Paying customers in four countries within weeks of launch. Firms signing pilot agreements before a product existed. Advisers calling Marloo life-changing. Not useful, not efficient, life-changing.

The secret? Going slow to go fast.

Hardy and Shak met at Sharesies where they helped build one of New Zealand's most loved brands, before starting something of their own. But instead of jumping straight to building, they spent six months in the ideas maze finding the right problem - exploring roofing, trade finance, retiring businesses. They built a 20-point framework, then threw it away. "Frameworks don't find markets."

When they landed on financial advice, they embedded inside firms for days - watching, listening, earning trust - until they were certain this was an industry where they could build in for years to come. But even then, they didn't start coding. They kept refining until they could describe Marloo in three simple steps. Crystal clear. If they couldn't communicate it simply, they weren't ready to build it.

Most founders build first and figure out how to explain it later. Hardy and Shak did it backwards. And that's why, when they finally launched, the product sold itself.

Because they'd gone so deep on the problem, they could design for global from day one. Not because they got lucky, but because they'd built that way on purpose.

Hardy runs the company from London. Shak builds from New Zealand. They disagree often and think that's the point. Tension resolved, then they move. No relitigating. Just trust.

Marloo is just getting started. Remember the name.

This is our last episode of 2025. We'll be back in the new year. Happy holidays.

Yes, there are acronyms. Yes, you'll learn what a chiplet is. Worth it.

But here's what you'll actually get: one of the best founder conversations we've recorded. Not because of the tech—but because of the humanity inside the tech.

Last year, Syenta had six weeks of cash left. No term sheets. The technology her team was building? The world's biggest semiconductor manufacturers said it was impossible. Two weeks later, she had four offers on the table. Now she's backed by the US government, Singapore, and Arizona.

What changed? Not the tech. The story.

"When you're trying to do something inauthentic—that is not your DNA as a founder—you're not gonna raise money," Jeka says. "Lately I haven't been selling at all. I've been just talking to people about what we do."

This episode is about falling in love with a problem so completely you move across the world to solve it. It's about building a team that burns the boats. It's about sharing your vulnerable vision before you feel ready. It's about being proud to be a tall poppy when Australian culture tells you to shrink.

The semiconductor stuff? It's actually fascinating once Jeka explains it. (AI chips sit idle 40% of the time because the wiring can't keep up. Her tech fixes that. Potential impact: 1% of global emissions saved.)

But even if you skip every technical detail, you'll walk away with lessons about fundraising in brutal markets, building culture through failure-sharing rituals, and going straight to the top instead of pushing from the bottom.

We've included a glossary in the episode description if you want it. You probably won't need it.

On July 30, that bet paid off. Australia's first launch permit. Fourteen seconds of flight. Right in the middle of the pack globally - SpaceX took four attempts to reach orbit.

Those 14 seconds proved everything that mattered: cleared ranges, ground systems working, hold-down claws releasing 45 tons of thrust flawlessly. Stage zero validated. And a month earlier? A 100kg satellite reached orbit, found in under 8 hours instead of the expected 2 weeks, still working 130+ days later.

"For a satellite company, that would've been massive," Adam says. "But we're a rocket company, so no one gives a shit."

Adam knew the regulations would change. He knew government support would come. "We took the risk first. Then government comes. I knew they would come." He started building anyway: 240 people in Queensland doing rockets, satellites, and hypersonics that foreign investors "cannot believe."

This episode takes you inside launch day: the orchestra of mission control, time vanishing in the final countdown, the moment Eris leapt off the pad. Adam talks about why he's building satellite buses to fix broken market economics, the path to dual-listing on the ASX and US exchanges, and going around the moon in 10 years.

If you're building deep tech from Australia and wondering whether to wait for perfect conditions, Adam's already answered that question.

"Stay tuned. Smoke and fire."

When August Robotics launched their exhibition robot in November 2019, it blew up - standing ovation, early revenue, real momentum. Then COVID hit. Exhibitions banned globally for 23 months. Zero revenue. Total cliff.

But under that first robot was something almost no robotics company ever builds: a platform: autonomous navigation accurate to 3mm, custom localisation, fleet coordination, modular architecture. The long, painful, expensive work that many startups can't survive.

Then it paid off.

→ Seven weeks from concept to prototype for their drilling robot

→ Google as their first demo and customer

→ 50,000 holes drilled across US data centres

→ DeWalt partnership unlocking entire tool ecosystems

→ More robots spinning out in months, not years

Alex is also opening an AI and data centre in Melbourne, choosing to build the next layer of August's platform from Australia, not just Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.

This episode breaks down the real hardware platform playbook: robot collaboration that collapses workflows, de-risking with hyperscaler customers, and why the "third way" of robotics creates network effects in physical space. Alex also talks about surviving 23 months of zero revenue, going from Blackbird LP to portfolio founder, and why he waited a decade for the timing to actually be right.

If you're building hardware from Australia, fundraising deep tech, or wondering when long-horizon bets actually flip into growth - this is the one.

Today, Nikki is co-founder and CEO of Cartesian, an AI-native platform backed by Blackbird that turns SaaS ecosystems into retention and growth engines. Cartesian's AI agents analyse user needs in real-time, detect buying intent, and connect users with the right ecosystem partners at exactly the moment they need them. No cold emails. No spray and pray. The result: users get personalised solutions, platforms deliver value, partners grow.

Nikki is building AI that works like she does: accumulating context and using it to connect meaningfully at the right moment. Finance gave her systems thinking. Tragedy gave her clarity. 120 conversations gave her deep customer insight.

In this episode, Nikki joins Mason to share why team beats idea every time, why relationships, not data, are the real moat, and why the foundations of sales never change: "People buy from people."

This one's for anyone questioning whether their "non-traditional" background disqualifies them - or wondering if their lived experience might just be the context that matters most.

Joe Harris returns to Wild Hearts—but this time as a founder. An engineer by training (ML for telecoms), operator by practice (Eucalyptus growth & product), and obsessive systems thinker, Joe unpacks why robotics is finally crossing from hype to inevitability. We trace the structural shifts powering the moment—collapsing hardware costs, foundation-model intelligence, and urgent customer pull—and the hard lessons from failed vertical farming plays that recalibrated what reliable automation actually demands. Joe introduces Alloy, a horizontal data and observability platform for robotics teams: find the 1% of mission data that matters, surface edge cases, track reliability toward “four-, five-, six-nines,” and shorten the loop from failure → fix → redeploy. If you’re building, buying, or betting on robots, this is the market map and playbook for the next decade.

What you’ll learn

• The three real drivers: cost curves, capability (VLM/VLA), and customer pull
• Reliability as the business model: why 99% isn’t enough—and how teams get to 4–6 nines
• Data, not demos: robots emit GB/min; how to isolate the 1% that changes outcomes
• Horizontal vs. vertical: what failed in indoor/vertical farming and why
• Alloy’s wedge: multimodal search (images, time series, logs), “scenarios,” alerts, and instant mission summaries to accelerate deployment and reduce unit costs
• Team & culture: hiring for speed, humility, and learning in a field moving weekly

Chapter guide (timestamps)

00:00 First operator-to-founder return: Joe’s path (engineer → Atlassian → Eucalyptus → Alloy)

02:00 Maker roots: coding tutorials at 12, early internet leverage

03:30 Many small businesses → the “one-thing, 10–20 years” decision

08:30 Why now for robotics: cost curves + reusable rockets as mindset shift

10:45 Vertical farming post-mortems: unit economics, reliability, scale errors

13:40 Reliability is everything: from 99% to 99.999% in the physical world

15:45 The data firehose: GB/min, multimodal chaos, and missing tooling

18:40 Operator-to-robot ratio as the core unit economic lever

21:10 Selling into robotics: design partners, security, and data heterogeneity

23:15 Common data primitives (perception, time series, logs) + ROS-driven formats

24:30 Why LLMs aren’t enough: context-window limits & multimodal encoding

27:00 Alloy’s product: natural-language search, similarity, “scenarios,” real-time alerts

28:50 Instant mission summaries vs. days of manual analysis

29:30 Edge AI tailwinds: Jetson class hardware, cheaper sensors (LiDAR/IMUs)

30:30 VLAs explained: from perception → plan → act (and why smoothness matters)

32:10 The pace of change: weekly breakthroughs, staying on the frontier

33:40 Distribution & adoption: enterprise first; consumer follows reliability

35:40 Safety and necessity: underwater, heavy industry, logistics

37:15 Autonomy acceptance: the “first Waymo ride” unlock

43:00 Ideal customers: high throughput, real deployments, cloud telemetry

44:50 ICP discovery playbook: questions that qualify real readiness

45:50 Team design: missionary talent, humility > hubris, learn-fast culture

46:40 Macro lens: robotics as a deflationary lever & company formation boom

48:00 Jobs & leverage: from decoding info → higher-order coordination

50:05 The Alloy analogy: the coal-shoveler that keeps the engine running

When Andrea Quinn made the leap from fashion merchandising to tech, she didn't start a company. She joined one. Today, she's VP of Go-To-Market Operations at Halter, New Zealand's newest unicorn, which just raised $155 million at a $1.55 billion valuation.

Not every path into building the future looks like a founder origin story. Some of the most crucial work happens when you join the right company at the right moment and help turn ambition into execution. Andrea's doing exactly that - scaling the GTM motion as Halter accelerates across Australia and the United States.In this episode, Blackbird Partner Sam Wong sits down with Andrea to explore how operators translate skills across industries and build the engines that power billion-dollar companies. From her Commercial Equation framework to practical AI applications in sales, Andrea breaks down what it actually takes to scale a startup from the inside.

This episode is for: founders building GTM, operators inheriting messy funnels, and anyone wondering if they need to start a company to build the future.

Because the answer is no. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is join the rocket ship and help build the engine.

In this week’s episode, Xavier Collins, co-founder of Wonder, joins Mason to explore how technology is tearing down the old gates of Hollywood, and what happens when anyone, anywhere, can tell stories that move the world.

Backed by Blackbird and LocalGlobe, Wonder is building an AI-native creative studio reimagining how films are made, who gets to make them, and what “production” even means. Xavier shares how AI can help the 90% of scripts that never get made finally see the light of day - from resurrecting forgotten footage to helping bold new voices get their first break.

We dive into instinct versus analytics, courage versus consensus, and the scrappy startup mindset redefining creative industries. It’s a story about belief, innovation, and the people daring to create what others think impossible.

This episode is for anyone who’s ever had a story they’ve wanted to tell, a dream they’ve wanted to build, or an idea they’ve been told was too crazy to work.

Because when content becomes infinite, the only thing that matters is the quality of the story - and your story might just be next.

From the emotional weight of leadership to the surprising financial realities of building something from scratch, Michelle shares the unfiltered truths of the founder journey - the highs, the hard parts, and the freedom that comes with letting go. Maddy Guest, from Blackbird’s investment team and host of the finance podcast So Invested, joins Michelle to unpack what those lessons teach us about resilience, risk, and redefining success.

This is a story about ambition and endurance — and the lessons that only reveal themselves when you decide to climb.

For three years, Airwallex burned money building invisible infrastructure no one believed in yet. Her co-founder drew a “really ugly unicorn” on a whiteboard predicting ten-times growth when they had zero revenue. Everyone laughed - but beneath the laughter was a serious undertone that they were onto something big. Something that would be game changing. So they kept building.

That bet on infrastructure became one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world, now moving $200 billion annually and adding $100 million in recurring revenue every quarter.

In this episode, Lucy shares why building two products simultaneously defied conventional startup wisdom, how hiring for intellectual curiosity beats credentials, and what it means to scale from zero to 1,800 people without losing speed. She also reflects on the power of ambitious predictions, staying simple at massive scale, and why resilience matters more than perfection.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, James joins Mason to share why the company never took VC money, how “flow state” shapes everything from product design to team culture, and what it really takes to scale without losing soul. They also dive deep into generative AI, ethical data, and why Procreate’s biggest unfair advantage may simply be staying small and Tasmanian.

James also reflects on the tension between addition and reduction, the power of jam sessions, and why listening to the “little voice” is the artist’s greatest superpower.

Time Stamps

00:00 – Intro

02:05 – Why brushstrokes were the starting point

05:10 – The art of subtraction: keeping flow while adding features

07:50 – Permanence as a product philosophy

09:36 – From “an amazing piece of shit” to a world-class creative tool

12:11 – How Procreate’s archetype grew from amateurs to architects

15:01 – Listening to users without losing the soul

17:31 – Scaling creativity and protecting flow inside the team

19:51 – Jam sessions, “holy shit” moments, and making ideas real

23:31 – James’ strong stance on generative AI and ethical data

34:51 – Authenticity over slogans: building trust with artists

37:21 – Bringing artists together, online and offline

39:06 – Staying independent: why Procreate never took VC

44:01 – Simplicity vs. optionality in future workflows

46:39 – The advice James gives every artist: listen to the little voice

48:26 – Outro

In our final  episode of this season of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Pete Shadbolt, co-founder of PsiQuantum, a company racing to build the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer. But this isn’t a conversation about quantum theory. It’s about execution. Engineering. Scaling. Building something that moves humanity forward - not in decades, but now.

Pete shares why 300 or 3,000 qubits won’t cut it, and why a million is the magic number. We explore the technical marvels (and madness) involved in the team’s journey: superconducting detectors millimetres from red-hot heaters, lasers brighter than a trillion photons, and a cryostat that throws out the chandelier model altogether.

But most of all, this is a story of ambition. Of leaving behind prestigious academic careers, raising a billion dollars, and assembling a team of physicists, welders, aerospace engineers, and cryo-specialists to take one shot at building something historic.

In this conversation, we cover:

🚀 Why PsiQuantum is chasing 1 million qubits—not 300, not 3,000🏗️ What it takes to move quantum computing from theory to hardware—with welders, chip designers, and aerospace engineers 

📉 Why academia can be a trap—and how PsiQuantum built an anti-academic company culture 

🌐 The real-world applications of quantum computing: from designing drugs to revolutionising materials science 

👩‍🔬 How team DNA, not just tech, shapes PsiQuantum’s ability to scale and execute 

⚙️ Why quantum computing isn’t a mass adoption tool - and why that’s perfectly okay

🔥 How engineering targets that once caused mutiny are now being hit daily

This episode concludes our fifth season of Wild Hearts. Over the past 40 weeks, it’s been our honour to chat to the founders and operators shaping the world we live in. If you’ve enjoyed the conversations, we would be grateful if you could like, subscribe, and share our program with other wild hearts. 

Wild Hearts will take a short break, and will return to all streaming platforms later this year. 

From everyone at the Wild Hearts team, thank you! 

You might know Anna from her nine years scaling the creator marketplace at Canva—but it was a stint as a pasta chef in the Dolomites that ultimately set her on the path to launching Clove.

Whether you’re interested in the role of AI in reducing decision fatigue, why brands are betting big on recipe creators as the next wave of culinary entrepreneurs or just stood in front of the fridge thinking “what’s for dinner?”—this episode is for you.

🔍 In this conversation, we cover:

🍳 The invisible mental load of everyday cooking—and how Clove is removing it with Smart Planner

📲 Why Clove’s approach to AI is more whisper than shout—and why that matters for creativity

📚 Building for creators: how Clove is giving food bloggers, TikTok cooks and chefs a new way to publish and earn

🎯 From pitch decks to real traction: Anna’s high-stakes decision to pause Clove’s creator program and set a new quality bar

🚀 The leap from Canva exec to culinary school student—and what working in a Michelin-starred restaurant taught Anna about product

🧠 Low ego, high initiative: what Clove looks for in early team members and building a culture of adaptability

🧭 What it means to follow the dots—why you don’t need to have it all figured out to move forward

🍽️ The long-term ambition: turning Clove into the global go-to for “what’s for dinner?”—with a billion recipes cooked through the platform

From Canva to Clove, Anna Guerrero shows what it looks like to reinvent yourself, back a bold vision, and build something that truly changes how we live and cook.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, guest host and investor at Blackbird, Maddy Guest sits down with Kate Vale; Google and Spotify’s first hire in Australia. 
From launching Google out of her lounge room to scaling Spotify into a household name, Kate shares behind-the-scenes stories of tech history in the making, the leadership lessons that stuck, and why her latest career act is all about investing in women.

In this conversation, we cover:

📞 The cold call from Google that changed her life and brought her to the global tech world—and tech in APAC
🚀 What it was like to launch Google Australia from her lounge room 
🌍 Why Spotify was a harder sell than Google—and how she got artists on board 
💡 The cultural rituals that helped Kate build high-performance teams across two giants 
🔥 The one mistake most startups make when scaling their teams globally 
📈 Why she co-founded a VC fund to back female tech founders during the pandemic 
🎯 What Kate looks for in a founder, and the red flags that kill the deal

This episode is a fascinating look behind the scenes at some of the earliest experiences of bringing global tech companies to Australia, and how these experiences have shaped Steph’s career and investing approach.

In this special live episode of Wild Hearts , Linktree co-founder and CEO Alex Zaccaria joins Mason Yates on stage at Sunrise Australia to unpack the messy, inspiring story behind one of Australia’s most iconic tech exports. 

From unpacking Alex’s early creative instincts to the cultural tensions between Australia and the US, this is an unfiltered conversation on clarity, leadership, and staying close to the product that made it all possible.

In this conversation, we cover:

🚀 How Linktree grew from a music industry side project into a global internet infrastructure tool

🔁 Why Alex Zaccaria scrapped traditional org charts and rebuilt the team from a “zero-based budget” approach

🧠 The internal mindset shift from people-pleasing to product-led, founder-first decision making

🔗 Why simplicity is one of the hardest product challenges—and how Linktree maintains it at massive scale

🗺️ What it means to build a business across two cultures—Australia and the US—and how the team navigates tall poppy syndrome

💸 How Linktree's new “Sponsored Links” marketplace is flipping influencer marketing into measurable performance

🎤 The evolution of leadership clarity and why Alex now operates in “mandate mode”

📈 What it takes to stay true to your product intuition—even when everyone around you tells you otherwise

And of course, because this is a live episode, there’s some audience questions and banter along the way! Listen in for a conversation about reclaiming vision, rewriting culture, and building at global scale while staying grounded in creative instinct.

According to Harry Flett, it's not just strategy or shipping speed; it’s how you make people feel. In the latest Operator episode of Wild Hearts, Harry, VP of Product, takes us behind the scenes at Tracksuit, where high-output product culture meets silliness, storytelling, and some surprisingly heartfelt moments. We explore Harry’s frameworks for thinking clearly, building with velocity, and designing for both customers and teammates.

In this episode, we cover:

💬 The power of the say-do ratio and how reputation is built through consistent follow-through

🧠 Why burnout often stems from being “too helpful”—and how Harry’s learning to step back

🌳 The leaf-branch-trunk-root framework that’s helping Harry delegate and build ownership

⚖️ Why great product leadership requires balancing 10,000-foot thinking with shipping the next feature

✍️ How writing is Harry’s superpower—and why it’s essential for clarity in teams, strategy, and scaling

🏆 The hiring philosophy that helped Tracksuit hire the best people

This episode is a playbook for leaders—whether you're in product, people, or operations—who want to scale with clarity, delegate with intention, and build a culture that people genuinely want to be part of. It’s packed with insights on communication, prioritisation, and the kind of leadership that drives real momentum. 

The former creative lead at Eucalyptus believes the solution to this ‘creative problem’ starts with a feedback loopand ends with a new kind of intelligence.

After leading one of Australia’s fastest-growing startups through a wave of performance marketing breakthroughs, George walked away to build something better. That “something” became Magic Brief: a tool that captures creative intelligence, not just analytics.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, George takes us inside the machine. From his 15 principles of high-performing teams to how AI can (and should) unlock—not replace—creativity, this is a wide-ranging conversation going deep on marketing and product.

In this episode, we cover:

📈 The 15 traits of high-performing creative teams

🧠 Why feedback loops—not freedom—unlock the best work

🤖 How AI can enhance creative strategy without replacing it

🎨 Why taste still matters in a world of AI-generated content

George Howes gives a masterclass in the intersection of AI, creative strategy, and product velocity. If you're in marketing, this is one you’ll want to play twice.

Vu Tran is a doctor, a co-founder of Go1, and now the co-founder of Black Sky Industries — Australia’s first scalable missile and solid rocket motor manufacturer. In this episode, Vu opens up about the moral tipping point that drove him into defence, the vulnerability he sees in Australia’s current military setup, and why he believes our future depends on becoming, in his words, “an echidna — small, underestimated, and far too prickly to bite.”

This is a conversation about personal mission, national security, and the power of bringing startup speed to one of the slowest-moving industries on the planet.

In this conversation, we cover:

🏥 The emotional toll and grounding power of Vu’s continued work as a doctor in Logan

🚀 How Black Sky Industries is tackling lethality and building solid rocket motors at scale

🛡️ What Vu means by “making Australia an echidna” — a defence philosophy grounded in self-reliance and deterrence

💣 Why no one wants to touch “the pointy stuff” — and why Vu’s choosing to anyway

🌍 How Australia’s current reliance on foreign defence suppliers makes us vulnerable — and what needs to change

💡 Lessons Vu took from scaling Go1 into a unicorn — and what he’s left behind at Black Sky

📈 Why defence tech is the next trillion-dollar market opportunity — and why Vu wants more founders to enter the space.

This episode is a raw and revealing look at how one founder is turning personal responsibility into national-scale impact — and why Australia needs more entrepreneurs willing to tackle the hardest problems.

