Australia’s VC power couple: Why Ian Gardiner walked away from Amazon to join his wife’s investment venture

Just last month Ian Gardiner — stalwart of the Australian startup scene — sent shockwaves across the ecosystem as he announced he was stepping down from his role as head of the Australia and New Zealand startup division at Amazon Web Services, to work full time at Jelix Ventures, the investment business headed up by his wife Andrea Gardiner.

Andrea has been running Jelix for two years already, becoming the second female founding chief executive of a venture capital in Australia. Having already led 12 syndicated investments into nine startups, and made its first exit, Jelix is now upping the ante and raising its first VC fund.

The startup that achieved an exit is StorReduce, a cloud storage management startup which has now been acquired by Pure Storage, generating tenfold returns for investors.

“That’s certainly a feather in our cap,” Andrea says. “It certainly shows that at least we’ve picked one good one, and hopefully the rest will follow.”

For Jelix, this first exit came at the same time as outside interest in raising a fund, and so “it just seemed like a good time” to take the next step, Andrea says. Read more

Stephanie Palmer-Derrien - Startup Smart - 5 Oct 2018