Join us, as we dive into the Wild Hearts archives to re-live previous episodes from some of our favourite guests! 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 hear from Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Ventures. He was one of the very first believers in Eucalyptus and he’ll provide an investors lens on what others can learn from Eucalyptus. Key topics covered: The problem with Direct to Consumer companies The importance of GTM focus in an Australian context. Ways you can allocate capital as a non technical founder. How to unlock talent in your organisation. Why you should spend 10% of your monthly marketing spend on testing. The biggest fundamental shift in customer acquisition, advertising and branding in the last decade. The best of Tim Doyle: “In Australia, there aren’t a huge number of Venture back-able consumer product opportunities, there’s just not that many billion dollar product opportunities, but there's a lot of 50 to 100 million dollar ones that more or less exist on the same infrastructure.” “What’s the actual thing you’re going to earn the right to exist on to begin with and how are you going to talk about that? If you can’t do that, you’ll never even get in. Do something dumb and focused and deliver on it really well, build your business around that and earn the right to do other stuff.” “Price the externalities of a staff member to understand their true value.” “The shorter the distance between your junior dev. and the customer the better the decisions that junior developer will make.” “The gap between designer and customer is as short as possible.” “Branding is iterative.” “In a world where feedback is so real, fast and clear, sitting around and psychoanalysing your customers and thinking about what the best piece of creative for them is, is a complete waste of time. You may as well just increase the speed at which you test and then back the winners extremely hard and trust the iterative system that you’ve built to continue to learn and get better at acquiring customers over time.” “A media model is constantly hungry.” “You’re always value investing. Every decision you make is, ‘Can I extract more value out of this than I have to pay for it?’ It's super true in media buying. TV /Advertising companies don’t understand the price of their own inventory because they negotiate over lunch. If you have a better system for deriving value than they have, then you can extract the value they can’t see.” Nick Crocker on Tim Doyle “Tim was the best marketer and marketing thinker that I’d met in the time I had been investing. “Eucalyptus is an anomaly in that they did everything they said they would and that's rare.” “The thing that I always felt with Tim, and that I know that Niki felt the first time he met Tim, was that he was an original thinker. And there is very little original thought in the world, period". “When you learn something new, really new and unique from someone, it's just a magical moment in this job.”
Building a deep-tech company like Fleet Space Technologies isn't just about the technology; it's about the people, the focus, and the vision to change the world. In this episode of Wild Hearts, Flavia Tata Nardini takes us behind the scenes of Fleet's growth, sharing how critical decisions, customer feedback, and personal resilience have shaped her leadership. Join us for a conversation that reveals the human side of leadership in one of the most cutting-edge industries today. Throughout the episode, we cover: 🚀 The role of founder resilience and how it shapes leadership growth 🧠 Why founders have a "different brain" and how it solves unsolvable problems 📊 How running a company "by the numbers" transformed Flavia's leadership style 🌍 The intersection of critical minerals exploration and the energy transition 🔄 The power of focus: How Fleet narrowed its scope to drive market fit 🎯 The challenges and rewards of firing customers to refine business strategy 💡 Lessons learned from capital raises and how discipline drives hypergrowth 🌌 Reflections on space innovation and the role of Fleet in reshaping Earth's future This episode is a candid look into the mindset and strategy of a founder tackling complex global challenges while navigating the personal and professional highs and lows of leadership.
What happens when a founder bets everything on simplicity—and wins? 🎧 Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to learn. That’s the story of Dr. Thomas Kelly and his ambitious telehealth platform, Heidi—a product that faced failure before transforming into a global success. In this episode of Wild Hearts, we delve into the remarkable journey of a founder who dared to strip everything back to focus on what mattered most. We cover: 🩺 The turning point: How Tom realised Heidi wasn’t delivering joy to clinicians and chose to pivot. 🛠️ Killing complexity: Why Heidi 2.0’s singular feature—transcribing consultations—became the key to success. 📈 Simplicity scales: The viral growth of Heidi 2.0 and how a $10M ARR business was born from focus. 💡 Lessons in failure: How Tom’s honest letter to investors unlocked clarity and trust. 🌟 The power of “useful”: Why simplicity and user focus beat grand visions every time. From embracing failure to redefining success, this episode is essential listening for founders, creators, and anyone who’s ever faced a crossroads.
