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."
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 yearsAlex 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.
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.
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 learnThe three real drivers: cost curves, capability (VLM/VLA), and customer pullReliability as the business model: why 99% isn’t enough—and how teams get to 4–6 ninesData, not demos: robots emit GB/min; how to isolate the 1% that changes outcomesHorizontal vs. vertical: what failed in indoor/vertical farming and whyAlloy’s wedge: multimodal search (images, time series, logs), “scenarios,” alerts, and instant mission summaries to accelerate deployment and reduce unit costsTeam & culture: hiring for speed, humility, and learning in a field moving weeklyChapter 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 leverage03:30 Many small businesses → the “one-thing, 10–20 years” decision08:30 Why now for robotics: cost curves + reusable rockets as mindset shift10:45 Vertical farming post-mortems: unit economics, reliability, scale errors13:40 Reliability is everything: from 99% to 99.999% in the physical world15:45 The data firehose: GB/min, multimodal chaos, and missing tooling18:40 Operator-to-robot ratio as the core unit economic lever21:10 Selling into robotics: design partners, security, and data heterogeneity23:15 Common data primitives (perception, time series, logs) + ROS-driven formats24:30 Why LLMs aren’t enough: context-window limits & multimodal encoding27:00 Alloy’s product: natural-language search, similarity, “scenarios,” real-time alerts28:50 Instant mission summaries vs. days of manual analysis29:30 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 frontier33:40 Distribution & adoption: enterprise first; consumer follows reliability35:40 Safety and necessity: underwater, heavy industry, logistics37:15 Autonomy acceptance: the “first Waymo ride” unlock43:00 Ideal customers: high throughput, real deployments, cloud telemetry44:50 ICP discovery playbook: questions that qualify real readiness45:50 Team design: missionary talent, humility > hubris, learn-fast culture46:40 Macro lens: robotics as a deflationary lever & company formation boom48:00 Jobs & leverage: from decoding info → higher-order coordination50:05 The Alloy analogy: the coal-shoveler that keeps the engine running
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.
When storytelling meets startup energy, magic happens.In this week’s episode, Xavier Collins, co-founder of Wonder, joins Mason to explore how technology is tearing down the old gates of Hollywood, and what happens when anyone, anywhere, can tell stories that move the world.Backed by Blackbird and LocalGlobe, Wonder is building an AI-native creative studio reimagining how films are made, who gets to make them, and what “production” even means. Xavier shares how AI can help the 90% of scripts that never get made finally see the light of day - from resurrecting forgotten footage to helping bold new voices get their first break.We dive into instinct versus analytics, courage versus consensus, and the scrappy startup mindset redefining creative industries. It’s a story about belief, innovation, and the people daring to create what others think impossible.This episode is for anyone who’s ever had a story they’ve wanted to tell, a dream they’ve wanted to build, or an idea they’ve been told was too crazy to work.Because when content becomes infinite, the only thing that matters is the quality of the story - and your story might just be next.
When Michelle Battersby launched Sunroom, she set out to change the game for women creators, building a platform where they could earn freely, safely, and on their own terms. Five years, three funding rounds and one pandemic later, she did just that. Thousands of creators made life-changing income, and Sunroom was acquired by Fanfix.From the emotional weight of leadership to the surprising financial realities of building something from scratch, Michelle shares the unfiltered truths of the founder journey - the highs, the hard parts, and the freedom that comes with letting go. Maddy Guest, from Blackbird’s investment team and host of the finance podcast So Invested, joins Michelle to unpack what those lessons teach us about resilience, risk, and redefining success.This is a story about ambition and endurance — and the lessons that only reveal themselves when you decide to climb.
When Lucy Liu co-founded Airwallex in 2015, she was flying around the world opening bank accounts in person and carrying bags of security tokens. Global businesses are digital. But finance was stuck in the past.For three years, Airwallex burned money building invisible infrastructure no one believed in yet. Her co-founder drew a “really ugly unicorn” on a whiteboard predicting ten-times growth when they had zero revenue. Everyone laughed - but beneath the laughter was a serious undertone that they were onto something big. Something that would be game changing. So they kept building.That bet on infrastructure became one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world, now moving $200 billion annually and adding $100 million in recurring revenue every quarter.In this episode, Lucy shares why building two products simultaneously defied conventional startup wisdom, how hiring for intellectual curiosity beats credentials, and what it means to scale from zero to 1,800 people without losing speed. She also reflects on the power of ambitious predictions, staying simple at massive scale, and why resilience matters more than perfection.
