Open the Pod Bay Doors

Vanessa is the founder and CEO of Storreduce, an Australian deep-tech startup playing in the storage area. She moved the business to Silicon Valley a couple of years ago to be closer to her market. I caught up with her on a pretty noisy exhibition floor at AWS's re:Invent customer event in Vegas.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I caught up with Peter Nichol, the CEO of Instaclustr in Las Vegas during AWS's re:Invent conference. Instaclustr is a Canberra-based software business offering managed solutions for Cassandra and other products. Might sound complicated and niche, but it's an amazing business on an amazing fast-growth trajectory.  Peter is a terrific guy with a clear vision for how he wants to scale Instaclustr. S...

Jeremy Kwong-Law manages Grok Ventures, which is Mike Cannon-Brookes's family office fund. Jeremy has a law degree  from Sydney Uni, a stint at Macquarie bank as well as a foray into running his own startup a few years ago.  This a fascinating story about how Jeremy got into venture, what a family office fund like this looks like, what their investment focus is. See omnystudio.com/listener for pri...

Dr Michelle Perugini is an academic, entrepreneur, and an internationally renowned expert in health, medical research, advanced analytics, and cognitive AI. Her business, Life Whsiperer uses AI, computer vision and machine learning to better select healthy embryos for IVF, and ultimately improve outcomes for couples wanting to have children. Success rates for IVF are low, placing unnecessary finan...

Slight change in format this week. Ian is off in Hawaii cycling up a volcano, so has handed the microphone over to his Innovation Bay co-founder Phaedon Stough. He caught up with Patrick Llewellyn, the CEO of Accel-backed Aussie startup success story 99Designs.  99Designs is one of the world's largest graphic design marketplaces. There are few who have executed such rapid global growth as successf...

Katherine is the founder and CEO of Brighte, a Sydney-based fintech startup. Its proposition is to lend to households looking to buy big-ticket items like solar panels, batteries, air conditioners, etc. A former Macquarie banker, she launched the business in late 2016. She has shown incredible traction and progress, having recently landed $3.5m in seed funding, including from Mike Cannon-Brookes (...

Bill has had a long career in the startup and venture space. He was a co-founder at Blackbird Ventures (with Niki Scevak and Rick Baker). He has a huge passion for #DeepTechFounders and has now recently launched Main Sequence Ventures along with Phil Morle, Mike Zimmermann, Martin Duursma and Mike Nicholls. It's a $100m fund part funded by CSIRO and part funded by the federal goverment. Bill prove...

Al is one of the new generation of Aussie VCs.  Tempus Partners was formed after his successful exit from ShippingEasy. He's now launched a $40m fund investing in the best early stage and Series A opportunities.  It's an awesome story and great to hear the insights from one of the best "emerging" VCs in Australia. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alison brings some unique insights to the podcast this week. She's done just about everything from early stage startups to a stint as a VC and now as a Director of Westpac and Cochlear (amongst other things!) She's an amazing thinker and problem solver. I enjoy all my interviews, but this is definitely up there as one of my favourites. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dan Cohen is an Australian serial entrepreneur. He successfully built and sold his first business Park Assist after a 10 year journey. In 2015 he co-founded Flare, a business redefining the employer-employee relationship. Has raised almost $10m locally, mostly from local VC Reinventure.  I've known Dan for years now and he is one of my favourite entrepreneurs. He seems to combine the essential ent...

I know you shouldn't have favourite children, or, I suppose, favourite startup CEOs. But Luke is definitely one of my favourite CEOs. Luke's story, and by extension the story of SafetyCulture is fascinating - the epitome of startup hustle. It was so inspiring that Luke produced and paid for a movie about it (along with his buddies from Canva and Vinomofo). It's appropriately called "The New Hustle...

Jason is a prinipal at Partners for Growth (PFG), a specialty lending company from Silicon Valley with an active presence in Australia. When it comes to financing high-growth companies, we tend to focus on equity deals - ie sell a percentage of your company shares to an investor. Debt is an instrument that is much less common. Why is this?  Jason has a great story to tell. Listen in and find out h...

We took the "studio" on the road with us to Hobart in Tasmania. Caught up James MacGregor, the founder and CEO of video animation startup Biteable. James is an outstanding entrepreneur demonstrating leadership, strong engineering, effective marketing, and tons of commercial hustle. Plus of course the essential ingredient - oodles of tenacity. Biteable is less than 4 years old and from its HQ in Ho...