What happens when one man’s parenting experiences become the blueprint for a global storytelling phenomenon? That’s exactly what Joe Brumm achieved with Bluey, the universally loved animated series. In this episode, we explore the journey of a father-turned-creative visionary who bet everything on capturing the magic of family life. From creating a team culture that prioritises love and ownership to scaling joy across continents, Joe’s story is an extraordinary blend of heart and hustle. In this conversation, we cover: 🐾 How Joe Brumm turned everyday parenting moments into a global phenomenon 🎨 The unique team culture at Bluey and how it fosters creative pride 📈 Scaling a family-first story into a global business without losing authenticity 🌏 Why Bluey resonates universally: the power of storytelling rooted in truth 💡 The importance of trusting your instincts in creative leadership 🎥 Behind the scenes of Bluey’s weekly animator screenings and their impact on quality 🚀 How Bluey leverages global partnerships while staying true to its Australian roots 📖 Joe Brumm’s lessons in transforming personal experiences into world-class content From the magic of storytelling to the power of team pride, this episode is a must-listen for anyone curious about building authentic and lasting creative work.
Amber Joseph is rewriting the rules of learning. After scaling a solo business to $700,000/year without cofounders or funding, she pivoted to tackle online education’s biggest flaws. Now the founder of NextWork, Amber is building a platform that teaches real-world skills, validated by real companies. In our latest episode of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Amber and dive deep into: 🚀 How Amber Joseph scaled a solo services business to $700,000/year with no cofounders or funding. 🤔 Amber’s pivot from a solo business to a startup solving online education’s biggest challenges. 🌍 The “learning loop” framework that redefines knowledge acquisition, application, and validation. 🎯 Why launching imperfect products accelerates progress and drives better user outcomes. 💡 How Amber built a 40,000-strong fan community in three months, and why fans turned into co-creators. 🤝 Amber’s approach to embedding her team within the customer community for faster iteration and trust-building. 🔑 How seamless onboarding and cultural insights are critical to NextWork’s growth. This episode isn’t just about Amber Joseph’s achievements—it’s a masterclass in turning failure into fuel and building communities that power transformational learning.
How do you transform a rejection into a stepping-stone for success? For Liam Millward, founder of Instant, that rejection sparked an obsession with speed and revenue that would drive his young company to incredible heights. In this conversation, we explore Liam’s journey of rapid growth, strategic pivots, and the lessons learned on the path to building a $100M+ business. In this episode, we learn: 🚀 The pivotal rejection and how it motivated Liam to persevere. 💼 The early funding struggle and how a $250K angel investment changed Instant’s trajectory. 💡 How revenue obsession became a core philosophy, shifting focus from product perfection to customer impact. 👥 Why Instant operates without managers, and how a flat sales culture drives performance. 🎯 The role of speed in Instant’s DNA—how quick pivots and rapid decision-making fuelled growth. 🔑 The value of a relentless customer focus that has transformed Instant from a “checkbox feature” into an $5M+ ARR product. Instant’s journey shows that with the right attitude and strategy, even setbacks can be transformed into stepping-stones for success at great heights.
What happens when you bring innovation to the heart of traditional farming? In this episode, we sit down with Craig Piggott, CEO and Founder of Halter, to discuss the journey of transforming the farming industry with smart technology. Craig shares insights on managing supply chain and critical path changes, boosting productivity, the company's plans to expand globally, and how he and his team are reimagining the possibilities for agriculture. What can you expect in this episode? 📱 The in-app experience that turns Halter into a farmer's essential tool. 💡 Craigs biggest lessons as he ‘grows into a CEO’. 🔥 The intensity of Halter's daily leadership meetings and the role of ‘gratitude’. 🌍 Halter’s approach to expanding internationally, beginning with the US market. 🏆 The challenges and insights of building a high-performance culture. 💡 Lessons on operational excellence and refining the supply chain. 🔥 The art of fundraising and the method Craig used in his successful rounds. This episode explores not only the innovative technology Halter brings to agriculture but also the resilience and drive behind building an impactful company in an evolving industry.
