Published by Blackbird Ventures
Wild Hearts is the podcast that reveals the real-time lessons from the founders and operators changing the world.
Listen on Apple Podcasts56 min
Danielle Strachman has built her whole career around a hard question: how do you spot someone who's going to do something extraordinary before there's any proof they will? She started as a school principal, helped build the Thiel Fellowship, and now runs 1517 Fund, backing founders without degrees and scientists most institutions won't go near. What she looks for is almost embarrassingly simple. Can this person not stop talking about the thing they're obsessed with? If the answer's yes, she'll ask for a Venmo handle and send $1,000 before the call is over. It's an instinct with a track record. Ethan Thornton was seventeen when 1517 handed him a small grant to tinker in his garage. A year later, that became a $100,000 grant to start his defence tech company, Mach Industries. A year after that, Sequoia was in. Most of our Wild Hearts guests this season are founders and builders. This one sits on the other side of the table, with the person who decides who gets backed. There's another twist: it's Joel Connolly, Creative Director and Head of the Blackbird Foundation, behind the mic. Back in June 2025, 1517 flew him to San Francisco to open their Fellowship Summit. Earlier this year, Blackbird flew Danielle out to speak at their startup festival, Sunrise. Joel and Danielle get into what actually makes a weirdo worth backing, why she won't measure the return on last month's grant, how 1517 makes a call when the whole team disagrees, and why she thinks of the job as "homeschooling CEOs". 🎧 [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 📸 [@wildheartspod]
53 min
Before Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks had a website, a company name, or a single piece of content published, she cold-messaged the COO of the Gates Foundation on LinkedIn. And they funded her. It’s a pattern that runs right through both this episode and everything Phoebe has built since. The media company reaching 3.5 million people a month, the women's sports show on TV, the podcasts in categories nobody expected young women to care about, and the book built on cold emails to the chiefs of staff of Nelson Mandela, Jacinda Ardern, Justin Trudeau, Tony Blair, and Kamala Harris. Most of us have started something without knowing quite what we were doing - no map, no contacts, figuring it out as we went - that part is familiar. The difference with Phoebe is what she did next. Because when her finger was hovering over the send button, she pressed it. And that one habit repeated relentlessly is how Missing Perspectives got funded, how The Right Hand got written, and how a blog on Squarespace became one of ANZ's most interesting media companies. In this conversation with Kate, Phoebe talks about what the beginner's mind actually unlocks, why data will force you to kill the things you love and why you should let it, and what the chiefs of staff to the world's most powerful leaders taught her about trust, loyalty, and the one quality that makes or breaks any working relationship.
1 hr 12 min
Jess Richmond thinks the premium on technical founders is about to flip. Building is cheap enough now that anyone can ship a bookkeeping app in a week. What's scarce, she argues, is having actually lived the problem: reconciled the transaction, sat in the procurement meeting, knows exactly what a customer will and won't trust. She pitched Blackbird on Sumday with a screenshotted SharePoint site. Four years on, she's betting the company on government agencies, the buyers with the least patience for anyone who hasn't already done the work of understanding how they operate. Kate sits down with Jess to talk about why not knowing venture capital's unwritten rules might have made her braver rather than naive, the $50,000 supplier decision that never accounted for its own emissions, and how she reverse-engineers a buyer's psychology before she ever mentions the product.
1 hr 5 min
Sagalee Omer looked around at the world he grew up in and decided to build the one he needed. Not metaphorically. Bikes for kids with no way to get around. Free therapy for a community that didn't talk about it. A storytelling platform to put everyday people on screen. A basketball tournament that's raised over $100K to fund it all. Four projects, one mission: young people who are seen, heard, and have the infrastructure to become who they are. The ambition is the same as any founder on this show. So is the discipline - knowing what to ship, when to push, and when to stop. What's different is who's investing: not a cap table, but a community. Sagalee is still in his twenties, came up through Blackbird Foundation's Protostars program, and has thought harder about identity, mission, and building for the long term than most people in this industry with a decade on him. Theia Gabatan from Blackbird Foundation sits down with Sagalee to talk about where the mission came from, what founders can take from building without institutional backing, why he calls himself a director not a founder, and the belief he holds that most people don't.
