About Room2Rise
The first board role is the hardest one to get
Ask a woman on a board how she got there and the answer is usually a name. Someone knew her. Someone put her forward. Someone made a call.
That is the system. It runs on access, and access has never been handed out evenly. In 2024, 71% of appointments to ASX 200 and NZX 10 boards went to people who already held public-board experience. The qualification for the role is having had the role, which is a fine arrangement if you are already inside it.
At the other end of the market are founders who could use exactly what those women know. They have not raised the round a board comes with. They do not have the network to assemble one. So they make expensive decisions alone, or they make them with the three people they already know.
Two access problems, pointing straight at each other. Room2Rise puts them in the same room.
Source: Heidrick & Struggles, Board Monitor Australia and New Zealand 2025.
What Room2Rise is
A matching platform for board advisory work. Advisors build a profile around what they have actually done. Founders tell us what is blocking them. We pair the two, and we stay close enough to the arrangement to make it work.
There is a readiness program for advisors who want one, and a group around it so nobody is doing this alone.
And what it isn’t
A course you finish and then wait. A directory you get lost in. A networking circuit that runs on breakfast events and business cards.
Everything here points at one outcome: a working relationship between a founder with a live problem and a woman who has solved it before.
What we believe
Exchange, not hierarchy. Exchange, not charity. Both sides give. Both sides get.
The advisor gets real experience on a real company. The founder gets expertise without the legal machinery. Neither has to be small for the other to feel big.
Where we work
Australia. Early-stage impact and innovation companies, mostly pre-Series A, where the decisions have outgrown the founder’s network. Many of the founders we work with are underrepresented in the rooms where capital and advice get handed out.