[NEXT] Lunch and Learn: Your Startup Is a System

​You've probably heard that founders all learn by doing. Trial and error of getting it wrong, fixing it, and along the way you listen to people a few years ahead of you tell you how they did it. That's the iteration cycle of getting punched in the face, and for many it's just a rite of passage.

​But there's a second body of knowledge sitting right beside all those stories, and it often goes understated. Thousands of ventures have been studied, the failures included, and the findings are consistent enough to have identified patterns. Success sometimes comes down to luck or a market shift. But what if you could shore up the structural weaknesses that are well known, rather than leaving it up to chance.

​Join us for a session on what the failure research actually says, and how to run a proper stock take on your own venture.

​Jane Korneyko builds diagnostic tools that read the fundamentals of a business against the research on why startups fail, and works with the programs and accelerators that back those businesses. This is the evidence base and the frameworks that come out of it, powered by decades of research by leading industry experts like Startup Genome.

​We'll get into:

• ​What the research says separates the ventures that survive, and why it has very little to do with the strength of the original idea

• ​The common fail points across a startup's journey, and how early in the timeline most of them are already set in motion

• ​The eight elements that hold a business together, purpose, strategy, governance, finance, marketing, technology, people and process, and why treating them as eight separate jobs is the thing that breaks them

• ​The frameworks and methodologies that map to each element, including the ones that never make it into an accelerator slide deck

• ​Sized for a solo founder with no team and no revenue, not just companies with a board and a finance function

​Who should attend?

• ​Founders who sense something structural is off but cannot put a name to it

• ​Early stage founders who assume strategy, governance and process are problems for a later, bigger version of the company

• ​Solo founders and consultants who wonder whether any of this applies at their size

• ​Operators at scale-ups still living with decisions someone made in year one

​About Jane:

​Jane Korneyko is the founder of Sova, where she builds the diagnostic layer that tells a founder which part of their business is actually broken. She spent years as an executive inside a law firm doing the same work in reverse, repairing fundamentals in established companies that had been left unattended for a decade, until she went looking for where those problems begin. That took her upstream to startups. She spent months on the research into why they fail, turned it into a tool for founders in early 2026, then rebuilt it for the programs, universities and accelerators that fund and support them and had no way of measuring whether any of it was working. Her position on all of it is that a tradie, a bakery and a software company are the same problem in different clothes, and the research agrees with her.

​About Sova:

​Sova is a diagnostic platform for early stage businesses, built by founder Jane Korneyko on the research into why startups fail. Rather than scoring a pitch or a plan, it reads a venture across the fundamentals that determine whether it survives, purpose, strategy, governance, finance, marketing, technology, people and process, and shows the founder where the structural weakness sits. A second version serves the other side of the table, giving programs, universities and accelerators a way to measure real startup outcomes instead of self-reported progress, and giving investors a view of the foundations underneath a pitch. It is now being piloted with the programs that support Australian founders.