An Aussie startup mentor network

I can only comment on 3 of the mentors (only 3 I have met or can remember) but Bart Jellema is the real deal, and quite a nice bloke to boot. Catherine Eibner is pleasant and friendly (runs the BizSpark stuff), and Nikki Durkin seems to have a great deal of talent towards business ideas marketed towards women (if you are looking at that demographic go talk to her).

Its nice to see something geared towards Aussies though, as frankly software houses are ignored by our governments (grants and tax breaks) and by the online press. Only Atlassian springs to mind as a hot Aussie software company and even they get very little coverage as far as I can see.

Hey everyone - Kim from PushStart here.

We're really glad we're able to add PushStart to the Aussie tech startup ecosystem.

To answer some of your questions

- Mentor Connect, the mentor matching service, will be national. It's heavily Sydney focused at the moment because that's where I, and the other co-founders, are from. That having been said, we have already started adding mentors from QLD, VIC and ACT and as @GVRV rightly says, more will no doubt sign up from all over the country when we open up applications in the next few weeks.

- The startup accelerator will be based in Sydney later on in the year.

- @mwill - A couple of years ago WA was the driving force in the local startup scene but most of the good people from those days have moved to the east coast or dropped out of the scene. You should jump on the Silicon Beach Google Group, the online hub of the Australian tech startup scene ATM, and ask your question there.

Any more questions, feel free to ask below or to send me an email at OOOkim@pushstart.com.auOOO (remove the O's)

Clicking around the site I see no mention of physical location, I'm based in Perth, and as far as I've seen there isn't much of a community here. Anyone know if any of these mentors (Or anyone interested in startup culture) call Perth/Western Aus their home?

This is fantastic, this mentoring network along with the startmate incubator will make for some great startups coming out Australia.

startmate and pushstart both seem to be sydney based

anyone know if there is anything like this in melbourne