Ep.34 How Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin Raised $35 million with Startups by Creating a Culture of Innovation

If you've ever wondered how you can create a culture of innovation in your business in order to accelerate growth, establish partnerships and raise capital, then you're definitely going to get a lot out of this episode.

My guest is Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin, and he's an expert in tech startups. His business, Blue Chilli, helps and supports entrepreneurs to build highly investable, scalable and well-designed businesses that are enabled by technology.

Blue Chilli has experienced great success. They've won a ton of awards including The Microsoft Silver Partnership and The General Assembly Startup Brand of the year, and they're well on their way to achieving their goal of creating 100 startups by the end of 2016. Sebastien himself won the 2013 EY Australian Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and in this conversation he shares some real gems around the tech-startup industry and the phases that business owners in that space have to go through.

In this episode we really get into:

• Sebastien's first business at the age of 19 and the lessons he learned from it

• Using the startup approach to help corporate clients with internal and external innovation

• Raising Blue Chilli's profile with community engagement

• Sebastien's vision to create a billion-dollar portfolio by 2020

• How systemisation, structure and process have allowed Blue Chilli to reach goals and meet a scalable level of demand

• The four phases that all tech-based startups go through and the macro funding objective that comes with each of them

• The 156 steps for new entrepreneurs, from the light bulb moment to achieving success

• Thought leadership and its media and distribution as a strategy for Blue Chilli

• Putting process and structure into an organisation to encourage a culture where innovation is the end result

• How Sebastien's thinking around technology has evolved to allow for scalability

• Looking at partnerships who offer complementary services to your own business in order to scale quickly

• The tech platforms that are instrumental to Blue Chilli and have helped Sebastien scale

• The three books that have fundamentally changed the way Sebastien sees the world