In the latest episode from our Operator series of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Jesse Creighton, Director (US), Heidi Health.

Jesse shares what it really looked like to launch the company’s American expansion — from hosting awkward dinners with two doctors at a 20-person table to building a high-performing sales team with its own unique culture in New York.

In this conversation, we cover:

🗽 What it was like being the first on the ground in New York to launch Heidi in the US

🎯 Why Heidi's initial customer outreach flopped — and what they learned from it

🧠 How freemium became a game-changing growth strategy in healthcare

🛠 Why product-market fit in the US required rethinking sales, support, and compliance

🌎 The role of generalists vs. specialists when building early-stage teams across markets

🎥 How customer obsession and Aussie culture helped shape Heidi’s US team

📈 The two biggest bets that paid off — and why most investors didn’t see them coming 

This episode is a masterclass in how to scale a startup across borders — blending instinct, experimentation, and a deep belief in product.

We unpack the misconceptions surrounding fusion, the unique design of OpenStar’s levitated dipole reactor, and why the pathway to commercial fusion might be shorter -and more valuable - than most people think.

🔍 In this conversation, we cover:

⚡ How OpenStar achieved first plasma in just 16 months—years faster than competitors

💥 Why fusion isn’t “30 years away” anymore—and never really was

📉 How misconceptions about cost, scale and safety are holding the industry back

🔩 The engineering breakthrough that allows OpenStar to iterate faster

🧪 Why their first product won’t be a power plant—and what it might be instead

🏥 Medical isotopes, nuclear waste and imaging: the early use cases for fusion

🔧 “Always include a crank”: how failure tolerance fuels rapid learning

🚀 The startup mindset behind building a trillion-dollar fusion company

This episode goes beyond fusion hype; it’s a candid look at how OpenStar is breaking barriers in one of the world’s hardest engineering challenges.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Elise Jenkins, co-founder of Opto Biosystems, to discuss the journey of building a first-in-class brain implant that merges neurotechnology with oncology. 

🎧 Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to learn.

We explore the highs and lows of moving from academia to a high-stakes startup, the unexpected hurdles of working with neurosurgeons, and the race toward first-in-human trials.

In this conversation, we cover:

🧠 Bridging the gap between neuroscience and cancer research

🔬 How brain-Computer interfaces could transform oncology

📈 The road to the first-in-human clinical trials and what It means for the future

💡 The challenges of moving from academia to a high-impact startup

⚡ Why the next generation of neural implants need to be MRI-invisible 

🏥 What It takes to get regulatory approval for a revolutionary medical implant 

🌎 Opto’s long-term vision: using neural biomarkers beyond brain cancer

If you're fascinated by the intersection of science, engineering, and medicine, this conversation is for you.

🎧 Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to learn.

✅Challenges of creating a hardware product

✅Helping people overcome shame and stigma

✅Building a brand beyond a visual identity

✅Investing in your own mental health

✅Reaching your audience where they are

With its range of sex toys and sex education resources, NORMAL has reimagined the sex shop into an online experience that is fun and informative, with the mission of empowering absolutely anybody to explore their sexuality free from stress and stigma.

In this special live episode of Wild Hearts, founder of NORMAL Lucy Wark spoke with me on stage at Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival.

Episode highlights from Lucy:

“More than 1 in 5 searches on the internet is about sex. There’s an incredibly large organic interest in this topic.”

“As a culture, we have a long history of religious and cultural ideas about sex being sinful, sex being something that should only exist inside marriage, or should only exist for the creation of children.”

“It’s not like selling toilet paper or mattresses. You’re trying to help people tackle quite deep psychological stigma.”

“Things like libido, desire, arousal, changes in the body, sexual dysfunction, relationship skills, and sex while ageing, sex in menopause, there is this enormous suite of challenges for which we are incredibly poorly prepared for by formal sex education.”

“A brand is not a logo and colours. To build authentic brands that mean something to people, is about a lot more than just building a visual identity.”

“I think having practices like therapy are incredibly helpful investments in yourself as a founder, and an operator, and just a good human being to be around, so that’s been probably the highest ROI thing I do.”

In this episode, Annabelle shares the rollercoaster journey of building a consumer brand from scratch, the unexpected lessons of going viral, and the challenges of breaking into retail.

In this conversation, we cover:

🔥 The TikTok video that went viral overnight and sold out 5,000 units

💥 The manufacturing disaster that led to exploding tubes and mass refunds

🚀 How Annabelle scaled CLUTCH from a side hustle to a retail success

🦈 The Shark Tank investor who tried to rip her off—and how she fought back

🎯 The unexpected challenges of retail, from supply chain issues to hidden costs

💡 The founder-led brand strategy that resonated with millions

📈 Lessons in growth, hiring, and relinquishing control in a fast-moving startup

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to scale a consumer product from zero to retail shelves, this conversation with Annabelle Hay is a masterclass in resilience, adaptability, and strategic growth.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, we chat with Armina Rosenberg, an investor combining traditional fundamental research with revolutionary AI-driven techniques. 

Armina dives into how her firm, Minotaur, leverages AI to break down barriers, uncover global opportunities, and make investment decisions at unprecedented speeds. It's not just about efficiency; it's about reshaping the way capital is allocated worldwide.

In this episode, we cover:

📈 How AI can remove language barriers in global investment research (03:30)

🔍 Armina’s innovative strategy for identifying mispriced companies (11:45)

🧠 How large language models (LLMs) transform fundamental analysis (14:10)

⚖️ Managing risk and building conviction with AI analytics (23:50)

🛠️ The competitive advantage of building proprietary AI software (29:30)

🚀 Future AI investment trends and capturing economic value (34:20)

This episode is a rare inside look at how AI is transforming the art of investing, and what it means for the future of software.

In this episode, Matt Hinds, Co-founder and CEO of Sauce AI, explains how AI is transforming the way companies prioritise, iterate, and execute on their product roadmaps. We dive into the tools, strategies, and mindset shifts that are allowing top teams to unlock massive leverage in world of product development.

In this conversation, we cover:

🧠 The evolving role of product managers in an AI-powered world

🚀 How Sauce AI is transforming product insights and decision-making

📉 Why some companies are eliminating PM roles – and why others are doubling down

💡 How top product teams use AI to unlock customer insights 100x faster

🛠️ The must-have AI tools that product managers should be using right now

🔄 The future of product iteration: instant feedback loops and automated workflows

Steve shares the moment that led to their pivotal product shift, the principles guiding their success, and why they believe 2025 is the year AI will truly transform enterprise support.

In this conversation, we cover:

💡 The breakthrough moment that led to Lorikeet’s pivot into AI-driven customer support

🚀 How Steve and his team outperformed well-funded competitors in Silicon Valley

📈 The underestimated value of customer engagement over customer love

🎯 Why AI in customer support isn’t just about summarising FAQs—and why that matters

🛠️ The power of engineers talking to customers and building based on real needs

💰 Why Steve believes the best startups should focus on making their existing customers wildly successful

⚡ How startup founders can avoid “doom loop” hiring behaviors and build teams that win

🔮 Why 2025 will be the year of enterprise AI—and how Lorikeet is positioning itself to lead

Steve Hind and his team at Lorikeet are proving that startups can outcompete legacy players—not by outspending them, but by outthinking them. This conversation is a deep dive into strategy, execution, and the mindset that leads to real impact.

In this episode, we talk about her path from industrial design to AI entrepreneurship, why the best research isn’t about collecting data but understanding people, and how Juno is changing the way businesses learn from their customers.

In this conversation, we cover:

🔍 The art of asking the right questions—and why small wording changes can completely alter responses

💡 Why Michelle believes AI has levelled the playing field—and what that means for the future of research

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The importance of co-founders—and how Michelle’s long-standing partnership with Josh gives Juno an advantage

🚀 The shift from consulting to product-based business models—and why Juno is moving away from selling time

🔬 Experimentation at the core of Juno’s growth—how the team tests hypotheses before scaling

💰 Pricing AI research: Can value-based pricing work for a product like Juno?

🌏 Expanding globally—why Latin America and Singapore are key emerging markets for Juno

🧠 The future of qualitative research—why Michelle believes surveys are outdated and how Juno is leading the next evolution

This episode isn’t just about AI; it’s about how Juno is redefining the way we gather insights, making research faster, more intuitive, and ultimately more human.

What does it take to turn an idea into a global business in just six months?

In this episode, we sit down with the founders of Springboards, Pip Bingemann and Amy Tucker, to uncover their whirlwind journey from a three-person team with an MVP to a thriving international business that’s transforming the creative agency space.

 Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to learn.

In this conversation, we cover:

The incredible growth of Springboards—from a 3-person team to a global operation (02:30)

How AI is inspiring, not replacing, human creativity in the agency world (15:45)

The pitching problem in agencies and how Springboards is solving it (22:10)

The expansion into international markets and how Amsterdam became a key hub (30:20)

The power of relationships in driving business success over 15 years (40:05)

Why “pitch theatre” is crucial for standing out in a crowded market (50:15)

The importance of balancing creativity and structure in agency work (1:02:40)

Overcoming fear and resistance to AI adoption within agencies (1:15:55)

Whether you’re a marketer, a creative, or a business leader, this conversation will change how you think about AI’s role in enhancing—not replacing—human creativity.

🔑 Why Apple’s "life's best work" mantra fosters trust and accountability across teams

📱 The revolutionary impact of the iPad on education and its role in transforming classrooms worldwide

📖 The secret to embedding Apple’s culture of clarity, strategy, and communication in organisations

🌟 How critical thinking and problem-solving are the most important skills for future leaders

🤖 Why AI is poised to revolutionise education, featuring insights from Khan Academy's AI tutor

👩‍💼 Stephanie’s role as COO at Box: Coordinating customer-focused strategies for sustained growth

📈 How to balance rapid growth and operational efficiency in the competitive SaaS industry

🌍 Lessons from Apple and Box on fostering innovation and creating meaningful impact at scale

Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, an educator, or a leader, join us to learn how Stephanie fostered trust, tackled challenges, and leveraged technology to drive education and innovation to new heights.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, Adam shares the highs, lows, and lessons learned as he prepares for the first Australian-made rocket launch from Australian soil.

Throughout the episode, we cover:

🚀 Adam Gilmour’s bold vision to enable human colonisation of the solar system

🧠  The rollercoaster highs and lows of building rockets from scratch in Australia

📊 How simplicity drives innovation: lessons from aerospace engineering

🌍 The importance of milestones in the rocket business and how they shape progress

🔄 Bootstrapping a space company with a small team and big dreams

🎯 Why launching from Australia provides unique orbital opportunities

💡 Navigating regulatory hurdles and securing trust in a high-risk industry

🌌 Adam’s predictions for humanity’s expansion into the solar system and beyond

Adam Gilmour’s story isn’t just about rockets—it’s a testament to resilience, innovation, and the boundless potential of human ambition 🚀

Flavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit.

In the second episode of, host Mason Yates speaks to co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth.

Key topics covered:

• How the next industrial revolution will be in space.
• The unique challenges facing space start-ups.
• The small data revolution.
• The importance of having a focused market.
• What Fleet did to shorten their customer feedback loop.
• Why a CEO has to be everywhere.

The best of Flavia Tata Nardini:

"Focus is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the startup world.”

“A lot of people talk about big data, we hated the word, it was just bullshit. So we called it a small data revolution. Just get a little piece of data. The smart data.”

“The [space] industry has got ninety percent awareness of everything that’s deployed. They just make decisions in a way that is not right. We want to change this, we want to give [everyone] full visibility. The problem has always been that connectivity was not present or super expensive.”

“We decided to fire all our customers that were tiny and focus like crazy in working with big energy companies and others.”

“You need to be a believer, you need to believe [in your product] in the first five to six years like crazy.”

“You cannot let people build you a product [and think] they will build it for you the way you wanted it. You have to be there. You have to do it. You have to show them the path."

Niki Scevak on Flavia Tata Nardini and Fleet:

“The ability to do something you could not do before to this huge industry, and to make it a hundred X cheaper was incredibly exciting."

“As much as it was about space, it was about the opportunity to build a telecommunications network for a tiny amount of money.”

“When you compare space startups to software startups, the disadvantages are around feedback loops."

“How Flavia in particular has wrangled people from around the world … I think it’s just incredible coordination and project management to get things to happen with not a lot of money and certainly with not a lot of structure."

“You have to divorce the outcome of something from the weighted probability of doing it.”

“You need to keep shooting. Luck is a process, you have to expose yourself to be lucky.

Halter is a fenceless farming startup. They're creating mind control technology for cows. An engineer by trade and dairy farmer by birth, Halter CEO is familiar with the relentless demands of farming.

“The day in the life of a farmer is you’re up at 4:30am every morning, even on Christmas morning, nothing waits for you.”

That’s about to change. Halter has developed an IoT wearable collar that can direct and move cows from any location on Earth.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Craig on the future of farming and creating a culture of radical honesty, and from investor and Rocket Lab founder on the biggest mistakes NZ entrepreneurs make, and what convinced him to invest in Halter.

Tim Doyle, co-founder of seed-stage company Eucalyptus, has spent $35M across political campaigns, mattresses and now healthcare. Before Eucalyptus, Tim was the Head of Marketing at Koala.

In this conversation, Tim talks about how he allocates capital, how Eucalyptus captures attention, where to extract value where others can’t see and how to acquire customers.

Later on in this episode, you’ll hear from Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Ventures. He was one of the very first believers in Eucalyptus and he’ll provide an investors lens on what others can learn from Eucalyptus.

Key topics covered:

• The problem with Direct to Consumer companies
• The importance of GTM focus in an Australian context.
• Ways you can allocate capital as a non technical founder.
• How to unlock talent in your organisation.
• Why you should spend 10% of your monthly marketing spend on testing.
• The biggest fundamental shift in customer acquisition, advertising and branding in the last decade.

The best of Tim Doyle:

“In Australia, there aren’t a huge number of Venture back-able consumer product opportunities, there’s just not that many billion dollar product opportunities, but there's a lot of 50 to 100 million dollar ones that more or less exist on the same infrastructure.”

“What’s the actual thing you’re going to earn the right to exist on to begin with and how are you going to talk about that? If you can’t do that, you’ll never even get in. Do something dumb and focused and deliver on it really well, build your business around that and earn the right to do other stuff.”

“Price the externalities of a staff member to understand their true value.”

“The shorter the distance between your junior dev. and the customer the better the decisions that junior developer will make.”

“The gap between designer and customer is as short as possible.”

“Branding is iterative.”

“In a world where feedback is so real, fast and clear, sitting around and psychoanalysing your customers and thinking about what the best piece of creative for them is, is a complete waste of time. You may as well just increase the speed at which you test and then back the winners extremely hard and trust the iterative system that you’ve built to continue to learn and get better at acquiring customers over time.”

“A media model is constantly hungry.”

“You’re always value investing. Every decision you make is, ‘Can I extract more value out of this than I have to pay for it?’ It's super true in media buying. TV /Advertising companies don’t understand the price of their own inventory because they negotiate over lunch. If you have a better system for deriving value than they have, then you can extract the value they can’t see.”

Nick Crocker on Tim Doyle

“Tim was the best marketer and marketing thinker that I’d met in the time I had been investing.

“Eucalyptus is an anomaly in that they did everything they said they would and that's rare.”

“The thing that I always felt with Tim, and that I know that Niki felt the first time he met Tim, was that he was an original thinker. And there is very little original thought in the world, period".

“When you learn something new, really new and unique from someone, it's just a magical moment in this job.”

In this episode of Wild Hearts, Flavia Tata Nardini takes us behind the scenes of Fleet's growth, sharing how critical decisions, customer feedback, and personal resilience have shaped her leadership. 

Join us for a conversation that reveals the human side of leadership in one of the most cutting-edge industries today.

Throughout the episode, we cover:

🚀 The role of founder resilience and how it shapes leadership growth

🧠 Why founders have a "different brain" and how it solves unsolvable problems

📊 How running a company "by the numbers" transformed Flavia's leadership style

🌍 The intersection of critical minerals exploration and the energy transition

🔄 The power of focus: How Fleet narrowed its scope to drive market fit

🎯 The challenges and rewards of firing customers to refine business strategy

💡 Lessons learned from capital raises and how discipline drives hypergrowth

🌌 Reflections on space innovation and the role of Fleet in reshaping Earth's future

This episode is a candid look into the mindset and strategy of a founder tackling complex global challenges while navigating the personal and professional highs and lows of leadership.

🎧 Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to learn.

That’s the story of Dr. Thomas Kelly and his ambitious telehealth platform, Heidi—a product that faced failure before transforming into a global success.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, we delve into the remarkable journey of a founder who dared to strip everything back to focus on what mattered most. We cover:

🩺 The turning point: How Tom realised Heidi wasn’t delivering joy to clinicians and chose to pivot.

🛠️ Killing complexity: Why Heidi 2.0’s singular feature—transcribing consultations—became the key to success.

📈 Simplicity scales: The viral growth of Heidi 2.0 and how a $10M ARR business was born from focus.

💡 Lessons in failure: How Tom’s honest letter to investors unlocked clarity and trust.

🌟 The power of “useful”: Why simplicity and user focus beat grand visions every time.

From embracing failure to redefining success, this episode is essential listening for founders, creators, and anyone who’s ever faced a crossroads.

In this episode, we explore the journey of a father-turned-creative visionary who bet everything on capturing the magic of family life.

From creating a team culture that prioritises love and ownership to scaling joy across continents, Joe’s story is an extraordinary blend of heart and hustle.

In this conversation, we cover:

🐾 How Joe Brumm turned everyday parenting moments into a global phenomenon

🎨 The unique team culture at Bluey and how it fosters creative pride

📈 Scaling a family-first story into a global business without losing authenticity

🌏 Why Bluey resonates universally: the power of storytelling rooted in truth

💡 The importance of trusting your instincts in creative leadership

🎥 Behind the scenes of Bluey’s weekly animator screenings and their impact on quality 

🚀 How Bluey leverages global partnerships while staying true to its Australian roots

📖 Joe Brumm’s lessons in transforming personal experiences into world-class content

From the magic of storytelling to the power of team pride, this episode is a must-listen for anyone curious about building authentic and lasting creative work.

After scaling a solo business to $700,000/year without cofounders or funding, she pivoted to tackle online education’s biggest flaws.

Now the founder of NextWork, Amber is building a platform that teaches real-world skills, validated by real companies. 

In our latest episode of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Amber and dive deep into:

🚀 How Amber Joseph scaled a solo services business to $700,000/year with no cofounders or funding.

🤔 Amber’s pivot from a solo business to a startup solving online education’s biggest challenges.

🌍 The “learning loop” framework that redefines knowledge acquisition, application, and validation.

🎯 Why launching imperfect products accelerates progress and drives better user outcomes.

💡 How Amber built a 40,000-strong fan community in three months, and why fans turned into co-creators.

🤝 Amber’s approach to embedding her team within the customer community for faster iteration and trust-building.

🔑 How seamless onboarding and cultural insights are critical to NextWork’s growth.

This episode isn’t just about Amber Joseph’s achievements—it’s a masterclass in turning failure into fuel and building communities that power transformational learning.

In this episode, we learn:

🚀 The pivotal rejection and how it motivated Liam to persevere.

💼 The early funding struggle and how a $250K angel investment changed Instant’s trajectory.

💡 How revenue obsession became a core philosophy, shifting focus from product perfection to customer impact.

👥 Why Instant operates without managers, and how a flat sales culture drives performance.

🎯 The role of speed in Instant’s DNA—how quick pivots and rapid decision-making fuelled growth.

🔑 The value of a relentless customer focus that has transformed Instant from a “checkbox feature” into an $5M+ ARR product.

Instant’s journey shows that with the right attitude and strategy, even setbacks can be transformed into stepping-stones for success at great heights.

In this episode, we sit down with Craig Piggott, CEO and Founder of Halter, to discuss the journey of transforming the farming industry with smart technology. Craig shares insights on managing supply chain and critical path changes, boosting productivity, the company's plans to expand globally, and how he and his team are reimagining the possibilities for agriculture.

What can you expect in this episode? 

📱 The in-app experience that turns Halter into a farmer's essential tool.

💡  Craigs biggest lessons as he ‘grows into a CEO’.

🔥 The intensity of Halter's daily leadership meetings and the role of ‘gratitude’.

🌍 Halter’s approach to expanding internationally, beginning with the US market.

🏆 The challenges and insights of building a high-performance culture.

💡 Lessons on operational excellence and refining the supply chain.

🔥 The art of fundraising and the method Craig used in his successful rounds.

This episode explores not only the innovative technology Halter brings to agriculture but also the resilience and drive behind building an impactful company in an evolving industry.

In this episode, Ines Lizaur, a former SpaceX engineer and now Head of Manufacturing at Vow, joins us on Wild Hearts to share her journey and insights on tackling big challenges in high-stakes environments.

From her early days at SpaceX where she grappled with relentless deadlines and operational reliability, to her transition to Vow, we explore how Ines has applied her experience from the fast-paced aerospace industry to cultivate sustainable solutions in food production.

🚀 What did SpaceX teach her about decisiveness under pressure and learning from failure?

🌌 What principles make SpaceX special, and what qualities define Elon Musk’s leadership?

🛠 How did cross-functional teamwork and scrappy problem-solving shape her leadership at Vow?

📈 What lessons can be drawn from simplifying processes and pushing boundaries in an emerging field?

🎯 How does she balance ambition with the grounded realities of scale and reliability in cultured meat?

