Welcome to our 4th FYI of 2019 (and final of the decade!)- Q4 in review 🎉
We hope you all enjoyed a break over Christmas and are feeling refreshed for the New Year. Both Ash and I took a full two weeks off over the holidays in order to properly switch off and mentally prepare for a busy few months ahead. We’re definitely feeling fresher as a result!
At A Glance
In the last quarter of 2019, we had 41 new rebels join the community 🙌 We also launched our Rebel Meetups in Malta and ran 26 events, bringing our total for the year to a whopping 89 (… plus 1 Member’s Retreat and our annual Christmas Party 😏).
The Deets
The biggest development over the last quarter has been the announcement of our new brand partners! We’re excited to continue working with FD Works, Rocketmakers and Womble Bond Dickinson over the next year, whilst also bringing new partners, Atomic Smash and Novel Wines, onboard.
To officially announce the launch, we had a get together at Novel Wines’s new shop in Bath where we shared our progress over the last year and our roadmap for the year ahead – exciting stuff 🚀
At the start of November, I made a (very last minute) trip to Lisbon for Web Summit! With 100s of talks across 25 stages, this 4-day event was definitely more of a marathon than a sprint. Particular highlights include fan-girling over Jessica Ennis and hearing from Canva co-founder, Melanie Perkins.
You can read my key takeaways here.
I also had the pleasure of being featured in Atomico’s 2019 ‘The State of European Tech’ report at the end of November, sharing insight into the challenges we see founders face in the Yena community. More than ever, it’s important that we’re giving the discussion around mental wellbeing the platform it deserves 💜
In December, we announced that both Ash & I are now scouting for Ada Ventures as part of the launch of their new £27m fund!
We have the pleasure of engaging with some awesome founders who are looking for investment so it’s great to be working with a fund that shares similar values to our own.
And finally, we announced the launch of this year’s #YenaStartupChallenge!
Throughout December we had 294 people sign-up for our 30-Day Challenge which helps aspiring founders get from idea to launch by the end of January. Having kicked off on January 2nd, we’re excited to see how everyone gets on over the coming weeks 🤓
And that’s it for this review, for 2019 and for the decade!
As of the end of the year, Yena is 6 years and 8 months old as a ‘thing’, 3 years and 3 months old as a business AND we’re still only just at the beginning… keep an eye out for what’s to come 👀
Much love – Abby x
P.s. Don’t forget to get signed-up to your first Rebel Meetup of 2020 here and check out our Jobs & Talent Board here.