Georgia Beattie is a woman worth meeting.
Worth it, because she’s a warm, engaging, uber-talented and super switched-on human, but also because her stellar career to date is hard to keep up with. (Catch her if you can! - our heads spin trying to keep up with Beattie's StartupVic schedule which sees her on startup judging panels, keynote speaking and at entrepreneurship events all over town!)
Beattie actually began her career studying entrepreneurship at RMIT and subsequently at Babson College in the USA (Babson happens to be ranked #1 in Entrepreneurship Internationally, but hopefully the University of Melbourne's Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship is going to take up the gauntlet very soon!)
Story goes that Beattie’s lightbulb moment as an entrepreneur was attending a festival in her early 20's and asking for a glass of wine only to be told it was too hard to serve wine in a glass at large functions. Hey Presto! (not quite) but Lupé Wines/Single Serve Packaging was founded in 2010 as a business selling pre-filled wine in shatterproof exportable PET plastic wine glasses designed for places where glass is deemed dangerous or just plain inconvenient. (As with many founders, Beattie found an innovative way to solve her own problem and founded a profitable business in the process).
The business went on to supply events, airlines and hotel minibars with the world's first single serve glass of wine designed for ease of use, and the company expanded quickly across Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China.
The awards followed: Lupé was listed as one of the top 10 startups to keep in your sights by BRW and Beattie was listed as Top 50 Entrepreneurs to watch in 2015. In 2016 the company was successfully sold.
Let’s jump hoops to today, and at girledworld we have crossed paths with Beattie many times since she has taken the CEO reins at StartupVictoria - the largest, go-to independent startup body for Victoria that focuses on creating more founders, and better founders.
StartupVic's major initiatives are positioning Victoria as the Number 1 Tech destination in the Asia Pacific, monthly startup Pitch Nights where startups compete for cash and in-kind prizes to accelerate their businesses, Australia’s first startup platform which offers a single location for events, jobs and mentors, and a recent project creating Victoria’s first startup ecosystem data map. This mapping will be critical to understanding our Victorian startup ecosystem, and how we can better support entrepreneurs to grow and scale their businesses beyond our shores.
We're truly delighted to have Georgia Beattie joining us alongside an incredible lineup of female founders, leaders and STEM champions at the Girledworld APAC Leadership SUMMIT 2017. Beattie will share her story as a successful founder and entrepreneur, her day to day as CEO of StartVic and the importance of grasping opportunities to drive yourself forward in your career. We can't wait to hear and learn from her!
So if you're a secondary school aged girl, a Mum, mentor, aunt, colleague, friend, entrepreneur, teacher, student or just someone who wants to be educated, inspired and empowered across one very big weekend of exploring STEM, startup and the future of work, please join us at the University of Melbourne's Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship on Saturday June 24 and Sunday June 25 2017.