2000’s with Cleardocs, a company he sold to Reuters, and most recently as a Co-founder of Limepay which started during the pandemic.

Specifically we discuss:

  • Lessons from Dan’s career as a founder and as an early Google Australia team member
  • How startups can negotiate, execute and leverage effective partnerships to scale
  • The importance of knowing your metrics and benchmarking against the market
  • How to build high performing teams
  • The key ingredients Clearco looks for when making investment decisions
  • & much more!

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Timestamps 

  • 3:15: Dan’s background
  • 5:24: lessons from early days at Google
  • 8:28: how to navigate and negotiate for effective partnerships
  • 11:45: How to gauge interest and make partnerships effective once active
  • 15:14: Dan’s experience as a founder
  • 27:58: Whether the constraints in the funding environment in early 00s was a benefit or a hindrance
  • 30:12: What is clearCO?
  • 34:51: How ClearCo makes investment decisions
  • 38:10: Key metrics ClearCo looks for
  • 40:45: How ClearCo helps companies that aren’t performing to benchmark performances
  • 44:42: How to build high performing teams
  • 50:46: Effective hiring processes from his time at Google

Our partners

A big thank you to our partners for this episode.

Lawpath

Lawpath’s Legal Advice Plan gives you access to lawyers on demand for one low monthly fee. Create legal documents, sign online and have a lawyer on-call to help you through any legal need for a fraction of the cost.  Lawpath has helped Australian businesses save over $100 million in legal fees, and are offering Startup Playbook listeners up to 20% off their most popular legal plans. Visit lawpath.com/playbook for your exclusive discount and discover an easier way to get your legals sorted.

Scendar 

We’re Scendar, an accounting and advisory practice better described as Finance as a Service (FaaS). We’re focused on founders, funders and startups. Clients that are ever-changing and adapting. We like fast movers. And as you might have guessed, we’re not your basic accountancy. We can take care of tax and the books whilst building a syndicate fund and a multimillion dollar exit strategy.  At Scendar, we’re empowered by our client’s potential. Find out more at Scendar.com

Dovetail Studios 

Dovetail Studios operates a venture studio and VC to transform ambitious ideas into unstoppable businesses. On top of being a renowned product development partner for startups like Afterpay, they also operate a VC fund to invest in early-stage companies that go through their venture studio program. So if you’re a non-technical, early-stage founder looking for a talented team to help supercharge your success, check out dovetailstudios.com

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