Here’s what you need to know today

• Ex-Cyclone Alfred made landfall over the weekend and about 350,000 houses and businesses lost power as more than 30cm of rainfall was recorded in a day. However, the worst of the forecasts did not come to pass, offering some relief for residents of Southern Queensland and Northern NSW. (ABC News)
  
  

• Australia, we are almost certainly having an election in May. And that means that the Federal Labor government have one more budget to deliver. The government have missed their window to get an election in before the back-to-back long weekends of Easter and Anzac Day, so now all eyes turn to the Treasurer Jim Chalmers to see what pre-election sweeteners he has in store. (Capital Brief)
  
  

• Western Australia went to the polls on Saturday and delivered a emphatic victory for WA Labor. The party led by sitting Premier Roger Cook is expected to win more than 40 seats in the 59-seat lower house. (AFR)
  
  

• The news broke late last week but it has now been confirmed: Star Entertainment will sell its stake in its new Brisbane entertainment complex and casino which will give it enough cash to stave off collapse for several more months. This buys the casino giant time to negotiate with creditors as it tries to arrange up to $1 billion in debt financing. (AFR)
  
  

• Poland’s Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, has announced the Polish army will expand to 500,000 troops and all adult men will receive military training. In all, Poland will invest $46 billion into its military this year. Poland doesn’t have a great history with great European powers, and believes that Russia doesn’t intend to stop at Ukraine. (The Guardian)
  
  

• Impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is now free. He was arrested in January on insurrection charges related to his declaration of martial law in December, and has been in jail ever since. Now, a South Korean court has overturned the arrest warrant citing procedural flaws. (ABC News)
  
  

• Mixed economic news out of the US. 151,000 jobs were added in February, below the forecast 160,000 and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1%. However, good news for workers, wage growth outpaced inflation. (CNN)

What the…?

America’s Bird Flu outbreak has seen more than 100 million chickens euthanised and egg prices shoot up. So much so that Americans are now starting to smuggle in eggs from Canada and Mexico.

And while President Trump continues to talk about fentanyl coming over the Canadian border, it turns out there have been almost 10-times more seizures of illegal eggs than fentanyl at the Canadian border over the past 6 months. (The Logic)

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Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

Steve Baxter’s advice to founders

This is an excerpt from our conversation with Steve Baxter on Equity Mates Investing podcast. You can listen to the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

Question: What are the most important lessons you learned as a founder?

Steve: The biggest piece of advice is just do it. The hardest thing is starting and then you just get more problems after that. But get out there and just do it with some intelligence. The things I didn't do along the way - I didn't know enough about basic bookkeeping. The thing that makes a business go away is running out of money. Get some business skills, that's very important. But whatever you start on, you're not going to finish - it'll morph along the way.

What's your advice for startups pitching to investors?

Keep pitches short - seven to ten pages maximum. Tell us what you do: this is the problem, this is the market, this is how we're solving it, this is about us. Don't make mistakes in pitch decks because when you consider it's a refined product, mistakes are really bad. Focus on getting your numbers right - people don't think about the numbers and what they actually mean, but it's fundamental to what they're pitching. A pitch is a sexed up story to convince us your view on the world is something we should care about.

How should entrepreneurs approach finding a co-founder?

I want to make sure you get that balance right. I always like having in the core founding group the appropriate technical skills - you need the person who knows how to build this thing and get them equity incentivized. It's good to have a mix of skills if you can - business versus tech versus operations. When that relationship goes bad, it can go stratospherically bad. Set up equity incentives correctly from the start.

What advice do you have for startups navigating the current difficult market environment?

Understand your runway, use this as an opportunity to potentially take your problems as a business issue and clear up anything that you possibly can. Get some runway behind you, actually start getting back to the basics of economics about how you're going to survive two years with maybe no fundraising. There's still money out there but you need to prove your business model - if you still can't prove your business model, you'll probably struggle.

Would you prefer to watch this interview rather than listen? Remember all Equity Mates content is now available on YouTube to watch:

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