Open The Pod Bay Doors

Paul Weingarth is the CEO and founder of Slyp - a fintech startup and platform sitting between retail/merchant services and banking. The vision of Slyp is to completely reimagine what a receipt could be used for. Rather than a receipt being the end of a transaction, Slyp are developing a network allowing a relationship between the merchant, bank and customer to begin at the end of the transaction.    We hear about Paul’s study of agri economics at uni (where his nickname was Urban Cowboy), his first full time role at Equigroup, how he helped to set up the team at Microsoft Financing in Australia before moving over to PayPal in 2010. Deeply passionate about the customer experience, and now with an enviable resume of experience, Paul co-founded Slyp in 2016 alongside Spiro Rokos and Mike Boyd.      With just a prototype, Paul and Slyp were able to engage all four major Australian banks as both investors and current and future customers - the only Australian fintech to have done so. Slyp’s merchant list extends

Joining us for Episode 148 is the fascinating George Peppou, Founder and CEO of Vow Food, a cultivated meat company, founded and operated in Sydney. Vow is made up of a multidisciplinary team of scientists, technologists and designers, working together in the relentless pursuit of better food.By making meat with animal cells, and not the animals themselves, Vow is creating the world's most tantalising and unique culinary experiences without compromising on ethics or our planet along the way. Ian and George dive into George's career path so far, from studying Biochemistry and Immunobiology at Sydney University to Founder and CEO of Vow Food. Tune in to hear more on: The effects of the meat industry and food production on the Global greenhouse gas emissions  How Vow as a product is produced and when it will first go to market The investment and growth stages of Vow  Georges business and personal challenges Quick fire round: Book: Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbel

Joining us for E147 is Angela Clark, Co Founder of Wallet Nation. Angela is a specialist in business transformation, customer experience, innovation and digital platforms. Angela’s experience spans multiple industries, customer segments and services, across education, media, payments and financial services. Angela has previously led companies as a CEO and Managing Director, founded her own start-ups and led transformation of divisions and customer strategy within larger companies.Tune in to hear Ian deep dive into Angela's fascinating career journey plus so much more as the pair cover off topics such as: The transition from corporate to start up Wallet Nation - How was it founded, where is it at currently and what is the vision Crypto Winter and the evolution of blockchain and web3 The benefits of being apart of a community Quickfire Round Book - Cloudstreet by Tim Winton News source - NY Times Tech CEO - Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Best productivity tool -  Weeding tools for the garden TV show - ESP News Tedx t

Our guest for episode 146 is Australian politician Hon Ed Husic MP. Elected to the House of Representatives as the Federal Member for Chifley in 2010, Ed is currently serving as Minister for Industry and Science.  Passionate about the digital economy creating the jobs of the future, Ed has a long-standing interest in the impact of tech on our economy and community and his portfolio appointments and parliamentary interests have focused on this. For a number of years, he has been part of the Federal Opposition’s team developing policies to promote early stage and digital innovation.In this episode, we dive into Ed's top priorities for policies within the startup ecosystem. Ian and Ed also touch on the Research and Development tax incentive, the positive impact migration and visas can have on growing the economy, as well as discuss politics in general plus the impact inflation and rising interest rates may have on small startups.  Tune in to hear more from Ed! Quickfire RoundBook - System Error by Rob Reich and

After a two year hiatus, Innovation Bay and ARENA teamed up once more for the ARENA Renewable Energy Founder Forum.    Across the course of the evening, four promising founders from a pool of 40 applications in the renewables space were invited to pitched their business to a room of experts and enthusiasts in the industry.    We heard from ARENA's Darren Miller, past alumni 5B’s Dr Nicole Kuepper-Russell and an expert panel, recorded the night, featured Renate Egan from the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, Kate Vidgen of Macquarie Group and Kristin Vaughan from Virescent Ventures.   Today we’re thrilled to share the panel discussion with you for this week’s episode. Across this educational and eye-opening conversation, Innovation Bay’s own Ian Gardiner alongside renewables experts Renate Egan, Kate Vidgen and Kristin Vaughan cover a range of topics.    We investigate the renewable energy industry shifts across the last 12-18 months, Australia’s evolution relative to other international markets in