This conversation is a fascinating look into how one of the great operators in the Aussie ecosystem is reshaping what it means to take calculated risks, simplify processes, and lead teams toward new frontiers in tech and sustainability.

In the latest episode in our Operators Series, we dive into the mind of Robert Kawalsky, Head of Product at Canva, to uncover the strategies behind one of the most successful product teams in the world. Robert reveals how a relentless focus on long-term goals, their product-first philosophy, and cross-functional teamwork fuels Canva’s success in empowering creativity on a global scale.

🔍 Tune in to hear Robert’s take on:

🎨 How simplicity and user-centricity keep Canva’s products intuitive and powerful.

🏆 Maintaining product velocity as Canva scales from 7 engineers to over 2,000.

🤖 How Canva integrates generative AI to empower users with cutting-edge tools.

📈 The Customer Zero program and why feedback loops are critical to their success.

🎯 The importance of goal alignment and how it fuels continuous iteration and innovation.

This episode is packed with insights from one of the leading product thinkers of our time, offering a masterclass in building and scaling world-class products.

This is the third time Tim Doyle, the founder of Eucalyptus, has joined us on Wild Hearts. Last episode, Tim shared his ambition to shock the business into a new level of growth. In this episode, we reflect on what’s changed at Eucalyptus over the past few years, his lessons as a CEO of a rapidly-changing company, and making good on Euc’s mission to serve 1 million patients by 2027.

In this conversation, we cover: 

🤔 How Eucalyptus built resilience through tough decisions around redundancies (30:00)

🚀 Tim's strategy for making impact in a highly competitive industry (23:00)

🌏 Why Australian startups can thrive globally (50:00)

🧑‍⚕️ Tim’s reflections on trusting clinical professionals and giving up control (39:00)

This episode is not just about the challenges faced by Eucalyptus; it's a deep dive into the vision of a company that's transforming healthcare and doing so in one of the most competitive markets in the world. 

How about being acquired by Canva within two years of launching?

In the case of Leonardo AI, the answer lies in innovation, speed, and strategic growth, as explored in this episode of Wild Hearts featuring Leonardo AI co-founder and CEO JJ Fiasson.

Leonardo has transformed the world of generative AI, helping creators develop hyper-realistic art for gaming, video production, and marketing. In the words of JJ, the company ‘democratises creativity’ and makes artistic expression accessible to all.

🔍 Across two conversations and many months, we will dive deep into the stories behind Leonardo AI’s unprecedented growth and acquisition, and hear first-hand what it took to reach such heights at breakneck speed.

🤔 How Leonardo AI build the third-largest discord in the world.

🚀 JJ’s philosophy on how to achieve a dizzying product velocity.

🔥 The story behind building the first Australian-built foundational model, Phoenix.

🎨 How the Canva acquisition came about.

🎭 How JJ views AI in the context of human creativity.

This episode is not just about the technical marvels of Leonardo AI; it's a deep dive into the vision of a company that's redefining the boundaries of imagination.

Welcome back to our Wild Heart Operator series!

This series is dedicated to surfacing the lessons from verified world class operators, the Australians and New Zealanders at the forefront of building generational companies. From product to manufacturing, engineering to marketing, each of these conversations is a masterclass in how someone at the top of their game gets it done. 

The answer is a mix of leadership, strategy, and the ability to adapt and thrive in a fast-paced environment.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, we’re excited to welcome Mikayla Hopkins, Head of Marketing at Tracksuit, a company empowering marketers with always-on tools that measure brand health and give them a seat at the boardroom table. Tracksuit is currently scaling globally, and Mikayla has been at the forefront of its marketing success.

We’ll dive deep into Mikayla’s journey from individual contributor to team leader, sharing insights into:

• Tracksuit’s unique marketing philosophy
• What makes a high-performing marketing team
• The key metrics Mikayla tracks as Head of Marketing
• The principles and tools the team relies on daily
• How Mikayla reinvented herself to grow alongside the company

If you're curious about scaling teams and brands, this is your episode.

Listen and subscribe on Apple & Spotify for more.

The answer is curiosity, courage, connections and the ability to collect as many ‘Pokemon Cards’ (skills) as possible.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, we are honoured to be joined by Robyn Denholm - Global Chair of Tesla, Chair of the Tech Council of Australia, and Operating Partner here at Blackbird.

We’ll dive deep into the lesser-told stories from Robyn’s career to uncover the lessons and insights from her hall-of-fame rise to become a technology titan of industry.

• Why does Denholm credit curiosity for driving her career?
• What was it like navigating the Dot-Com Bubble?
• How did Denholm turn not getting the CFO role at Sun into a growth opportunity? 
• Why does Denholm believe balancing innovation with operational discipline is a key to company success? 

This episode is dedicated to Australian exceptionalism. 

In this episode, we talk to Holly Cardew, Carted’s Founder, about how they are changing the future of shopping by standardising and organising the world’s products into a shoppable knowledge graph.  

In Carted’s new ecosystem, shoppers are at the centre, and non-traditional commerce platforms will become the new vehicles for the world’s best contextual shopping experiences. As with all big, hard things - the journey is not linear. We touch on the beginnings of their product graph API with permissionless integrations and standardising a billion products, how that led to building a new multi-merchant contextual commerce experience for publishers - and then to where they are today with their consumer-facing API implementation, Swurl. 

All of these forked paths have led the team to exactly where they need to be.

Forage is on a mission to transform career education and employment. By offering job simulations from leading companies, they enable students to gain real-world skills and experience, enabling them to make more informed decisions about the career they pursue. This innovative approach challenges traditional recruitment methods, focusing on education first to create a more inclusive and diverse talent pool.

✅ How Tom’s unique upbringing primed him to tackle the problem

✅ Transitioning from being an “unhappy lawyer” to founder

✅ Finding the formula for selling to enterprise clients

✅ The challenges of building a category-defining company

✅ The “holy grail” of personalised education

Want to learn more?

Episode Highlights from Tom:

"Instead of hiring first and training second, you should actually be using software that educates the candidate pipeline first and then using that pool of talent and the signals that are surfaced in that experience to hire exceptional candidates"​

“We’re category defining, we’re painting a different future for what recruitment can look like, and that’s challenging. These companies have recruited in a very specific way for a very long time, and it can be challenging to will that future into existence.”

"I hope that education does become more responsive to workplace needs... It's about how do you broaden the surface area of luck for young people to end up in roles that do stimulate them"​

Kiki is on a mission to revolutionise the way we live and connect. By leveraging the power of existing social ties, their unique peer-to-peer subletting platform enables users greater flexibility to travel, helping unlock new lifestyles, friendships and savings.

✅Growing a “cult-like” community around the ethos of subletting

✅Lessons from early mistakes launching in New Zealand

✅Launching in New York: Kiki’s global vision

Episode Highlights from Toby:

“If we can pull this off, we're gonna change how a billion people live, and unchain a billion people from their rent.”

“Stop trying to boil the whole ocean. Find one rock pool. Boil the hell out of that rock pool… Build an ocean of rock pools… That’s why we ended up pivoting from the whole of Sydney, just to Bondi.”

[In the app] “Every single thing you see is intentional. For example… the first thing we push is the name of the person whose place it is. Person. This is not fucking Bondi bubble pad. This is Jenny's home, you know, Jenny's actual home… it's about people, it's about the connection.”

“We've literally had people run up to me in the street, cry in my arms, because they got to see their grandma for the last time before she passed away. Because they were able to go back and see her because they didn’t have to pay rent while they were gone.”

“New York is literally in crisis, it couldn't be worse to be honest. You know, people are paying 2. 5 times more rent on average than people in Sydney.”

“Ship less, but better”, with Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail

✅Lessons from working at Atlassian

✅Detention & Sparring: “sacred rituals” of Dovetail’s design team

✅Balancing product simplicity with new features

✅Design thinking & the “double diamond” framework

Dovetail is on a mission to help the world improve the quality of everything. Dovetail’s customer insights hub allows teams to quickly analyse research data and share insights collaboratively, helping thousands of teams build better products by helping them understand their customers. 

Episode Highlights from Lucy:

“Everything is a design problem! It’s just a way to solve problems.”

“We have a few rituals that are sacred to the design team. One we call Design Detention, and the other is Design Sparring… They’re two pretty standard rituals that a lot of design teams have, usually they’re called collaboration & critique.”

“We have a ratio of about 1 designer to 6 engineers, and that feels like a good ratio for us. At Atlassian I think it was 1 designer to 8 engineers… so it just depends on the company culture and how fast the engineers move.”

“Once you have a product and you have users, you get so many feature requests, and it’s really easy to just build everything that everyone asks you to build. But you have to be quite thoughtful about what problem that is solving, how does that fit into your existing feature set?”

✅Lessons from working at Stitch Fix and Amazon

✅What it means to be truly “developer first”

✅The decision to make Marqo open source

✅Who will be the winners and losers of the AI revolution

Marqo is building a revolutionary framework that provides search functionality to developers, allowing their applications to search anything - text, images, video, audio - with human-like understanding. Marqo makes it possible to do things that were hard or impossible with keyword search, and is poised to completely reshape how we search.

Episode Highlights from Jesse:

“The amount of data is increasing exponentially. A lot of it is unstructured, it’s messy. We’re going to need to be able to search this data, machines will need to be able to search it.”

“We’ve got this tagline: search the way you think. You’re able to communicate very fluently, have it understand, and retrieve really relevant results.”

“Nothing exists today without open source. There’s certainly that somewhat altruistic motivation to give something back after being such a beneficiary. But it’s also just a very good way to get feedback and iterate very fast.”

“We’ve already seen the commoditisation of a lot of these technologies around LLMs. We’ve been very cautious about where we invest on that, because a lot of it is very hard to defend, it becomes commoditised. It’s a race to the bottom and the companies just become marketing companies basically. That’s fine, but that’s not necessarily what we want to do.”

Contact Mason here.

✅ Deciding to join SafetyCulture rather than raise venture capital

✅ Importance of thinking global from day one

✅ Hiring the hungry, not the proven

✅ Advantages of freemium model  

Episode Highlights from Darren:

“We have set out to disrupt workplace education, and what we learned very early on is that workplace education and training is fundamentally broken.”

“We then began to see that the need stretches far beyond the workplace… And so we began to look at the opportunity as being able to really change the way people learn at work, but increasingly… to also make that available to people as individuals.”

“The United Nations came on board to use the platform to educate in places like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sub-Saharan Africa, and that’s now spread into UN Women, UNAIDS, UNITAR, all their initiatives around climate change etcetera, are all being driven out through EdApp.”

 “We sent fresh graduates, one to New York and one to London to go and establish an office there… We were like, “Here’s a plane ticket, good luck.” And what we achieved from that was just so immense.”

Outtakes: 

✅ How cyber threats are shifting with the rise of AI

✅ The value of authenticity when community-building 

✅ A step by step guide to protecting your cyber borders

✅ The power of storytelling for teaching and learning

Within the episode, we explore the shifting landscape of cybersecurity, where software developers are not just creators but custodians of security. Delving into the historical disconnect between CISOs (Chief information security officers) and engineering teams and how bridging this gap can enhance security measures in larger organisations.

The growing awareness around third-party dependency risks - a concern that has prompted businesses to reflect on their exposure. Drawing an intriguing analogy, Laura likens each new piece of software or technology to adopting a puppy, bringing with it responsibilities and potential challenges that need to be managed.

A key highlight is Laura’s vision for the future, where every software developer dedicates time to security. She shares SafeStack’s mission to protect companies of all scales, by empowering software teams worldwide to weave security throughout the development cycles. 

Listen to hear how SafeStack will reach 13 million software developers, getting them to enjoy one hour of security every fortnight, regardless of the amazing technology they’re building all through the power of storytelling.

Episode highlights from Laura Bell Main: 

“And what I realized was that to sell to people who were essentially just like me, I needed to. Sell to people like me and I wouldn't pick up a cold call, and I don't care about your marketing emails as pretty as they are.”

“What we needed to be was authentically in the community sharing value with no strings attached. We needed to give people the chance to explore the product in a way that they, you know, they could do their research before they came to talk to someone.”

“The teeny, tiny, scrappy little three people things. They need to do security too, and they've got no budget. Trying to sell to them is just, that's silly. Don't do that,  give them the free version. Give them just some essentials. They can get started. And that goodwill and that standing, cultivates with them. They grow with it. And so, as they grow, our hope is that they will grow into us.”

“It's hard and every country has its own culture with doing this, so there's a lot to learn, but it's quite freeing now that we are able to say, Hey, we don't need to behave like the playbook security company. We can just be the company we need to be to get to our particular audience.”

“Yeah.  it goes through how we teach, right? nobody wants to sit there and be bored to death by training. The best way to teach, especially when it's something to do with risk is stories.”

“I'm really mission driven. I dunno whether it came from that before or I was already there, but it's, it's really empowering to go to work every day knowing that you're doing something that's bigger than yourself.”

“I'm genuinely nerdily excited about technology. I, I feel like all of the things I used to read as a kid are coming to life in front of me, the good and the bad. And, yeah, I think it's a pretty cool time to be a technologist”

• A layer-by-layer framework for building your growth function 
• Misalignment in team design and how that manifests into frustration 
• The four main areas of greatness you need as a leader
• How to tackle the gnarliest beast of any business: Attribution

Today’s episode is special. It marks a new era for Wild Hearts, where we will shine a light on world-class operators.

The goal is to reveal the lessons, tools, benchmarks and metrics that have surfaced from building and scaling world-class companies. And today’s episode will be all about growth from a company synonymous with it, Eucalyptus, a healthcare technology company building digital experiences for patients. Joe Harris started at Euc as the first growth lead hire, he became the head of growth and now he’s the Chief Commercial Officer.

Eucalyptus builds higher touch, higher quality healthcare experiences for the world. They’re one of the fastest-growing companies that Blackbird has ever funded. Within their first few years, the team has launched and grown four brands reaching over 700,000 people in Australia, UK and Germany.

Behind this, quite frankly, insane growth is a team of some of Australia’s most talented, creative and driven operators, and one of those is Joe Harris. Joe started at Euc in 2020 as a Growth Engineer, quickly moving up the ranks to the Head of Growth and then finally as the Chief Commercial Officer. This rapid progression happened in less than three years, as Joe described it:

“If you had said, I will give you a million dollars. If you can get within like 20% of the correct answer of what's gonna happen to you over the next three years, I would somehow owe you money” 

In this episode of Wild Hearts, Joe walks us through what exactly a growth team is, the step-by-step framework for building your own growth function, how to become a great leader (and coach people around you to become one too), Also quick lessons learned about ineffective solutions that were not going to have the expected impact, and how to address such situations.

Episode Highlights from Joe:

“When we first launched software, it was the most complex personalization journey that we had at the business at the time. Because it's an individually compounded treatment per patient, that is a much harder proposition to have people understand, especially coming from a cold start of never even having heard of it before.”

“The most important thing is the broadening of the mind or the breaking of barriers. And that is the final kind of frontier for a leader.”

“I think there is nothing more profoundly impactful than being hungry, being coachable like it's a compounding engine that you're building with that”

“If I sum [leadership] up, it's to bring clarity, derive the process, coach the next generation of process builders or leaders, and then breaking the barriers and, and helping people expand their, their solution.”

“When I think about setting out metrics to do a split test, honestly it can be done on any metric because a split test is a mechanism to test the change in a metric. So in these examples, we would be looking at basic completion rates of things.”

“The team needs to be accountable for the work that they do, but they must have agency over the thing they're accountable for.What the violation of that looks like is a team who's accountable for the conversion rate of like this part of the experience, but they actually...]]>Lessons on Scaling Eucalyptus as Head of Growth and frameworks for leadership with CCO, Joe Harris.

• A layer-by-layer framework for building your growth function 
• Misalignment in team design and how that manifests into frustration 
• The four main areas of greatness you need as a leader
• How to tackle the gnarliest beast of any business: Attribution

Today’s episode is special. It marks a new era for Wild Hearts, where we will shine a light on world-class operators.

The goal is to reveal the lessons, tools, benchmarks and metrics that have surfaced from building and scaling world-class companies. And today’s episode will be all about growth from a company synonymous with it, Eucalyptus, a healthcare technology company building digital experiences for patients. Joe Harris started at Euc as the first growth lead hire, he became the head of growth and now he’s the Chief Commercial Officer.

Eucalyptus builds higher touch, higher quality healthcare experiences for the world. They’re one of the fastest-growing companies that Blackbird has ever funded. Within their first few years, the team has launched and grown four brands reaching over 700,000 people in Australia, UK and Germany.

Behind this, quite frankly, insane growth is a team of some of Australia’s most talented, creative and driven operators, and one of those is Joe Harris. Joe started at Euc in 2020 as a Growth Engineer, quickly moving up the ranks to the Head of Growth and then finally as the Chief Commercial Officer. This rapid progression happened in less than three years, as Joe described it:

“If you had said, I will give you a million dollars. If you can get within like 20% of the correct answer of what's gonna happen to you over the next three years, I would somehow owe you money” 

In this episode of Wild Hearts, Joe walks us through what exactly a growth team is, the step-by-step framework for building your own growth function, how to become a great leader (and coach people around you to become one too), Also quick lessons learned about ineffective solutions that were not going to have the expected impact, and how to address such situations.

Episode Highlights from Joe:

“When we first launched software, it was the most complex personalization journey that we had at the business at the time. Because it's an individually compounded treatment per patient, that is a much harder proposition to have people understand, especially coming from a cold start of never even having heard of it before.”

“The most important thing is the broadening of the mind or the breaking of barriers. And that is the final kind of frontier for a leader.”

“I think there is nothing more profoundly impactful than being hungry, being coachable like it's a compounding engine that you're building with that”

“If I sum [leadership] up, it's to bring clarity, derive the process, coach the next generation of process builders or leaders, and then breaking the barriers and, and helping people expand their, their solution.”

“When I think about setting out metrics to do a split test, honestly it can be done on any metric because a split test is a mechanism to test the change in a metric. So in these examples, we would be looking at basic completion rates of things.”

“The team needs to be accountable for the work that they do, but they must have agency over the thing they're accountable for.What the violation of that looks like is a team who's accountable for the conversion rate of like this part of the experience, but they actually can't push code or change the service or change anything about it.”

“And don't get me wrong, like those are not my wins. Those are the team's wins. I'm there as a facilitator. I'm there to like be a mechanic, like with the wrench and fix when there's a blockage, right? But ultimately, like they're doing the heavy lifting now.

Mason's Blinq

• How making mistakes can lead to finding the right problem
• Realising that New Zealand can compete with the Silicon Valley's
• The importance of learning the process vs. framework distinction 
• Building conviction through learning-oriented mental models

Partly's mission is to reimagine how the world interacts with vehicle parts in smarter ways that build a more connected and lasting world. To achieve this, Partly offers three solutions: PartsPal; an auto parts inventory and fitment management tool, Partly Marketplace; the #1 way to buy and sell parts around the globe, and UVDB - the Universal Vehicle Database.

In the first episode of our latest season of Wild Hearts, Partly co-founder and CEO Levi Fawcett chats to host Mason Yates about his journey to finding the ‘right problem’, lessons learned from failed startups, and the importance of not hiring yourself.

Episode Highlights from Levi Fawcett

"Process is not bad. It's just overused a lot and we prefer to think of things as a framework. A process implies a step-by-step thing that you do and follow mindlessly, a framework just gives you a way of thinking about things and that's the important distinction."

"Understanding that mission, how much a team can do and it is possible from New Zealand, right? [At Rocket Lab], we were the second private company in the world to put something into space. There was SpaceX and then there was us... That certainly raises the bar in terms of understanding what's possible, and realizing we can absolutely compete with the Silicon Valleys of the world. "

"AllGoods was just this huge series of mistakes, not understanding what competition actually means, why you should avoid it, what a network effect is, why scaling demand on a marketplace is not valuable at all, how margins work, why taking a small chunk of a big margin makes a lot more sense etc."

"As we dug a little bit deeper, we realized there's nearly 2 trillion USD spent every year on these parts. Actually, this is not a local New Zealand problem. This is a global problem. A problem that was mostly unsolved for technical reasons as opposed to business reasons. When we applied all the things we'd learned at AllGoods around the business in terms of is this a defensible business with a large long-term moat? The answer was definitely yes."

"One of the most important things is don't hire yourself. As the company scales, you need more specialists."

Mason's Blinq

✅Challenges of creating a hardware product

✅Helping people overcome shame and stigma

✅Building a brand beyond a visual identity

✅Investing in your own mental health

✅Reaching your audience where they are

With its range of sex toys and sex education resources, NORMAL has reimagined the sex shop into an online experience that is fun and informative, with the mission of empowering absolutely anybody to explore their sexuality free from stress and stigma. 

In this special live episode of Wild Hearts, founder of NORMAL Lucy Wark spoke with me on stage at Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival.

Episode highlights from Lucy:

“More than 1 in 5 searches on the internet is about sex. There’s an incredibly large organic interest in this topic.”

“As a culture, we have a long history of religious and cultural ideas about sex being sinful, sex being something that should only exist inside marriage, or should only exist for the creation of children.”

“It’s not like selling toilet paper or mattresses. You’re trying to help people tackle quite deep psychological stigma.”

“Things like libido, desire, arousal, changes in the body, sexual dysfunction, relationship skills, and sex while ageing, sex in menopause, there is this enormous suite of challenges for which we are incredibly poorly prepared for by formal sex education.” 

