Open the Pod Bay Doors

Olympia Yarger, founder and CEO of GoTerra, is converting food waste into livestock feed by using robots, AI, and maggots. Yes, maggots. After years of working across many different agriculture sectors, Olympia knew she wanted to find a new way to help farmers and make farms more efficient. It was only when she starting farming insects to feed her own poultry that she stumbled upon the solution. S...

Welcome to the latest edition of OTPBD News Special, Innovation Bay's fortnightly podcast analysing the news that matters for Australian and Kiwi startups. Meet the panel... Founder: James Ferguson, Immutable Games Investor: Niki Scevak, Blackbird Ecosystem: Cheryl Mack, Stone & Chalk Topics we discuss: Our panel covers recent funding news, including raises by See Mode, Buildkite, SpaceX and B...

David Shein first emigrated from South Africa to Australia in 1986. 9 months after touching down he founded his company Com Tech, a specialist supplier of networking and communications products. He grew the business for 14 years and eventually sold it to Dimension Data for over $1bil. At the time of David's exit, Com Tech employed over 1,400 people, had offices Australia wide, and achieved revenue...

Kristo Käärmann is the co-founder and CEO of TransferWise, a peer-to-peer international money transfer business. Kristo Käärmann cofounded TransferWise in London in 2011 with fellow Estonian Taavet Hinrikus, the first employee at Skype. Since then, the business has amassed over 8 million customers and moves more than US$5 billion every month. TransferWise has 2,200 employees in 14 global offices a...

Welcome to the OTPBD News Special, Innovation Bay's fortnightly podcast that analyses the news that matters for Australian and Kiwi startups. Meet the panel... Founder: Lauren Hall, iVvy Investor: Bede Moore, Antler Ecosystem Leader: Angus Hervey, FutureCrunch Topics we discuss: In this episode our panel covers ANZ funding news, including raises by Jig Space, Pyn and XYSense, as well as relevant l...

Tom Humphrey is an experienced Aussie entrepreneur and Partner at Access Ventures, a venture capital fund based in Denver, Colorado that invests in early stage technology companies. Before joining Access, Tom helped grow two successful startups, OurDeal and Kanopy. He was COO of OurDeal, a “group-buying” ecommerce website in Australia and helped scale the business to a successful exit to News Corp...

Sarah Nolet is one of Australia's leading agriculture technology (agtech) experts. She's the founder and CEO of AgThentic, an agtech strategy and advisory firm, and the co-founder of Tenacious Ventures, Australia’s first dedicated agrifood tech VC firm. Sarah also hosts the podcast "Agtech - So What" which tells the story of innovators at the intersection of agriculture and technology. In this epi...

Welcome to the OTPBD News Special, our fortnightly podcast analysing the news that matters for Australian and Kiwi startups. Meet the panel... Founder: Billy Tucker, OneFlare Investor: Melissa Widner, NAB Ventures Ecosystem Leader: Gavin Appel, Ignition Lane Topics we discuss: In this episode our panel covers both ANZ happenings and global headlines. Some local topics covered include local funding...

Stephen Thompson is a founding partner and managing director of Brandon Capital Partners, the largest life science healthcare fund in Australasia. Brandon Capital raised their first fund in 2007 with the mission of commercializing Australian medical research. Stephen and his co-founder noticed that Australia was home to loads of world-class medical research but didn't have the weight of local capi...

Hello and welcome to the 8th edition of the OTPBD News Special, our fortnightly podcast analysing the news that matters to Australian and Kiwi startups. Meet this week's panel: VC: Alan Jones, M8 Ventures Founder: Kath Hamilton, Loop+ Ecosystem: Annie Parker, Microsoft Topics we discuss: This week we cover the latest funding news and discuss hot topics like the impact of the Victorian COVID-19 out...

We're joined this week by Vuki Vujasinovic, Founder & CEO of global PR and communications agency Sling & Stone. The agency has quite the rockstar client roster; some current clients in the US, AU and NZ include Twitter, Uber, Xero, Hubspot, CultureAmp, Slack, Stripe, CSIRO, Domain...the list goes on. The agency launched in 2010 and exclusively works with disrupters, challengers, and entrep...

Welcome to the 7th edition of the OTPBD News Special! It’s our fortnightly podcast analysing news that matters for Australian and Kiwi startups. Meet this week's panel: VC: Sarah Nolet, Tenacious Ventures & AgThentic Founder: Adam Theobald, Ordermentum Ecosystem: Paul Smith, AFR Topics we discuss: We cover funding news, the acquisition of self-driving startup ZOOX by Amazon, the federal govern...

