Next Chapter

Celebrating another one of our young founders! At 18 here is Ishan Mahajan’s story 📖 “If there was one word I would use to describe myself it would be a wanderer”🧙🏼♂️ ”I would rather be viewed for my legacy: the things I did, rather than the money I made” Ishan was born to hard-working immigrant parents. Growing up he witnessed them translate their creative spirit and drive into running their own business which changed both their own lives and left a positive impact on the world. He has carried over this ambition, creativity and multidisciplinary thinking into his own life. Ishan’s experience lies at the crossover of both startups and VC. He is the co-founder AstraCell (https://lnkd.in/gWpHKk8H) which re-engineers fuel cells in order to decrease platinum. Astrafuelcell received international news recognition, grant funding, and non-provisional and provisional patents. Simultaneously, he founded an environmental nonprofit that planted nearly 100,000 trees worldwide in indigenous communities (Grey To Green International) All the while, Ishan is also studying chemistry and economics before he completes his medicine degree. Ishan has worked in the VC space. Ishan’s two main interests are climate tech and healthcare:  1️⃣ In healthcare, he is particularly interested in positive innovation: decreasing medical fraud; change to billing in US; platform to detect medical billing and medical issues 2️⃣ Environment = so many issues caused by humans and so much scope to innovate. Ishan says: ”When thinking about energy it allows me to think freely, like painting on a free form canvas. This is because it integrates so many disciplines: chemical engineering, physics, business practices and even great than that, is underpinned by philosophy and history” Keen to see what comes!

At just 18, Nextie Rose N. is already shaking up the scene in the tech and aerospace world! What is Rose up to? ⭐️ Head of Marketing and Product Management Minimis Technologies, a hardware and software tech startup, particularly targeting social media and phone addiction ⭐️ Studying Aerospace Engineering at UNSW ⭐️ Recently won the 2024 Innovator Pro Pitch Fest, 'This Sydney Life' with the City of Sydney council to improve and diversify nightlife 🔮 She has a super keen interest in startups to do with rockets 🚀 & space 🪐 and would love to found something in this area in the future. Here are Rose’s 5 biggest learnings over the past 3 years: 1. When you have a goal and vision for what you want in your future, it makes it far easier to be laser-focused, stay on track, be motivated and prioritise your time: ‘for me this is space’ 2. Strive for justice and always speak up for people whose voices may be underrepresented; recognise one’s privilege — that we did nothing to deserve the life and context we were born into — and try to use it to life other’s out of injustice: “I believe no one is free until we are all free” 3. Pass on the luck and opportunities you've been given: give other people the chances you have been given: pay it forward 4. Be kind to people and value everyone’s time, energy and work 5. Show the people around me that they matter to me a lot; try to show gratitude for people — even if it is awkward Check out some of Rose's recommendations and favourite quotes below!

Noah is the Co-Founder of both Flowback and AI Safety Sweden and was previously the CTO of Talentium (now a board member). 🎯 At Flowback, Noah and his cofounders are transforming company management into data-driven science. He likens this to what Renaissance technologies did to finance, except they are doing this to management using mathematics and data science. ‘Imagine taking a machine learning model and mapping that onto an organisation map as a whole… It is about integrating project management and decision making into one thing’. They do this through a workflow process called Tidal. 🎩 Meanwhile at Talentium, where Noah is on the board, the team is building an automated AI recruitment search engine. ⛑ AI Safety Sweden is a non-profit initiative to upskill the general public in AI safety and to foster a new generation of AI safety researchers. The basic idea behind AI safety as Noah describes it is “making sure AI systems do what we humans want them to do”. This has two sides: 1) Our understanding of AI (innovation) 2) Ethics (regulation & policy). He explained that AI systems are a giant neural network built out of a very minimalistic/simplistic series of synapses. We pour a giant amount of data into these networks and basically scale them up, with more layers making the performance of them go up — except as we do this, inside of them act as like a big black box. There is a shortcoming of understanding what is going inside of these giant matrices. So the goal is to get AI to do what we want it to do and then to be able to scale this up to general intelligence. 🚀 Excited for big things as Noah builds out Flowback and AI Safety Sweden!

Nextie Jackson Henry is subversive to say the least. At 15, he famously hacked the UN. At school he dropped Maths. He never went to University. And at 18 he is already working as a Consultant at CyberCX, Australia’s largest cyber security company. Here is some of Jackson’s story. He describes the process of getting to where he is now as long and iterative: his model for success being to publicly demonstrate capability in the space. For example, as an ethical hacker, Jackson gained recognition from the United Nations themselves for exposing a shortcoming in their system. At only 18, what is Jackson looking to in the future? In the long-run Jackson is excited to create something within the Cyber space: he is currently working in ‘Stealth Mode’, continually thinking about how to improve the space + value-add. Cyber is a booming industry with plenty of room to grow!