“A brand is not a logo and colours. To build authentic brands that mean something to people, is about a lot more than just building a visual identity.”

“I think having practices like therapy are incredibly helpful investments in yourself as a founder, and an operator, and just a good human being to be around, so that’s been probably the highest ROI thing I do.”

✅How to build an audience before launching

✅Overcoming the adversity that arrives with launching a bathhouse during COVID

✅Leaning on your values as a decision making tool

✅Challenges in finding investors aligned to Mary and Freya’s vision

Sense Of Self came out of Mary and Freya’s dream to create an Australian space that would draw on global practices to meet modern wellness needs in an inclusive way.

The result is Sense Of Self, a contemporary bathhouse and spa with beautiful design and a big mission.

Want to learn more? Listen to the 8th episode of Season 3 of our Wild Hearts podcast. 👇

Episode Highlights from Mary and Freya:

“We have a motto, come as you are, take what you need. And we really stick with that.”

“We built an audience in two ways… Building an audience through events, holding panels and getting experts together and having conversations about social connection, belonging, and our values, and from that we grew an audience as well as an incredible understanding of the ways in which people access these feelings and what they mean to our audience. And secondly, digital marketing.”

“Our audience was everything to us. Because we’d built this audience, and then we were like, shit, we’ve got to put our money where our mouth is, no one is really believing in us, so we signed a lease.”

“We got to the tipping point of believability. Before that we were treated like these two young girls with this big idea of a day spa. And we were like, no, it’s very different from that, and it was only once we had a site, we had customers, and we were absolutely obsessed with it because we’d put everything we have into it that we passed that point where people took us seriously.”

“We thought about everything from the customer’s perspective, and the way that we thought about the customer was someone coming in quite vulnerable, and how we made them feel “held”, but having their boundaries positively pushed.”

“It’s really key to our model to bring these curated, new experiences to people.”

✅How expectations of employees have evolved

✅Being “customer obsessed” vs “employee obsessed”

✅Giving employees an opportunity to shape their work lives

✅Strategies to avoid burnout

✅Challenging early days of creating a community of EX designers

✅Employee branding: the promise you make to your people

Excellent’s mission is to transform people’s experience of work, to enable a world where missions are accomplished by employees who love what they do. Founded in 2021 as a course in Employee Experience (EX) Design, Excellent has become a global platform.

Episode Highlights from Samantha:

“Step one is always discovery. Organisations always say, what’s the first thing we can do? And I say: ask your people. Getting those really objective insights so you can take a very well informed step forward and invest in things that are actually going to make a difference.”

“Our mission is really exciting: we want to transform the world’s experience of work. When I talk to people about that, people want to be on board. We’ve actually had customers ask us when we’re looking for talent in their country, can we please join?”

“There’s data that shows the most trusted entity in someone’s life is the organisation they work for, not the government or the news or their church. And so, employees are coming to work for far more than just a job, they’re looking for community and somewhere to really belong.”

“My personal vision is that every employee has the opportunity to contribute to decisions that impact them, or has the opportunity to contribute to their own employee experience.”

“In particular if you’re in a startup or a growth company, you’ve got to be really real about that proposition that people are joining you for. Often it’s crazy, it’s a wild ride, and so you’re looking for people who want to be on that.”

Lessons from Atlassian, Campaign Monitor & Shopify

How to approach building a 100 year company

Raising a $10.6 million seed round

Why the best designers are the best problem solvers. 

Kinde’s ambition is a reflection of its co-founder, Ross Chaldecott. Ross believes every founder has the potential to unlock the future of human achievement - and that everyone should have the tools and the opportunity to participate.

Ross breaks down this ambition with vivid clarity in our interview today, explaining the power of “have[ing] the biggest purpose that we can possibly imagine, which is to create a world with more founders”.

Episode Highlights from Ross:

“One of the big things (I learned at Atlassian, Campaign Monitor and Shopify) and we think about it a lot at Kinde as well, is building a 100 year business. It forces you to think quite differently, you stop thinking about how we solve just today’s problem, you think about how you solve it for the long term.”

“One of the things that Mike and Scott and Atlassian did so well is giving people that space to experiment, to play, to learn, to try new things, and to fail if they needed to. Failure was never something that was penalised, failure is just a sign that you tried something different.”

“The reality is that it takes time to build a platform… And so what we cannot do is kid ourselves that we are gonna build out the whole platform because that's when we're five years in the garage, never getting any customers. And so what we've had to do is look at the product that we're building towards and say what is the most sensible, smallest piece that will bring exponential value to our customers, and go and build that thing.”

“The best designers that I've ever worked with, spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and understanding the problem and understanding the solution. And then a very small amount of time on actually executing that… The best designers are the best problem solvers.”

“How can we enable as many people as possible to go out there and change the world? Founders are fundamentally the people who are changing the world.”

Learn more about Kinde here

✅ Lessons from the Startmate Accelerator: “The incline on the learning curve was immense”

✅ “Daylighting”: solving issues in the company through radical transparency

✅ “Drafting”: following in the wake of a more established company

✅ Reframing Sitemate’s weaknesses as their biggest strengths

✅ Sitemate’s vision for the future of engineers in the built world

Sitemate builds software for the built world. Its vision is to enable the human race to build roads, bridges and buildings faster than we build software.

Episode Highlights from Hartley:

On traveling to San Francisco for Startmate: “The incline on the learning curve was immense. I remember about halfway through the trip we sat down and processed what we’d learned in the last two days, and it felt like a mini lifetime of learnings crammed into 6 meetings over 2 days.”

“The Zilla analogy comes from… how quickly and how big an individual and the team around them can grow… One day when you grow up you’ll be stomping around, causing mayhem for a bunch of companies you’re scared of right now because you think they’re big and undefeatable, and one day you’ll be their Godzilla tearing down their buildings.”

“We basically had wounds in the business all over the place, and the process to fixing those was sending a monthly update. We started doing it in May 2018, we’re never going to miss a month, and there’s going to be no filter. It’s going to show all the scabs.”

“We went through a really hard hiring stage, there was a period of time where I had to basically become the interim CTO… and we cycled through 3 or 4 failed engineering hires, and we eventually just kept improving and iterating on our process. We now have this quite insane hiring flow, where the first 3 steps of the process are completely automated.”

“Our fundamental belief is that engineers in the built world in the future will operate in a similar way to how technology teams operate today. They’ll all be using best in class tools, real time, highly configurable, fast to deploy, that are seamlessly interconnected.”

Learn more about Sitemate here

✅Why unlocking the capacity of students could fundamentally change humanity

✅The cycle of learning: thinking, building, observing & synthesising

✅How Edrolo are building “content technology”

✅Becoming “artist-scientists” and creating repeatable beauty

✅How to help kids discover a “love of learning” 

Edrolo’s mission is to improve education and the future lives of learners. 

Find Edrolo's website here: https://edrolo.com.au/

Roughly one third of people in the developed world reach the point of being able to teach themselves new things. Duncan believes that with Edrolo, it will be possible to increase that number to 80 or 90%, which would fundamentally change humanity.

Episode Highlights from Duncan:

“To me, the next great problem to solve is unlocking the capacity of human minds. And to me, we don’t need any more time, or money, or new curriculums to do it. I’m not saying those things wouldn’t help. But I don’t think they are precluding us from getting there.”

“There are still some jobs that are very physical, but they are slowly going away. If your job is knowledge work, which is the increasing percentage of jobs, and if your job is non-repetitive, the machines are replacing all the repetitive ones... then I’m going to argue that the most important skill is thinking.”

“If you’re not helping the world be better, people aren’t on board. Your goal has to be to make the world better, and you have to be making progress towards it. Then they have to see how they’re able to contribute to that. Those are the foundational elements. Upon that foundation, you can build a positive sum ecosystem where people like working etc, but if you don’t have those foundational elements, I don’t think anything else really matters.”

“In the developed world roughly one third of people get to the point where they can teach themselves new things. I think one definition of what we’re trying to do is get as many people to this point as possible… I would hope that we could take this from roughly a third, to 80 or 90% by the end of year 10, and if that’s the case, we have fundamentally changed all of humanity.”

“A unit of thinking, a unit of building products, a unit of observing, a unit of synthesising, and round and round. That’s what I would call a cycle of learning. You need to get externally validated units of learning, and that can only happen by going outside.”

“To me, there’s often an overly simplistic idea of what culture (in a company) should be, and it often comes out as monoculture… to me, the only constant is change, and you’re trying to set up the entire business to be able to shift, and for people to be part of what that is, and for different types of cultures to sit in different places. So, effectively a mess, but a beautiful mess, hopefully.”

1. Why an agile mindset was a “game changer” for building teams
2. Breaking up a long term goal into smaller “units of progress”.
3. How Inventia teams share responsibility for outcomes, not tasks.
4. How technology is reshaping medicine.

Inventia builds machines to bioprint human cells in 3D. These machines help forward-thinking drug discovery and medical research pioneers create human tissue for research and therapy that mimic real human tissue structures, rather than in environments that fail 90% of the time.

Episode Highlights from Cameron & Aidan:

“We tried to adopt an agile mindset and have outcome driven teams, so putting biologists, material scientists and engineers together in a team, and having really clear outcomes for the product to guide them. They can use all their different skills and experience and deliver something really incredible.” - Aidan

“The technology that we’re developing is a fundamental shift in our ability to engineer biological tissue at scale, so it’s a big mission. We’re setting out to build a generational business. And we knew from the outset it was important to break that up into discrete horizons or units of progress.” - Cameron

“We thought we had a product, but then we realised the printer was not the product, the product was what the customer takes out of it. It’s been that journey of learning more about what’s the actual product, and what our customer is going to get value out of.” - Aidan

“The one thing I’d do differently is seek to get the product into the hands of more customers early on. The only way to truly iterate on the product and learn where the real value is is to work with as many customers as you can, and learn as much as you can from their usage and feedback.” - Cameron

Learn more about Inventia Life Sciences: https://bit.ly/3RhRjz6

Cameron Ferris's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3TrHSz2

Dr Aidan O'Mahony's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3CDo2ed

Get in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below: https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq

1. The 5 dimensions of great people management
2. Why soft skills are key (and aren't taught elsewhere)
3. How the AI tool The Mintable is building assists managers in real time
4. What the first thing each manager should do is
5. How to let people go

The Mintable gives managers the training, tools and community they need to succeed.

Episode Highlights from Lauren:

“50% of us will leave a job directly because of a manager, and one study found it takes 22 months for a direct report to recover physically and emotionally from the effects of a bad manager.”

“The root of most hard conversations is that there wasn’t a clear expectation in place.”

“The first thing you’ve got to do is define success. You have to know, at any given point, what success looks like for each of the people on your team. If you don’t, they will certainly not.”

“At the Mintable we’ve got what we call the 5 dimensions of great management: Aware, Care, Prepare, Share and Dare.”

“We call it strategic care: what are the key things that you need to learn about the people on your team to get the best out of them? Understand how someone likes to receive feedback, how they like to receive recognition.”

Learn more about The Mintable:

https://bit.ly/3JVRo9k

Lauren Humphrey's Linkedin:

https://bit.ly/3K5nKi0

Get in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below:

https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq

✅ Jarrod’s best operating lessons at UberEats.

✅ Why product-market fit is the fundamentally wrong approach.

✅ How to build virality into your product.

✅ When Jarrod knew to leave UberEats to build Blinq full-time.

Blinq is reimagining how professionals connect. Want to learn more?

1. Read Blackbird's investment memo is here.
2. Check out Blinq’s job openings here.

Highlights from S3 E1 of Wild Hearts with Blinq Founder Jarrod Webb

"[Uber] really helped me set the standard for what a generational company needs to do in terms of the output quality, the people that you hire and how you work." 🦄

The intersection of "Market | Product | Channel | Model fit is an incredible framework for thinking about how to build a generational company... Product-Market fit is not the right way to think about building anything." 🔥

“There are four factors that you need for virality. Firstly, you need a really short time to the “aha!” moment… Secondly, people need to be able to explain the product within one sentence... Thirdly, there needs to be a really broad value proposition… And finally, the product needs to get better the more of your network is on the product.”

Businesses started reaching out, saying "hang on, we'll pay you" and Jarrod "realised [he] had a viral product with a bottoms-up SaaS component" to it. "After a few customers came onboard, I realised this actually has real traction, so I left Uber to work on this full time, and then grew a lot during 2021." 🐣

Get in contact with Mason to share feedback, ask questions or share a pitch deck here.

“If you look at the health system across the world, inequality and the capacity of the system are going to be the biggest problems of our time.”

“The 20th century in medicine was the century of the molecule… but I believe that the 21st century is going to be about zooming out and looking at the healthcare system as a whole.”

Dr. Aengus Tran is on a mission to improve the standard of care for a million people every day.

💙 Saving a million lives a day with Dr. Aengus Tran and Samantha Wong

Highlights from S2 E6 of our Wild Hearts podcast with harrison.ai co-founder Dr. Aengus Tran and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong:

• How harrison.ai built a product in 18 months that is now used for 1 in 4 chest x-rays in Australia 🤯
• What Aengus learned from Vietnam's “Father of computer science.” 👨‍💻
• The simple math behind the biggest problem of our century 😱
• The inevitable future of the healthcare industry according to Samantha Wong 🤓

"Fl0 is a lego kit of blocks for modern engineers. Developers can assemble these blocks together, then build and ship complex applications without needing to code.” says Dale the co-founder of FL0.

They’re pioneering a new category in software engineering, “Dev Acceleration as a Service”.

Highlights from S2 E4 of our Wild Hearts podcast with FL0 co-founder Dale Brett and Blackbird Principal Tom Humphrey:

• How 10 years of building startups led to the unique insight that created FL0 🧐
• Finding product-market fit in 2021 🦸‍♀️
• How FL0 is thinking about its GTM alongside pioneering a new category 🏃‍♀️
• How to use fundraising to build a village of support around your startup 🏘
• A framework for thinking about GTM right at the beginning. Here is the blog Tom & Mason referred to.

See FL0's job openings here.

“We’re in this engineering effectiveness space… but the culture, the people side, that’s the heart of it for us. The outputs and how we measure them, that’s a function of how the people are doing.”

Multitudes is using data to create happier, higher-performing teams.

Find the teams jobs board here: https://www.multitudes.co/careers

Highlights from Season 2 Episode 3 of Wild Hearts with Multitudes co-founder Lauren Peate and Blackbird partner Samantha Wong

• What Lauren learned about teamwork and culture from four years running a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy.
• How Multitudes found product-market fit and built culture into their team from day one.
• How to recognise the silent heroes in your teams who give feedback, mentorship, and improve everything.
• How leaders can embrace the uncomfortable to make meaningful change in workplaces.
• How a parallel fundraising process helps startups raise quicker.

This team is revolutionising cuisine by tapping into the vast biosphere of potential foods that humanity has been unable to sustainably farm. Through synthetic biology, they lift this limitation and pave the way for a third agricultural revolution, one that is ethical, abundant, and importantly, irresistibly delicious.

Since our last episode with Vow, they have more than doubled in team size and have continued to crush the technical challenges before them with blistering speed.

Listen in to today’s show to hear how George and Tim are building a dream team of technical and non-technical talent, their fresh approach to product building, and how the future of cultured meats is developing.

“For us this is going to be about connecting the depths of biology with the depths of food science, to make foods that outpace anything that animal meats have in terms of their sensory and performance enhancing attributes.”

We also chat with Head of Operations Ellen to discover how Vow have approached technology to bring their team to new heights.

“How do we not just automate things, but how do we use technology to make people super humans?”

Finally, we’ll speak with Blackbird Partner Sam Wong to learn how she’s thinking about the future of food, what she’s most excited about with Vow, and how her investment thesis has evolved in light of this.

Head to Vow's jobs board to see the open roles below:

https://www.vowfood.com/careers

Want to join Eucalyptus? Find the jobs board here.

Episode interviewees: Tim Doyle, co-founder of Eucalyptus and Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird

Key topics covered:

• The challenges and opportunities of healthcare
• Which experiments are helping Eucalyptus scale beyond 100 people
• How the company's ambition has grown over the past year

The best of Tim Doyle:

• "If you can make medical information accessible and engaging, you can empower better decisions at a much earlier point.
• "If you don't maximise the amount of time that your organisation is fully stocked and ready to work on the problem that you're trying to solve at the hardest level, then you probably rob yourself of the chance to solve that problem by the time you next need to go back out to market"
• "One of the things about being a founder of a company is that you realise how much better people in your organisation are at most things than you are very quickly."
• "Our philosophy on marketing is that if you product enough stuff in enough channels, often enough, then you lower the cost of doing that, and then the best stuff will outperform the average stuff by a thousand percent."

The best of Nick Crocker:

• "The execution is pretty spectacular. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's stunning to watch."
• "Visionary founders are most impactful when they're partnered with an operational psychopath...someone who's completely true, completely across everything and fearless in throwing themselves into unknown, dense, difficult to understand areas."
• Growing 10% in your first month is very different to growing 10% in your 24th month"
• "It's not just people buying ads. It's a growth engineering team...a resource allocation team in a really complex problem space."

Culture Amp is on a mission to improve the quality of work for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Today, over 3000 companies use their software to monitor how their teams are feeling. This way, managers can put their fingers on the pulse of culture and implement real actions to change the way people work.

"You can boil HR down to one thing - can we get our senior people to have difficult conversations with other people?"

In our final episode for the year, we will hear about how key company values helped lead Culture Amp to unicorn status, the data insights gained from monitoring thousands of companies worldwide, and Blackbird’s relationship with the company.

Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe - we'll return with new episodes in 2021.

Episode interviewees: Didier Elzinga, CEO and co-founder of Culture Amp, Chloe Hamman, Director of People Science at Culture Amp, and Nick Crocker, Partner at Blackbird.

Key topics covered:

• Culture Amp's defining moments
• Data insights into company culture around the world
• How Blackbird has evolved to invest in larger companies

The best of Didier Elzinga:

• "Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled"
• "It's actually much harder to get people to care about your product than it is to build it"
• "Our mission is not to sell X thousand copies of software - selling X thousand copies of software is part of the way we deliver our mission"
• "You have to think about how your values can be weaponised"

The best of Chloe Hamman:

• "People want to be in places where they can grow and develop, over and above a clear career path"
• "If you're not giving your employers clear job previews, they are more likely to leave"
• "The best managers check in on a weekly basis with their employees"
• "It's not about changing what your organisation does, it's about communicating more widely about why and how you are doing thi

“The day in the life of a farmer is you’re up at 4:30am every morning, even on Christmas morning, nothing waits for you.”

That’s about to change. Halter has developed an IoT wearable collar that can direct and move cows from any location on Earth. In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Craig on the future of farming and creating a culture of radical honesty, and from investor and Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck on the biggest mistakes NZ entrepreneurs make, and what convinced him to invest in Halter.

Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.

Episode interviewees: Craig Piggot, CEO of Halter and Peter Beck, investor and founder of Rocket Lab.

Key topics covered:

• How to create a culture of radical honesty
• The future of farming
• Why a bottom-up hierarchy allows you to move faster

The best of Craig Piggot:

• "Instead of thinking heaps about it, just got out there and do it. The tools humans have are so powerful - you can build, test and iterate pretty much anything."
• "Our vision is to unlock the connection between humans and animals for a better world."
• "Things unsaid are as bad as lying."
• "We want to spend just as much time designing the culture as we do our product."

The best of Peter Beck:

• "You don't create big things on Monday to Friday, eight to five, it just does not happen."
• "The biggest mistake NZ entrepreneurs make is claiming their idea is world-class without actually going into the world to test whether it's world-class."
• "There's more cows on the planet than people."
• "Your company is not a logo or brand, it is 100% who you hire."

“We've got four or five businesses worth over a hundred million dollars with more than a hundred staff each. Four years ago, they were one person trying to solve a problem” says Michael Batko, CEO at Startmate.

In today’s episode, we’ll get an insider’s look at Startmate, discuss what the best investors do to help founders, and learn about some of the biggest challenges and advice for start-ups going through Startmate.

Episode interviewees: Michael Batko, CEO of Startmate, Saron Berhane, co-founder and COO of BioScout, and Lane Litz, co-founder and CEO of Chatterize.

Key topics covered:

• The three core elements to Startmate’s community
• Why the best founders are customer-obsessed
• What the best operators and investors do to help startups

The best of Michael Batko:

“Your starting point is actually not the product. Your starting point is customers.”

“Instead of going into a meeting expecting a million dollar cheque from a 30 minute conversation, you want to be building those investor relationships, ideally over six to 12 months.”

“Rather than telling you what to do, the best mentors ask really good questions, to trigger thoughts and processes for you to then validate for your customers.”

“The most beautiful thing we see at Startmate is that our founder alumni come back as mentors. They invest back into the fund and then, because our founders are successful, they get more money back into the ecosystem.”

The best of Saron Berhane:

“As a team of engineers, the goal setting process really pushed us from having huge product-centric goals to goals that actually focussed on our market and customers.”

“With the push from Startmate, we went from thinking we’d be on the farm in six months to being on the farm in a month.”

The best of Lane Litz:

“You need to accelerate. Be brave, set a really high, very tough goal and kill it.”

“What you don’t want to know will kill your company so, so fast.”

“The idea of the pitch was we want to build technology led banking, rather than banking led technology” says Up co-founder, Dom Pym.

In today’s episode, we’ll dive into how Up is making us feel comfortable with our finances, what they’re doing differently in the engineering team, how to lead with authenticity within a product team and so much more.

Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.

Episode interviewees: Up co-founder Dom Pym and Head of Product Anson Parker.

Key topics covered:

• Up's origin story and working with Bendigo Bank
• Creating a superstar engineering team
• Product management at Up

The best of Dom Pym:

• “We didn't want to be running a service business, but we also didn't want to just build technology and license it to the big banks"
• "Our idea was how can we use those technologies that exist in other industries and use them in banking?”
• "Up was the first bank where you could open a real bank account in less than three minutes, just by downloading the app from the app store and putting in your details.”
• "I still interview everybody. I do the last interview whenever we bring anybody on board”
• "We built a physics engine inside the actual app using the capabilities like the gyroscope and the gravity engine within your iPhone, so that you could feel your money sort of wobbling when you share your phone around. It seemed like it was almost a gimmick, but it's using technology to create an interaction and user experience that didn't exist with any other bank in the world.”
• "We want Up to be the number one bank in Australia for under 35s. That's going to take decades."

• The best of Anson Parker: “As much as we were frustrated or thought that it could be a lot better, I think a lot of our customers, especially those early adopters, had exactly the same view."
• "Some features we ship are almost nonfunctional - like celebrating people's yearly anniversary since the day they joined up, for example. It's not necessarily a piece of traditional functionality, but it really speaks to the relationship and valuing that.”
• "We didn't want to be a sign on top of a big building downtown, we wanted to be something p
...]]>Up is a unique bank. As the first digital bank in Australia, they launched with a team of less than 30 people. They’ve since upended expectations of how banks can operate, using cloud hosting, continuous deployment and an ever-expanding list of unexpected, customer-first features. Their secret? A magical engineering culture.




“The idea of the pitch was we want to build technology led banking, rather than banking led technology” says Up co-founder, Dom Pym.




In today’s episode, we’ll dive into how Up is making us feel comfortable with our finances, what they’re doing differently in the engineering team, how to lead with authenticity within a product team and so much more.




Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviewees: Up co-founder Dom Pym and Head of Product Anson Parker.




Key topics covered:

• Up's origin story and working with Bendigo Bank
• Creating a superstar engineering team
• Product management at Up






The best of Dom Pym:

• “We didn't want to be running a service business, but we also didn't want to just build technology and license it to the big banks"
• "Our idea was how can we use those technologies that exist in other industries and use them in banking?”
• "Up was the first bank where you could open a real bank account in less than three minutes, just by downloading the app from the app store and putting in your details.”
• "I still interview everybody. I do the last interview whenever we bring anybody on board”
• "We built a physics engine inside the actual app using the capabilities like the gyroscope and the gravity engine within your iPhone, so that you could feel your money sort of wobbling when you share your phone around. It seemed like it was almost a gimmick, but it's using technology to create an interaction and user experience that didn't exist with any other bank in the world.”
• "We want Up to be the number one bank in Australia for under 35s. That's going to take decades."






• The best of Anson Parker: “As much as we were frustrated or thought that it could be a lot better, I think a lot of our customers, especially those early adopters, had exactly the same view."
• "Some features we ship are almost nonfunctional - like celebrating people's yearly anniversary since the day they joined up, for example. It's not necessarily a piece of traditional functionality, but it really speaks to the relationship and valuing that.”
• "We didn't want to be a sign on top of a big building downtown, we wanted to be something p

]]>477acb2b-147b-4ca9-90ea-d302d94c3f78Wed, 04 Nov 2020 18:00:00 +110001:00:05falsefull114141Up is a unique bank. As the first digital bank in Australia, they launched with a team of less than 30 people. They’ve since upended expectations of how banks can operate, using cloud hosting, continuous deployment and an ever-expanding list of unexpected, customer-first features. Their secret? A magical engineering culture. “The idea of the pitch was we want to build technology led banking, rather than banking led technology” says Up co-founder, Dom Pym. In today’s episode, we’ll dive into how Up is making us feel comfortable with our finances, what they’re doing differently in the engineering team, how to lead with authenticity within a product team and so much more. Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe. Episode interviewees: Up co-founder Dom Pym and Head of Product Anson Parker. Key topics covered: Up's origin story and working with Bendigo Bank Creating a superstar engineering team Product management at Up The best of Dom Pym: “We didn't want to be running a service business, but we also didn't want to just build technology and license it to the big banks" "Our idea was how can we use those technologies that exist in other industries and use them in banking?” "Up was the first bank where you could open a real bank account in less than three minutes, just by downloading the app from the app store and putting in your details.” "I still interview everybody. I do the last interview whenever we bring anybody on board” "We built a physics engine inside the actual app using the capabilities like the gyroscope and the gravity engine within your iPhone, so that you could feel your money sort of wobbling when you share your phone around. It seemed like it was almost a gimmick, but it's using technology to create an interaction and user experience that didn't exist with any other bank in the world.” "We want Up to be the number one bank in Australia for under 35s. That's going to take decades." The best of Anson Parker: “As much as we were frustrated or thought that it could be a lot better, I think a lot of our customers, especially those early adopters, had exactly the same view." "Some features we ship are almost nonfunctional - like celebrating people's yearly anniversary since the day they joined up, for example. It's not necessarily a piece of traditional functionality, but it really speaks to the relationship and valuing that.” "We didn't want to be a sign on top of a big building downtown, we wanted to be something pDetecting Disease with Vexev“How can we have the biggest impact globally?”




Vascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Currently symptoms do not appear until the late stages, often when it is too late. Two PhD students, John Carroll & Eamonn Colley made a breakthrough discovery that enables a radically earlier diagnosis.




They founded Vexev to create an affordable health service that maps the vascular systems of customers, observes how it changes over time, and alerts doctors if something is about to go wrong. This technology has the potential to impact millions of people, transcending humanity beyond vascular disease. In this episode, you’ll learn about the initial research that led to Vexev, the size of the problem John and Eamonn are solving, and why Tip Piumsomboon was convinced to invest in their idea.




Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviewees: Vexev co-founders John Carroll, Eamonn Colley and Blackbird Principal Tip Piumsomboon.

Key topics covered:

• How John and Eamonn went from academics to entrepreneurs
• The changing healthcare landscape
• Proactive, not reactive, medical treatment



The best of John and Eamonn:

• “We were PHD students: running a company and even working out how to email was new to us.”
• "“If we're tracking the coronary arteries over time, things like heart attacks are no longer these sudden events, it's actually a long, slow development over time.”
• "This is happening and we're completely blind to it. We just wait until it's so bad of a problem that the patient is taken into the emergency room.”
• "If our system can work in those remote communities in the middle of outback Australia, we're very confident that they're going to be able to work a

]]>“How can we have the biggest impact globally?”




Vascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Currently symptoms do not appear until the late stages, often when it is too late. Two PhD students, John Carroll & Eamonn Colley made a breakthrough discovery that enables a radically earlier diagnosis.




They founded Vexev to create an affordable health service that maps the vascular systems of customers, observes how it changes over time, and alerts doctors if something is about to go wrong. This technology has the potential to impact millions of people, transcending humanity beyond vascular disease. In this episode, you’ll learn about the initial research that led to Vexev, the size of the problem John and Eamonn are solving, and why Tip Piumsomboon was convinced to invest in their idea.




Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviewees: Vexev co-founders John Carroll, Eamonn Colley and Blackbird Principal Tip Piumsomboon.

Key topics covered:

• How John and Eamonn went from academics to entrepreneurs
• The changing healthcare landscape
• Proactive, not reactive, medical treatment



The best of John and Eamonn:

• “We were PHD students: running a company and even working out how to email was new to us.”
• "“If we're tracking the coronary arteries over time, things like heart attacks are no longer these sudden events, it's actually a long, slow development over time.”
• "This is happening and we're completely blind to it. We just wait until it's so bad of a problem that the patient is taken into the emergency room.”
• "If our system can work in those remote communities in the middle of outback Australia, we're very confident that they're going to be able to work a

]]>52fd3244-c987-4fe7-9bba-6b67e48fbd74Wed, 21 Oct 2020 18:00:00 +110001:03:57falsefull113131“How can we have the biggest impact globally?” Vascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Currently symptoms do not appear until the late stages, often when it is too late. Two PhD students, John Carroll & Eamonn Colley made a breakthrough discovery that enables a radically earlier diagnosis. They founded Vexev to create an affordable health service that maps the vascular systems of customers, observes how it changes over time, and alerts doctors if something is about to go wrong. This technology has the potential to impact millions of people, transcending humanity beyond vascular disease. In this episode, you’ll learn about the initial research that led to Vexev, the size of the problem John and Eamonn are solving, and why Tip Piumsomboon was convinced to invest in their idea. Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe. Episode interviewees: Vexev co-founders John Carroll, Eamonn Colley and Blackbird Principal Tip Piumsomboon. Key topics covered: How John and Eamonn went from academics to entrepreneurs The changing healthcare landscape Proactive, not reactive, medical treatment The best of John and Eamonn: “We were PHD students: running a company and even working out how to email was new to us.” "“If we're tracking the coronary arteries over time, things like heart attacks are no longer these sudden events, it's actually a long, slow development over time.” "This is happening and we're completely blind to it. We just wait until it's so bad of a problem that the patient is taken into the emergency room.” "If our system can work in those remote communities in the middle of outback Australia, we're very confident that they're going to be able to work aFulfilling Solar's Destiny with SunDriveSunDrive is a solar technology company aiming to create low cost, energy efficient and more material abundant solar cells.




“We are in a very fragile period in time. Everything that we are doing is to try and accelerate the day in which we can continue to progress as a civilisation without the expense of destroying the environment” says SunDrive co-founder Vince Allen.




In today’s episode, SunDrive’s co-founders will discuss their first steps to building a category defining business. We’ll also hear from Blackbird co-founder and Partner Niki Scevak on the importance of milestones and the backlash from the cleantech graveyard.




As promised, head to https://www.sundrivesolar.com/ to learn more about SunDrive.




Episode interviewees: SunDrive co-founders Vince Allen, David Hu and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak.




Key topics covered:

• Australia can lead the world in solar energy
• SunDrive’s vision, product and business model
• Vince and David’s founding story






The best of Vince & David:




“We have everything that's needed for Australia to be the first solid power developed country.”




“Today only 3% of the world's electricity comes from solar. There is still a long road ahead of us. And the technology today is not well suited for the longer term.”




“Although the current solar cell structures have suited us well to get to this point, more advanced solar cells are going to be needed and we need to get around this silver problem. Copper is a thousand times more abundant than silver and a hundred times cheaper than silver.”




“We’re not in the business of trying to manufacture the entire value chain. We’re focusing on our copper step - the last, most critical step in the solar cell manufacturing process.”




“We are in a very fragile period in time. Everything that we are doing is to try and accelerate the day in which we can continue to progress as a civilisation without the expense of destroying the environment.”




“You have to find somebody you trust and who shares the same values, vision and moral standards - everything.”




“As soon as you bring up working on Cleantech, they’re already running for the hills.”










Niki Scevak on SunDrive:




“When we make an investment at Blackbird, we think very deeply about what are the three most important things that need to happen to show the unit of progress in the first seed round. SunDrive smashed all of those milestones.”




“The road we’re on, using silver in solar panels, is a dead end road. Overall we’re just going to run out of silver to build the solar panels.”




“I think everyone at Blackbird believes that a world powered by the sun is a world we want to be in, and that SunDrive can produce a high margin, great product or process that fits into that world.”




“You can make so much progress with so little capital and so little time, and Vince, Dave and the team have done everything that they hoped to do in the seed round, and they’re very down to earth.”




“A lot of hardware startups can prove something in the lab, in a small way, but they fall over when they try to make a lot of money from it or they try to go mainstream.”




“We’re open to investing and not ruining the environment. What are the activities we’re doing that are not sustainable and let’s fix those activities. We’d love to invest in those new solutions and new ways of going about things.”




]]>SunDrive is a solar technology company aiming to create low cost, energy efficient and more material abundant solar cells.




“We are in a very fragile period in time. Everything that we are doing is to try and accelerate the day in which we can continue to progress as a civilisation without the expense of destroying the environment” says SunDrive co-founder Vince Allen.




In today’s episode, SunDrive’s co-founders will discuss their first steps to building a category defining business. We’ll also hear from Blackbird co-founder and Partner Niki Scevak on the importance of milestones and the backlash from the cleantech graveyard.




As promised, head to https://www.sundrivesolar.com/ to learn more about SunDrive.




Episode interviewees: SunDrive co-founders Vince Allen, David Hu and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak.




Key topics covered:

• Australia can lead the world in solar energy
• SunDrive’s vision, product and business model
• Vince and David’s founding story






The best of Vince & David:




“We have everything that's needed for Australia to be the first solid power developed country.”




“Today only 3% of the world's electricity comes from solar. There is still a long road ahead of us. And the technology today is not well suited for the longer term.”




“Although the current solar cell structures have suited us well to get to this point, more advanced solar cells are going to be needed and we need to get around this silver problem. Copper is a thousand times more abundant than silver and a hundred times cheaper than silver.”




“We’re not in the business of trying to manufacture the entire value chain. We’re focusing on our copper step - the last, most critical step in the solar cell manufacturing process.”




“We are in a very fragile period in time. Everything that we are doing is to try and accelerate the day in which we can continue to progress as a civilisation without the expense of destroying the environment.”




“You have to find somebody you trust and who shares the same values, vision and moral standards - everything.”




“As soon as you bring up working on Cleantech, they’re already running for the hills.”










Niki Scevak on SunDrive:




“When we make an investment at Blackbird, we think very deeply about what are the three most important things that need to happen to show the unit of progress in the first seed round. SunDrive smashed all of those milestones.”




“The road we’re on, using silver in solar panels, is a dead end road. Overall we’re just going to run out of silver to build the solar panels.”




“I think everyone at Blackbird believes that a world powered by the sun is a world we want to be in, and that SunDrive can produce a high margin, great product or process that fits into that world.”




“You can make so much progress with so little capital and so little time, and Vince, Dave and the team have done everything that they hoped to do in the seed round, and they’re very down to earth.”




“A lot of hardware startups can prove something in the lab, in a small way, but they fall over when they try to make a lot of money from it or they try to go mainstream.”




“We’re open to investing and not ruining the environment. What are the activities we’re doing that are not sustainable and let’s fix those activities. We’d love to invest in those new solutions and new ways of going about things.”




]]>0fa67b8e-c2d4-48eb-96f1-6a19d8500461Wed, 07 Oct 2020 18:00:00 +110058:42falsefull112121SunDrive is a solar technology company aiming to create low cost, energy efficient and more material abundant solar cells. “We are in a very fragile period in time. Everything that we are doing is to try and accelerate the day in which we can continue to progress as a civilisation without the expense of destroying the environment” says SunDrive co-founder Vince Allen. In today’s episode, SunDrive’s co-founders will discuss their first steps to building a category defining business. We’ll also hear from Blackbird co-founder and Partner Niki Scevak on the importance of milestones and the backlash from the cleantech graveyard. As promised, head to https://www.sundrivesolar.com/ to learn more about SunDrive. Episode interviewees: SunDrive co-founders Vince Allen, David Hu and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak. Key topics covered: Australia can lead the world in solar energy SunDrive’s vision, product and business model Vince and David’s founding story The best of Vince & David: “We have everything that's needed for Australia to be the first solid power developed country.” “Today only 3% of the world's electricity comes from solar. There is still a long road ahead of us. And the technology today is not well suited for the longer term.” “Although the current solar cell structures have suited us well to get to this point, more advanced solar cells are going to be needed and we need to get around this silver problem. Copper is a thousand times more abundant than silver and a hundred times cheaper than silver.” “We’re not in the business of trying to manufacture the entire value chain. We’re focusing on our copper step - the last, most critical step in the solar cell manufacturing process.” “We are in a very fragile period in time. Everything that we are doing is to try and accelerate the day in which we can continue to progress as a civilisation without the expense of destroying the environment.” “You have to find somebody you trust and who shares the same values, vision and moral standards - everything.” “As soon as you bring up working on Cleantech, they’re already running for the hills.” Niki Scevak on SunDrive: “When we make an investment at Blackbird, we think very deeply about what are the three most important things that need to happen to show the unit of progress in the first seed round. SunDrive smashed all of those milestones.” “The road we’re on, using silver in solar panels, is a dead end road. Overall we’re just going to run out of silver to build the solar panels.” “I think everyone at Blackbird believes that a world powered by the sun is a world we want to be in, and that SunDrive can produce a high margin, great product or process that fits into that world.” “You can make so much progress with so little capital and so little time, and Vince, Dave and the team have done everything that they hoped to do in the seed round, and they’re very down to earth.” “A lot of hardware startups can prove something in the lab, in a small way, but they fall over when they try to make a lot of money from it or they try to go mainstream.” “We’re open to investing and not ruining the environment. What are the activities we’re doing that are not sustainable and let’s fix those activities. We’d love to invest in those new solutions and new ways of going about things.”Above Water with FreightFishFreightFish is a New Zealand-based autonomous hydrofoil shipping company that aims to create a third option beyond the long wait of traditional ocean freight and the expensive extravagance of shipping by air.




“We should have a hundred boats on the water. We should have a swarm of ships. Way more service focused and way less engineering focused than we are now,” says Max Olsen, co-founder and CEO of FreightFish.




The FreightFish vision is to deliver goods anywhere in the world in 5-6 days and for half the cost of air. Advances in hydrofoil ships and cheaper carbon fibre manufacturing are making this vision imminently possible.




“Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.”




Title: Above Water with FreightFish




Episode interviews: FreightFish co-founder and CEO Max Olsen and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong.




Key topics covered:

• FreightFish’s vision to build a swarm of ships.
• What exceptional engineering talent looks like
• Team Building in New Zealand
• Robots as a Service






The best of Max:

“We promised to build a prototype at 1/10th of the scale and then, everything we thought that was going to be hard about building turned out to be easy - and everything that we thought was easy turned out to be hard.”




“When you've backed yourself into the worst engineering corner, you’ve just got to bust your way out of it.”




“The ocean is super unforgiving.”




“How ready is our team at any given moment to completely rebuild a system? The structure of testing is the most important engineering principle.”




“Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.”




“Determination and resilience are the one and two most important traits.”




“In the face of almost certain defeat, can you turn yourself around?”




“The moral of the story is don't commit fraud.”




“Success is such a fleeting feeling and you only get it for a moment.Pause for a moment. Let's go take two hours to walk up a hill, spend some time learning a new skill, doing like a search and rescue mission out in one of the chase boats







Samantha Wong on FreightFish:




“ I love the sheer originality of the idea. Why not create a third way for freight to move, between slow, cheap, sea freight and fast, but super expensive and environmentally unfriendly, air freight.”




“One benefit of FreightFish is that you can actually get started with one boat. With one vehicle, you can start a freight service because it just plugs into existing supply chains. Therefore the capital requirements for a company doing that, much less than say an autonomous vehicle company.”




“America's Cup history in Auckland is really important to note when it comes to why you would build a company like FreightFish in Auckland. Team New Zealand snuck a win through innovative hydrofoils, so there are actually a very deep pockets of hydro-foiling talent here in New Zealand.”




“In my experience, attracting the best talent involves inspiring them and getting the image in their minds in such a way that they just can't forget it. They just can't shake it from their imagination.”




“I think attitude is such a big part of a good hire. That and humility around trying things and bringing a lot of energy to do their job.”







]]>FreightFish is a New Zealand-based autonomous hydrofoil shipping company that aims to create a third option beyond the long wait of traditional ocean freight and the expensive extravagance of shipping by air.




“We should have a hundred boats on the water. We should have a swarm of ships. Way more service focused and way less engineering focused than we are now,” says Max Olsen, co-founder and CEO of FreightFish.




The FreightFish vision is to deliver goods anywhere in the world in 5-6 days and for half the cost of air. Advances in hydrofoil ships and cheaper carbon fibre manufacturing are making this vision imminently possible.




“Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.”




Title: Above Water with FreightFish




Episode interviews: FreightFish co-founder and CEO Max Olsen and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong.




Key topics covered:

• FreightFish’s vision to build a swarm of ships.
• What exceptional engineering talent looks like
• Team Building in New Zealand
• Robots as a Service






The best of Max:

“We promised to build a prototype at 1/10th of the scale and then, everything we thought that was going to be hard about building turned out to be easy - and everything that we thought was easy turned out to be hard.”




“When you've backed yourself into the worst engineering corner, you’ve just got to bust your way out of it.”




“The ocean is super unforgiving.”




“How ready is our team at any given moment to completely rebuild a system? The structure of testing is the most important engineering principle.”




“Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.”




“Determination and resilience are the one and two most important traits.”




“In the face of almost certain defeat, can you turn yourself around?”




“The moral of the story is don't commit fraud.”




“Success is such a fleeting feeling and you only get it for a moment.Pause for a moment. Let's go take two hours to walk up a hill, spend some time learning a new skill, doing like a search and rescue mission out in one of the chase boats







Samantha Wong on FreightFish:




“ I love the sheer originality of the idea. Why not create a third way for freight to move, between slow, cheap, sea freight and fast, but super expensive and environmentally unfriendly, air freight.”




“One benefit of FreightFish is that you can actually get started with one boat. With one vehicle, you can start a freight service because it just plugs into existing supply chains. Therefore the capital requirements for a company doing that, much less than say an autonomous vehicle company.”