Louise Nobes is the founder of the Australian arm of 42 - a globally innovative software engineering and coding trade school. 42 is free to attend with entry criteria being that you must be 16 to attend and either undergo a strenuous 2 hour logic test (and pass) or a 4 week intensive bootcamp (and pass).    An ex-social worker, Louise is incredibly passionate about supporting underprivileged and underrepresented people. While teaching at Flinders NVI, Louise became fixated on wanting to push into work of the future and how it would look to bring in the best educational model that focused on coding and jobs - and one that was open to everyone. After looking up 42 on the advice of a colleague, Louise contacted the French headquarters to ask if she could become the Australia license holder. Within 24 hours they agreed.    Louise looks at everything with a lens focused on diversity and equality. She is driven by a desire to solve some of the really complex problems in society - one problem in particular being you

Wayne Gerard wears a number of hats. By day, he is the Co-Founder & CEO of RedEye and the current Queensland Chief Entrepreneur. He lives on a working farm outside of Brisbane, is a trail runner and is deeply passionate about innovation, entrepreneurship, the climate, helping others and making a difference with the time we have!    Wayne spent 10 years in the ARMY straight out of school, first as a tactical communications officer and later with a key role to build the ARMY’s first drone. This opportunity led to a job offer with Boeing, then a Queensland tech company (Lincom) before starting his own consultancy company. Following a devastating flood that affected his property in 2011, Wayne reevaluated his position, wanting to move away from being the product of his business.    During a trip to the US, Wayne came up with an idea for a SaaS business - a single instance multi tenant cloud as a solution for engineering companies. RedEye was born with BHP the very first customer. Fast forward 10 years and Way

Joining us for E142 are Katie Heathcote, Associate Director Technology - Export Services for Investment NSW and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, CEO and Founder of Fintech company Cape.Katie’s role at Investment NSW sees her meet hustle with NSW tech companies that are at the right stage to scale globally. Investment NSW provides advice and mentoring to companies into which markets they should select to scale into, with one of Katie’s role responsibilities to ramp up exports for NSW. Investment NSW also has a department specialising in export assistance grants, an MVP team that focuses on the local ecosystem and helps companies get to the point of scaling and a tech precincts team that offers rental and subsidies among so much more.Ryan is the CEO and Founder of Cape, an expense management platform that will work with businesses to spend smarter, reduce wasteful spending and grow their business. Cape are currently in the closed beta phase of their timeline, having onboarded their first 34 customers and are about to mo

Just last month (June) Innovation Bay spent 3 days and 3 nights in Noosa, Queensland with over 100 of the country’s leading VCs for our VC community Aurora’s annual cornerstone event, Venture Downunder (VDU). After a learning day full to the brim with panels, discussions, keynotes and serendipitous conversations, we took the opportunity to sit down with three of the most illustrious and active VCs in the ecosystem right now to take a snapshot in time of the current state of affairs of our industry and to catch their thoughts, concerns and what they’re most excited about right now.Joining Ian, around a small bar table in a quiet backroom, were:Karen Chan, Portfolio Manager, Perennial PartnersJohn Henderson, General Partner, Airtree VenturesStew Glynn, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, TEN13During VDU, Macquarie's Head of Wealth Management Investment Strategy, Jason Todd, provided attendees with an incredibly insightful, if not at times concerning, view into the current state of play. We took the podcast group