How do you go from launching reusable rockets to pioneering cultured meat manufacturing? In this episode, Ines Lizaur, a former SpaceX engineer and now Head of Manufacturing at Vow, joins us on Wild Hearts to share her journey and insights on tackling big challenges in high-stakes environments. From her early days at SpaceX where she grappled with relentless deadlines and operational reliability, to her transition to Vow, we explore how Ines has applied her experience from the fast-paced aerospace industry to cultivate sustainable solutions in food production. 🚀 What did SpaceX teach her about decisiveness under pressure and learning from failure? 🌌 What principles make SpaceX special, and what qualities define Elon Musk’s leadership? 🛠 How did cross-functional teamwork and scrappy problem-solving shape her leadership at Vow? 📈 What lessons can be drawn from simplifying processes and pushing boundaries in an emerging field? 🎯 How does she balance ambition with the grounded realities of scale and reliability in cultured meat? This conversation is a fascinating look into how one of the great operators in the Aussie ecosystem is reshaping what it means to take calculated risks, simplify processes, and lead teams toward new frontiers in tech and sustainability.
With over 2000 engineers, an ever-expanding product suite, and billions of users, how does Canvacontinue launching world-class products at breakneck speed? In the latest episode in our Operators Series, we dive into the mind of Robert Kawalsky, Head of Product at Canva, to uncover the strategies behind one of the most successful product teams in the world. Robert reveals how a relentless focus on long-term goals, their product-first philosophy, and cross-functional teamwork fuels Canva’s success in empowering creativity on a global scale. 🔍 Tune in to hear Robert’s take on: 🎨 How simplicity and user-centricity keep Canva’s products intuitive and powerful. 🏆 Maintaining product velocity as Canva scales from 7 engineers to over 2,000. 🤖 How Canva integrates generative AI to empower users with cutting-edge tools. 📈 The Customer Zero program and why feedback loops are critical to their success. 🎯 The importance of goal alignment and how it fuels continuous iteration and innovation. This episode is packed with insights from one of the leading product thinkers of our time, offering a masterclass in building and scaling world-class products.
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 few years, his lessons as a CEO of a rapidly-changing company, and making good on Euc’s mission to serve 1 million patients by 2027. In this conversation, we cover: 🤔 How Eucalyptus built resilience through tough decisions around redundancies (30:00) 🚀 Tim's strategy for making impact in a highly competitive industry (23:00) 🌏 Why Australian startups can thrive globally (50:00) 🧑⚕️ Tim’s reflections on trusting clinical professionals and giving up control (39:00) This episode is not just about the challenges faced by Eucalyptus; it's a deep dive into the vision of a company that's transforming healthcare and doing so in one of the most competitive markets in the world.
✨ 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, helping creators develop hyper-realistic art for gaming, video production, and marketing. In the words of JJ, the company ‘democratises creativity’ and makes artistic expression accessible to all. 🔍 Across two conversations and many months, we will dive deep into the stories behind Leonardo AI’s unprecedented growth and acquisition, and hear first-hand what it took to reach such heights at breakneck speed. 🤔 How Leonardo AI build the third-largest discord in the world. 🚀 JJ’s philosophy on how to achieve a dizzying product velocity. 🔥 The story behind building the first Australian-built foundational model, Phoenix. 🎨 How the Canva acquisition came about. 🎭 How JJ views AI in the context of human creativity. This episode is not just about the technical marvels of Leonardo AI; it's a deep dive into the vision of a company that's redefining the boundaries of imagination.