Sam Chandler is the Founder and CEO of Nitro, a software company developing commercial software used to create, edit, sign, and secure Portable Document Format files and digital documents. Nitro is Australian-founded and is now listed on the ASX and headquartered in downtown San Francisco, with offices in Melbourne, Australia; Dublin, Ireland; and London, England. Sam grew up in Tasmania and start...

Welcome to the 6th edition of the OTPBD News Special. It’s our fortnightly podcast that anaylses the news that matters for the Australian and Kiwi startup ecosystem. Meet this week's panel: VC: Dean Dorrell, Carthona Capital Founder: Gemma Lloyd, Work180 Ecosystem: Mark Pesce, This Week In Startups Topics we discuss: We cover the latest funding news and discuss the Black Lives Matter movement and...

Leigh Jasper is the co-founder and CEO of Aconex, the world's most widely used cloud collaboration platform for construction, engineering and infrastructure projects. Aconex was acquired by Oracle in 2018 for $1.6B. Leigh started the business back in 2000 with school friend Rob Philpot, after working at McKinsey & Company where he consulted for clients in the financial services, media and info...

Fred Schebesta is a serial entrepreneur, best known for co-founding finder.com, one of the world’s leading comparison websites. Before launching Finder, he started Freestyle Media, a successful digital marketing agency, while at university. In 2007, Freestyle was sold to a public company and the funds were used to start Finder.com. Fred, with his co-founder Frank Restuccia, have grown Finder organ...

Welcome to the fifth edition of OTPBD News Special, our fortnightly podcast looking at the stories behind the headlines of the news that matters for the Australian and Kiwi startup ecosystem. Today, our panel features... VC: Elicia McDonald, Principal at AirTree Ventures Founder: Joe Forbes, Co-Founder of Biarri Ecosystem: Stephanie Palmer-Derrien, Startups and Technology Editor at SmartCompany To...

Dan Phillips has spent most of his career building up Macquarie Capital's Venture Capital Group. Somewhat of a well-kept secret in the Australian startup ecosystem, in the past 25 years the Venture Capital Group has done 36 deals and deployed almost $600 million dollars of capital into some fantastic companies. The group has 11 companies currently in the portfolio. In this pod interview, Ian and D...

Hello and welcome to the fourth edition of the OTPBD News Special. It’s our fortnightly podcast looking at the stories behind the headlines of the news that matters for the Australian and Kiwi startup ecosystem. Meet this week's panel: VC: Mike Dovey, Firemark Ventures Founder: Justin Webb, AgriWebb Ecosystem: Imogen Baxter, Square Peg Capital Topics we discuss: We discuss the flurry of new invest...

Jeremy Liew was named by the Sydney Morning Herald as Silicon Valley’s “Most powerful Aussie”. One look at his track record, and it's no surprise why. Hailing from Perth, Jeremy is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. After spending the ‘90s and early 2000s working for web pioneers such as Netscape, AOL, CitySearch, and Interactive Corp, Jeremy joined Lightspeed in 2006 to help the firm, whic...

Welcome to the third episode of the OTPBD News Special. It’s a fortnightly podcast looking at the stories behind the headlines of the news that matters for the Australian and Kiwi startup ecosystem. Meet this week's panel: VC: Daniel Petre, AirTree Ventures Founder: Antony Ceravolo, Sine Ecosystem: Rachael Neumann, AWS Topics we discuss: Will superannuation funds continue to back Aussies VCs, the...

Jaime Bott is a partner at Sequoia Capital, managing their Talent Advisory function. She leads a talent team of 14 who help Sequoia's portfolio companies hire amazing talent, assemble a recruiting function, and build a board. Since Jaime started at Sequoia in 2010, talent evolved into an essential function for VC firms. 10 years ago there were less than 5 people in the Bay Area working for venture...

Today we speak with Michael Pryor, co-founder, CEO and current Head of Product for Trello at Atlassian. Trello was acquired by Atlassian in 2017 for $425M and stands as Atlassian's largest-ever acquisition. Trello is one of many products developed by Fog Creek Software, a company Michael co-founded with Joel Spolsky back in 2000. Michael's co-founder pitched Trello at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2007 wi...

Welcome to episode two of the OTPBD News Special. It’s a fortnightly podcast looking at the stories behind the headlines of the news that matters for the Australian and Kiwi startup ecosystem. Meet this weeks panel: VC: Paul Naphtali, Rampersand Founder: Rob Loewenthal, Whooshkaa Ecosystem: Yolanda Redrup, AFR Topics we discuss: VC investment activity since Covid-19 hit, including latest Aussie st...

Nick Carter is one of Australia's leading energy experts; he is currently Senior Vice President of Energy Tech and Solutions at Macquarie in Australia. He joined Macquarie from Tesla, where he managed APAC business development for the Tesla energy software suite. Nick has a long career in the energy space and has also worked with electric vehicles at AGL Energy, environmental policy and strategy a...