kate-kendall3Kate’s biography

Kate Kendall is a British-Australian entrepreneur, community builder, coach, and advisor. As a startup industry veteran, she’s founded multiple companies including most recently, Atto: a trusted startup school and virtual accelerator program for female founders. Kate is the founder director of Indie Labs (a startup advisory studio and product firm). She also founded CloudPeeps, The Fetch and IndieConf.

Kate is a pioneer of the ‘indie way’ for startup building and regularly champions alt-funding pathways, having bootstrapped businesses as well as successfully raising traditional investor capital, crowdfunding, and grant funding.

Kate holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Business (Marketing) degrees. She started out as a business journalist and now regularly advises companies on the role of community, low-code tech entrepreneurship, and global startup operations. Her work has been featured in Quartz, BuzzFeed, The Next Web, The Australian, the ABC, Marie Claire, Lifehacker and more.

Over the past decade, she’s lived and worked in Melbourne, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, and Brisbane. She is currently based in regional Victoria, Australia with her husband, two daughters, and two cats. Their next chapter includes moving to a farm in the Macedon Ranges.

For more: see press, speaking and LinkedIn.

Images & headshots:

A collection of images are available in the following Dropbox folders:

Hat tips & mentions:

  • The Most Influential Australian Entrepreneur on Twitter, Smart Company
  • 10 Startup Founder Blogs Every Entrepreneur Should Read, General Assembly
  • Founder of The Year 2012, Startup Daily
  • Top 30 Digital Influencers, Australian Government Trade Commission
  • 10 Hot Shots Raising the Bar in Female Achievement, Marie Claire
  • 10 Tech Entrepreneurs Disrupting The Event Industry, Event Manager Blog
  • Top 20 Young Professionals to Watch, Brazen Careerist
  • Top 100 Influential People, The Age Melbourne Magazine
  • Top 10 Female Entrepreneurs, Startup Smart

Other roles:

In 2019 and 2020, Kate served on the board of One Roof and co-created the strategy and website for their digital membership offering.

In 2017, Kate took part in Advance Queensland’s HotDesQ program in Brisbane.

In 2016, Kate co-founded the Aussie Founders Network in Silicon Valley.

In 2014, Kate helped Stripe launch in Australia with community and event strategy.

In 2012, Kate advised on digital and community development to Dumbo Feather – a well-regarded indie magazine featuring conversations with extraordinary people. She also consulted to social bookmarking site Delicious on product strategy and communications.

In 2011, she worked with Travellerspoint (online travel community) and The Conversation (news and analysis edtech startup).

In 2010, she worked with Y Combinator flight search startup Adioso as the marketing and communications director. Prior to this, she was the digital director at the magazine company Niche Media, which publishes titles such as Macworld, Marketing and Desktop. Kate started at Niche Media in 2008 as the online editor and feature writer of Marketing, writing cover stories on global superbrands such as Google (including an interview with Marissa Mayer), L’Oréal and Microsoft.

Before this, Kate worked in a mixture of editorial, marketing and comms roles at Universal Magazines, ACP Magazines (as an intern) and Bed Bath N’ Table.

katekendall-brooklyn

History as a community organizer:

Being an event-organizing junkie in remission, Kate has volunteered a lot of time and soul into the communities she works and plays in. In 2009, she kicked off Social Media Melbourne aka #socialmelb – a weekly conversational breakfast gathering of people interested and working in the digital space. The group is renowned for facilitating discussion across industry and is a catalyst for collaboration, idea generation and knowledge transfer. In 2011, she co-organised the tech entrepreneurship Silicon Beach and travel industry Travel Massive Melbourne meetups, as well as leading the first Women 2.0 Founder Friday in Australia and one of the largest, early Instameets in the world. In 2014, she helped organize the Down Under New York Aussie Tech Meetup and the New York Email Marketing Meetup. In 2015, she created Freelance Friday. In 2016, she cofounded the Aussie Founders Network in Silicon Valley.