We Write Cheques Now

Lyra Spotlight

We turned the office into a demo night with 9 builders got up in front of a room on Friday 21 August and showed the thing they've  been secretly working on, and the range was ridiculous: AR furniture, meeting tooling, note taking, a marketplace, a couple of things that are hard to explain in one line and much easier to just watch. Jacinta May and Nicolas De Matteis took it out with Percene and walked away with $1,000. We had judges from NextGen Ventures and January Capital in the room alongside Anh and one of our engineers, we ran out of chairs about 20 minutes in, and yes, we celebrated with fireworks. If you build things and you want a room that actually wants to hear about it, come to the next one.

Lyra Cap Is Live

lyracap.vc is up. Fund I is funded by Lyra, built by founders for founders in the same week one of the portfolio companies got into YC. Watching the investment side and the engineering side start feeding each other has been one of the more surreal parts of this year.

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The Clubs Have Gotten Out of Hand

In the best way. Melbourne now has an Oyster Club, a Running Club, a chess bracket that meets more reliably than most standups, and a Dungeons and Dragons night. Dessert Club took over happy hour at Bar Bruno on $1 oyster night. Bouldering, badminton, board games, cafe and pilates all kept running in Sydney. Someone put up a Clash Royale tournament with $50 of their own money on the line. And after one too many rounds of chopsticks loaded the wrong way, Jared offered to start a Melbourne dishwasher club to teach everyone how to load a dishwasher properly, which Sydney immediately tried to franchise. Nobody plans any of this. It just keeps happening.

Grad Season

Alan, Alvin and Roger all graduated this month, and the office emptied out to go stand in the sun and take photos with them. There is a picture of an engineer merging a PR in full academic dress that we will be holding onto for a very long time.

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Welcome!!

Ryan Kennedy joined as a founding software engineer, straight off consulting on enterprise security at IBM. Before that he was on Enterprise Security at Canva, where he built a HAR sanitiser in Flask, wrote the testing program for endpoint updates, and used Open Policy Agent to govern access controls, on top of interning at  Atlassian on systems admin.

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Manojvradan Balaji came in a week later, from Rhombus AI, where he was building what they describe as Cursor for data engineering. He co-directed AI Soc at UNSW, took $2,000 off Optiver for the best project in his course, and days before he started came runner up out of 167 teams at the Pinch hackathon with Impulse, an idea he and a friend validated by walking into 21 Sydney venues and asking.