Transparent Venture Capital by Tribe Global Ventures

Don, Aaron and Jack unpack a big week in venture, AI and building companies. Venture Downunder with Innovation Bay: pirate parties, poker, the Kill All The Puppies triage session (bridge, dilute, sell or fold), and why founder pitches at events should be three minutes, not ten. Canva blames frontier AI costs for a rare revenue downgrade: growth guidance cut from 30% to 20%, Canva AI 2.0 halted, in-house models to replace OpenAI and Veo 3, and why Tribe cancelled its Canva seats for Claude Design. Sovereign AI: Prof Anton Van Den Hengel's case for Australian capability. The only capability that survives is research, your advantage is momentum not checkpoints, and Anthropic engineers reckon they have nine to twelve months of coding left. HotDoc founder Ben Hurst steps away after 14 years: the maturity to recognise when your company needs a CEO and not a founder, and why the two energies are different jobs. Incumbents milking it: Don's Ansarada rant (pricing that scales with your data room, a 2007 interface, switching costs locked in by your deal risk framework), and Airtable reportedly selling for about $1 billion, 88% below peak, with founders wiped out by the preference stack. How 26-year-old Grace Brown built Andromeda into a $100 million robotics company, and the story of Abby the robot getting a couple dancing to their wedding song again after 20 years. Anti-portfolio goals: Vu Tran on why making a top VC's anti-portfolio is a benchmark, not a rejection. Ken Griffin on Citadel buying Sowood's $30 billion portfolio overnight: things come to those who wait, but only what's left by those who hustle. Sharts: data centre investment overtaking hotels and retail, Peter V'landys and NRL scoring, Federal Circuit Court general protections claims up 100% in three years, and EVs plus hybrids about to cross petrol and diesel in Australian vehicle sales. hello@tribeglobal.vc

In today's episode, I sit down with Kirstin Hunter, CEO of Birchal, the equity crowdfunding platform that, over 8 years since equity crowdfunding became legal in Australia, has facilitated more than $241 million across 338 successful crowd-sourced funding offers, from over 140,000 individual investments. We were also joined by Dom Pym, a significant shareholder in Birchal, who also co-founded Up, Australia's highest rated bank. Dom invests through his family office Euphemia, plus he's just launched Triple Bubble, Australia's first dedicated fintech fund. Now I recently became a shareholder in Birchal myself, which came out of a bus ride with Dom where he laid out why he keeps investing, the changes he's pushing for, and what a future looks like that resolves the issues investors in crowdfunding campaigns have experienced to date. Regular listeners will know we've talked about equity crowdfunding on Transparent VC a number of times. It's an industry still maturing, and it needs to solve a number of issues so it can better serve the founders and investors it's trying to connect. We think it has a role to play in the ecosystem and are keen to help get it right. That conversation on the bus with Dom led to a discussion with Kirstin, who'd not long taken over as CEO, and I felt there was good alignment on the issues that need to be resolved, so I wrote a cheque and here we are. We get into who crowd-sourced funding actually suits and who it doesn't, areas that have needed to be improved, and how angel, VC and crowdfunding can work together.

Matt James was employee number 22 at Virtual Gaming Worlds (VGW), joining as an early engineer when revenue was just beginning to land and rising to CTO. He scaled with the business through to roughly 1000 staff worldwide and over a $1Billion in annual revenue by the time he left, with VGW going on to post A$6.1B in revenue in FY24.  Today he is Co-founder and CTO at SupplyWise, a Perth-based B2B e-commerce platform for SME suppliers and retailers, and one of Australia's more vocal voices on production-grade agentic AI coding. This is a great episode, with key discussion points including:  What an inflection-point AI coding workflow actually looks like in production (not just MVPs). How a non-technical founder should evaluate engineering hires now. Practical strategy for upgrading legacy codebases and databases when an investor or director is pushing for pace. Where the moats are when code itself is becoming a commodity The SaaS investability question: small and medium SaaS may have a golden age, but venture-backable outliers get harder hello@tribeglobal.vc 

