Wild Hearts

In 2017, Mick Liubinskas got one line from an old basketball mate: "maybe it's time you got in the game." He'd just moved to the US, read the IPCC reports for the first time, and had three kids under seven. But he couldn't unsee it, so he got in the game. Nine years on, Mick leads Climate Salad - a community of 800 Australian climate tech founders and operators that he deliberately chose to keep l...

Most of us remember what it's like to want to be in a room we're not allowed into. For Phoebe Pincus, that room was startups. Before she became CEO of Startmate, she was writing heartfelt cover letters to startups who never wrote back, wanting in with no warm intro and no way through the door. And so when someone said yes, she never forgot what that felt like and it's shaped everything she's built...

When Nick Rudder's co-founder left and went back to Australia, Nick was alone in the US. His wife was pregnant with twins. Their health insurance wouldn't cover the pregnancy. He had almost no budget and no product. He could have gone home. He didn't. Sphere - now backed by a16z - builds international tax compliance for the fastest-growing software companies in the world. Most of their customers h...

There are people who think about culture. And then there's Didier Elzinga. Fifteen years running CultureAmp. 7,000 organisations. A front-row seat to how culture forms and fractures - the writedowns, the departures, the hard conversations that don't make it into announcements. During this episode, Didier draws on Buddhist philosophy, Buckminster Fuller, spiral dynamics, Brené Brown and more. Not a...

If you're here for commentary on the Pope, Trump, or the geopolitics of frontier AI - this isn't that episode. If you're here for the unfiltered view from the people actually building Claude - stay. This one is for the builders, the tinkerers, and the curious. Two of the people behind Claude - not here for governments, the press, or the Vatican. Instead, here to zero in on what they're seeing, and...

Earlier this year, Eucalyptus sold for $1.6 billion - one of the biggest exits in Australian startup history. Charlie Gearside co-founded it. A year on, he's spending his time on YouTube and on Build Australia, the nonpartisan movement he launched last month to make space for a more ambitious version of this country. He talks publicly about property investing, the universities, and a culture that...

After 77 episodes and eight years at Blackbird, Mason Yates is signing off as host of Wild Hearts. This is his final episode - just eight minutes, no fanfare and true to how he hosted: generous with the floor, light on his own voice. Mason started Wild Hearts in 2020. Lockdown. Sourdough. Tiger King. Across the six seasons since, Mason has sat down with founders building mind control for cows, sen...

When Apple's iOS privacy changes hit, most people saw a headache. Rory Garton-Smith and Harry Dixon saw something else: millions of brands suddenly unable to reach customers, and no good solution in sight. So they built one. Checkmate connects consumers with personalised offers at the exact moment of intent, replacing spray-and-pray marketing with something precise enough that household brands are...

Min-Kyu Jung was a corporate lawyer who taught himself to code because he saw a problem that needed solving. Three years later, Ivo is winning enterprise deals against vendors with much bigger names, with clients like Uber, Netflix, Shopify, and Reddit choosing them in head-to-head bake-offs. How does an unknown startup from New Zealand win those deals? Min-Kyu stopped coding for three months to t...

How did two first time founders get so wise? Paying customers in four countries within weeks of launch. Firms signing pilot agreements before a product existed. Advisers calling Marloo life-changing. Not useful, not efficient, life-changing. The secret? Going slow to go fast. Hardy and Shak met at Sharesies where they helped build one of New Zealand's most loved brands, before starting something o...

This is the most technical episode we've ever done. Listen anyway. Yes, there are acronyms. Yes, you'll learn what a chiplet is. Worth it. But here's what you'll actually get: one of the best founder conversations we've recorded. Not because of the tech—but because of the humanity inside the tech. Last year, Syenta had six weeks of cash left. No term sheets. The technology her team was building? T...

Most founders wait for perfect conditions. Not Adam Gilmour. He started Gilmour Space before Australia even had a space agency. On July 30, that bet paid off. Australia's first launch permit. Fourteen seconds of flight. Right in the middle of the pack globally - SpaceX took four attempts to reach orbit. Those 14 seconds proved everything that mattered: cleared ranges, ground systems working, hold-...

Most robotics companies die trying to build their first product. Alex Wyatt spent seven years building the platform so the second product took seven weeks. When August Robotics launched their exhibition robot in November 2019, it blew up - standing ovation, early revenue, real momentum. Then COVID hit. Exhibitions banned globally for 23 months. Zero revenue. Total cliff. But under that first robot...