Amanda Price is the head of KPMG's High Growth Ventures team. Their aim is to help founders build successful startups by helping them with access to capital, customers and international connections. She returned from almost 10 years in Los Angeles in various startup roles and has been a pillar of the Aussie startup community for over three years now.  She's smart and passionate about startups. I r...

Flavia is my favourite rocket scientist. Passionate, driven, intelligent and with unbelievable amounts of tenacity, it seems there is nothing that Flavia can't do if she puts her mind (and talents) to it. Fleet is a space business providing free global satellite connectivity for the internet of things. Over the next few years they will be launching and managing a constellation of up to 100 nano-sa...

Karen is the CEO of corporate startup accelerator Slingshot. She has spent most of her career in various tech roles, most recently as CEO of News-owned job site Career One. Slingshot has delivered programs for several major Australian corporates over the last 3 years, including NRMA, HCF, Qantas and Lion. It's an interesting model which seems to have carved out a good spot in a relatively competit...

Niki Scevak is the founder of Australian accelerator program Startmate as well as a founding partner at VC Blackbird. He's been passionately involved in the Australian startup sector since 2008 when he returned home from the USA. Niki has done about as much as anyone I know to support and grow the startup ecosystem. Startmate is on its fifth (or sixth?) cohort. Blackbird has now made almost 40 inv...

Nico Chu is a very accomplished senior executive from the global IT corporate ranks. He has held senior global roles with companies like Expedia and Orbitz. His last corporate role was successfully helping to navigate Orbitz through their $1.5bn acquisition by Expedia.  His new venture, Sinorbis, is a software business helping western (well, non-Chinese) companies market themselves into the enormo...

Gen is a remarkable young woman. Smart, driven, humble. She has demonstrated a remarkable ability in her short career so far to (ahem) "get shit done".  She cut her teeth in understanding double sided-markets with recruitment marketplace OneShift. This was sold earlier this year to Programmed. Gen and her co-founder/CTO Jess Glenn have now embarked on Tamme, a service for micro-targeting both side...

Rob is the CEO and founder of podcasting platform Whooshkaa. An accountant by background, Rob was formerly the CEO at Macquarie Radio Network before he left and threw himself into the startup world with Whooshkaa a couple of years ago.  Whooshkaa as well as being the publishing platform for Open the Pod Bay Doors is also one of the best startups in Australia right now. Commercially and technically...

Jennifer Tejada is the CEO of Pagerduty, a company that provides (I'm quoting from their web site) - "full-stack visibility and actionable insights for better software and better customer experiences. " It might sound niche, but this is a huge and growing area, especially with the way software is currently being developed, deployed and managed.  Just 7 years old and a graduate of Y-Combinator,  Pa...

We held an Innovation Bay event in Melbourne recently where we hosted Partners from three of the country's best VCs (Airtree, Reinventure and Squarepeg). Between them they represent almost $750m of Venture Capital and have made around 60 investments between them.  Fascinating discussion covering the background of Australia's VC sector, where it has got to now, some of the upcoming trends and what...

Terry Gold is the Managing Directors of Techstars in Adelaide. I don't think he would mind being described as a "veteran" of this industry, having founded, run, sold, mentored many many companies over his "several" years in the sector. Terry was an awesome interview subject. Smart, caring, passionate. We discussed his background in the US, how he ended up as a core member of the early Boulder, Col...

On Thursday 13 July 2017, Jobs NSW announced the creation of the "Sydney Startup Hub", a new, 17,000 sq m space dedicated to housing, and nurturing, much of Sydney's startup community. Anchor tenants of Fishburners, Tankstream, Stone & Chalk and The Studio. Scheduled to open later in 2017.  David Thodey is the Chairman of Jobs NSW and managed to squeeze in this special episode of the podcast s...

Slightly different episode format this week. This was recorded at an Innovation Bay event in Sydney, so we had the fun of recording at a live event in front of a studio audience. Please forgive the audio challenges around the Q&A section. Apart from a mis-joke about Paul growing up in Liverpool (he didn't, but I actually thought he was serious when he said he did!) this is a great and fascinat...