1 hr 7 min
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 lean when it could have grown. He knows the funding volatility, the long hardware timelines, the challenge of selling Australian innovation to Australians who'd sooner trust the same thing from a US startup. But when three founders in the same week told him their sales cycles were getting shorter, he almost cried. What this conversation gets into is the tension in climate tech right now: how do you hold genuine conviction about an existential problem while speaking a language that CFOs, customers and markets can actually act on? And what happens when you finally make peace with what kind of builder you actually are instead of the one you assumed you were supposed to be? Kate sits down with Mick to talk about why he walked away from a tech career to work on climate, what he learned from building and deliberately shrinking a community, the one leading indicator that tells him the tide is turning, and what he changed his mind about.
1 hr 4 min
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 since. Today Phoebe leads Startmate, the community-driven seed fund that has touched over 10,000 founders, operators and investors across the ANZ ecosystem. She's also the co-founder of Cheeky Run Club, an amateur running podcast that hit a million downloads in two years by doing one thing: making people feel like they belonged as runners. In this episode, she talks about what it actually takes to build a community people genuinely belong to, not just show up to. What she looks for in the founders most likely to succeed and the trap that even the best fall into. Why making it easier to build products is quietly creating a generation of founders who've stopped talking to customers. And why everything that looks like a threat to the startup ecosystem - hacker houses, closing accelerators, VCs going earlier - looks to Phoebe like good news. In a world drowning in bad news, Phoebe looks at the same facts as everyone else and chooses to see opportunity. We love it.
1 hr 8 min
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 have never had a compliance platform before. They're moving too fast to have built one, which means Nick isn't up against a competitor. He's becoming the function they don't yet have. How you get from "everything is on fire" to "a16z writes the check" is the episode. The 60 discovery calls before a line of code. The Figma prototype he sold until a customer told him to grow up. The AI he built to reason over trade law while the old guard said it couldn't be done. Kate sits down with Nick to talk about what it takes to rebuild from nothing and what the fastest corner of the market actually demands right now.
1 hr 7 min
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 as decorations but as working tools for a CEO who has spent two decades in the room when things go wrong and when they go right. He knows the difference between organisations that are succeeding and ones that are performing success. That's the vantage point he brings to AI. Not the model specs or the market positioning. The human question: what happens to culture, identity, and the way we work together when the tools change this fast? Who holds the values of an organisation when part of its team isn't human? And does context - the real context, the stuff that lives in a company's bones - survive the remaking? He also has a question he's been considering that has nothing to do with AI. The one every founder eventually faces, usually alone. When your identity and your company have been the same thing for twenty years - who are you when that changes? Kate sits down with Didier to go there. On culture, on AI, on what a leader owes the people who follow them. And on what, exactly, is worth protecting.
1 hr 2 min
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 how you can get more from AI, however you're using it. Katelyn Lesse runs engineering for Anthropic's Claude Developer Platform. Angela Jiang runs product. They're the people closest to what builders are actually doing with the technology and are exactly the kind of spark people they'll tell you every team needs. What they're seeing: teams that transform overnight because one person in them is genuinely obsessed. Founders who move with the model instead of against it. A shift from "content is king" to "context is king" that most people haven't caught up to yet. And a clean slate advantage - available to anyone willing to look at an old problem as if it's never been solved before.
1 hr 3 min
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 calls earnest people try-hards. None of it is comfortable, and none of it is what most people do after an exit. He's also the first to admit that none of this pays off quickly. The work is to shift what Australians think is acceptable to want. A project that’s measured in decades, not quarters. Kate sits down with Charlie to talk about untangling your identity from a company you built. The brutal question he had to ask himself before leaving Eucalyptus. Why he won't go into politics. Why he thinks the most risky thing right now might be doing nothing. And the one topic he's still too nervous to make a video about.
7 min
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, sending toaster-sized satellites into orbit, and chasing a million-qubit quantum computer. Holding the mic through the 2021 supernova, the 2022 correction, the survivor years, and the deep tech wave defining this moment. There's one question he's asked nearly every founder along the way: what gives you the most energy? In this episode he walks back through the answers that have stayed with him - Melanie Perkins, Tim Doyle, Tom Kelly, Flavia Tata Nardini - and shares three lessons from 77 episodes on the craft of interviewing. And then he hands the show over to Kate Glazebrook. If you've been listening since 2020, this one's a love letter to the archive you helped build. If you're new, it's the perfect doorway in. Thank you, Mason. From all of us.