Nikki Brown is a Cambridge graduate who quit a dream job at Google after mere months. "I wasn't happy being a cog in a machine," she says. So she built her own. Today, Nikki is co-founder and CEO of Cartesian, an AI-native platform backed by Blackbird that turns SaaS ecosystems into retention and growth engines. Cartesian's AI agents analyse user needs in real-time, detect buying intent, and conne...

There’s a graveyard of robotics companies—billions torched on beautiful demos we’ve all seen before, but never felt. This episode explains why the economics, the software, and the demand curve have finally flipped—and how Alloy plans to fuel the winners. Joe Harris returns to Wild Hearts—but this time as a founder. An engineer by training (ML for telecoms), operator by practice (Eucalyptus growth...

You don't have to be the founder to build the future. When Andrea Quinn made the leap from fashion merchandising to tech, she didn't start a company. She joined one. Today, she's VP of Go-To-Market Operations at Halter, New Zealand's newest unicorn, which just raised $155 million at a $1.55 billion valuation. Not every path into building the future looks like a founder origin story. Some of the mo...

When storytelling meets startup energy, magic happens. In this week’s episode, Xavier Collins, co-founder of Wonder, joins Mason to explore how technology is tearing down the old gates of Hollywood, and what happens when anyone, anywhere, can tell stories that move the world. Backed by Blackbird and LocalGlobe, Wonder is building an AI-native creative studio reimagining how films are made, who get...

When Michelle Battersby launched Sunroom , she set out to change the game for women creators, building a platform where they could earn freely, safely, and on their own terms. Five years, three funding rounds and one pandemic later, she did just that. Thousands of creators made life-changing income, and Sunroom was acquired by Fanfix. From the emotional weight of leadership to the surprising finan...

When Lucy Liu co-founded Airwallex in 2015, she was flying around the world opening bank accounts in person and carrying bags of security tokens. Global businesses are digital. But finance was stuck in the past. For three years, Airwallex burned money building invisible infrastructure no one believed in yet. Her co-founder drew a  “really ugly unicorn”  on a whiteboard predicting ten-tim...

Procreate co-founder James Cuda has spent more than a decade obsessing over one thing: the brushstroke. From hacking the iPad 1 to run at 60fps, to turning a side project into the world’s leading creative app, James has built Procreate on a radical philosophy: simplicity, permanence, and creative freedom above all else. In this episode of Wild Hearts, James joins Mason to share why the company nev...

What if you could take the most mysterious force in physics—and make it useful? In our final  episode of this season of Wild Hearts , we sit down with Pete Shadbolt, co-founder of PsiQuantum , a company racing to build the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer. But this isn’t a conversation about quantum theory. It’s about execution. Engineering. Scaling. Building something that moves human...

What if planning dinner wasn’t a chore—but something you looked forward to? In this episode, Wild Hearts guest host, Silk Kadala - investor at Blackbird - chats with Anna Guerrero, founder of Clove , a beautifully designed cooking app that’s reimagining how we cook at home. You might know Anna from her nine years scaling the creator marketplace at Canva—but it was a stint as a pasta chef in the Do...

What’s it like to be employee number one at two of the most iconic tech companies of the past two decades? In this episode of Wild Hearts, guest host and investor at Blackbird,  Maddy Guest  sits down with  Kate Vale ; Google and Spotify’s first hire in Australia.  From launching Google out of her lounge room to scaling Spotify into a household name, Kate shares behind-the-scenes stories of tech h...

What happens when a side project becomes a platform used by over 75 million people—yet  the founder feels like they’re losing control of it? In this special live episode of Wild Hearts , Linktree co-founder and CEO Alex Zaccaria joins Mason Yates on stage at Sunrise Australia to unpack the messy, inspiring story behind one of Australia’s most iconic tech exports.  From unpacking Alex’s early creat...

What makes a team thrive? According to  Harry Flett , it's not just strategy or shipping speed; it’s how you make people feel. In the latest Operator episode of Wild Hearts, Harry, VP of Product, takes us behind the scenes at  Tracksuit , where high-output product culture meets silliness, storytelling, and some surprisingly heartfelt moments. We explore Harry’s frameworks for thinking clearly, bui...