“America's Cup history in Auckland is really important to note when it comes to why you would build a company like FreightFish in Auckland. Team New Zealand snuck a win through innovative hydrofoils, so there are actually a very deep pockets of hydro-foiling talent here in New Zealand.”




“In my experience, attracting the best talent involves inspiring them and getting the image in their minds in such a way that they just can't forget it. They just can't shake it from their imagination.”




“I think attitude is such a big part of a good hire. That and humility around trying things and bringing a lot of energy to do their job.”







]]>605c10df-b915-4429-b939-8f633cb7ec8cWed, 16 Sep 2020 21:02:00 +110001:00:19falsefull111111FreightFish is a New Zealand-based autonomous hydrofoil shipping company that aims to create a third option beyond the long wait of traditional ocean freight and the expensive extravagance of shipping by air. “We should have a hundred boats on the water. We should have a swarm of ships. Way more service focused and way less engineering focused than we are now,” says Max Olsen, co-founder and CEO of FreightFish. The FreightFish vision is to deliver goods anywhere in the world in 5-6 days and for half the cost of air. Advances in hydrofoil ships and cheaper carbon fibre manufacturing are making this vision imminently possible. “Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.” Title: Above Water with FreightFish Episode interviews: FreightFish co-founder and CEO Max Olsen and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong. Key topics covered: FreightFish’s vision to build a swarm of ships. What exceptional engineering talent looks like Team Building in New Zealand Robots as a Service The best of Max: “We promised to build a prototype at 1/10th of the scale and then, everything we thought that was going to be hard about building turned out to be easy - and everything that we thought was easy turned out to be hard.” “When you've backed yourself into the worst engineering corner, you’ve just got to bust your way out of it.” “The ocean is super unforgiving.” “How ready is our team at any given moment to completely rebuild a system? The structure of testing is the most important engineering principle.” “Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.” “Determination and resilience are the one and two most important traits.” “In the face of almost certain defeat, can you turn yourself around?” “The moral of the story is don't commit fraud.” “Success is such a fleeting feeling and you only get it for a moment.Pause for a moment. Let's go take two hours to walk up a hill, spend some time learning a new skill, doing like a search and rescue mission out in one of the chase boats Samantha Wong on FreightFish: “ I love the sheer originality of the idea. Why not create a third way for freight to move, between slow, cheap, sea freight and fast, but super expensive and environmentally unfriendly, air freight.” “One benefit of FreightFish is that you can actually get started with one boat. With one vehicle, you can start a freight service because it just plugs into existing supply chains. Therefore the capital requirements for a company doing that, much less than say an autonomous vehicle company.” “America's Cup history in Auckland is really important to note when it comes to why you would build a company like FreightFish in Auckland. Team New Zealand snuck a win through innovative hydrofoils, so there are actually a very deep pockets of hydro-foiling talent here in New Zealand.” “In my experience, attracting the best talent involves inspiring them and getting the image in their minds in such a way that they just can't forget it. They just can't shake it from their imagination.” “I think attitude is such a big part of a good hire. That and humility around trying things and bringing a lot of energy to do their job.”Making user researchers feel like superheroes with DovetailDovetail was founded three years ago by CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and CTO Brad Ayers, who met working at Atlassian. They founded Dovetail on the belief that deeply understanding your customers is the key to creating a great product.




Seeing first hand how manual and siloed user research and product development processes are, they set out to build a collaborative platform for research professionals.




"When a product manager, researcher or designer leaves a company, all of their customer understanding, context on the market and the invaluable data and insights in their head goes away too," says Benjamin. "So every time a product manager starts at a new organisation, they spend the first six months onboarding."




Dovetail's platform solves this problem with easy to use collaborative tools, data and research analysis and video transcription tools, meaning UX and product teams can build a centralised research repository.




With just three employees and no sales team, Dovetail has grown to support hundreds of customers including Square, VMware, Shopify, BCG, Esri, Harvard, Maersk, Teradata, and the Royal Bank of Scotland, with thousands of people within these organisations using Dovetail every month.




"Not hiring sales over the past three years has kept us product-led," says Benjamin. "We invest heavily in the product so we can build a lot of features that should be self-explanatory, intuitive and self-service."




Title: Making user researchers feel like superheroes with Dovetail




Episode interviews: Dovetail co-founder and CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker.




Key topics covered:

• To bootstrap or not to bootstrap?
• The rise of user researchers
• Dovetail's product-led strategy
• Dovetail’s winning recipe for customer growth






The best of Benjamin:




"Research is extremely fragmented in terms of methodologies and tools. It's very immature as a discipline. In 10-15 years it will be somewhere closer to where design is heading, where you have players like Figma that are signed posted to become the standard."




"We want to be known as being the standard way that all product teams organise and scale their customer understanding."




"If you can have a product that makes sense and conceptually matches what customers have in their head and the marketing website reinforces this through the funnel, you don't need onboarding. You can focus on other things like showing the value."




"I try to be quite open with the team, and am genuine, authentic and transparent about my frustrations and challenges."




"At Dovetail, we don't have any support people. Each week a new person is on support, and when you start at Dovetail, you get thrown in on your first week, which is trial by fire."




"It's so good because you can tell at the end of the week that a new person has built up so much context and empathy."




"Rather than do lots of things to 80 percent kind of done, just do less things to 100 percent."




"Velocity is probably the single most important thing for a startup or any company. You need to be as fast as you can be to respond, to change in the market, to ship new features, to execute on those ideas that you're getting through your customer research."




"The more customer-focused you are, the faster you'll be able to build valuable products and services, and that's a huge differentiator."




"More and more, the user experience is becoming the key differentiator for businesses."

]]>Dovetail was founded three years ago by CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and CTO Brad Ayers, who met working at Atlassian. They founded Dovetail on the belief that deeply understanding your customers is the key to creating a great product.




Seeing first hand how manual and siloed user research and product development processes are, they set out to build a collaborative platform for research professionals.




"When a product manager, researcher or designer leaves a company, all of their customer understanding, context on the market and the invaluable data and insights in their head goes away too," says Benjamin. "So every time a product manager starts at a new organisation, they spend the first six months onboarding."




Dovetail's platform solves this problem with easy to use collaborative tools, data and research analysis and video transcription tools, meaning UX and product teams can build a centralised research repository.




With just three employees and no sales team, Dovetail has grown to support hundreds of customers including Square, VMware, Shopify, BCG, Esri, Harvard, Maersk, Teradata, and the Royal Bank of Scotland, with thousands of people within these organisations using Dovetail every month.




"Not hiring sales over the past three years has kept us product-led," says Benjamin. "We invest heavily in the product so we can build a lot of features that should be self-explanatory, intuitive and self-service."




Title: Making user researchers feel like superheroes with Dovetail




Episode interviews: Dovetail co-founder and CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker.




Key topics covered:

• To bootstrap or not to bootstrap?
• The rise of user researchers
• Dovetail's product-led strategy
• Dovetail’s winning recipe for customer growth






The best of Benjamin:




"Research is extremely fragmented in terms of methodologies and tools. It's very immature as a discipline. In 10-15 years it will be somewhere closer to where design is heading, where you have players like Figma that are signed posted to become the standard."




"We want to be known as being the standard way that all product teams organise and scale their customer understanding."




"If you can have a product that makes sense and conceptually matches what customers have in their head and the marketing website reinforces this through the funnel, you don't need onboarding. You can focus on other things like showing the value."




"I try to be quite open with the team, and am genuine, authentic and transparent about my frustrations and challenges."




"At Dovetail, we don't have any support people. Each week a new person is on support, and when you start at Dovetail, you get thrown in on your first week, which is trial by fire."




"It's so good because you can tell at the end of the week that a new person has built up so much context and empathy."




"Rather than do lots of things to 80 percent kind of done, just do less things to 100 percent."




"Velocity is probably the single most important thing for a startup or any company. You need to be as fast as you can be to respond, to change in the market, to ship new features, to execute on those ideas that you're getting through your customer research."




"The more customer-focused you are, the faster you'll be able to build valuable products and services, and that's a huge differentiator."




"More and more, the user experience is becoming the key differentiator for businesses."

]]>be3fb023-b2b8-4bf4-a209-1e680748764fWed, 02 Sep 2020 19:00:00 +110001:11:48falsefull110101Dovetail was founded three years ago by CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and CTO Brad Ayers, who met working at Atlassian. They founded Dovetail on the belief that deeply understanding your customers is the key to creating a great product. Seeing first hand how manual and siloed user research and product development processes are, they set out to build a collaborative platform for research professionals. "When a product manager, researcher or designer leaves a company, all of their customer understanding, context on the market and the invaluable data and insights in their head goes away too," says Benjamin. "So every time a product manager starts at a new organisation, they spend the first six months onboarding." Dovetail's platform solves this problem with easy to use collaborative tools, data and research analysis and video transcription tools, meaning UX and product teams can build a centralised research repository. With just three employees and no sales team, Dovetail has grown to support hundreds of customers including Square, VMware, Shopify, BCG, Esri, Harvard, Maersk, Teradata, and the Royal Bank of Scotland, with thousands of people within these organisations using Dovetail every month. "Not hiring sales over the past three years has kept us product-led," says Benjamin. "We invest heavily in the product so we can build a lot of features that should be self-explanatory, intuitive and self-service." Title: Making user researchers feel like superheroes with Dovetail Episode interviews: Dovetail co-founder and CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker. Key topics covered: To bootstrap or not to bootstrap? The rise of user researchers Dovetail's product-led strategy Dovetail’s winning recipe for customer growth The best of Benjamin: "Research is extremely fragmented in terms of methodologies and tools. It's very immature as a discipline. In 10-15 years it will be somewhere closer to where design is heading, where you have players like Figma that are signed posted to become the standard." "We want to be known as being the standard way that all product teams organise and scale their customer understanding." "If you can have a product that makes sense and conceptually matches what customers have in their head and the marketing website reinforces this through the funnel, you don't need onboarding. You can focus on other things like showing the value." "I try to be quite open with the team, and am genuine, authentic and transparent about my frustrations and challenges." "At Dovetail, we don't have any support people. Each week a new person is on support, and when you start at Dovetail, you get thrown in on your first week, which is trial by fire." "It's so good because you can tell at the end of the week that a new person has built up so much context and empathy." "Rather than do lots of things to 80 percent kind of done, just do less things to 100 percent." "Velocity is probably the single most important thing for a startup or any company. You need to be as fast as you can be to respond, to change in the market, to ship new features, to execute on those ideas that you're getting through your customer research." "The more customer-focused you are, the faster you'll be able to build valuable products and services, and that's a huge differentiator." "More and more, the user experience is becoming the key differentiator for businesses."AI is Saving Lives with See-ModeToday, See-Mode have announced their Series A funding led by MassMutual Ventures. This is the second time Blackbird has invested and partner Niki Scevak has also now joined the board.




The mission of See-Mode is to predict the recurrence of strokes by detecting plaque build-ups and modelling blood flow through computational fluid dynamics.




Their software, made for clinicians and sonographers, can report vascular ultrasound scans with a single click and in less than a minute. That's in contrast to the widely used processes that take between 10 to 20 minutes.




"Our seed round helped with building and validating our first product, including the core technology and getting it to the point of regulatory approval," said Milad Mohammadzadeh, cofounder of See-Mode.




"Our Series A is about expanding on the products that we've built, solving more of our customer's problems, and getting to a repeatable and scalable sales process."




Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




AI is Saving Lives with See-Mode




Episode interviews: See-Mode cofounders Milad Mohammadzadeh and Sadaf Monajemi, and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak.







Key topics covered:

• The state of healthcare in 10 years, according to See-Mode
• Why healthcare data should be in the public sphere
• How See-Mode produces health reports in minutes
• Improving clinicians work life
• See-Mode's product journey and milestones
• Where is See-Mode heading with their Series A






The best of Milad:




"Patients' connectivity to doctors will take a turn for the better over the next decade."




"I imagine that we will see two important changes over the next decade. We will speed up the workflow of the clinicians and unlock a level of depth of understanding from the clinical information that we didn't have access to before."




"We use mathematical equations (the geometry of blood vessels) to simulate how blood flow would move through the neck or the brain of a patient. Imagine a very intricate piping system."




"We've had to be as creative as we can with fast iteration loops, while at the same time building good relationships with a handful of clinicians that have bought into the mission to access a wider network."




"Blackbird has this fantastic motto of ‘the hungry, not the proven.’ We are starting to subscribe to that more and more every day."




"We have tried to build See-Mode in a way that doctors don't have to make any changes to the current clinical workflow or scan their patients any differently."




"We're trying to make interactions with See-Mode as-easy-as logging into your email."




"Anyone who has access to [medical] data has a responsibility, and obligation, to ensure that that data is being used for the benefit of future patients and the society."




The best of Sadaf:




"I can't imagine anytime in the future that AI would replace doctors, but I can imagine clinicians who use AI as a tool will replace the ones who don't."




"When you make data public, you're increasing the chance every month every single patient will have better treatment sooner.




“We are enabling precision medicine and patient-specific information.”




“The blood vessels in my brain look different compared to yours, but based on the current guidelines, b

]]>Today, See-Mode have announced their Series A funding led by MassMutual Ventures. This is the second time Blackbird has invested and partner Niki Scevak has also now joined the board.




The mission of See-Mode is to predict the recurrence of strokes by detecting plaque build-ups and modelling blood flow through computational fluid dynamics.




Their software, made for clinicians and sonographers, can report vascular ultrasound scans with a single click and in less than a minute. That's in contrast to the widely used processes that take between 10 to 20 minutes.




"Our seed round helped with building and validating our first product, including the core technology and getting it to the point of regulatory approval," said Milad Mohammadzadeh, cofounder of See-Mode.




"Our Series A is about expanding on the products that we've built, solving more of our customer's problems, and getting to a repeatable and scalable sales process."




Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




AI is Saving Lives with See-Mode




Episode interviews: See-Mode cofounders Milad Mohammadzadeh and Sadaf Monajemi, and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak.







Key topics covered:

• The state of healthcare in 10 years, according to See-Mode
• Why healthcare data should be in the public sphere
• How See-Mode produces health reports in minutes
• Improving clinicians work life
• See-Mode's product journey and milestones
• Where is See-Mode heading with their Series A






The best of Milad:




"Patients' connectivity to doctors will take a turn for the better over the next decade."




"I imagine that we will see two important changes over the next decade. We will speed up the workflow of the clinicians and unlock a level of depth of understanding from the clinical information that we didn't have access to before."




"We use mathematical equations (the geometry of blood vessels) to simulate how blood flow would move through the neck or the brain of a patient. Imagine a very intricate piping system."




"We've had to be as creative as we can with fast iteration loops, while at the same time building good relationships with a handful of clinicians that have bought into the mission to access a wider network."




"Blackbird has this fantastic motto of ‘the hungry, not the proven.’ We are starting to subscribe to that more and more every day."




"We have tried to build See-Mode in a way that doctors don't have to make any changes to the current clinical workflow or scan their patients any differently."




"We're trying to make interactions with See-Mode as-easy-as logging into your email."




"Anyone who has access to [medical] data has a responsibility, and obligation, to ensure that that data is being used for the benefit of future patients and the society."




The best of Sadaf:




"I can't imagine anytime in the future that AI would replace doctors, but I can imagine clinicians who use AI as a tool will replace the ones who don't."




"When you make data public, you're increasing the chance every month every single patient will have better treatment sooner.




“We are enabling precision medicine and patient-specific information.”




“The blood vessels in my brain look different compared to yours, but based on the current guidelines, b

]]>7b2ceeb0-788e-4080-bd13-0d9ebc98d672Wed, 19 Aug 2020 19:30:00 +110054:29falsefull1991Today, See-Mode have announced their Series A funding led by MassMutual Ventures. This is the second time Blackbird has invested and partner Niki Scevak has also now joined the board. The mission of See-Mode is to predict the recurrence of strokes by detecting plaque build-ups and modelling blood flow through computational fluid dynamics. Their software, made for clinicians and sonographers, can report vascular ultrasound scans with a single click and in less than a minute. That's in contrast to the widely used processes that take between 10 to 20 minutes. "Our seed round helped with building and validating our first product, including the core technology and getting it to the point of regulatory approval," said Milad Mohammadzadeh, cofounder of See-Mode. "Our Series A is about expanding on the products that we've built, solving more of our customer's problems, and getting to a repeatable and scalable sales process." Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe. AI is Saving Lives with See-Mode Episode interviews: See-Mode cofounders Milad Mohammadzadeh and Sadaf Monajemi, and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak. Key topics covered: The state of healthcare in 10 years, according to See-Mode Why healthcare data should be in the public sphere How See-Mode produces health reports in minutes Improving clinicians work life See-Mode's product journey and milestones Where is See-Mode heading with their Series A The best of Milad: "Patients' connectivity to doctors will take a turn for the better over the next decade." "I imagine that we will see two important changes over the next decade. We will speed up the workflow of the clinicians and unlock a level of depth of understanding from the clinical information that we didn't have access to before." "We use mathematical equations (the geometry of blood vessels) to simulate how blood flow would move through the neck or the brain of a patient. Imagine a very intricate piping system." "We've had to be as creative as we can with fast iteration loops, while at the same time building good relationships with a handful of clinicians that have bought into the mission to access a wider network." "Blackbird has this fantastic motto of ‘the hungry, not the proven.’ We are starting to subscribe to that more and more every day." "We have tried to build See-Mode in a way that doctors don't have to make any changes to the current clinical workflow or scan their patients any differently." "We're trying to make interactions with See-Mode as-easy-as logging into your email." "Anyone who has access to [medical] data has a responsibility, and obligation, to ensure that that data is being used for the benefit of future patients and the society." The best of Sadaf: "I can't imagine anytime in the future that AI would replace doctors, but I can imagine clinicians who use AI as a tool will replace the ones who don't." "When you make data public, you're increasing the chance every month every single patient will have better treatment sooner. “We are enabling precision medicine and patient-specific information.” “The blood vessels in my brain look different compared to yours, but based on the current guidelines, bThe Founding Story of Blackbird with Niki, Rick, Mike Cannon-Brookes & HunterWe’ve just announced our fourth fund of $500M.




And so today we are going to do a deep dive into Blackbird’s founding story.




The very first believer in Blackbird was Mike Cannon-Brookes, the Co-founder and Co-Ceo of Atlassian. In this episode, we’ll unpack what excites him about the start-up ecosystem in Australia and the culture he hopes to help Blackbird build upon.




Hunter Somerville, General Partner at Greenspring Associates, will then explain his belief in ANZ’s new wave of home-grown talent building world class companies and the importance of trusted relationships between founders and investors when making venture fund decisions.




But first, I’ll be talking with Niki Scevak and Rick Baker, co-founders and Partners at Blackbird. We’ll cover Blackbird’s origin story, our investment philosophy, and what the future holds for Blackbird’s founders, the team and its investors.




]]>We’ve just announced our fourth fund of $500M.




And so today we are going to do a deep dive into Blackbird’s founding story.




The very first believer in Blackbird was Mike Cannon-Brookes, the Co-founder and Co-Ceo of Atlassian. In this episode, we’ll unpack what excites him about the start-up ecosystem in Australia and the culture he hopes to help Blackbird build upon.




Hunter Somerville, General Partner at Greenspring Associates, will then explain his belief in ANZ’s new wave of home-grown talent building world class companies and the importance of trusted relationships between founders and investors when making venture fund decisions.




But first, I’ll be talking with Niki Scevak and Rick Baker, co-founders and Partners at Blackbird. We’ll cover Blackbird’s origin story, our investment philosophy, and what the future holds for Blackbird’s founders, the team and its investors.




]]>d9d99e91-f4b0-48fe-8661-d9b7e677c2dbTue, 04 Aug 2020 19:00:00 +110001:05:27falsefull1881We’ve just announced our fourth fund of $500M. And so today we are going to do a deep dive into Blackbird’s founding story. The very first believer in Blackbird was Mike Cannon-Brookes, the Co-founder and Co-Ceo of Atlassian. In this episode, we’ll unpack what excites him about the start-up ecosystem in Australia and the culture he hopes to help Blackbird build upon. Hunter Somerville, General Partner at Greenspring Associates, will then explain his belief in ANZ’s new wave of home-grown talent building world class companies and the importance of trusted relationships between founders and investors when making venture fund decisions. But first, I’ll be talking with Niki Scevak and Rick Baker, co-founders and Partners at Blackbird. We’ll cover Blackbird’s origin story, our investment philosophy, and what the future holds for Blackbird’s founders, the team and its investors.Future-Proof Workspaces with Alex & LukeFuture-Proof Workplaces with Alex & Luke from XY Sense




In 2016, Melbourne-based entrepreneurs, Alex Birch, and Luke Murray decided to start a company to solve the problem of office space utilisation.




"We came to this realisation that large-enterprise organisations spend so much money on their space and it's very challenging for them to understand exactly how well this space is being used," says Alex.




This realisation led to the founding of XY Sense, a sensor and an artificial intelligence platform to monitor companies and their employees' workspace usage.




For these software engineer co-founders, building a hardware solution was a new experience and so was working with cutting-edge technologies, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).




"We didn't build an algorithm and then choose how to apply it," says Alex.




"We said, here's the problem we need to solve. What's the best technology to do that and it just so happened that the best technology for this was deep learning and artificial intelligence."




Episodes air every second Wednesday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviews: XY co-founder and CEO Alex Birch, XY Sense co-founder and CTO Luke Murray, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker.




