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 softw...
Jul 11, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, t...
Jun 27, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jun 13, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 anybod...
Dec 13, 2022•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Nov 22, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 accompli...
Oct 25, 2022•49 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Oct 11, 2022•56 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast 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 hu...
Sep 27, 2022•47 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast 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.c...
Sep 13, 2022•47 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast 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 cel...
Aug 30, 2022•46 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast A Managing Masterclass with Lauren Humphrey, co-founder of The Mintable The 5 dimensions of great people management Why soft skills are key (and aren't taught elsewhere) How the AI tool The Mintable is building assists managers in real time What the first thing each manager should do is How to let people go The Mintable gives managers the training, tools and community they need to succeed. Episode Highlights from Lauren: “50% of us will leave a job directly because of a manager, and one study fo...
Aug 16, 2022•53 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast S3 E1: Key Insights Covered 🧚♂️ ✅ Jarrod’s best operating lessons at UberEats. ✅ Why product-market fit is the fundamentally wrong approach. ✅ How to build virality into your product. ✅ When Jarrod knew to leave UberEats to build Blinq full-time. Blinq is reimagining how professionals connect. Want to learn more? Read Blackbird's investment memo is here. Check out Blinq’s job openings here. Highlights from S3 E1 of Wild Hearts with Blinq Founder Jarrod Webb "[Uber] really helped me set the sta...
Aug 02, 2022•40 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Harrison.ai is partnering with leading healthcare companies to build AI products at never-before-seen speeds in the industry 🤓 “If you look at the health system across the world, inequality and the capacity of the system are going to be the biggest problems of our time.” “The 20th century in medicine was the century of the molecule… but I believe that the 21st century is going to be about zooming out and looking at the healthcare system as a whole.” Dr. Aengus Tran is on a mission to improve th...
Dec 15, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast 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”. High...
Nov 09, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Oct 12, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast 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, abund...
Aug 24, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Blackbird Key topics covered: The challenges and opportunities of healthcare Which experiments are helping Eucaly...
Jul 14, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast 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 C...
Dec 02, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast 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 he...
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Nov 04, 2020•1 hr•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast “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....
Oct 21, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast 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 he...
Oct 07, 2020•59 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Sep 16, 2020•1 hr•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast 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,...
Sep 02, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Aug 19, 2020•54 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Future-Proof Workplaces with Alex & Luke from XY Sense In 2016, Melbourne-based entrepreneurs, Alex Birch, and Luke Murray decided to start a company to solve the problem of office space utilisation. "We came to this realisation that large-enterprise organisations spend so much money on their space and it's very challenging for them to understand exactly how well this space is being used," says Alex. This realisation led to the founding of XY Sense, a sensor and an artificial intelligence platfo...
Jul 28, 2020•56 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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 i...
Jul 07, 2020•1 hr•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 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 th...
Jun 23, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast 