Procreate co-founder James Cuda has spent more than a decade obsessing over one thing: the brushstroke. From hacking the iPad 1 to run at 60fps, to turning a side project into the world’s leading creative app, James has built Procreate on a radical philosophy: simplicity, permanence, and creative freedom above all else.In this episode of Wild Hearts, James joins Mason to share why the company never took VC money, how “flow state” shapes everything from product design to team culture, and what it really takes to scale without losing soul. They also dive deep into generative AI, ethical data, and why Procreate’s biggest unfair advantage may simply be staying small and Tasmanian.James also reflects on the tension between addition and reduction, the power of jam sessions, and why listening to the “little voice” is the artist’s greatest superpower.Time Stamps00:00 – Intro02:05 – Why brushstrokes were the starting point05:10 – The art of subtraction: keeping flow while adding features07:50 – Permanence as a product philosophy09:36 – From “an amazing piece of shit” to a world-class creative tool12:11 – How Procreate’s archetype grew from amateurs to architects15:01 – Listening to users without losing the soul17:31 – Scaling creativity and protecting flow inside the team19:51 – Jam sessions, “holy shit” moments, and making ideas real23:31 – James’ strong stance on generative AI and ethical data34:51 – Authenticity over slogans: building trust with artists37:21 – Bringing artists together, online and offline39:06 – Staying independent: why Procreate never took VC44:01 – Simplicity vs. optionality in future workflows46:39 – The advice James gives every artist: listen to the little voice48:26 – Outro
Imagine being able to understand your customers better than ever before—instantly. That’s the promise of AI-powered product management. In this episode, Matt Hinds, Co-founder and CEO of Sauce AI, explains how AI is transforming the way companies prioritise, iterate, and execute on their product roadmaps. We dive into the tools, strategies, and mindset shifts that are allowing top teams to unlock massive leverage in world of product development.In this conversation, we cover:🧠 The evolving role of product managers in an AI-powered world🚀 How Sauce AI is transforming product insights and decision-making 📉 Why some companies are eliminating PM roles – and why others are doubling down💡 How top product teams use AI to unlock customer insights 100x faster🛠️ The must-have AI tools that product managers should be using right now 🔄 The future of product iteration: instant feedback loops and automated workflows
Winning against billion-dollar incumbents isn't about money—it’s about strategy. In this episode, we talk to Steve Hind, the co-founder of Lorikeet, about how he and his team built an AI-powered customer support tool that’s not just competing but winning in one of the most crowded markets in tech. Steve shares the moment that led to their pivotal product shift, the principles guiding their success, and why they believe 2025 is the year AI will truly transform enterprise support.In this conversation, we cover:💡 The breakthrough moment that led to Lorikeet’s pivot into AI-driven customer support 🚀 How Steve and his team outperformed well-funded competitors in Silicon Valley 📈 The underestimated value of customer engagement over customer love 🎯 Why AI in customer support isn’t just about summarising FAQs—and why that matters 🛠️ The power of engineers talking to customers and building based on real needs 💰 Why Steve believes the best startups should focus on making their existing customers wildly successful ⚡ How startup founders can avoid “doom loop” hiring behaviors and build teams that win 🔮 Why 2025 will be the year of enterprise AI—and how Lorikeet is positioning itself to lead Steve Hind and his team at Lorikeet are proving that startups can outcompete legacy players—not by outspending them, but by outthinking them. This conversation is a deep dive into strategy, execution, and the mindset that leads to real impact.
How do you take a deeply human skill—asking great questions—and scale it with AI? Michelle Gilmore, co-founder and CEO of Juno, is tackling that challenge head-on. In this episode, we talk about her path from industrial design to AI entrepreneurship, why the best research isn’t about collecting data but understanding people, and how Juno is changing the way businesses learn from their customers.In this conversation, we cover:🔍 The art of asking the right questions—and why small wording changes can completely alter responses 💡 Why Michelle believes AI has levelled the playing field—and what that means for the future of research 🧑🤝🧑 The importance of co-founders—and how Michelle’s long-standing partnership with Josh gives Juno an advantage🚀 The shift from consulting to product-based business models—and why Juno is moving away from selling time 🔬 Experimentation at the core of Juno’s growth—how the team tests hypotheses before scaling 💰 Pricing AI research: Can value-based pricing work for a product like Juno?🌏 Expanding globally—why Latin America and Singapore are key emerging markets for Juno 🧠 The future of qualitative research—why Michelle believes surveys are outdated and how Juno is leading the next evolutionThis episode isn’t just about AI; it’s about how Juno is redefining the way we gather insights, making research faster, more intuitive, and ultimately more human.