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 Blackbird. We’ll dive deep into the lesser-told stories from Robyn’s career to uncover the lessons and insights from her hall-of-fame rise to become a technology titan of industry. Why does Denholm credit curiosity for driving her career? What was it like navigating the Dot-Com Bubble? How did Denholm turn not getting the CFO role at Sun into a growth opportunity? Why does Denholm believe balancing innovation with operational discipline is a key to company success? This episode is dedicated to Australian exceptionalism.
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 the human race to build roads, bridges and buildings faster than we build software. Episode Highlights from Hartley: On traveling to San Francisco for Startmate: “The incline on the learning curve was immense. I remember about halfway through the trip we sat down and processed what we’d learned in the last two days, and it felt like a mini lifetime of learnings crammed into 6 meetings over 2 days.” “The Zilla analogy comes from… how quickly and how big an individual and the team around them can grow… One day when you grow up you’ll be stomping around, causing mayhem for a bunch of companies you’re scared of right now because you think they’re big and undefeatable, and one day you’ll be their Godzilla tearing down their buildings.” “We basically had wounds in the business all over the place, and the process to fixing those was sending a monthly update. We started doing it in May 2018, we’re never going to miss a month, and there’s going to be no filter. It’s going to show all the scabs.” “We went through a really hard hiring stage, there was a period of time where I had to basically become the interim CTO… and we cycled through 3 or 4 failed engineering hires, and we eventually just kept improving and iterating on our process. We now have this quite insane hiring flow, where the first 3 steps of the process are completely automated.” “Our fundamental belief is that engineers in the built world in the future will operate in a similar way to how technology teams operate today. They’ll all be using best in class tools, real time, highly configurable, fast to deploy, that are seamlessly interconnected.” Learn more about Sitemate here
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: https://edrolo.com.au/ Roughly one third of people in the developed world reach the point of being able to teach themselves new things. Duncan believes that with Edrolo, it will be possible to increase that number to 80 or 90%, which would fundamentally change humanity. Episode Highlights from Duncan: “To me, the next great problem to solve is unlocking the capacity of human minds. And to me, we don’t need any more time, or money, or new curriculums to do it. I’m not saying those things wouldn’t help. But I don’t think they are precluding us from getting there.” “There are still some jobs that are very physical, but they are slowly going away. If your job is knowledge work, which is the increasing percentage of jobs, and if your job is non-repetitive, the machines are replacing all the repetitive ones... then I’m going to argue that the most important skill is thinking.” “If you’re not helping the world be better, people aren’t on board. Your goal has to be to make the world better, and you have to be making progress towards it. Then they have to see how they’re able to contribute to that. Those are the foundational elements. Upon that foundation, you can build a positive sum ecosystem where people like working etc, but if you don’t have those foundational elements, I don’t think anything else really matters.” “In the developed world roughly one third of people get to the point where they can teach themselves new things. I think one definition of what we’re trying to do is get as many people to this point as possible… I would hope that we could take this from roughly a third, to 80 or 90% by the end of year 10, and if that’s the case, we have fundamentally changed all of humanity.” “A unit of thinking, a unit of building products, a unit of observing, a unit of synthesising, and round and round. That’s what I would call a cycle of learning. You need to get externally validated units of learning, and that can only happen by going outside.” “To me, there’s often an overly simplistic idea of what culture (in a company) should be, and it often comes out as monoculture… to me, the only constant is change, and you’re trying to set up the entire business to be able to shift, and for people to be part of what that is, and for different types of cultures to sit in different places. So, effectively a mess, but a beautiful mess, hopefully.”