Dr Julio Ribeiro is the Co-Founder and CEO of Inventia Life Science, a deeptech, biotechnology company. Inventia build instruments for the 3D printing of biomaterials (literal living human cells) to print 3D structures or models of tumors with an ultimate aim to accelerate the drug discovery process and speed up medical research.The impact Julio and Inventia are looking to have is life-changing. To date, the pharmaceuticals industry has spent billions of dollars in research. According to Julio, 90% of drug trials fail. Inventia’s technology reduces the pipeline of unsuccessful drugs, speeding up the process of getting those that do work onto the market.Inventia have to date raised $35million with the likes of Blackbird, Skipp Capital, Main Sequence and angels as investors. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies globally already utilise the technology, with labs all across the world and a global waitlist eager to use the technology. The current funds and next few years will see Inventia exploring the market and s

IT’S OUR BIRTHDAY! Today, Innovation Bay’s Open The Pod Bay Doors turns 5! To celebrate, we’ve taken it way back to our very first guest. Daniel Petre is the Godfather of the ecosystem and has arguably been around longer and had more success than anyone else in the sector. In 2014, Daniel founded Airtree alongside Craig Blair but a year ago, made the move out of VC and into the philanthropy space.Daniel felt the need to step away from VC for a number of reasons - to make way for the next generation to shine, the business model of VC started to lose it’s shine for where he wanted to focus his energies, and he became a grandfather - a milestone that has seen him appreciate so clearly how short life is.His move into philanthropy was initially driven by his time working with Bill Gates in the US whose mother’s greatest value has resonated with Daniel over the years - that if you’ve been fortunate in life, it’s your responsibility to give back, not your choice. Inspired, Daniel has founded StartupGiving - a concie

Darren Miller is the CEO of Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) - whose purpose it is to support the transition to net zero emissions by accelerating the pace of pre-commercial innovation.Darren is deeply committed to net zero and improving our chances on planet earth. He believes we have all the technologies we need between now and 2030 - from solar, wind, lithium batteries, electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and household energy management - and if we can deploy these things at scale quickly in the economy, we’ll overshoot what we need to do by 2030 in order to reach net zero.ARENA does this by utilising federal funding to invest and support renewable energy startups and projects for the Australian economy. ARENA and Innovation Bay have teamed up for the third year running for the ARENA Renewable Energy Founder Forum on 28 July. The event showcases Australia's most exciting early stage renewable technology startups and pairs them with Australia's leading venture capitalists and angel investors - to su

Anthony Zaccaria is the Co-Founder of Linktree which is essentially a category creator for link in bio tools and a one-stop place to house entire online link ecosystems. In just 6 years, Linktree has gathered a massive global following with a user base of 24 million people - or the population of Australia (!!) - generating 1.2 billion Linktree visits per month. Earlier this year, Linktree reached unicorn status, with a $1.3 billion USD valuation following a $110 million USD raise.Anthony co-founded Linktree with his brother Alex Zacarria and mutual mate Nick Humphries in 2016. The company now employs 265 people across 12 countries and is growing rapidly. The model for Linktree is simple - in fact the prototype was built in 6 hours - the idea originating from their marketing business Bolster. While running marketing campaigns they thought there had to be a better way to consolidate all client links (think website, social media, Spotify etc) in one place. Linktree has since become a website replacement for many

Dale Brett is the Co-Founder & CEO at Fl0 - a low code platform for software engineers. Founded just a year ago (in 2021), Fl0 raised $11.5 million in its seed round with funding from the likes of Blackbird, Skip Capital and Jelix. Fl0’s vision is to empower software developers and engineers to be 20 times faster and more efficient.Prior to Fl0, Dale founded payment startup, Tapify, which, after only 12 months, received acquisition offers too good to refuse. As a part of Tapify’s acquisition, they were able to found Willow, a digital twin company that integrates real assets like stadiums and rail networks, analysing their data to help them optimise and run more efficiently. Dale has exited in the running of the business but continues to sit on the board for Willow.Fl0 is a remote first company, employing 22 staff across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Colorado, Vancouver and Europe. The company has been named “Canva for software engineers”. Its low code platform offers building blocks and tools to empower en