54 min
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 now paying attention. Eight-figure ARR. 260 million users. Revenue up 6,000% in six months. But the more interesting thing is what they've learned along the way. Because when you sit inside the shopping journeys of hundreds of millions of people, patterns emerge. Shopping windows. Platform preferences. How intent signals behave. What converts and what doesn't - and exactly why. That data is now the foundation of an AI marketing platform that goes well beyond savings. In this conversation with Mason Yates, Rory and Harry talk about how they found the gap, how they solved the chicken-and-egg problem between brands and consumers, and where the intelligence they've built is taking them next.
1 hr 10 min
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 talk to 400 people. He went all-in on in-house legal teams while competitors hedged. He built features over weekends to save deals, then spent years on details others ignored. In this conversation with Mason Yates, Min-Kyu shares why being unknown became an advantage, what it takes to win trust with lawyers, and why going deep on one thing beats being everywhere at once.
1 hr 0 min
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 of their own. But instead of jumping straight to building, they spent six months in the ideas maze finding the right problem - exploring roofing, trade finance, retiring businesses. They built a 20-point framework, then threw it away. "Frameworks don't find markets." When they landed on financial advice, they embedded inside firms for days - watching, listening, earning trust - until they were certain this was an industry where they could build in for years to come. But even then, they didn't start coding. They kept refining until they could describe Marloo in three simple steps. Crystal clear. If they couldn't communicate it simply, they weren't ready to build it. Most founders build first and figure out how to explain it later. Hardy and Shak did it backwards. And that's why, when they finally launched, the product sold itself. Because they'd gone so deep on the problem, they could design for global from day one. Not because they got lucky, but because they'd built that way on purpose. Hardy runs the company from London. Shak builds from New Zealand. They disagree often and think that's the point. Tension resolved, then they move. No relitigating. Just trust. Marloo is just getting started. Remember the name. This is our last episode of 2025. We'll be back in the new year. Happy holidays.
55 min
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? The world's biggest semiconductor manufacturers said it was impossible. Two weeks later, she had four offers on the table. Now she's backed by the US government, Singapore, and Arizona. What changed? Not the tech. The story. "When you're trying to do something inauthentic—that is not your DNA as a founder—you're not gonna raise money," Jeka says. "Lately I haven't been selling at all. I've been just talking to people about what we do." This episode is about falling in love with a problem so completely you move across the world to solve it. It's about building a team that burns the boats. It's about sharing your vulnerable vision before you feel ready. It's about being proud to be a tall poppy when Australian culture tells you to shrink. The semiconductor stuff? It's actually fascinating once Jeka explains it. (AI chips sit idle 40% of the time because the wiring can't keep up. Her tech fixes that. Potential impact: 1% of global emissions saved.) But even if you skip every technical detail, you'll walk away with lessons about fundraising in brutal markets, building culture through failure-sharing rituals, and going straight to the top instead of pushing from the bottom. We've included a glossary in the episode description if you want it. You probably won't need it.
40 min
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-down claws releasing 45 tons of thrust flawlessly. Stage zero validated. And a month earlier? A 100kg satellite reached orbit, found in under 8 hours instead of the expected 2 weeks, still working 130+ days later. "For a satellite company, that would've been massive," Adam says. "But we're a rocket company, so no one gives a shit." Adam knew the regulations would change. He knew government support would come. "We took the risk first. Then government comes. I knew they would come." He started building anyway: 240 people in Queensland doing rockets, satellites, and hypersonics that foreign investors "cannot believe." This episode takes you inside launch day: the orchestra of mission control, time vanishing in the final countdown, the moment Eris leapt off the pad. Adam talks about why he's building satellite buses to fix broken market economics, the path to dual-listing on the ASX and US exchanges, and going around the moon in 10 years. If you're building deep tech from Australia and wondering whether to wait for perfect conditions, Adam's already answered that question. "Stay tuned. Smoke and fire."
1 hr 4 min
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 was something almost no robotics company ever builds: a platform: autonomous navigation accurate to 3mm, custom localisation, fleet coordination, modular architecture. The long, painful, expensive work that many startups can't survive. Then it paid off. → Seven weeks from concept to prototype for their drilling robot → Google as their first demo and customer → 50,000 holes drilled across US data centres → DeWalt partnership unlocking entire tool ecosystems → More robots spinning out in months, not years Alex is also opening an AI and data centre in Melbourne, choosing to build the next layer of August's platform from Australia, not just Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. This episode breaks down the real hardware platform playbook: robot collaboration that collapses workflows, de-risking with hyperscaler customers, and why the "third way" of robotics creates network effects in physical space. Alex also talks about surviving 23 months of zero revenue, going from Blackbird LP to portfolio founder, and why he waited a decade for the timing to actually be right. If you're building hardware from Australia, fundraising deep tech, or wondering when long-horizon bets actually flip into growth - this is the one.
