Wild Hearts

What does it take for a startup to go from a house of brands to a healthcare powerhouse? And what changes about your leadership to get it there? This is the third time Tim Doyle, the founder of Eucalyptus, has joined us on Wild Hearts . Last episode, Tim shared his ambition to shock the business into a new level of growth. In this episode, we reflect on what’s changed at Eucalyptus over the past f...

✨ What does it take for a startup to go from 14,000 users to 19 million in less than a year? How about being acquired by Canva within two years of launching? In the case of Leonardo AI , the answer lies in innovation ,  speed , and strategic growth , as explored in this episode of Wild Hearts featuring Leonardo AI co-founder and CEO JJ Fiasson . Leonardo has transformed the world of generative AI...

What does it take to grow from one of the first hires to leading the team at one of NZ’s fastest-growing tech startups? Welcome back to our Wild Heart Operator series! This series is dedicated to surfacing the lessons from verified world class operators, the Australians and New Zealanders at the forefront of building generational companies. From product to manufacturing, engineering to marketing,...

What does it take to go from running a family-owned service station to being the global chair of Tesla?   The answer is curiosity, courage, connections and the ability to collect as many ‘Pokemon Cards’ (skills) as possible. In this episode of Wild Hearts, we are honoured to be joined by Robyn Denholm - Global Chair of Tesla, Chair of the Tech Council of Australia, and Operating Partner here at Bl...

Forget what you think you know about building a new e-commerce experience because Carted sees the world differently. It’s a world where the merchant is no longer the only focus for commerce innovation. In this episode, we talk to Holly Cardew, Carted’s Founder, about how they are changing the future of shopping by standardising and organising the world’s products into a shoppable knowledge graph. ...

Reshaping education and employment, with Tom Brunskill, Co-Founder of Forage Forage is on a mission to transform career education and employment. By offering job simulations from leading companies, they enable students to gain real-world skills and experience, enabling them to make more informed decisions about the career they pursue. This innovative approach challenges traditional recruitment met...

Unlocking a new way of living with Toby Thomas-Smith, Co-Founder of Kiki Kiki is on a mission to revolutionise the way we live and connect. By leveraging the power of existing social ties, their unique peer-to-peer subletting platform enables users greater flexibility to travel, helping unlock new lifestyles, friendships and savings. ✅Growing a “cult-like” community around the ethos of subletting...

❤️‍🔥Episode 6, Season 4 “Ship less, but better”, with Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail ✅Lessons from working at Atlassian ✅Detention & Sparring: “sacred rituals” of Dovetail’s design team ✅Balancing product simplicity with new features ✅Design thinking & the “double diamond” framework Dovetail is on a mission to help the world improve the quality of everything. Dovetail’s custo...

Searching the way we think with Jesse Clark, co-founder of Marqo ✅Lessons from working at Stitch Fix and Amazon ✅What it means to be truly “developer first” ✅The decision to make Marqo open source ✅Who will be the winners and losers of the AI revolution   Marqo is building a revolutionary framework that provides search functionality to developers, allowing their applications to search anything...

EdApp is changing workplace education and training with accessible and engaging mobile learning which leverages microlearning and gamification. By using a freemium model, and through their partnerships with NGOs such as the United Nations, EdApp is empowering and educating millions of learners around the world. ✅ Deciding to join SafetyCulture rather than raise venture capital ✅ Importance of th...

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...

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 W...

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 wi...

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 sho...

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 creat...

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 Exce...

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...

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...

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...

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 outco...

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...

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...

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...

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 F...

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 peo...