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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. 👇 Episode Highlights from Mary and Freya: “We have a motto, come as you are, take what you need. And we really stick with that.” “We built an audience in two ways… Building an audience through events, holding panels and getting experts together and having conversations about social connection, belonging, and our values, and from that we grew an audience as well as an incredible understanding of the ways in which people access these feelings and what they mean to our audience. And secondly, digital marketing.” “Our audience was everything to us. Because we’d built this audience, and then we were like, shit, we’ve got to put our money where our mouth is, no one is really believing in us, so we signed a lease.” “We got to the tipping point of believability. Before that we were treated like these two young girls with this big idea of a day spa. And we were like, no, it’s very different from that, and it was only once we had a site, we had customers, and we were absolutely obsessed with it because we’d put everything we have into it that we passed that point where people took us seriously.” “We thought about everything from the customer’s perspective, and the way that we thought about the customer was someone coming in quite vulnerable, and how we made them feel “held”, but having their boundaries positively pushed.” “It’s really key to our model to bring these curated, new experiences to people.”

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 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 found it takes 22 months for a direct report to recover physically and emotionally from the effects of a bad manager.” “The root of most hard conversations is that there wasn’t a clear expectation in place.” “The first thing you’ve got to do is define success. You have to know, at any given point, what success looks like for each of the people on your team. If you don’t, they will certainly not.” “At the Mintable we’ve got what we call the 5 dimensions of great management: Aware, Care, Prepare, Share and Dare.” “We call it strategic care: what are the key things that you need to learn about the people on your team to get the best out of them? Understand how someone likes to receive feedback, how they like to receive recognition.” Learn more about The Mintable: https://bit.ly/3JVRo9k Lauren Humphrey's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3K5nKi0 Get in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below: https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq

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 standard for what a generational company needs to do in terms of the output quality, the people that you hire and how you work." 🦄 The intersection of "Market | Product | Channel | Model fit is an incredible framework for thinking about how to build a generational company... Product-Market fit is not the right way to think about building anything." 🔥 “There are four factors that you need for virality. Firstly, you need a really short time to the “aha!” moment… Secondly, people need to be able to explain the product within one sentence... Thirdly, there needs to be a really broad value proposition… And finally, the product needs to get better the more of your network is on the product.” Businesses started reaching out, saying "hang on, we'll pay you" and Jarrod "realised [he] had a viral product with a bottoms-up SaaS component" to it. "After a few customers came onboard, I realised this actually has real traction, so I left Uber to work on this full time, and then grew a lot during 2021." 🐣 Get in contact with Mason to share feedback, ask questions or share a pitch deck here.

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 the standard of care for a million people every day. 💙 Saving a million lives a day with Dr. Aengus Tran and Samantha Wong Highlights from S2 E6 of our Wild Hearts podcast with harrison.ai co-founder Dr. Aengus Tran and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong: How harrison.ai built a product in 18 months that is now used for 1 in 4 chest x-rays in Australia 🤯 What Aengus learned from Vietnam's “Father of computer science.” 👨‍💻 The simple math behind the biggest problem of our century 😱 The inevitable future of the healthcare industry according to Samantha Wong 🤓

FL0 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 🧐 Finding product-market fit in 2021 🦸‍♀️ How FL0 is thinking about its GTM alongside pioneering a new category 🏃‍♀️ How to use fundraising to build a village of support around your startup 🏘 A framework for thinking about GTM right at the beginning. Here is the blog Tom & Mason referred to. See FL0's job openings here.

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/careers Highlights from Season 2 Episode 3 of Wild Hearts with Multitudes co-founder Lauren Peate and Blackbird partner Samantha Wong What Lauren learned about teamwork and culture from four years running a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy. How Multitudes found product-market fit and built culture into their team from day one. How to recognise the silent heroes in your teams who give feedback, mentorship, and improve everything. How leaders can embrace the uncomfortable to make meaningful change in workplaces. How a parallel fundraising process helps startups raise quicker.

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 Blackbird Key topics covered: The challenges and opportunities of healthcare Which experiments are helping Eucalyptus scale beyond 100 people How the company's ambition has grown over the past year The best of Tim Doyle: "If you can make medical information accessible and engaging, you can empower better decisions at a much earlier point. "If you don't maximise the amount of time that your organisation is fully stocked and ready to work on the problem that you're trying to solve at the hardest level, then you probably rob yourself of the chance to solve that problem by the time you next need to go back out to market" "One of the things about being a founder of a company is that you realise how much better people in your organisation are at most things than you are very quickly." "Our philosophy on marketing is that if you product enough stuff in enough channels, often enough, then you lower the cost of doing that, and then the best stuff will outperform the average stuff by a thousand percent." The best of Nick Crocker: "The execution is pretty spectacular. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's stunning to watch." "Visionary founders are most impactful when they're partnered with an operational psychopath...someone who's completely true, completely across everything and fearless in throwing themselves into unknown, dense, difficult to understand areas." Growing 10% in your first month is very different to growing 10% in your 24th month" "It's not just people buying ads. It's a growth engineering team...a resource allocation team in a really complex problem space."

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 moments Data insights into company culture around the world How Blackbird has evolved to invest in larger companies The best of Didier Elzinga: "Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled" "It's actually much harder to get people to care about your product than it is to build it" "Our mission is not to sell X thousand copies of software - selling X thousand copies of software is part of the way we deliver our mission" "You have to think about how your values can be weaponised" The best of Chloe Hamman: "People want to be in places where they can grow and develop, over and above a clear career path" "If you're not giving your employers clear job previews, they are more likely to leave" "The best managers check in on a weekly basis with their employees" "It's not about changing what your organisation does, it's about communicating more widely about why and how you are doing thi

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 honesty The future of farming Why a bottom-up hierarchy allows you to move faster The best of Craig Piggot: "Instead of thinking heaps about it, just got out there and do it. The tools humans have are so powerful - you can build, test and iterate pretty much anything." "Our vision is to unlock the connection between humans and animals for a better world." "Things unsaid are as bad as lying." "We want to spend just as much time designing the culture as we do our product." The best of Peter Beck: "You don't create big things on Monday to Friday, eight to five, it just does not happen." "The biggest mistake NZ entrepreneurs make is claiming their idea is world-class without actually going into the world to test whether it's world-class." "There's more cows on the planet than people." "Your company is not a logo or brand, it is 100% who you hire."

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 community Why the best founders are customer-obsessed What the best operators and investors do to help startups The best of Michael Batko: “Your starting point is actually not the product. Your starting point is customers.” “Instead of going into a meeting expecting a million dollar cheque from a 30 minute conversation, you want to be building those investor relationships, ideally over six to 12 months.” “Rather than telling you what to do, the best mentors ask really good questions, to trigger thoughts and processes for you to then validate for your customers.” “The most beautiful thing we see at Startmate is that our founder alumni come back as mentors. They invest back into the fund and then, because our founders are successful, they get more money back into the ecosystem.” The best of Saron Berhane: “As a team of engineers, the goal setting process really pushed us from having huge product-centric goals to goals that actually focussed on our market and customers.” “With the push from Startmate, we went from thinking we’d be on the farm in six months to being on the farm in a month.” The best of Lane Litz: “You need to accelerate. Be brave, set a really high, very tough goal and kill it.” “What you don’t want to know will kill your company so, so fast.”

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

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

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