Stuart Clout founded Thedocyard at 3am on the floor of a Sydney law firm boardroom, listed it on the ASX the week before COVID locked down Australia, merged with Ansarada, and rode the combined business through to a $236m acquisition by Datasite. He joins Don and Aaron to unpack twelve years of B2B SaaS lessons, the deal mechanics, and what he wishes he had known sooner. Intro and origin story The 3am post-it note moment and the birth of Closing Rooms Top three lessons: founder problem fit, demos vs sales, the Mom Test The Gail Goodman talk that kept Stuart in the game $500 of coffees: the lead-gen tactic that beat everything else Anti-sales is the new sales Apathy, durability and becoming a verb The 2020 ASX listing one week before COVID The Ansarada merger: how the deal got done The Datasite acquisition: $236m, $2.50 per share, nine months of process The ACCC and policy frustrations Where Australian B2B SaaS should focus Founder mindset, fitness, family and "you can have everything, just not at the same time" Find Stuart hello@tribeglobal.vc   

Key links from this week's episode:  Agents leave you nowhere to hide.  Hockey Stick Advisory partnership revenue gap tool.  Morphless.com . Save 30% on your AWS bill.  Techvisa.com.au  VentureCrowd parent in administration.  hello@tribeglobal.vc   

  Michael Batko building in public.  Adam Said from Octopus on durability. Adam Said from Octopus on GTM. Shocks vs regime shifts.  

Our guest today is James Leathem , Founder and former CEO of VendorPanel.  Tribe was a proud investor in Vendor Panel until its exit to Accel-KKR in late 2024 and merger with Unimarket. This episode is a "playbook" for founders and investors alike of starting, scaling and exiting a B2B technology business. We hope you enjoy!  hello@tribeglobal.vc  

Albert and Chris break down the key take aways from another excellent report. A must listen and read for all founders and investors. You can read the full report here. 

In this week's episode:  We're back! Why patients and technology may do what the health system can't by Vu Tran. Don's latest addiction: Replit. Speed gets you a demo but not a quality product. Jense Admits he works 7 days a week, including holidays, in a constant state of anxiety, out of fear of going bankrupt. Sharts:   

In this week's ep: Where You Raise Matters. Culture Amp & SafetyCulture Writedown. EVP's $100M Fund. Sharts. hello@tribeglobal.vc 

In this week's episode: Episode 100: reflections from 100 episodes.  Blackbird funds change hands at steep discounts, rattling investors. How Australia's top VCs are rethinking startup moats. Sharts.   hello@tribeglobal.vc 

In this week's episode: OneMRI announces capital raise. Blackbird 2015 fund returns hurt. SEO continuing to be challenged by Chat. James Deck from Clevvi . Sharts

In this episode, Aaron and Don are joined by Chris Gillings of Cut Through Venture to understand the key insights from the Q2 2025 Australian Venture Capital Funding Report. We discuss: Funding outcomes. Whilst the quarter was disappointing, there is evidence to suggest there is a lot of activity occurring behind the scenes.  Valuations.  How Chris is seeing AI play out in early stage ventures. Lots more! hello@tribeglobal.vc

In this week's episode:  Gilmore Space launch.  Employment Hero sues Seek, an investor and rival, over platform access. Seek hits back in Employment Hero fight, implies misuse of data. UQ's vaccine victory. Square Peg backs its youngest ever founder in $2.1m Source raise. Sharts: ​​​​​​​hello@tribeglobal.vc 

In this week's episode: Facebook Meta hiring spree.  AI tools are not yet there.  AI usage a baseline expectation at Shopify.   “Coward founders”.  Don't know why ChatGPT is working.  Chief of Staff role is trying to solve the wrong problem.  To drive a tech boom, deal with property. Sharts:  ​​​​​​​hello@tribeglobal.vc