Wild Hearts

Reshaping education and employment, with Tom Brunskill, Co-Founder of Forage 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"​

Unlocking a new way of living with Toby Thomas-Smith, Co-Founder of Kiki 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.”

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Searching the way we think with Jesse Clark, co-founder of Marqo ✅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.

EdApp is changing workplace education and training with accessible and engaging mobile learning which leverages microlearning and gamification. By using a freemium model, and through their partnerships with NGOs such as the United Nations, EdApp is empowering and educating millions of learners around the world. ✅ 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.”

Welcome back to another episode of Wild Hearts. One Blackbird described this week's episode as ‘My favourite episode yet. Laura is incredibly charismatic, I was riveted from start to finish!' 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”

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

The step-by-step guide to building a marketplace with Levi Fawcett, Co-Founder of Partly.  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

Changing the conversation on sexual wellness with Lucy Wark, founder of Normal (live Sunrise edition) ✅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.”

The tipping point of believability with Mary Minas and Freya Berwick, co-founders of Sense Of Self ✅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.

Transforming the world's experience of work with Samantha Gadd, co-founder of Excellent ✅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.”

Building a 100 year company with Ross Chaldecott, co-founder of Kinde 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

Unleashing your Zilla with Hartley Pike, co-founder of Sitemate ✅ 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

Unlocking the capacity of human minds with Duncan Anderson, co-founder of Edrolo ✅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.”

Inventia's mission is to scale the creation of human tissue. This startup is creating some of the most powerful tools for advanced medical discovery today, and today we dive into how Inventia has been built from the ground up. Why an agile mindset was a “game changer” for building teams Breaking up a long term goal into smaller “units of progress”. How Inventia teams share responsibility for outcomes, not tasks. 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

A Managing Masterclass with Lauren Humphrey, co-founder of The MintableThe 5 dimensions of great people managementWhy soft skills are key (and aren't taught elsewhere)How the AI tool The Mintable is building assists managers in real timeWhat the first thing each manager should do isHow to let people goThe 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/3JVRo9kLauren Humphrey's Linkedin:https://bit.ly/3K5nKi0Get in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below: https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq

S3 E1: Key Insights Covered

Harrison.ai is partnering with leading healthcare companies to build AI products at never-before-seen speeds in the industry

Bardee is reshaping the global food system.Today we speak with a former architect turned co-founder CEO, Phoebe Gardner. She is the definition of a Wild Heart, she's ambitious, a learn it all, resilient and put simply, an incredible person and friend.Today, she will reveal why Bardee's mission is important, how Bardee transforms food waste into high quality products using insects, the stories from their first facility, what it took to raise the stakes and move to a facility 30x larger than their first one, running at incredible speed while holding herself to the highest value standards and so much more.We also speak with Nick Crocker, a general partner at Blackbird and hear about Bardee's secret insight into food waste, his investment logic when times were tough amidst COVID, Bardee's wonderful business model and what makes Phoebe a Wild Heart.See Bardee's job board here:https://bardee.com/join-bardee/

FL0 supercharges back-end engineers with the power of a low-code format, letting developers build 20x faster. The team is pioneering a new category in software engineering, “Dev Acceleration as a Service”."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

Building the best teams of the future means celebrating the silent heroes who hold teams together, understanding who isn't receiving the support they need, and practicing diversity, equity, and inclusion intelligently “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/careersHighlights from Season 2 Episode 3 of Wild Hearts with Multitudes co-founder Lauren Peate and Blackbird partner Samantha WongWhat 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.

Welcome to the second coming of Vow! Today, we speak with George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, co-founders of Vow, as well as Ellen Dinsmoor, Vow's Head of Operations, and Samantha Wong, a General Partner at Blackbird Ventures.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

Welcome back to Season Two of the Wild Hearts podcast. To kick off the season, we're speaking to our very first guest on this podcast: Tim Doyle, co-founder of Eucalyptus, a startup that dreams, builds and runs digital healthcare companies.Want to join Eucalyptus? Find the jobs board here.Episode interviewees: Tim Doyle, co-founder of Eucalyptus and Nick Crocker, General Partner at BlackbirdKey topics covered:The challenges and opportunities of healthcareWhich experiments are helping Eucalyptus scale beyond 100 peopleHow the company's ambition has grown over the past yearThe 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."

