“Start on some chewing gum and sticky tape”: Tractor Ventures co-founder Jodie Imam says now’s the best time to launch your startup

Jodie Imam, co-founder and co-CEO of Tractor Ventures since late 2020, has been running companies for more than 20 years. She started off in corporates and telcos in Sydney and London, but moved to fashion when that work started feeling “soul-destroying”. In fashion, she managed two multinational labels and “learned a lot about cashflow”.

Her first startup, Occasional Butler, started in 2011 and was a marketplace for small jobs around the home and office, “back when marketplaces weren’t really a thing”, until its acquisition by Airtasker in 2014. Not satisfied with being an early mover in just one vertical, Imam opened depot8, one of Melbourne’s first shared office spaces in 2012. She described it as a great business that “educated the market about new things”.

Depot8 went strong until its “brutal end”, when COVID-19 shut down just about everything, especially physical office work, in early 2020.

Always a voracious member of the startup community, she was doing a lot of ecosystem work, mentoring and helping other startups when she met Matt Allen, who was mulling the idea of Tractor Ventures. In the two years since its founding, Tractor Ventures has grown to 16 people and deployed more than $20 million in funds in more than 70 startups.

Jodie Imam joins SmartCompany as a guest judge for the Pitch in February. She filled us in on the outlook for the year ahead and what she’s hunting for.

What’s in store for Tractor Ventures in 2023?

“We’re shooting for a five-year goal of having $1 billion of funds under management. That’s our big hairy goal that we’re working towards, and at the moment we’re in a bit of a theme of ‘ready to scale’. So, by the end of June, we’re going to have all of our processes, systems and plans in place for what it takes for us to actually now really scale. And then the second half of the year is experiencing that full-pace scale.”

Last year there was some negativity and bad news in the startup space but plenty of positive stories too. What has been the feeling on the ground in some of the conversations you’ve been having?

“It’s funny because we’ve automated quite a lot of our processes already and I’m seeing some alerts come through. Our companies need to report revenue, because that’s how they pay back their loan as a percentage of their revenue. We’re seeing a real mixed bag of some drops this month compared to last, and some big swings as well. So, I think, like in any cycle there are winners and losers, right? And I feel like these businesses that we’re supporting, they’ve got strong customer relationships, and a lot of them are business-to-business, so there’s no real immediate impact at this stage. They’re still travelling well, they’re still ambitious and positive and could very well be the winners in this cycle.”

Tractor Ventures has a different model than traditional VC funding; how does this change how startups should pitch to you?

“It’s interesting. Especially, I guess, the last half of last year, we saw such tailwinds because of that. The whole VC valuations and the softening and the tightening of that. Founders, for one, probably didn’t want to go down that [traditional VC] path even more, or thought they wouldn’t even have an opportunity to. Or maybe they just didn’t want to be selling shares at a reduced valuation. So a lot of the founders we were talking to were saying ‘we want to take this money, continue to grow, and then look at VC when this phase picks back up’. 

“So it’s been a very good time for us in our whole lifecycle of trying to educate founders that: you should have a weighted cost of capital at the very least. If you’re going to sell shares, don’t sell them all and don’t sell them all early.”

You were an early adopter in newer trends that have now taken off. What are your thoughts on how things have changed since then?

“It’s funny. When we were starting at Occasional Butler, going around looking for capital, there were about two VCs, there was one networking group, and there really wasn’t an ecosystem. Still, I feel like 10 years on, 12 years on, we’re still at the starting point, but there’s a huge ecosystem, there’s so much support. I think we’re very friendly with all the VC community. I actually just got an email from a founder who I’m going to send her deck to a couple of VCs that I know. There’s so much collaboration in our ecosystem, there’s so much support, so it’s a much easier time now.

“And of course with the developments in technology you don’t have to sell the house to start the business, you can start on some chewing gum and sticky tape and get things started, so it’s much easier.”

Jodie Imam is a guest judge on our first the Pitch event for 2023, held in partnership with sponsors AWS. Want her to hear your great idea? Get pitching!