Open The Pod Bay Doors

Jeremy Kwong-Law manages Grok Ventures, which is Mike Cannon-Brookes's family office fund. Jeremy has a law degree  from Sydney Uni, a stint at Macquarie bank as well as a foray into running his own startup a few years ago. This a fascinating story about how Jeremy got into venture, what a family office fund like this looks like, what their investment focus is. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr Michelle Perugini is an academic, entrepreneur, and an internationally renowned expert in health, medical research, advanced analytics, and cognitive AI. Her business, Life Whsiperer uses AI, computer vision and machine learning to better select healthy embryos for IVF, and ultimately improve outcomes for couples wanting to have children.Success rates for IVF are low, placing unnecessary financial and emotional burden on couples. Selecting the right embryo during IVF treatment is critical to ensuring a successful outcome. However, embryo selection is typically a manual and imprecise process. Life Whisperer's goal is to improve IVF success rates, and reduce cost and emotional burden on couples by selecting the best embryos.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Slight change in format this week. Ian is off in Hawaii cycling up a volcano, so has handed the microphone over to his Innovation Bay co-founder Phaedon Stough. He caught up with Patrick Llewellyn, the CEO of Accel-backed Aussie startup success story 99Designs. 99Designs is one of the world's largest graphic design marketplaces. There are few who have executed such rapid global growth as successfully as Patrick.To date, 99designs has hosted more than 245,000 graphic design contests and paid out more than $60 million to its community of 250,000 designers around the world. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Katherine is the founder and CEO of Brighte, a Sydney-based fintech startup. Its proposition is to lend to households looking to buy big-ticket items like solar panels, batteries, air conditioners, etc. A former Macquarie banker, she launched the business in late 2016. She has shown incredible traction and progress, having recently landed $3.5m in seed funding, including from Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian's co-CEO).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bill has had a long career in the startup and venture space. He was a co-founder at Blackbird Ventures (with Niki Scevak and Rick Baker). He has a huge passion for #DeepTechFounders and has now recently launched Main Sequence Ventures along with Phil Morle, Mike Zimmermann, Martin Duursma and Mike Nicholls. It's a $100m fund part funded by CSIRO and part funded by the federal goverment.Bill proved his geek chops and street cred by nominating Rick & Morty as his favourite TV show. Love it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Al is one of the new generation of Aussie VCs.  Tempus Partners was formed after his successful exit from ShippingEasy. He's now launched a $40m fund investing in the best early stage and Series A opportunities.  It's an awesome story and great to hear the insights from one of the best "emerging" VCs in Australia.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alison brings some unique insights to the podcast this week. She's done just about everything from early stage startups to a stint as a VC and now as a Director of Westpac and Cochlear (amongst other things!) She's an amazing thinker and problem solver. I enjoy all my interviews, but this is definitely up there as one of my favourites.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dan Cohen is an Australian serial entrepreneur. He successfully built and sold his first business Park Assist after a 10 year journey. In 2015 he co-founded Flare, a business redefining the employer-employee relationship. Has raised almost $10m locally, mostly from local VC Reinventure. I've known Dan for years now and he is one of my favourite entrepreneurs. He seems to combine the essential entrepreneurial traits of tenacity, ambition and arrogance but with healthy dollops of humility. There are some extremely valuable insights in this interview.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I know you shouldn't have favourite children, or, I suppose, favourite startup CEOs. But Luke is definitely one of my favourite CEOs. Luke's story, and by extension the story of SafetyCulture is fascinating - the epitome of startup hustle. It was so inspiring that Luke produced and paid for a movie about it (along with his buddies from Canva and Vinomofo). It's appropriately called "The New Hustle" - if you haven't seen it check it out - you'll find it on YouTube.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jason is a prinipal at Partners for Growth (PFG), a specialty lending company from Silicon Valley with an active presence in Australia. When it comes to financing high-growth companies, we tend to focus on equity deals - ie sell a percentage of your company shares to an investor. Debt is an instrument that is much less common. Why is this? Jason has a great story to tell. Listen in and find out how he went from a Phd in Ancient History from Oxford University via a few years with Silicon Valley Bank in San Francisco to PFG's man on the ground in Australia. And what exactly is venture debt?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We took the "studio" on the road with us to Hobart in Tasmania. Caught up James MacGregor, the founder and CEO of video animation startup Biteable. James is an outstanding entrepreneur demonstrating leadership, strong engineering, effective marketing, and tons of commercial hustle. Plus of course the essential ingredient - oodles of tenacity. Biteable is less than 4 years old and from its HQ in Hobart has build a worldwide user base of over 2 million customers. His story is a great one, and it feels like he is only just getting started!I didn't have my usual microphones with me for this episode, so not quite the richness of our usual productions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amanda Price is the head of KPMG's High Growth Ventures team. Their aim is to help founders build successful startups by helping them with access to capital, customers and international connections.She returned from almost 10 years in Los Angeles in various startup roles and has been a pillar of the Aussie startup community for over three years now. She's smart and passionate about startups. I really enjoyed our conversation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flavia is my favourite rocket scientist. Passionate, driven, intelligent and with unbelievable amounts of tenacity, it seems there is nothing that Flavia can't do if she puts her mind (and talents) to it.Fleet is a space business providing free global satellite connectivity for the internet of things. Over the next few years they will be launching and managing a constellation of up to 100 nano-satellites operating in a low earth orbit and providing ubiquitous connectivity for the tens of billions of internet-connected devices around the world. They just raised $5m from Blackbird and Mike Cannon-Brooke's investment fund, Grok Ventures.Flavia has a great story of how she got to this point. And articulates well the remarkable ambition she still has for the business. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Karen is the CEO of corporate startup accelerator Slingshot. She has spent most of her career in various tech roles, most recently as CEO of News-owned job site Career One. Slingshot has delivered programs for several major Australian corporates over the last 3 years, including NRMA, HCF, Qantas and Lion. It's an interesting model which seems to have carved out a good spot in a relatively competitive market.Karen and I cover a lot of ground in this (quite long) episode. She's an awesome lady - great fun to talk to with some great insights.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Niki Scevak is the founder of Australian accelerator program Startmate as well as a founding partner at VC Blackbird. He's been passionately involved in the Australian startup sector since 2008 when he returned home from the USA.Niki has done about as much as anyone I know to support and grow the startup ecosystem. Startmate is on its fifth (or sixth?) cohort. Blackbird has now made almost 40 investments across its two funds. Many of their most recent investments are in what one might call "non-standard" sectors such has self-driving cars and space. Niki is a deep thinker with a keen intellect. And a great guy too.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nico Chu is a very accomplished senior executive from the global IT corporate ranks. He has held senior global roles with companies like Expedia and Orbitz. His last corporate role was successfully helping to navigate Orbitz through their $1.5bn acquisition by Expedia. His new venture, Sinorbis, is a software business helping western (well, non-Chinese) companies market themselves into the enormous Chinese market. China has 720m internet users, which is one quarter of the world's internet population. Broadly speaking they love western goods and services. However it's very difficult for those brands to get their message delivered behind the Great Chinese Firewall in a way that resonates. Sinorbis has built software and associated services that is helping with this.Nico has a great story. And is a shining example of someone coming from the corporate world to make a significant splash in the startup world. (Also, sorry for my Barry White voice - got whacked with a bug just before this was recorded.)See omnystudi

