A founder with one extraordinary strength beats a well-rounded team every time. One spike is enough to change an industry. Five average scores is a company that probably won't.
✕ Smooth. No thanks.
Team
Progress
Invention
Vision
10x
Decent at everything. Memorable for nothing.
✓ Spiky. Now we're talking.
Team
Progress
Invention
Vision
10x
One spike that makes you say: I'd back that founder anywhere.
The Five Spike Framework is how we think about what makes a great early-stage company. It's not a scorecard — it's a lens. You don't need all five. You need one so undeniable it stops the room.
Developed by Startmate, Australia's leading startup accelerator. To progress to the next stage, you must demonstrate at least one of these spikes clearly and credibly.
01
Team
You would buy stock in this founder.
Ways to demonstrate
Previously built or shipped something, even if small
Unique, lived connection to the problem
Off-the-charts determination — the kind that survives being told no
Learn-it-all mindset, not know-it-all
Attracts exceptional people before they have any reason to join
Unbridled, specific ambition
Example
Canva — Melanie Perkins
Unique connection to problem: Mel tutored design students at university. She watched first-hand how impenetrable Photoshop was — a two-semester course just to learn the basics.
Previously shipped: At 19, she built software to design school yearbooks. It became Australia's largest yearbook company before Canva existed.
Attracts exceptional talent: Lars Rasmussen — co-founder of Google Maps — became an advisor before Canva had meaningful traction.
Mel was rejected by over 100 investors before landing her first cheque. The team spike was so strong it didn't matter.
02
Progress
Things are happening, fast.
Ways to demonstrate
Real paying customers — not "in conversations"
Revenue trajectory, not just total ARR
Exceptional engagement relative to how long you've existed
Enterprise logos signed up before they had to be
Technical milestones shipped on a cadence that makes people uncomfortable
Waitlists, virality, word of mouth with zero marketing spend
Example
Strava
Zero paid acquisition: Strava reached 100M+ users without a meaningful marketing budget. Runners told runners. Cyclists told cyclists. The product was the growth channel.
Engagement as the signal: Users weren't just signing up — they were uploading every run, every ride, every morning. The social loop made the app genuinely sticky before "retention" was a metric anyone talked about.
Community before features: Strava built segments, KOMs, and local leaderboards that made ordinary streets feel like racecourses. Progress that creates new behaviour — not just new users — is the real signal.
The progress spike doesn't require big numbers. It requires a rate of change that is hard to ignore and harder to replicate.
03
Invention
A genuine technology leap, not an improvement.
Ways to demonstrate
Novel technical approach that wasn't possible or practical before
IP, patents, or proprietary methods that create a defensible moat
A founding team with deep, specific technical expertise in this exact problem
Something that makes adjacent experts say "we didn't know that was possible"
Not a new application of existing technology — a new capability
Example
OpenAI
Not just AI — a different kind of AI: OpenAI combined large-scale pretraining, the Transformer architecture, and unprecedented compute to create models that could generalise across tasks in ways previous AI could not.
The leap was magnitude, not category: GPT-3 didn't just improve on existing language models — it crossed a threshold where qualitative behaviour changed. Capabilities emerged that weren't explicitly trained for.
The moat was accumulated compute and data: The technical choices made early — RLHF, scale — created compounding advantages that took years for competitors to close.
Invention doesn't mean you invented the category. It means you moved the frontier.
04
Unique Vision
The founders see the future differently — and it's compelling.
Ways to demonstrate
A view of the world that is specific, falsifiable, and not obvious in hindsight
You're creating a market, not entering one
The idea sounds wrong to most people but right for a specific, important reason
You can articulate exactly why now — why this idea works in 2025 but not 2020
Your vision is compelling enough that people change their behaviour to prove you right
Example
Airbnb
The contrarian bet: In 2008, it was genuinely strange to suggest that strangers would sleep in each other's homes. The idea wasn't "a better hotel" — it was a reframe of what accommodation even meant.
Rejected for the wrong reasons: Multiple prominent VCs passed, citing limited market size. They missed that Airbnb wasn't addressing the hotel market — it was creating an entirely new one.
The vision unlocked new behaviour: Hosts monetised spare rooms they'd never have listed on a hotel platform. Guests stayed in cities they'd never have been able to afford otherwise.
The best unique visions are polarising. If everyone immediately agrees, it's probably not a vision — it's just a plan.
05
10x
Not incrementally better. Ten times better.
Ways to demonstrate
10x faster — a task that took hours now takes minutes
10x cheaper — opens up a customer segment that couldn't afford the alternative
10x easier — removes a skill or resource barrier entirely
10x better quality — meaningfully changes outcomes, not just experience
The comparison to alternatives is uncomfortable for incumbents to make publicly
Example
Stripe
10x simpler: Before Stripe, accepting payments online meant weeks of bank negotiations and thousands of lines of custom API integration. Stripe reduced it to seven lines of code.
10x faster: A developer could go from idea to taking live payments in an afternoon. That compression unlocked a generation of founders who'd previously given up at the payments step.
10x broader reach: By removing the barriers, Stripe didn't just serve existing businesses better — it enabled entirely new ones. Millions of companies exist today specifically because Stripe made charging a card trivial.
10x doesn't have to mean every dimension. One axis — price, speed, ease — delivered at 10x is enough to make a product impossible to ignore.
Ready to score your companies?
Use Spike Score to rate, rank, and compare across all five spikes.