The Aussie Founders Network | Board and Team
Carl Hartmann, board member
Carl Hartmann is a prominent, multi-award winning Australian entrepreneur best known from his work as Co-Founder & CEO of Temando. Carl took Temando from an idea to one of the largest Australian technology companies, having raised over $56M in funding which was successfully acquired in a trade sale by French company Neopost in 2018. After exiting Temando, Carl co-founded Shortlyster, an intelligent recruitment platform. Carl is also the adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the University of Queensland (the leading Australian University and a top 50 global university); Serves as a Non-Executive Director on a several boards, and has won a number of awards including the IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year Australia, Asia Pacific and global runner up, amongst others.
Elias Bizannes, founding board member
Elias Bizannes currently CEO & Board Member at Zoom Systems. Elias founded the San Francisco incubator space StartupHouse, the international bootcamp, StartupBus, and created Australia's Silicon Beach. He previously worked at VC firm Charles River Ventures, search engine startup Vast.com, and professionals services firm PwC.
Maria Sipka, board member
Recognized as one of the leading women in technology by Forbes, Australian entrepreneur Maria Sipka pioneered influencer marketing in early 2000 and is visionary and co-founder at Linqia. Linqia is a venture funded technology company headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in New York, Chicago and Bentonville. Prior to Linqia, Maria was part of the founding team and COO at XING, Europe’s leading business network, where she led XING’s monetization and internationalization strategy exiting shortly after its IPO. Today, XING has a market cap of over $1B. Maria is passionate about Social Impact Storytelling based on the belief that all ideas start with two things, emotional connection and inspired action.
Geoff McQueen, founding board member
CEO of Accelo, a powerful and easy-to-use cloud-based professional service automation (PSA) platform. Accelo raised a $9M series A in 2017. Geoff is a strong voice in the Aussie community, he wrote the definitive guide on navigating E3 applications. A founding mentor of Startmate and former director of the Illawarra Hawks, Geoff splits his time between the three Accelo offices; San Francisco, Denver and Wollongong.