Future-Proof Workspaces with Alex & Luke




Key topics covered:




• Why a laser-focused mission wins
• How accurate data can unlock employee productivity and effectiveness
• XY Sense’s use of ML, AI and real-time data
• Alex and Luke's team-focused approach to company culture
• How XY Sense-enabled workspaces operate in a COVID-19 world






The best of Alex:




"Offices are used only about 60% of the time. So for a bank that could equate to around about a hundred million dollars spent on empty office space every year."




"We felt that there was a unique opportunity to build what we saw to be the Holy Grail for office space utilisation."




"Because XY Sense was in a very similar domain as the previous one, we were entrenched in the problem, and we understood it deeply, so that gave us a lot of credibility that we knew how to grow a company."




"Luke and I spent ten months building a prototype and bootstrapped it together. It was a Raspberry Pi prototype, but it was able to detect and understand where people were in the space anonymously."




"If you don't trust the data, then what good is analytics? For us to have trustworthy data, it has to be in real-time, so that if you walk around the room, you'll see the heat signature change in the floor plan."




"Our real-time data leads to all of our analytics. We have a 10,000-foot view of our analytics showing across the globe, how well different buildings are going."




"We can drill down to a country, to a building, to a floor, to a desk and see from a thousand-foot view or a 10,000-foot view right down into the detail."




"We can set an alarm for social distancing, so when there's someone who's in too close to another person, we can send a text message.




"Luke, my co-founder and I pride ourselves on our integrity. We want to be as honest and transparent as possible with

]]>Future-Proof Workplaces with Alex & Luke from XY Sense




In 2016, Melbourne-based entrepreneurs, Alex Birch, and Luke Murray decided to start a company to solve the problem of office space utilisation.




"We came to this realisation that large-enterprise organisations spend so much money on their space and it's very challenging for them to understand exactly how well this space is being used," says Alex.




This realisation led to the founding of XY Sense, a sensor and an artificial intelligence platform to monitor companies and their employees' workspace usage.




For these software engineer co-founders, building a hardware solution was a new experience and so was working with cutting-edge technologies, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).




"We didn't build an algorithm and then choose how to apply it," says Alex.




"We said, here's the problem we need to solve. What's the best technology to do that and it just so happened that the best technology for this was deep learning and artificial intelligence."




Episodes air every second Wednesday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviews: XY co-founder and CEO Alex Birch, XY Sense co-founder and CTO Luke Murray, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker.




Future-Proof Workspaces with Alex & Luke




Key topics covered:




• Why a laser-focused mission wins
• How accurate data can unlock employee productivity and effectiveness
• XY Sense’s use of ML, AI and real-time data
• Alex and Luke's team-focused approach to company culture
• How XY Sense-enabled workspaces operate in a COVID-19 world






The best of Alex:




"Offices are used only about 60% of the time. So for a bank that could equate to around about a hundred million dollars spent on empty office space every year."




"We felt that there was a unique opportunity to build what we saw to be the Holy Grail for office space utilisation."




"Because XY Sense was in a very similar domain as the previous one, we were entrenched in the problem, and we understood it deeply, so that gave us a lot of credibility that we knew how to grow a company."




"Luke and I spent ten months building a prototype and bootstrapped it together. It was a Raspberry Pi prototype, but it was able to detect and understand where people were in the space anonymously."




"If you don't trust the data, then what good is analytics? For us to have trustworthy data, it has to be in real-time, so that if you walk around the room, you'll see the heat signature change in the floor plan."




"Our real-time data leads to all of our analytics. We have a 10,000-foot view of our analytics showing across the globe, how well different buildings are going."




"We can drill down to a country, to a building, to a floor, to a desk and see from a thousand-foot view or a 10,000-foot view right down into the detail."




"We can set an alarm for social distancing, so when there's someone who's in too close to another person, we can send a text message.




"Luke, my co-founder and I pride ourselves on our integrity. We want to be as honest and transparent as possible with

]]>35495c67-b836-4b0a-8823-b4f4626d64d8Tue, 28 Jul 2020 19:00:00 +110055:33falsefull1771Future-Proof Workplaces with Alex & Luke from XY Sense In 2016, Melbourne-based entrepreneurs, Alex Birch, and Luke Murray decided to start a company to solve the problem of office space utilisation. "We came to this realisation that large-enterprise organisations spend so much money on their space and it's very challenging for them to understand exactly how well this space is being used," says Alex. This realisation led to the founding of XY Sense, a sensor and an artificial intelligence platform to monitor companies and their employees' workspace usage. For these software engineer co-founders, building a hardware solution was a new experience and so was working with cutting-edge technologies, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). "We didn't build an algorithm and then choose how to apply it," says Alex. "We said, here's the problem we need to solve. What's the best technology to do that and it just so happened that the best technology for this was deep learning and artificial intelligence." Episodes air every second Wednesday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe. Episode interviews: XY co-founder and CEO Alex Birch, XY Sense co-founder and CTO Luke Murray, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker. Future-Proof Workspaces with Alex & Luke Key topics covered: Why a laser-focused mission wins How accurate data can unlock employee productivity and effectiveness XY Sense’s use of ML, AI and real-time data Alex and Luke's team-focused approach to company culture How XY Sense-enabled workspaces operate in a COVID-19 world The best of Alex: "Offices are used only about 60% of the time. So for a bank that could equate to around about a hundred million dollars spent on empty office space every year." "We felt that there was a unique opportunity to build what we saw to be the Holy Grail for office space utilisation." "Because XY Sense was in a very similar domain as the previous one, we were entrenched in the problem, and we understood it deeply, so that gave us a lot of credibility that we knew how to grow a company." "Luke and I spent ten months building a prototype and bootstrapped it together. It was a Raspberry Pi prototype, but it was able to detect and understand where people were in the space anonymously." "If you don't trust the data, then what good is analytics? For us to have trustworthy data, it has to be in real-time, so that if you walk around the room, you'll see the heat signature change in the floor plan." "Our real-time data leads to all of our analytics. We have a 10,000-foot view of our analytics showing across the globe, how well different buildings are going." "We can drill down to a country, to a building, to a floor, to a desk and see from a thousand-foot view or a 10,000-foot view right down into the detail." "We can set an alarm for social distancing, so when there's someone who's in too close to another person, we can send a text message. "Luke, my co-founder and I pride ourselves on our integrity. We want to be as honest and transparent as possible withHow to Hire the Best with Kate Glazebrook and Khyati SundaramHiring is the most important decision a company makes.




Any company is only as great as the people building it. But, bias in hiring decisions can often mean the best candidate doesn’t land the job.




Applied solves these problems.




Six years ago, Kate Glazebrook, a behavioural economist and Harvard graduate, was living in the UK and working in part of the government's Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the "nudge unit."




It was here that Kate and her co-founder, Richard Marr, came up with the idea for Applied, a platform that removes information that can lead to bias in hiring – such as names, CVs and education background.




Through blind application processes, ordering effects, and keeping scores anonymous across the team marking the candidates, Applied helps organisations hire the best person for the job regardless of their background.




Late last year, Kate made the tough decision to step down as CEO of Applied.




"On account of my privileged existence I've had in life, it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever taken."




Her replacement, Khyati Sundaram, Applied's Head of Product, went through the platform's application process and was appointed Acting-CEO in December 2019, and as CEO in March this year.




"If you look at the timeline, it goes; Q4 CEO transition, Q1 Series A fundraise as a new CEO, Q2 COVID-19. It's been about the hardest first three quarters of being a CEO as you could imagine."




Episodes air every second Wednesday at 6 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviews: Kate Glazebrook, Co-Founder of Applied, Khyati Sundaram, CEO of Applied and Nick Crocker, Partner at Blackbird.




Key topics covered:




• Uncovering biases in hiring
• Strategies for averaging 9/10 ratings with over 200,000 candidates
• How you can retain 96% of your employees after one year
• Why you should look for mission alignment over culture
• Kate's decision to step down as CEO
• Khyati’s decision to step up






The best of Kate:




"Applied's mission statement is deadly simple; we want to help you to hire the best person for the job regardless of their background.”




"There have been studies over the last 50 years and have shown that the rate of unconscious bias discrimination against people from minority backgrounds is essentially not changed since the 1970s."




"We tend to hire the same type of person over and over again, and often that person will look and feel a lot like us because we tend to get along with those people better."




The best of Khyati:




“Every product decision goes back to the mission and the vision of the company, building that from the ground up.”




“The first 70 days were very much a baptism by fire. There's a certain element of risk when you go knocking on doors saying, “you don't know me, but please trust me. I am the right person for the next phase of his incredible business, a different person than you had imagined, but nonetheless, the right person.”




Nick on Applied:




"Helping people to find jobs where they can be the best is just a fundamentally great thing to be in the business of doing."




"The way that most companies hire is insane and wrong and broken, and it's the reason why companies have such high empl

]]>Hiring is the most important decision a company makes.




Any company is only as great as the people building it. But, bias in hiring decisions can often mean the best candidate doesn’t land the job.




Applied solves these problems.




Six years ago, Kate Glazebrook, a behavioural economist and Harvard graduate, was living in the UK and working in part of the government's Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the "nudge unit."




It was here that Kate and her co-founder, Richard Marr, came up with the idea for Applied, a platform that removes information that can lead to bias in hiring – such as names, CVs and education background.




Through blind application processes, ordering effects, and keeping scores anonymous across the team marking the candidates, Applied helps organisations hire the best person for the job regardless of their background.




Late last year, Kate made the tough decision to step down as CEO of Applied.




"On account of my privileged existence I've had in life, it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever taken."




Her replacement, Khyati Sundaram, Applied's Head of Product, went through the platform's application process and was appointed Acting-CEO in December 2019, and as CEO in March this year.




"If you look at the timeline, it goes; Q4 CEO transition, Q1 Series A fundraise as a new CEO, Q2 COVID-19. It's been about the hardest first three quarters of being a CEO as you could imagine."




Episodes air every second Wednesday at 6 am. Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviews: Kate Glazebrook, Co-Founder of Applied, Khyati Sundaram, CEO of Applied and Nick Crocker, Partner at Blackbird.




Key topics covered:




• Uncovering biases in hiring
• Strategies for averaging 9/10 ratings with over 200,000 candidates
• How you can retain 96% of your employees after one year
• Why you should look for mission alignment over culture
• Kate's decision to step down as CEO
• Khyati’s decision to step up






The best of Kate:




"Applied's mission statement is deadly simple; we want to help you to hire the best person for the job regardless of their background.”




"There have been studies over the last 50 years and have shown that the rate of unconscious bias discrimination against people from minority backgrounds is essentially not changed since the 1970s."




"We tend to hire the same type of person over and over again, and often that person will look and feel a lot like us because we tend to get along with those people better."




The best of Khyati:




“Every product decision goes back to the mission and the vision of the company, building that from the ground up.”




“The first 70 days were very much a baptism by fire. There's a certain element of risk when you go knocking on doors saying, “you don't know me, but please trust me. I am the right person for the next phase of his incredible business, a different person than you had imagined, but nonetheless, the right person.”




Nick on Applied:




"Helping people to find jobs where they can be the best is just a fundamentally great thing to be in the business of doing."




"The way that most companies hire is insane and wrong and broken, and it's the reason why companies have such high empl

]]>f9379919-d0a9-45e0-9cff-29234430544aTue, 07 Jul 2020 19:30:00 +110001:00:09falsefull1661Hiring is the most important decision a company makes. Any company is only as great as the people building it. But, bias in hiring decisions can often mean the best candidate doesn’t land the job. Applied solves these problems. Six years ago, Kate Glazebrook, a behavioural economist and Harvard graduate, was living in the UK and working in part of the government's Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the "nudge unit." It was here that Kate and her co-founder, Richard Marr, came up with the idea for Applied, a platform that removes information that can lead to bias in hiring – such as names, CVs and education background. Through blind application processes, ordering effects, and keeping scores anonymous across the team marking the candidates, Applied helps organisations hire the best person for the job regardless of their background. Late last year, Kate made the tough decision to step down as CEO of Applied. "On account of my privileged existence I've had in life, it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever taken." Her replacement, Khyati Sundaram, Applied's Head of Product, went through the platform's application process and was appointed Acting-CEO in December 2019, and as CEO in March this year. "If you look at the timeline, it goes; Q4 CEO transition, Q1 Series A fundraise as a new CEO, Q2 COVID-19. It's been about the hardest first three quarters of being a CEO as you could imagine." Episodes air every second Wednesday at 6 am. Don't forget to subscribe. Episode interviews: Kate Glazebrook, Co-Founder of Applied, Khyati Sundaram, CEO of Applied and Nick Crocker, Partner at Blackbird. Key topics covered: Uncovering biases in hiring Strategies for averaging 9/10 ratings with over 200,000 candidates How you can retain 96% of your employees after one year Why you should look for mission alignment over culture Kate's decision to step down as CEO Khyati’s decision to step up The best of Kate: "Applied's mission statement is deadly simple; we want to help you to hire the best person for the job regardless of their background.” "There have been studies over the last 50 years and have shown that the rate of unconscious bias discrimination against people from minority backgrounds is essentially not changed since the 1970s." "We tend to hire the same type of person over and over again, and often that person will look and feel a lot like us because we tend to get along with those people better." The best of Khyati: “Every product decision goes back to the mission and the vision of the company, building that from the ground up.” “The first 70 days were very much a baptism by fire. There's a certain element of risk when you go knocking on doors saying, “you don't know me, but please trust me. I am the right person for the next phase of his incredible business, a different person than you had imagined, but nonetheless, the right person.” Nick on Applied: "Helping people to find jobs where they can be the best is just a fundamentally great thing to be in the business of doing." "The way that most companies hire is insane and wrong and broken, and it's the reason why companies have such high emplRediscovering Mission with Michael FoxCo-founder of Shoes of Prey has started a new company, Fable.




Fable sells braised beef. With one caveat, the main ingredient is shiitake mushrooms.




Michael Fox was a co-founder of Shoes of Prey - the business raised $30m, hired 100s of employees and was on a tear to give shoe lovers the chance to design their own shoes. In 2018 the business shut its doors. Shoes of Prey was hugely ambitious and Michael and his co founders Jodie and Mike, almost pulled it off!




While working on Shoes of Prey as the co-founder and CEO, Michael read a book that would change his eating habits forever and unbeknownst to him, set him on the course of his next startup, Fable. The team at Blackbird is absolutely thrilled Michael dared to go again on another startup!




In this episode we’ll hear from Michael on how this discovery turned into co-founding Fable, a plant based meats company that uses mushrooms to create alternative protein, like braised beef.




We’ll hear about the magical properties of mushrooms and what lessons he’s leaning on from his Shoes of Prey journey.




Blackbird’s Partner Rick Baker will share what stood out during Fable’s pitch, what's defensive about Fable’s business model and why Blackbird is excited to be working with Fable.




And finally, Co-founder Jim Fuller will share his favourite Fable recipe and go-to mushrooms.




Key Notes:




• “Society has lost the plot” when it comes to animal agriculture. Learn why.
• Mushroom meat can beat it’s animal equivalent. How?
• Heston Blumenthal describes Fable as “delicious, versatile and natural slow cooked meat alternative.”
• What lessons from Shoes of Prey apply to Fable's supply chain, R&D investment and manufacturing processes.
• Blackbird co-founder and Partner describes what's defensive about Fable’s business model.
• How to cook a Texan braised beef speciality using mushrooms.






Buy Here:

https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/90856/fable-plant-based-braised-beef

]]>Co-founder of Shoes of Prey has started a new company, Fable.




Fable sells braised beef. With one caveat, the main ingredient is shiitake mushrooms.




Michael Fox was a co-founder of Shoes of Prey - the business raised $30m, hired 100s of employees and was on a tear to give shoe lovers the chance to design their own shoes. In 2018 the business shut its doors. Shoes of Prey was hugely ambitious and Michael and his co founders Jodie and Mike, almost pulled it off!




While working on Shoes of Prey as the co-founder and CEO, Michael read a book that would change his eating habits forever and unbeknownst to him, set him on the course of his next startup, Fable. The team at Blackbird is absolutely thrilled Michael dared to go again on another startup!




In this episode we’ll hear from Michael on how this discovery turned into co-founding Fable, a plant based meats company that uses mushrooms to create alternative protein, like braised beef.




We’ll hear about the magical properties of mushrooms and what lessons he’s leaning on from his Shoes of Prey journey.




Blackbird’s Partner Rick Baker will share what stood out during Fable’s pitch, what's defensive about Fable’s business model and why Blackbird is excited to be working with Fable.




And finally, Co-founder Jim Fuller will share his favourite Fable recipe and go-to mushrooms.




Key Notes:




• “Society has lost the plot” when it comes to animal agriculture. Learn why.
• Mushroom meat can beat it’s animal equivalent. How?
• Heston Blumenthal describes Fable as “delicious, versatile and natural slow cooked meat alternative.”
• What lessons from Shoes of Prey apply to Fable's supply chain, R&D investment and manufacturing processes.
• Blackbird co-founder and Partner describes what's defensive about Fable’s business model.
• How to cook a Texan braised beef speciality using mushrooms.






Buy Here:

https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/90856/fable-plant-based-braised-beef

]]>d5988abf-7c97-454c-8e48-ac8a7d0cbf2bTue, 23 Jun 2020 19:30:00 +110001:09:20falsefull1551Co-founder of Shoes of Prey has started a new company, Fable. Fable sells braised beef. With one caveat, the main ingredient is shiitake mushrooms. Michael Fox was a co-founder of Shoes of Prey - the business raised $30m, hired 100s of employees and was on a tear to give shoe lovers the chance to design their own shoes. In 2018 the business shut its doors. Shoes of Prey was hugely ambitious and Michael and his co founders Jodie and Mike, almost pulled it off! While working on Shoes of Prey as the co-founder and CEO, Michael read a book that would change his eating habits forever and unbeknownst to him, set him on the course of his next startup, Fable. The team at Blackbird is absolutely thrilled Michael dared to go again on another startup! In this episode we’ll hear from Michael on how this discovery turned into co-founding Fable, a plant based meats company that uses mushrooms to create alternative protein, like braised beef. We’ll hear about the magical properties of mushrooms and what lessons he’s leaning on from his Shoes of Prey journey. Blackbird’s Partner Rick Baker will share what stood out during Fable’s pitch, what's defensive about Fable’s business model and why Blackbird is excited to be working with Fable. And finally, Co-founder Jim Fuller will share his favourite Fable recipe and go-to mushrooms. Key Notes: “Society has lost the plot” when it comes to animal agriculture. Learn why. Mushroom meat can beat it’s animal equivalent. How? Heston Blumenthal describes Fable as “delicious, versatile and natural slow cooked meat alternative.” What lessons from Shoes of Prey apply to Fable's supply chain, R&D investment and manufacturing processes. Blackbird co-founder and Partner describes what's defensive about Fable’s business model. How to cook a Texan braised beef speciality using mushrooms. Buy Here: https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/90856/fable-plant-based-braised-beefChanging the Food Game with George & TimVow's mission is building a better food system with more delicious, sustainable, equitable and interesting options. They are resurrecting past culinary delights long forgotten by history via synthetic biology, and in essence, reinventing food from the ground up.




Tim and George are two scrappy founders who show anything is possible with the right drive and determination. If they are successful in their mission, Vow will become a cellular-agriculture powerhouse with many brands under their umbrella.




Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviews: George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, co founders of Vow, and Samantha Wong, partner at Blackbird.




Key topics covered:

1. The next agricultural revolution
2. Science meets automation behind Vow’s approach
3. Inside look into how Vow made a proof of concept with $60K instead of millions of dollars
4. The software principles helping Vow recreate a new category of food
5. Culture and leadership when working from a lab
6. Why farmers won’t be displaced from the next agricultural revolution






The best of Tim and George:

• “We've seen the ethical problems, environmental problems, and most recently the opportunity for viruses to jump from animal, to animal, to human and the huge consequences of global pandemics that come from animals.”
• “We're able to re-imagine what's possible and have exciting new flavours and totally different foods to what we've been producing using traditional agriculture.”
• What do we bring to this? It was that imagination. It was that idea that we don't have to think about this and the terms that our ancestors did. And we can start to build for a future where we don't associate animals and meat anymore.
• “10 years from now, if you walk into the supermarket or a restaurant, no matter which country you're in, you're going to have an option of eating cultured meat.”
• “Over time it’s going to become the dominant category because you have all of the advantages of animal products without any of the disadvantages of animal production.”
• “We were going out and acquiring biopsies by calling up farms and doing crazy stuff and almost getting in trouble with the law and the process.”
• “George and I self-funded that whole thing...for about $60,000 Australian dollars, we got to our first proof of concept. That's generally how much you would spend on one or two pieces of equipment in the lab.”
• “We wanted to prove that not only could you do it and it could be done, but also that two people with relatively basic science backgrounds could pick something up like that, leverage the incredible intelligence of people around them and just apply pure hustle and get it started.”
• “The cost of the inputs for cultured meat are going to drop precipitously and as they do the cost of manufacturing infrastructure will drop as well.”
• “We’re creating a house of brands that is driven by a product-market fit engine with human-centered design principles underlying that.”
• “We focus on building up individuals to be their best selves. It's creating the team that we dreamed of, and it's allowing the people on our team to grow and be so much better than they even imagined.”
• “We want a future where people see the unveiling of a new food in the same way that they think about an iPhone.”
• “We have an opportunity right now at the nexus of this next kind of agricultural revolution to be the country that supports that innovation. And so we have this really rich, massive, massive opportunity to increase the Australian GDP around this brand new technology.”
...]]>Vow's mission is building a better food system with more delicious, sustainable, equitable and interesting options. They are resurrecting past culinary delights long forgotten by history via synthetic biology, and in essence, reinventing food from the ground up.




