Wild Hearts

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, th...

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 Blackbi...

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...

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 col...

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...

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, rathe...

“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 system...

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’...

FreightFish is a New Zealand-based autonomous hydrofoil shipping company that aims to create a third option beyond the long wait of traditional ocean freight and the expensive extravagance of shipping by air. “We should have a hundred boats on the water. We should have a swarm of ships. Way more service focused and way less engineering focused than we are now,” says Max Olsen, co-founder and CEO o...

Dovetail was founded three years ago by CEO Benjamin Humphrey , and CTO Brad Ayers , who met working at Atlassian. They founded Dovetail on the belief that deeply understanding your customers is the key to creating a great product. Seeing first hand how manual and siloed user research and product development processes are, they set out to build a collaborative platform for research professionals....

Today, See-Mode have announced their Series A funding led by MassMutual Ventures. This is the second time Blackbird has invested and partner Niki Scevak has also now joined the board. The mission of See-Mode is to predict the recurrence of strokes by detecting plaque build-ups and modelling blood flow through computational fluid dynamics. Their software, made for clinicians and sonographers, can r...

We’ve just announced our fourth fund of $500M. And so today we are going to do a deep dive into Blackbird’s founding story. The very first believer in Blackbird was Mike Cannon-Brookes, the Co-founder and Co-Ceo of Atlassian. In this episode, we’ll unpack what excites him about the start-up ecosystem in Australia and the culture he hopes to help Blackbird build upon. Hunter Somerville, General Par...

Future-Proof Workplaces with Alex & Luke from XY Sense In 2016, Melbourne-based entrepreneurs, Alex Birch , and Luke Murray decided to start a company to solve the problem of office space utilisation. "We came to this realisation that large-enterprise organisations spend so much money on their space and it's very challenging for them to understand exactly how well this space is being used," sa...

Hiring is the most important decision a company makes. Any company is only as great as the people building it. But, bias in hiring decisions can often mean the best candidate doesn’t land the job. Applied solves these problems. Six years ago, Kate Glazebrook, a behavioural economist and Harvard graduate, was living in the UK and working in part of the government's Behavioural Insights Team, also k...

Co-founder of Shoes of Prey has started a new company, Fable. Fable sells braised beef. With one caveat, the main ingredient is shiitake mushrooms. Michael Fox was a co-founder of Shoes of Prey - the business raised $30m, hired 100s of employees and was on a tear to give shoe lovers the chance to design their own shoes. In 2018 the business shut its doors. Shoes of Prey was hugely ambitious and Mi...

Vow's mission is building a better food system with more delicious, sustainable, equitable and interesting options. They are resurrecting past culinary delights long forgotten by history via synthetic biology, and in essence, reinventing food from the ground up. Tim and George are two scrappy founders who show anything is possible with the right drive and determination. If they are successful in t...

Flavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit. In the second episode of Wild Hearts , host Mason Yates speaks to Fleet Space co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth. Key topics covered: How the next industrial revolution will be in space. The...

Tim Doyle, co-founder of seed-stage company Eucalyptus, has spent $35M across political campaigns, mattresses and now healthcare. Before Eucalyptus, Tim was the Head of Marketing at Koala. In this conversation, Tim talks about how he allocates capital, how Eucalyptus captures attention, where to extract value where others can’t see and how to acquire customers. Later on in this episode, you’ll hea...

A preview of what's to come. Wild Hearts is a podcast dedicated to sharing the real stories of founders - the passionate few taking giant leaps forward. In this series, we’ll uncover the stories of founders navigating their way through the often messy and difficult ups and downs of building a business. We’ll share lessons from founders who are knocking at the door of success. Founders who are on t...