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 shop into an online experience that is fun and informative, with the mission of empowering absolutely...

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 create an Australian space that would draw on global practices to meet modern wellness needs in an...

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 Excellent’s mission is to transform people’s experience of work, to enable a world where missions are...

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 human achievement - and that everyone should have the tools and the opportunity to...

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 engineers in the built world Sitemate builds software for the built world. Its vision is to enable...

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 mission is to improve education and the future lives of learners.  Find Edrolo's website here:...

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 outcomes, not tasks. •How technology is reshaping medicine. Inventia builds machines to...

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 Highlights from Lauren: "50% of us will leave a job directly because of a manager,...

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. Highlights from S3 E1 of Wild Hearts with Blinq Founder Jarrod Webb "[Uber] really helped me...

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 out and looking at the healthcare system as a whole." Dr. Aengus Tran is on a mission to...

Bardee is reshaping the global food system. Today we speak with a former architect turned co-founder CEO, Phoebe Gardner. She is the definition of a Wild Heart, she's ambitious, a learn it all, resilient and put simply, an incredible person and friend. Today, she will reveal why Bardee's mission is important, how Bardee transforms food waste into high quality products using insects, the stories from their first facility, what it took to raise the stakes and move to a facility 30x larger...

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 FL0. They're pioneering a new category in software engineering, "Dev Acceleration as a...

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 people are doing." Multitudes is using data to create happier, higher-performing teams. Find...

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, they lift this limitation and pave the way for a third agricultural revolution, one that is ethical,...

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 is here. Episode interviewees: Tim Doyle, co-founder of Eucalyptus and Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Key topics covered: •The challenges and opportunities of healthcare •Which experiments are...

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, over 3000 companies use their software to monitor how their teams are feeling. This way,...

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 collar that can direct and move cows from any location on Earth. In today's episode, you'll hear...

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 today's episode, we'll get an insider's look at Startmate, discuss what the best investors do...

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, rather than banking led technology" says Up co-founder, Dom Pym. In today's episode, we'll dive into...

"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 systems of customers, observes how it changes over time, and alerts doctors if something is about to...

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's co-founders will discuss their first steps to building a category defining business. We'll...

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 of FreightFish. The FreightFish vision is to deliver goods anywhere in the world in 5-6 days and...

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. "When a product manager, researcher or designer leaves a company, all of their customer...

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 report vascular ultrasound scans with a single click and in less than a minute. That's in...