In the midst of a global pandemic, company culture has never been more important. Teams are spread out over countries and cities, navigating zoom calls, slack channels and calendar invites. In this climate, the mental well-being and performance of employees is pushed to its limits.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 momentsData insights into company culture around the worldHow Blackbird has evolved to invest in larger companiesThe 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 things"The best of Nick Crocker: "Culture is a competitive differentiator for a company""Self awareness is one of the most important personality traits in solving problems""No one was taught how to manage""The courage to be vulnerable is a rare but powerful company value"

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 Craig Piggot 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 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 honestyThe future of farmingWhy a bottom-up hierarchy allows you to move fasterThe 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."

Startmate is the epicentre for startup ambition across Australia and New Zealand. Over the last decade, they’ve built a community of the most ambitious founders, operators and investors.“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 communityWhy the best founders are customer-obsessedWhat the best operators and investors do to help startupsThe 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.”

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 BankCreating a superstar engineering teamProduct management at UpThe 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 people could wear on a t-shirt”"One end of the scale is like, don't make it too painful. But the other end is like, can you make this actually be fun?”"It's all good to have this master plan, but you can't ship that on day one. You need to find a way to incrementally build that and acknowledge that you might not end up building what you thought you were going to build on day one."

“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 entrepreneursThe changing healthcare landscapeProactive, not reactive, medical treatmentThe 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 all across the world.”"We found the further you are away from the hospitals, the more likely you are to probably need them due to health inequality and socioeconomic issues.”Tip Piumsomboon on Vexev: “With healthcare, there's a lot of variables. Going into the market and understanding the regulatory part of it, the IP part of it, the different stakeholders - it’s not like a software product where you can just launch it on the internet and see who downloads it. It’s a lot more systematic.”"They did what they said they would do in the space of two months.”"When things are hard, it gives me a lot of comfort that John and Eamonn have each other to talk it through and it helps them make better decisions versus dwelling in their heads about it.”"The challenge, as with every startup, is going from building a product to building a team. How do you bring another two or three or 20 or 50 other people into the circle? And how do you create a culture that allows everyone's voices to be heard?”“Being on someone's board is kind of like being on someone's team, and the most important part of the team is trust.”

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 energySunDrive’s vision, product and business modelVince and David’s founding storyThe 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.”

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 FreightFishEpisode 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 likeTeam Building in New ZealandRobots as a ServiceThe 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 boatsSamantha 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.”

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 DovetailEpisode 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 researchersDovetail's product-led strategyDovetail’s winning recipe for customer growthThe 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."Nick Crocker on Dovetail: "If you can build a company that grows in proportion to new users, their usage or passion for your product, that changes the unit economics of your business entirely.""Instead of pumping dollars into sales and marketing, you pump more dollars into product improvements, and that scales way further and way longer and way more efficiently than sales and marketing.""There is no hack to their incredible growth except consistency of excellent execution over a multiple-year period.""I love that Dovetail is trying to be the default community for researchers to come and learn from their peers and grow and really find a home.""It's just this constant, relentless drumbeat of shipping, and that's a cultural thing. It's core to who Dovetail is and in particular to who the founders are.""I think they could go up against any product team in the world right now."LinksWhat I'm looking for in SaaS (Author, Rick Baker)How to build a great productCareers at Dovetail