Tim and George are two scrappy founders who show anything is possible with the right drive and determination. If they are successful in their mission, Vow will become a cellular-agriculture powerhouse with many brands under their umbrella.




Don't forget to subscribe.




Episode interviews: George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, co founders of Vow, and Samantha Wong, partner at Blackbird.




Key topics covered:

1. The next agricultural revolution
2. Science meets automation behind Vow’s approach
3. Inside look into how Vow made a proof of concept with $60K instead of millions of dollars
4. The software principles helping Vow recreate a new category of food
5. Culture and leadership when working from a lab
6. Why farmers won’t be displaced from the next agricultural revolution






The best of Tim and George:

• “We've seen the ethical problems, environmental problems, and most recently the opportunity for viruses to jump from animal, to animal, to human and the huge consequences of global pandemics that come from animals.”
• “We're able to re-imagine what's possible and have exciting new flavours and totally different foods to what we've been producing using traditional agriculture.”
• What do we bring to this? It was that imagination. It was that idea that we don't have to think about this and the terms that our ancestors did. And we can start to build for a future where we don't associate animals and meat anymore.
• “10 years from now, if you walk into the supermarket or a restaurant, no matter which country you're in, you're going to have an option of eating cultured meat.”
• “Over time it’s going to become the dominant category because you have all of the advantages of animal products without any of the disadvantages of animal production.”
• “We were going out and acquiring biopsies by calling up farms and doing crazy stuff and almost getting in trouble with the law and the process.”
• “George and I self-funded that whole thing...for about $60,000 Australian dollars, we got to our first proof of concept. That's generally how much you would spend on one or two pieces of equipment in the lab.”
• “We wanted to prove that not only could you do it and it could be done, but also that two people with relatively basic science backgrounds could pick something up like that, leverage the incredible intelligence of people around them and just apply pure hustle and get it started.”
• “The cost of the inputs for cultured meat are going to drop precipitously and as they do the cost of manufacturing infrastructure will drop as well.”
• “We’re creating a house of brands that is driven by a product-market fit engine with human-centered design principles underlying that.”
• “We focus on building up individuals to be their best selves. It's creating the team that we dreamed of, and it's allowing the people on our team to grow and be so much better than they even imagined.”
• “We want a future where people see the unveiling of a new food in the same way that they think about an iPhone.”
• “We have an opportunity right now at the nexus of this next kind of agricultural revolution to be the country that supports that innovation. And so we have this really rich, massive, massive opportunity to increase the Australian GDP around this brand new technology.”






Samantha Wong on Vow:

]]>3bb83541-7659-4f5d-8a3f-3682bcc9856eTue, 09 Jun 2020 20:27:00 +110001:02:38falsefull1441Vow's mission is building a better food system with more delicious, sustainable, equitable and interesting options. They are resurrecting past culinary delights long forgotten by history via synthetic biology, and in essence, reinventing food from the ground up. Tim and George are two scrappy founders who show anything is possible with the right drive and determination. If they are successful in their mission, Vow will become a cellular-agriculture powerhouse with many brands under their umbrella. Don't forget to subscribe. Episode interviews: George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, co founders of Vow, and Samantha Wong, partner at Blackbird. Key topics covered: The next agricultural revolution Science meets automation behind Vow’s approach Inside look into how Vow made a proof of concept with $60K instead of millions of dollars The software principles helping Vow recreate a new category of food Culture and leadership when working from a lab Why farmers won’t be displaced from the next agricultural revolution The best of Tim and George: “We've seen the ethical problems, environmental problems, and most recently the opportunity for viruses to jump from animal, to animal, to human and the huge consequences of global pandemics that come from animals.” “We're able to re-imagine what's possible and have exciting new flavours and totally different foods to what we've been producing using traditional agriculture.” What do we bring to this? It was that imagination. It was that idea that we don't have to think about this and the terms that our ancestors did. And we can start to build for a future where we don't associate animals and meat anymore. “10 years from now, if you walk into the supermarket or a restaurant, no matter which country you're in, you're going to have an option of eating cultured meat.” “Over time it’s going to become the dominant category because you have all of the advantages of animal products without any of the disadvantages of animal production.” “We were going out and acquiring biopsies by calling up farms and doing crazy stuff and almost getting in trouble with the law and the process.” “George and I self-funded that whole thing...for about $60,000 Australian dollars, we got to our first proof of concept. That's generally how much you would spend on one or two pieces of equipment in the lab.” “We wanted to prove that not only could you do it and it could be done, but also that two people with relatively basic science backgrounds could pick something up like that, leverage the incredible intelligence of people around them and just apply pure hustle and get it started.” “The cost of the inputs for cultured meat are going to drop precipitously and as they do the cost of manufacturing infrastructure will drop as well.” “We’re creating a house of brands that is driven by a product-market fit engine with human-centered design principles underlying that.” “We focus on building up individuals to be their best selves. It's creating the team that we dreamed of, and it's allowing the people on our team to grow and be so much better than they even imagined.” “We want a future where people see the unveiling of a new food in the same way that they think about an iPhone.” “We have an opportunity right now at the nexus of this next kind of agricultural revolution to be the country that supports that innovation. And so we have this really rich, massive, massive opportunity to increase the Australian GDP around this brand new technology.” Samantha Wong on Vow:The View From The Top with Flavia Tata NardiniFlavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit.




In the second episode of Wild Hearts, host Mason Yates speaks to Fleet Space co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth.




Key topics covered:

1. How the next industrial revolution will be in space.
2. The unique challenges facing space start-ups.
3. The small data revolution.
4. The importance of having a focused market.
5. What Fleet did to shorten their customer feedback loop.
6. Why a CEO has to be everywhere.






The best of Flavia Tata Nardini:

• "Focus is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the startup world.”
• “A lot of people talk about big data, we hated the word, it was just bullshit. So we called it a small data revolution. Just get a little piece of data. The smart data.”
• “The [space] industry has got ninety percent awareness of everything that’s deployed. They just make decisions in a way that is not right. We want to change this, we want to give [everyone] full visibility. The problem has always been that connectivity was not present or super expensive.”
• “We decided to fire all our customers that were tiny and focus like crazy in working with big energy companies and others.”
• “You need to be a believer, you need to believe [in your product] in the first five to six years like crazy.”
• “You cannot let people build you a product [and think] they will build it for you the way you wanted it. You have to be there. You have to do it. You have to show them the path.”






Niki Scevak on Flavia Tata Nardini and Fleet:

• “The ability to do something you could not do before to this huge industry, and to make it a hundred X cheaper was incredibly exciting."
• “As much as it was about space, it was about the opportunity to build a telecommunications network for a tiny amount of money.”
• “When you compare space startups to software startups, the disadvantages are around feedback loops."
• “How Flavia in particular has wrangled people from around the world … I think it’s just incredible coordination and project management to get things to happen with not a lot of money and certainly with not a lot of structure."
• “You have to divorce the outcome of something from the weighted probability of doing it.”
• “You need to keep shooting. Luck is a process, you have to expose yourself to be lucky.”

]]>Flavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit.




In the second episode of Wild Hearts, host Mason Yates speaks to Fleet Space co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth.




Key topics covered:

1. How the next industrial revolution will be in space.
2. The unique challenges facing space start-ups.
3. The small data revolution.
4. The importance of having a focused market.
5. What Fleet did to shorten their customer feedback loop.
6. Why a CEO has to be everywhere.






The best of Flavia Tata Nardini:

• "Focus is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the startup world.”
• “A lot of people talk about big data, we hated the word, it was just bullshit. So we called it a small data revolution. Just get a little piece of data. The smart data.”
• “The [space] industry has got ninety percent awareness of everything that’s deployed. They just make decisions in a way that is not right. We want to change this, we want to give [everyone] full visibility. The problem has always been that connectivity was not present or super expensive.”
• “We decided to fire all our customers that were tiny and focus like crazy in working with big energy companies and others.”
• “You need to be a believer, you need to believe [in your product] in the first five to six years like crazy.”
• “You cannot let people build you a product [and think] they will build it for you the way you wanted it. You have to be there. You have to do it. You have to show them the path.”






Niki Scevak on Flavia Tata Nardini and Fleet:

• “The ability to do something you could not do before to this huge industry, and to make it a hundred X cheaper was incredibly exciting."
• “As much as it was about space, it was about the opportunity to build a telecommunications network for a tiny amount of money.”
• “When you compare space startups to software startups, the disadvantages are around feedback loops."
• “How Flavia in particular has wrangled people from around the world … I think it’s just incredible coordination and project management to get things to happen with not a lot of money and certainly with not a lot of structure."
• “You have to divorce the outcome of something from the weighted probability of doing it.”
• “You need to keep shooting. Luck is a process, you have to expose yourself to be lucky.”

]]>40fdcdf8-1447-4fbf-bf7e-1e59e118d65fMon, 25 May 2020 19:30:00 +110042:08falsefull1331Flavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit. In the second episode of Wild Hearts, host Mason Yates speaks to Fleet Space co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth. Key topics covered: How the next industrial revolution will be in space. The unique challenges facing space start-ups. The small data revolution. The importance of having a focused market. What Fleet did to shorten their customer feedback loop. Why a CEO has to be everywhere. The best of Flavia Tata Nardini: "Focus is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the startup world.” “A lot of people talk about big data, we hated the word, it was just bullshit. So we called it a small data revolution. Just get a little piece of data. The smart data.” “The [space] industry has got ninety percent awareness of everything that’s deployed. They just make decisions in a way that is not right. We want to change this, we want to give [everyone] full visibility. The problem has always been that connectivity was not present or super expensive.” “We decided to fire all our customers that were tiny and focus like crazy in working with big energy companies and others.” “You need to be a believer, you need to believe [in your product] in the first five to six years like crazy.” “You cannot let people build you a product [and think] they will build it for you the way you wanted it. You have to be there. You have to do it. You have to show them the path.” Niki Scevak on Flavia Tata Nardini and Fleet: “The ability to do something you could not do before to this huge industry, and to make it a hundred X cheaper was incredibly exciting." “As much as it was about space, it was about the opportunity to build a telecommunications network for a tiny amount of money.” “When you compare space startups to software startups, the disadvantages are around feedback loops." “How Flavia in particular has wrangled people from around the world … I think it’s just incredible coordination and project management to get things to happen with not a lot of money and certainly with not a lot of structure." “You have to divorce the outcome of something from the weighted probability of doing it.” “You need to keep shooting. Luck is a process, you have to expose yourself to be lucky.”Earn The Right To Exist with Tim DoyleTim Doyle, co-founder of seed-stage company Eucalyptus, has spent $35M across political campaigns, mattresses and now healthcare. Before Eucalyptus, Tim was the Head of Marketing at Koala.




In this conversation, Tim talks about how he allocates capital, how Eucalyptus captures attention, where to extract value where others can’t see and how to acquire customers.




Later on in this episode, you’ll hear from Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Ventures. He was one of the very first believers in Eucalyptus and he’ll provide an investors lens on what others can learn from Eucalyptus.




Key topics covered:

1. The problem with Direct to Consumer companies.
2. The importance of GTM focus in an Australian context.
3. Ways you can allocate capital as a non technical founder.
4. How to unlock talent in your organisation.
5. Why you should spend 10% of your monthly marketing spend on testing.
6. The biggest fundamental shift in customer acquisition, advertising and branding in the last decade.






The best of Tim Doyle:

• “In Australia, there aren’t a huge number of Venture back-able consumer product opportunities, there’s just not that many billion dollar product opportunities, but there's a lot of 50 to 100 million dollar ones that more or less exist on the same infrastructure.”
• “What’s the actual thing you’re going to earn the right to exist on to begin with and how are you going to talk about that? If you can’t do that, you’ll never even get in. Do something dumb and focused and deliver on it really well, build your business around that and earn the right to do other stuff.”
• “Price the externalities of a staff member to understand their true value.”
• “The shorter the distance between your junior dev. and the customer the better the decisions that junior developer will make.”
• “The gap between designer and customer is as short as possible.”
• “Branding is iterative.”
• “In a world where feedback is so real, fast and clear, sitting around and psychoanalysing your customers and thinking about what the best piece of creative for them is, is a complete waste of time. You may as well just increase the speed at which you test and then back the winners extremely hard and trust the iterative system that you’ve built to continue to learn and get better at acquiring customers over time.”
• “A media model is constantly hungry.”
• “You’re always value investing. Every decision you make is, ‘Can I extract more value out of this than I have to pay for it?’ It's super true in media buying. TV /Advertising companies don’t understand the price of their own inventory because they negotiate over lunch. If you have a better system for deriving value than they have, then you can extract the value they can’t see.”






Nick Crocker on Tim Doyle

• “Tim was the best marketer and marketing thinker that I’d met in the time I had been investing.”
• “Eucalyptus is an anomaly in that they did everything they said they would and that's rare.”
• “The thing that I always felt with Tim, and that I know that Niki felt the first time he met Tim, was that he was an original thinker. And there is very little original thought in the world, period.”
• “When you learn something new, really new and unique from someone, it's just a magical moment in this job.”

]]>Tim Doyle, co-founder of seed-stage company Eucalyptus, has spent $35M across political campaigns, mattresses and now healthcare. Before Eucalyptus, Tim was the Head of Marketing at Koala.




In this conversation, Tim talks about how he allocates capital, how Eucalyptus captures attention, where to extract value where others can’t see and how to acquire customers.




Later on in this episode, you’ll hear from Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Ventures. He was one of the very first believers in Eucalyptus and he’ll provide an investors lens on what others can learn from Eucalyptus.




Key topics covered:

1. The problem with Direct to Consumer companies.
2. The importance of GTM focus in an Australian context.
3. Ways you can allocate capital as a non technical founder.
4. How to unlock talent in your organisation.
5. Why you should spend 10% of your monthly marketing spend on testing.
6. The biggest fundamental shift in customer acquisition, advertising and branding in the last decade.






The best of Tim Doyle:

• “In Australia, there aren’t a huge number of Venture back-able consumer product opportunities, there’s just not that many billion dollar product opportunities, but there's a lot of 50 to 100 million dollar ones that more or less exist on the same infrastructure.”
• “What’s the actual thing you’re going to earn the right to exist on to begin with and how are you going to talk about that? If you can’t do that, you’ll never even get in. Do something dumb and focused and deliver on it really well, build your business around that and earn the right to do other stuff.”
• “Price the externalities of a staff member to understand their true value.”
• “The shorter the distance between your junior dev. and the customer the better the decisions that junior developer will make.”
• “The gap between designer and customer is as short as possible.”
• “Branding is iterative.”
• “In a world where feedback is so real, fast and clear, sitting around and psychoanalysing your customers and thinking about what the best piece of creative for them is, is a complete waste of time. You may as well just increase the speed at which you test and then back the winners extremely hard and trust the iterative system that you’ve built to continue to learn and get better at acquiring customers over time.”
• “A media model is constantly hungry.”
• “You’re always value investing. Every decision you make is, ‘Can I extract more value out of this than I have to pay for it?’ It's super true in media buying. TV /Advertising companies don’t understand the price of their own inventory because they negotiate over lunch. If you have a better system for deriving value than they have, then you can extract the value they can’t see.”






Nick Crocker on Tim Doyle

• “Tim was the best marketer and marketing thinker that I’d met in the time I had been investing.”
• “Eucalyptus is an anomaly in that they did everything they said they would and that's rare.”
• “The thing that I always felt with Tim, and that I know that Niki felt the first time he met Tim, was that he was an original thinker. And there is very little original thought in the world, period.”
• “When you learn something new, really new and unique from someone, it's just a magical moment in this job.”

]]>613a081b-0146-49af-9c82-a96c216f98a7Mon, 11 May 2020 20:00:00 +110059:03falsefull1221Tim Doyle, co-founder of seed-stage company Eucalyptus, has spent $35M across political campaigns, mattresses and now healthcare. Before Eucalyptus, Tim was the Head of Marketing at Koala. In this conversation, Tim talks about how he allocates capital, how Eucalyptus captures attention, where to extract value where others can’t see and how to acquire customers. Later on in this episode, you’ll hear from Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Ventures. He was one of the very first believers in Eucalyptus and he’ll provide an investors lens on what others can learn from Eucalyptus. Key topics covered: The problem with Direct to Consumer companies. The importance of GTM focus in an Australian context. Ways you can allocate capital as a non technical founder. How to unlock talent in your organisation. Why you should spend 10% of your monthly marketing spend on testing. The biggest fundamental shift in customer acquisition, advertising and branding in the last decade. The best of Tim Doyle: “In Australia, there aren’t a huge number of Venture back-able consumer product opportunities, there’s just not that many billion dollar product opportunities, but there's a lot of 50 to 100 million dollar ones that more or less exist on the same infrastructure.” “What’s the actual thing you’re going to earn the right to exist on to begin with and how are you going to talk about that? If you can’t do that, you’ll never even get in. Do something dumb and focused and deliver on it really well, build your business around that and earn the right to do other stuff.” “Price the externalities of a staff member to understand their true value.” “The shorter the distance between your junior dev. and the customer the better the decisions that junior developer will make.” “The gap between designer and customer is as short as possible.” “Branding is iterative.” “In a world where feedback is so real, fast and clear, sitting around and psychoanalysing your customers and thinking about what the best piece of creative for them is, is a complete waste of time. You may as well just increase the speed at which you test and then back the winners extremely hard and trust the iterative system that you’ve built to continue to learn and get better at acquiring customers over time.” “A media model is constantly hungry.” “You’re always value investing. Every decision you make is, ‘Can I extract more value out of this than I have to pay for it?’ It's super true in media buying. TV /Advertising companies don’t understand the price of their own inventory because they negotiate over lunch. If you have a better system for deriving value than they have, then you can extract the value they can’t see.” Nick Crocker on Tim Doyle “Tim was the best marketer and marketing thinker that I’d met in the time I had been investing.” “Eucalyptus is an anomaly in that they did everything they said they would and that's rare.” “The thing that I always felt with Tim, and that I know that Niki felt the first time he met Tim, was that he was an original thinker. And there is very little original thought in the world, period.” “When you learn something new, really new and unique from someone, it's just a magical moment in this job.”The wildest of ideas, right at the beginningA preview of what's to come.




Wild Hearts is a podcast dedicated to sharing the real stories of founders - the passionate few taking giant leaps forward.




In this series, we’ll uncover the stories of founders navigating their way through the often messy and difficult ups and downs of building a business. We’ll share lessons from founders who are knocking at the door of success. Founders who are on the front line of innovation. The ones in the weeds with their customers, the learn it alls. The founders with laser focused, unrelenting ambitions.




There’s a bias in covering the success stories of founders -in telling the stories of the big winners after they’ve done the hard yards.




You won’t find that in this podcast.




What you will find are stories of grit and potential. Founders running at milestones, fast. You’ll discover the ones that move the fastest, win. If you want to hear from those founders, then this podcast is for you.




We’ll also hear from the investors who have backed them. The first believers, who are trying to earn a court side seat to the best business stories of our time. Each episode, these investors will share their everything from first impressions of the founders, to what made their story worth investing in.




At Blackbird, we believe those in the front row seat have the best view of the game, and the right context to make great investment decisions.

]]>A preview of what's to come.




Wild Hearts is a podcast dedicated to sharing the real stories of founders - the passionate few taking giant leaps forward.




In this series, we’ll uncover the stories of founders navigating their way through the often messy and difficult ups and downs of building a business. We’ll share lessons from founders who are knocking at the door of success. Founders who are on the front line of innovation. The ones in the weeds with their customers, the learn it alls. The founders with laser focused, unrelenting ambitions.




There’s a bias in covering the success stories of founders -in telling the stories of the big winners after they’ve done the hard yards.




You won’t find that in this podcast.




What you will find are stories of grit and potential. Founders running at milestones, fast. You’ll discover the ones that move the fastest, win. If you want to hear from those founders, then this podcast is for you.




We’ll also hear from the investors who have backed them. The first believers, who are trying to earn a court side seat to the best business stories of our time. Each episode, these investors will share their everything from first impressions of the founders, to what made their story worth investing in.




At Blackbird, we believe those in the front row seat have the best view of the game, and the right context to make great investment decisions.

]]>b19f387e-d107-45fb-b8f1-7de58e450f0eThu, 30 Apr 2020 06:54:00 +110002:00falsefull1111A preview of what's to come. Wild Hearts is a podcast dedicated to sharing the real stories of founders - the passionate few taking giant leaps forward. In this series, we’ll uncover the stories of founders navigating their way through the often messy and difficult ups and downs of building a business. We’ll share lessons from founders who are knocking at the door of success. Founders who are on the front line of innovation. The ones in the weeds with their customers, the learn it alls. The founders with laser focused, unrelenting ambitions. There’s a bias in covering the success stories of founders -in telling the stories of the big winners after they’ve done the hard yards. You won’t find that in this podcast. What you will find are stories of grit and potential. Founders running at milestones, fast. You’ll discover the ones that move the fastest, win. If you want to hear from those founders, then this podcast is for you. We’ll also hear from the investors who have backed them. The first believers, who are trying to earn a court side seat to the best business stories of our time. Each episode, these investors will share their everything from first impressions of the founders, to what made their story worth investing in. At Blackbird, we believe those in the front row seat have the best view of the game, and the right context to make great investment decisions.