Wild Hearts

This week Kate hands over the mic to Saron Berhane, who leads Blackbird's deep tech programme. She was recently in San Francisco and sat down with two Australians who had to move to the Bay Area to do the sort of work they wanted to do. Which is both their personal experience and one of their main arguments in this episode. Australia's problem in AI isn't compute. It's that the smartest people here go into quant trading or get on a plane, and nobody has built them a reason to stay. Baseten is where they landed. It's an AI infrastructure and production-grade inference platform, the layer that lets engineering teams deploy, scale and optimise machine learning models. Sydneysider Tuhin Srivastava co-founded it, and it recently raised a$1.5B Series F led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, Blackbird and Spark Capital. Mudith Jayasekara and Charlie O'Neill are Baseten's Co-Heads of Model Training. Before that they founded Parsed, a mechanistic interpretability lab that Baseten acquired. Mudith trained as a doctor. Charlie started in law and philosophy and wanted to study English literature. Neither took the path you'd draw if you were designing someone to run model training at a company like this, and both think that's the point. The conversation is wide-ranging and deeply technical. Saron takes them through what's actually happening inside the open source ecosystem right now, which is stranger and more hopeful than the usual framing allows. Sitting underneath all of it is one question. When everything difficult gets commoditised, what's left? The training recipe is now roughly the same everywhere. Post-training has gone from a specialist problem to something a small team can attempt. The friction on running an experiment has mostly gone. What's left is taste, and having enough of the right people in one room.

Content note: this episode discusses suicide, self-harm and family violence. Support details are at the bottom of these notes. Before Elliot Taylor was a tech founder, he spent fifteen years sitting with people on the worst days of their lives. He ran community homes. He had kids sleeping on his couch after they’d been kicked out of their homes. His place became a safe house for people leaving violent relationships. And the longer he did it, the clearer it got that the model he was working inside couldn't reach the scale the problem was actually at. So he went looking for a more scalable way to have impact, and to his own surprise he founded a startup. Throughline builds the infrastructure that connects people to the right mental health or online harm support the moment they go looking for it. Someone tells ChatGPT they don't want to live anymore. Someone searches Google for a way out of a violent relationship. Throughline is the layer that gets them to a real service in their own country and their own language, one that's actually open when they call. In this episode, Kate asks what he's learned building a company in a place most founders would never think to look. They get into why fear, rather than any shortage of services, is what stands between a person and help. How you experiment when being wrong isn't an option. What it's like building product while the laws that govern it are still being drafted around you. And how you look after a team who spend their days reading the hardest things people write. Elliot's ambition is to build the biggest mental health intervention the world has ever seen. If you need support: Lifeline 13 11 14 (Australia), 1737 call or text (New Zealand), 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732 (Australia, family and sexual violence).

Nirmal Govind has spent thirty years trying to predict human behaviour, and he keeps finding the edges of it. He joined Netflix when the company still had two original shows to its name, and over the decade that followed his work spread into almost every corner of the business: the engineering that makes a video start playing the moment you hit play, the quality checks on content arriving from studios, and eventually the data behind what a company spending twenty billion dollars a year should actually make. He is now Canva's first ever Chief Algorithms Officer. One of the things his team ran was a test on artwork. Each time a new show launched they would put a batch of different images in front of viewers to see which one made people stop and click, and internally, colleagues would call it in advance. These were people who had spent years studying what audiences do, and they had strong instincts about what would land. Most of the time they were wrong. Human taste, it turns out, is not something you get much better at guessing just because you have watched it closely for a long time. Kate and Nirmal spend a good while in that territory, in the places where the data runs out. There is a lovely example of a director who chose to open the second episode of a show by continuing a battle scene from the first, with no titles and no credits, just straight back into it. Twenty minutes in, the opening credits finally rolled, and the team watched a wave of people leave in the middle of the episode. Obvious in hindsight. Credits mean an ending, and the audience took the hint. In this episode, Kate talks with Nirmal about what a Chief Algorithms Officer actually does all day, why an algorithm should let you finish a two-minute job and leave, what happened when he asked an AI tool to size up an opportunity and the answer came back three times off, and plenty more.

Luke Anear began his working life as a private investigator, sitting in cars and filming people who had been injured at work. He'll tell you it was the coolest job he ever had. It was also where the problem found him. He was watching people whose lives had been altered by something preventable, paid by the system that let it happen. Once he understood he was part of the problem, he had to become part of the solution. That was 2004, in a garage on the northern outskirts of Townsville. No software industry, no co-founder, about 30 computer science graduates a year coming out of James Cook University. Twenty-one years later, Mitti has passed a billion dollars in revenue since it began. It took a long time to get here. Luke is unusually honest about the things they tried that didn't work: the training platform he built in 2007 that he describes as a bad version of PowerPoint, the document management system in 2010, the telemarketers ringing businesses to ask if they wanted safety paperwork. The checklist app that made the company's name didn't arrive until 2012, eight years in. "Rarely is your first idea your best idea." The simplicity everyone recognises now came out of years of unpicking every jurisdiction and every industry until there was something small enough to be useful. In this episode, Kate Glazebrook talks with Luke about the store manager who replaced a 700 question checklist with one question asked three times a day, why an industry that hasn't changed since 1666 is the biggest thing Mitti is building, what it means to rebuild a company in six months when AI writes 90% of your code, why that led them to hire more human experts rather than fewer, and the two years since he stepped down as CEO because, in his words, he was cooked.

When Rae Wang started at Microsoft in the early 2000s, the company culture valued aggression and intensity. Someone punched a hole in a wall. Someone kicked a door until it came off its hinges. People threw chairs out of conference rooms. The people responsible for these outbursts were celebrated as legends. Rae did more than just survive the tumult, she thrived, and stayed long enough to see the culture become less destructive and more collaborative. A decade later, Rae joined Google as a Product Manager for Google Cloud, and today Rae is Head of Product, Enterprise at Atlassian. Her time leading teams in some of the world’s largest tech companies has given her a remarkable vantage point on how the tech industry has evolved over the last 20+ years. In particular, Rae excels at the “boring” and often unglamorous things tech platforms need to survive at scale: security, reliability, compliance, and all kinds of key infrastructure that no one notices until it stops working. In this episode, Kate Glazebrook talks with Rae about how she’s seen tech culture evolve over the years, why AI can build you an app but can’t handle security compliance, what improv comedy has taught her about conflict resolution, and plenty more. 🎧 [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 📸 [@wildheartspod]

Few companies show up on "best place to work" lists as consistently as Canva despite running at a level of ambition that would flatten most teams. Jennie Rogerson is the person responsible for holding that combination together. She's Canva's Chief People Officer but she didn't come up through HR. She started as an EA to founders Mel and Cliff, became their chief of staff, then was handed the job of making Canva the best place to work. She's openly sceptical of the high-performance-culture language most of Canva's peers reach for. She's made caring an explicit, unembarrassed part of how the company operates. And despite around 300,000 job applications a year, Canva still won't anchor its hiring to credentials. Kate sits down with Jennie to talk about the interview challenge that got her the job (it involved the founders' anxious dog), why she thinks culture is never a system, "cheese grating" her own ideas with the people most likely to shred them, and what it actually takes to scale a culture people want to stay in. 🎧 [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 📸 [@wildheartspod]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.