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-ModeEpisode 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-ModeWhy healthcare data should be in the public sphereHow See-Mode produces health reports in minutesImproving clinicians work lifeSee-Mode's product journey and milestonesWhere is See-Mode heading with their Series AThe 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, both of them would be treated with a single data point.""The human brain by nature is systematically biased, and this is the case for the clinicians as well. The way your doctor interprets your scan very much depends on the past 5,000 cases they have seen."Niki on See-Mode"AI has allowed computers to see like a human, and to interpret imaging like a human, so all of these interesting categories of AI investment, in the beginning, are around industries that require the solving of images.""A wave of problems that we've gravitated towards at Blackbird is healthcare diagnostics and the ability of software to help humans diagnose medical conditions.""The idea of investing in healthcare was one of our anti-investment themes when we started Blackbird in 2012. We said we'd never invest in a healthcare company, but, of course, technology will lead you in fresh directions.""See-Mode's product is so transformational. When the product is so transformational, when it completely reinvents the radiologist’s day, when it completely reinvents the user of the product's work life, that makes it worthy because it is such a leap forward versus an incremental one.""The world truly is divided into people who do things and people who talk about things. With such a small amount of capital in their seed round, and such a small amount of time they went and built a wonderful product.""Sadaf single-handedly wrangled regulatory approval in a matter of months, they built a wonderful team in Melbourne full of talented engineers, and there were no complaints — it was just results, results, results."

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.

Future-Proof Workplaces with Alex & Luke from XY SenseIn 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 & LukeKey topics covered:Why a laser-focused mission winsHow accurate data can unlock employee productivity and effectivenessXY Sense’s use of ML, AI and real-time dataAlex and Luke's team-focused approach to company cultureHow XY Sense-enabled workspaces operate in a COVID-19 worldThe 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 our team and also with our customers and potential customers.""We prioritise rewarding our team when they have delivered versus rewarding individual delivery. We're all about helping each other out, delivering together, working towards that common goal."The best of Luke:"We knew the industry so well, we knew there was a market there, and we knew it was waiting for us.""We've seen the industry move from making ad-hoc decisions on hundreds of millions of dollars of commercial real estate to having a thirst for data to make smarter decisions.""Our sensor runs networks within the actual device that's deployed onsite; therefore, the only thing that leaves the device is anonymous XY coordinates.""Our data lets us show a real-time view of utilisation in action, and allows the customer to build trust in that data.""Marc Alexander (Blackbird portfolio founder and co-founder of Raine) is, in a way, one of the founding team members. We got him on board, and he helped us through some early stages of hiring the hardware team and figuring out exactly how to find a manufacturer."Nick on XY Sense:"Their depth of understanding of the problem and their clarity on the solution was so vivid.""The best version of understanding how your company needs to utilise their space is a complex, interesting problem that spans from architecture to behavioural science.""Real-time data has become the life and death literally for these companies.""My dream is that XY Sense sensors become the default way you track the utilisation of any space — whether it's interior designers, architects, committed commercial office spaces, governments, cities, our homes, our shared office spaces, cafes, or restaurants."

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 hiringStrategies for averaging 9/10 ratings with over 200,000 candidatesHow you can retain 96% of your employees after one yearWhy you should look for mission alignment over cultureKate's decision to step down as CEOKhyati’s decision to step upThe 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 employee churn.""Applied makes you judge an applicant on the quality of their answers and the questions that you ask.""My view of the world is that X years from now is that all hiring will be done on a blind hiring basis."Relevant Links:https://www.beapplied.com/

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

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:The next agricultural revolutionScience meets automation behind Vow’s approachInside look into how Vow made a proof of concept with $60K instead of millions of dollarsThe software principles helping Vow recreate a new category of foodCulture and leadership when working from a labWhy farmers won’t be displaced from the next agricultural revolutionThe 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:“I don’t think the existing paradigm of growing animals to eat them will still exist in 30, 40, or 50 years from now.”“The cost per pound wholesale of meat has been rising, which indicates that you cannot drive any more efficiency. It has just gotten as cheap as it can as a product, despite the best efforts of industrial agriculture.”“No one has ever had to grow tons of heart tissue before. It's a scale question, and one that I think the world really needs to answer now.”“[Tim and George] were very open and shared early and often about what they were thinking about doing. They took their own money and hustled their way to a biopsy and produced meat within a few months, which was just staggering.”“The fact that they did it without being sort of experts in the area just seemed to me to suggest that they would just learn-it-alls and whatever the challenge was that they encountered, they would just find a pass through.”“Right now I can't even test the product, it's illegal in Australia. That’s part of the bet that we’re taking.”“We're either going to be importers of it, or exporters of it. I would rather us be exporters, personally.”Head to Vow's website here. https://www.vowfood.com/

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: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.”

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.”

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.