1 hr 0 min
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 connect users with the right ecosystem partners at exactly the moment they need them. No cold emails. No spray and pray. The result: users get personalised solutions, platforms deliver value, partners grow. Nikki is building AI that works like she does: accumulating context and using it to connect meaningfully at the right moment. Finance gave her systems thinking. Tragedy gave her clarity. 120 conversations gave her deep customer insight. In this episode, Nikki joins Mason to share why team beats idea every time, why relationships, not data, are the real moat, and why the foundations of sales never change: "People buy from people." This one's for anyone questioning whether their "non-traditional" background disqualifies them - or wondering if their lived experience might just be the context that matters most.
54 min
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 & product), and obsessive systems thinker, Joe unpacks why robotics is finally crossing from hype to inevitability. We trace the structural shifts powering the moment—collapsing hardware costs, foundation-model intelligence, and urgent customer pull—and the hard lessons from failed vertical farming plays that recalibrated what reliable automation actually demands. Joe introduces Alloy , a horizontal data and observability platform for robotics teams: find the 1% of mission data that matters, surface edge cases, track reliability toward “four-, five-, six-nines,” and shorten the loop from failure → fix → redeploy. If you’re building, buying, or betting on robots, this is the market map and playbook for the next decade. What you’ll learn The three real drivers : cost curves, capability (VLM/VLA), and customer pull Reliability as the business model : why 99% isn’t enough—and how teams get to 4–6 nines Data, not demos : robots emit GB/min; how to isolate the 1% that changes outcomes Horizontal vs. vertical : what failed in indoor/vertical farming and why Alloy’s wedge : multimodal search (images, time series, logs), “scenarios,” alerts, and instant mission summaries to accelerate deployment and reduce unit costs Team & culture : hiring for speed, humility, and learning in a field moving weekly Chapter guide (timestamps) 00:00 First operator-to-founder return: Joe’s path (engineer → Atlassian → Eucalyptus → Alloy) 02:00 Maker roots: coding tutorials at 12, early internet leverage 03:30 Many small businesses → the “one-thing, 10–20 years” decision 08:30 Why now for robotics: cost curves + reusable rockets as mindset shift 10:45 Vertical farming post-mortems: unit economics, reliability, scale errors 13:40 Reliability is everything: from 99% to 99.999% in the physical world 15:45 The data firehose: GB/min, multimodal chaos, and missing tooling 18:40 Operator-to-robot ratio as the core unit economic lever 21:10 Selling into robotics: design partners, security, and data heterogeneity 23:15 Common data primitives (perception, time series, logs) + ROS-driven formats 24:30 Why LLMs aren’t enough: context-window limits & multimodal encoding 27:00 Alloy’s product: natural-language search, similarity, “scenarios,” real-time alerts 28:50 Instant mission summaries vs. days of manual analysis 29:30 Edge AI tailwinds: Jetson class hardware, cheaper sensors (LiDAR/IMUs) 30:30 VLAs explained: from perception → plan → act (and why smoothness matters) 32:10 The pace of change: weekly breakthroughs, staying on the frontier 33:40 Distribution & adoption: enterprise first; consumer follows reliability 35:40 Safety and necessity: underwater, heavy industry, logistics 37:15 Autonomy acceptance: the “first Waymo ride” unlock 43:00 Ideal customers: high throughput, real deployments, cloud telemetry 44:50 ICP discovery playbook: questions that qualify real readiness 45:50 Team design: missionary talent, humility > hubris, learn-fast culture 46:40 Macro lens: robotics as a deflationary lever & company formation boom 48:00 Jobs & leverage: from decoding info → higher-order coordination 50:05 The Alloy analogy: the coal-shoveler that keeps the engine running
52 min
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 most crucial work happens when you join the right company at the right moment and help turn ambition into execution. Andrea's doing exactly that - scaling the GTM motion as Halter accelerates across Australia and the United States.In this episode, Blackbird Partner Sam Wong sits down with Andrea to explore how operators translate skills across industries and build the engines that power billion-dollar companies. From her Commercial Equation framework to practical AI applications in sales, Andrea breaks down what it actually takes to scale a startup from the inside. This episode is for: founders building GTM, operators inheriting messy funnels, and anyone wondering if they need to start a company to build the future. Because the answer is no. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is join the rocket ship and help build the engine.