Nextie Neil Mitra is currently building Mitra Biotechnologies (https://lnkd.in/gNaYvV6m) a deep-tech medical device startup developing nanomaterials to make diagnostic tests 1000X lower-cost and 10X faster! 📖 Here is Neil’s Remarkable Story 📖 “When I was very young, I visited my grandparents, who lived in India every winter break. Every time I went there, I visited my uncle who is a cardiologist - and every time I visited his waiting room, I could tell the clear disparity between Canada's and India's healthcare infrastructure. From that point on, I had a strong internal drive to help others within the medical world - I fell in love with medicine at a young age and I wanted to become a Cardiac Surgeon. 📚 ⚙️ As I entered middle school, I started playing around with robotics and developed a few medical device prototypes for aiding visually impaired individuals in navigation (since my own Grandmother was visually impaired). This later became my first startup company when I started high school. 🏫 While in high school, a close aunt of mine passed away due to a heart attack. I got interested in heart attack diagnostics from that point, and started cold-emailing professors at the University of Waterloo to start working with them on a device that could accelerate the speed of point-of-care tests. From there, I did national and international-level science fairs for my research work and turned that into my current startup company. 🚀 🔥 During my final year of high school, I got Letters of Support for my work with Mitra Biotechnologies from some of the world's leading microfluidics and nanobiotechnology researchers, which led me to raise our Pre-Seed Round of funding after I completed my first year of University in 2023. Watching this space 👀 Checkout some of his top tips below!

Excited to show off one of our Nexties, Anders Rodem! 🚀 Anders founded a non-profit utility company in Norway ($50m in revenue first year). He then exited to get back to studying while doing small startups on the side, focusing on becoming more technical. He recently just signed on the board of SIKT Alumni, responsible for taking care of the community around H.K.H. Crown Prince Haakon’s annual conference. Throughout the journey he has worked in everything from Advertising (as a Producer), VR in China, ML in finance (Norwegian Oil fund) and a range of Consulting work from city planning to education. Safe to say it has been a wild ride with amazing breadth. He has had 3 smaller exits so far. Watching this space! 🔥

Welcome to Next Chapter Edmond Lau! Edmond is the founder Esoteric (www.esoteric.style), a venture dedicated to empowering users with portable profiles of their personal taste, known as TASTE IDs, that travel the internet with them 👨🏼🎨 In an environment inundated with content, curation serves as the key to navigating the noise. However, users have always lacked control and ownership over their taste data. Through Esoteric’s TASTE IDs, Edmond's mission is clear 💫: to empower users by granting them control over the often-overlooked but potent aspect of their identity, their personal taste. Previously, Edmond served as a tech lawyer at DLA Piper specialising in web3. Prior to that, he honed his skills as a graphic designer and art director, specialising in consumer fashion and lifestyle branding. Notably, Edmond was recognised as the AgIdeas ‘NewStar’ for his work as a designer. In addition to leading Esoteric, Edmond also profiles emerging figures at the nexus of internet culture and fashion on his Substack, World of Eso (worldofeso.substack.com). Connect with Edmond on Twitter: @nstlgiaxpress

Inside Next Chapter’s first Sydney event of the year, our Bohemian Soiree! An event to celebrate the subversiveness of founders, the people who confuse the world, the ones who do things differently. Co-painting, art, conversation cards, woodfired pizza and Basis Health roamed wild and free!

Ben, this is elite. We can't wait 🚀

Nextie Stanley Tanudjaja grew up internationally between Indonesia, Singapore, and Australia. Through his global experiences, he nurtured a strong desire to help others, which has manifested in a passion for solving humanity's greatest challenge - climate change. Stanley is currently on an exploration to find where he can create the most positive impact. At the time of writing, he has worked for three venture-backed startups, an energy consulting firm, family office, a private equity firm, and co-founded a sustainable fashion startup. He's now furthering this exploration by completing his honours in renewable energy engineering, conducting research in machine learning-based climate risk modelling. He strongly believes in the power of cross-disciplinary learning and that developing empathy and understanding between investors, policy makers and founders alike is key to the collaboration required to solve climate change. Stanley envisions himself at the forefront of merging sustainability with investment. He's exploring starting a fund or business that directly addresses climate risks in a just transition, reflecting his journey across different cultures and his desire to make a lasting impact. Check out some of his recommendations below 👇