Gen is a remarkable young woman. Smart, driven, humble. She has demonstrated a remarkable ability in her short career so far to (ahem) "get shit done". She cut her teeth in understanding double sided-markets with recruitment marketplace OneShift. This was sold earlier this year to Programmed. Gen and her co-founder/CTO Jess Glenn have now embarked on Tamme, a service for micro-targeting both sides of marketplaces, at a hyper-local level. She has also co-founded (with Jane Lu from Showpo) "Like Minded Bitches Drinking Wine" which now has 46,000+ female members around the world who enjoy wine and business. We discussed this and more. Jump in and enjoy...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rob is the CEO and founder of podcasting platform Whooshkaa. An accountant by background, Rob was formerly the CEO at Macquarie Radio Network before he left and threw himself into the startup world with Whooshkaa a couple of years ago. Whooshkaa as well as being the publishing platform for Open the Pod Bay Doors is also one of the best startups in Australia right now. Commercially and technically it is doing an amazing job. Rob is intelligent, focused, talented and super-humble. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jennifer Tejada is the CEO of Pagerduty, a company that provides (I'm quoting from their web site) - "full-stack visibility and actionable insights for better software and better customer experiences. " It might sound niche, but this is a huge and growing area, especially with the way software is currently being developed, deployed and managed. Just 7 years old and a graduate of Y-Combinator,  Pagerduty has raised over US$80m from investors including Accel, Bessemer and Andreessen Horowitz.  It has over 9,000 clients globally and around 330 staff.Pagerduty just launched in Australia and Jennifer was in town to get things kicked off. She has a strong link to Australia (Bondi in particular) having married an Aussie through their love of ocean-yacht-racing. She spent 10 years or so in Australia before heading back to San Francisco and eventually ending up at Pagerduty in 2016. She's a remarkable woman with a huge wealth of experiences and insights. One of my favourite guests so far. Enjoy.See omnystudio.com/list

We held an Innovation Bay event in Melbourne recently where we hosted Partners from three of the country's best VCs (Airtree, Reinventure and Squarepeg). Between them they represent almost $750m of Venture Capital and have made around 60 investments between them. Fascinating discussion covering the background of Australia's VC sector, where it has got to now, some of the upcoming trends and what the future holds. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.