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 bioprint human cells in 3D. These machines help forward-thinking drug discovery and medical research pioneers create human tissue for research and therapy that mimic real human tissue structures, rather than in environments that fail 90% of the time. Episode Highlights from Cameron & Aidan: “We tried to adopt an agile mindset and have outcome driven teams, so putting biologists, material scientists and engineers together in a team, and having really clear outcomes for the product to guide them. They can use all their different skills and experience and deliver something really incredible.” - Aidan “The technology that we’re developing is a fundamental shift in our ability to engineer biological tissue at scale, so it’s a big mission. We’re setting out to build a generational business. And we knew from the outset it was important to break that up into discrete horizons or units of progress.” - Cameron “We thought we had a product, but then we realised the printer was not the product, the product was what the customer takes out of it. It’s been that journey of learning more about what’s the actual product, and what our customer is going to get value out of.” - Aidan “The one thing I’d do differently is seek to get the product into the hands of more customers early on. The only way to truly iterate on the product and learn where the real value is is to work with as many customers as you can, and learn as much as you can from their usage and feedback.” - Cameron Learn more about Inventia Life Sciences: https://bit.ly/3RhRjz6 Cameron Ferris's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3TrHSz2 Dr Aidan O'Mahony's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3CDo2ed Get in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below: https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq
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, and one study found it takes 22 months for a direct report to recover physically and emotionally from the effects of a bad manager.” “The root of most hard conversations is that there wasn’t a clear expectation in place.” “The first thing you’ve got to do is define success. You have to know, at any given point, what success looks like for each of the people on your team. If you don’t, they will certainly not.” “At the Mintable we’ve got what we call the 5 dimensions of great management: Aware, Care, Prepare, Share and Dare.” “We call it strategic care: what are the key things that you need to learn about the people on your team to get the best out of them? Understand how someone likes to receive feedback, how they like to receive recognition.” Learn more about The Mintable: https://bit.ly/3JVRo9k Lauren Humphrey's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3K5nKi0 Get in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below: https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq
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 set the standard for what a generational company needs to do in terms of the output quality, the people that you hire and how you work." 🦄 The intersection of "Market | Product | Channel | Model fit is an incredible framework for thinking about how to build a generational company... Product-Market fit is not the right way to think about building anything." 🔥 “There are four factors that you need for virality. Firstly, you need a really short time to the “aha!” moment… Secondly, people need to be able to explain the product within one sentence... Thirdly, there needs to be a really broad value proposition… And finally, the product needs to get better the more of your network is on the product.” Businesses started reaching out, saying "hang on, we'll pay you" and Jarrod "realised [he] had a viral product with a bottoms-up SaaS component" to it. "After a few customers came onboard, I realised this actually has real traction, so I left Uber to work on this full time, and then grew a lot during 2021." 🐣 Get in contact with Mason to share feedback, ask questions or share a pitch deck 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 out and looking at the healthcare system as a whole.” Dr. Aengus Tran is on a mission to improve the standard of care for a million people every day. 💙 Saving a million lives a day with Dr. Aengus Tran and Samantha Wong Highlights from S2 E6 of our Wild Hearts podcast with harrison.ai co-founder Dr. Aengus Tran and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong: How harrison.ai built a product in 18 months that is now used for 1 in 4 chest x-rays in Australia 🤯 What Aengus learned from Vietnam's “Father of computer science.” 👨💻 The simple math behind the biggest problem of our century 😱 The inevitable future of the healthcare industry according to Samantha Wong 🤓
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 Service”. Highlights from S2 E4 of our Wild Hearts podcast with FL0 co-founder Dale Brett and Blackbird Principal Tom Humphrey: How 10 years of building startups led to the unique insight that created FL0 🧐 Finding product-market fit in 2021 🦸♀️ How FL0 is thinking about its GTM alongside pioneering a new category 🏃♀️ How to use fundraising to build a village of support around your startup 🏘 A framework for thinking about GTM right at the beginning. Here is the blog Tom & Mason referred to. See FL0's job openings here.
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 the teams jobs board here: https://www.multitudes.co/careers Highlights from Season 2 Episode 3 of Wild Hearts with Multitudes co-founder Lauren Peate and Blackbird partner Samantha Wong What Lauren learned about teamwork and culture from four years running a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy. How Multitudes found product-market fit and built culture into their team from day one. How to recognise the silent heroes in your teams who give feedback, mentorship, and improve everything. How leaders can embrace the uncomfortable to make meaningful change in workplaces. How a parallel fundraising process helps startups raise quicker.