AI & Creativity: how Springboards is changing the game for agenciesWhat does it take to turn an idea into a global business in just six months? In this episode, we sit down with the founders of Springboards, Pip Bingemann and Amy Tucker, to uncover their whirlwind journey from a three-person team with an MVP to a thriving international business that’s transforming the creative agency space. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to learn.In this conversation, we cover:The incredible growth of Springboards—from a 3-person team to a global operation (02:30)How AI is inspiring, not replacing, human creativity in the agency world (15:45)The pitching problem in agencies and how Springboards is solving it (22:10)The expansion into international markets and how Amsterdam became a key hub (30:20)The power of relationships in driving business success over 15 years (40:05)Why “pitch theatre” is crucial for standing out in a crowded market (50:15)The importance of balancing creativity and structure in agency work (1:02:40)Overcoming fear and resistance to AI adoption within agencies (1:15:55)Whether you’re a marketer, a creative, or a business leader, this conversation will change how you think about AI’s role in enhancing—not replacing—human creativity.
Discover how Stephanie Carullo from Box and Apple, transformed education through technology. In this episode, she shares the pivotal moments that redefined classrooms, the culture at Apple, and her vision for the future of AI in learning. 🔑 Why Apple’s "life's best work" mantra fosters trust and accountability across teams📱 The revolutionary impact of the iPad on education and its role in transforming classrooms worldwide📖 The secret to embedding Apple’s culture of clarity, strategy, and communication in organisations🌟 How critical thinking and problem-solving are the most important skills for future leaders 🤖 Why AI is poised to revolutionise education, featuring insights from Khan Academy's AI tutor👩💼 Stephanie’s role as COO at Box: Coordinating customer-focused strategies for sustained growth📈 How to balance rapid growth and operational efficiency in the competitive SaaS industry 🌍 Lessons from Apple and Box on fostering innovation and creating meaningful impact at scale Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, an educator, or a leader, join us to learn how Stephanie fostered trust, tackled challenges, and leveraged technology to drive education and innovation to new heights.
What does it take to launch Australia into the global space race? For Adam Gilmour, CEO and founder of Gilmour Space Technologies, the answer is a bold vision, relentless innovation, and an unwavering commitment from a founder and their team.In this episode of Wild Hearts, Adam shares the highs, lows, and lessons learned as he prepares for the first Australian-made rocket launch from Australian soil.Throughout the episode, we cover:🚀 Adam Gilmour’s bold vision to enable human colonisation of the solar system🧠 The rollercoaster highs and lows of building rockets from scratch in Australia📊 How simplicity drives innovation: lessons from aerospace engineering 🌍 The importance of milestones in the rocket business and how they shape progress 🔄 Bootstrapping a space company with a small team and big dreams 🎯 Why launching from Australia provides unique orbital opportunities💡 Navigating regulatory hurdles and securing trust in a high-risk industry 🌌 Adam’s predictions for humanity’s expansion into the solar system and beyondAdam Gilmour’s story isn’t just about rockets—it’s a testament to resilience, innovation, and the boundless potential of human ambition 🚀
Join us as we dive into the archives of Wild Hearts to re-live some of our favourite episodes! Flavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit.In the second episode of, host Mason Yates speaks to co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth.Key topics covered: How the next industrial revolution will be in space. The unique challenges facing space start-ups. The small data revolution. The importance of having a focused market. What Fleet did to shorten their customer feedback loop. Why a CEO has to be everywhere. The best of Flavia Tata Nardini:"Focus is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the startup world.”“A lot of people talk about big data, we hated the word, it was just bullshit. So we called it a small data revolution. Just get a little piece of data. The smart data.”“The [space] industry has got ninety percent awareness of everything that’s deployed. They just make decisions in a way that is not right. We want to change this, we want to give [everyone] full visibility. The problem has always been that connectivity was not present or super expensive.”“We decided to fire all our customers that were tiny and focus like crazy in working with big energy companies and others.”“You need to be a believer, you need to believe [in your product] in the first five to six years like crazy.”“You cannot let people build you a product [and think] they will build it for you the way you wanted it. You have to be there. You have to do it. You have to show them the path."Niki Scevak on Flavia Tata Nardini and Fleet:“The ability to do something you could not do before to this huge industry, and to make it a hundred X cheaper was incredibly exciting."“As much as it was about space, it was about the opportunity to build a telecommunications network for a tiny amount of money.”“When you compare space startups to software startups, the disadvantages are around feedback loops."“How Flavia in particular has wrangled people from around the world … I think it’s just incredible coordination and project management to get things to happen with not a lot of money and certainly with not a lot of structure."“You have to divorce the outcome of something from the weighted probability of doing it.”“You need to keep shooting. Luck is a process, you have to expose yourself to be lucky.
Join us as we dive into the archives of Wild Hearts to re-live some of our favourite episodes! 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 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 from Craig on the future of farming and creating a culture of radical honesty, and from investor and Rocket Lab founder on the biggest mistakes NZ entrepreneurs make, and what convinced him to invest in Halter.
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.