Unsung Heroes - SHR!MP S01E06

18 October 2025

To avoid losing the initial momentum SHRMP had until Buildmate started, I was looking for a way to sustain it. Through my early involvement with NAFI, I met our first potential intern, whom I was eager to provide with a worthwhile opportunity. From previous experience, I knew that hosting one intern typically required about the same overhead as hosting several, which would likely create a more rewarding environment for him. Based on this idea, I advertised SHRMP.bio's first Startup Internship Programme (SIP)on LinkedIn, which received over 75 applications in two days from across the globe before LinkedIn shut the ad down for some obscure reason. After a week of interviews, SHRMP.bio's first team was formed: six fantastic volunteers from three different Australian states and three different countries began an early startup journey to flesh out ideas and outline what a first prototype of the SHRMPreactor might look like.

In our second meeting, the team announced, "If there's not going to be a real shrimp in the system, we are not going to work on the project".

What can you do? Let's start planning for a live system, then (sounded unnecessarily complicating things to me, but at the same time also a lot more fun as well).

And quite possibly, that early SHRMP team isn't even aware of the lasting impact they've had on SHRMP.bio; their drive pushed SHRMP to develop the first prototype ideas into an actionable plan by the time we moved into Stone&Chalk for the latter half of 2024, when we finally joined Startmate's Buildmate pilot programme.