Laura is the CEO and Founder of SafeStack Academy, a community-centric online education platform on a mission to give software developers, analysts and architects all of the skills they need to build secure internet software.Laura entered the workforce at 16 after telling quite a few lies to become an apprentice software developer for EDS. She put herself through her qualifications to get to university and night school and then went back to do her degree in her early 20s. During 2005/2006 she took a year out to work for Cern in Geneva before taking up a post for British Intelligence. After a number of years working in counterterrorism and counter online harm, Laura took a trip to NZ for 6 weeks and never left - 11 years later, she holds a passport and has 2 small kiwi children.Fascinated with how fast software was being built, Laura found a niche seeing that security wasn't adapting to this speed. With a newborn in tow, she took a leap and after winning a couple of high growth NZ clients, began her startup at

Allegra Spender, currently running as an independent candidate for the Senate seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s east, is daughter to Italian immigrant parents - her father a barrister, politician and diplomat, her mother a renowned Australian fashion designer, the late Carla Zampatti.Allegra was Head Girl at Ascham School graduating with a HR score of 99.95 and went on to study Economics at the University of Cambridge in England. Her first job out of uni was as a consultant with McKinsey which she reflects was a great place to learn the trade of consulting and to think about business strategically, but Allegra wanted to use these tools for good and apply them to the social sector. Her ambition saw her work for the UK Treasury, in Kenya for a not-for-profit and as part of a huge teaching hospital.Upon returning to Australia in 2007, “the time was right” and Allegra was named Managing Director of Carla Zampatti, where she was able to apply her learned skills to this point back into the family business. Allegra succ

For the past 14 years, Tech23 has showcased and amplified the emerging deeptech talent coming out of Australia that have the potential to create new industries and smarter solutions. Tech23 is a national forum whereby 23 early stage companies are chosen to tell their story and speak about their innovation on stage to an audience of industry leaders, investors, potential enterprise customers and other up and coming founders.At the 2021 badge in November last year, Innovation Bay attended and flagged five of our favourites. In episode 133 of Open The Pod Bay Doors, we have invited these five companies to come onto the podcasts to tell us a bit about their business, their technology and what their future plans look like.The episode begins with Rachel Slattery, the mastermind behind Tech23, who explains a little about the forum’s history and purpose. We then go on to meet the incredible humans behind our chosen five companies from last year’s event.Josh Ismin is Co-Founder & CEO of Psylo - a psychedelic biote

Duncan Anderson, along with his two friends Jeremy Cox and Ben Sze, is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of EdTech company Edrolo. After some time working at Google, Duncan and his two business partners met while working at Goulburn and Sacs some 10 years ago. The original idea for Edrolo was as a two-sided marketplace - tutors on one side and students on the other - but quickly evolved into it’s earliest incarnation as somewhat of a YouTube for learning for VCE students.Fast forward to now, Edrolo employs approximately 200 staff, is in 1200 schools and services around 30,000 students across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland and is backed by some of Australia’s biggest VC’s such as Airtree and Blackbird. It is a fully vertically integrated company - meaning they create all their own content, do all tech stack, sales and customer support in house.Duncan is driven by trying to make the world a better place through education. A self-confessed learning machine, Duncan’s mind ticks at a million miles an hour, soaki

Ben Thompson is the Founder and CEO of Employment Hero. The company is Australia’s newest unicorn, recently announcing a funding round of $181 million, valuing the firm at $1.25 billion. Ben grew up in Frenchs Forrest in Sydney and finished his schooling in Armidale, rural NSW. After finishing law and economics at uni, Ben took up a number of tenures in Australia including with Sydney Futures Exchange and Perpetual before jumping on a flight to London where he was employed by Interactive Investor International and ran theirs and lastminute.com’s IPO and then by UK’s largest property portal, Right Move. After a number of years in London working and playing hard in the excitement of the dot-com boom, Ben and his (now) wife married and moved back to Sydney to raise their family. Simultaneously, Ben decided he never wanted to work for anyone again and so started his own business. Employment Hero currently services 80,000 SME customers, managing 750,000 thousand employees. With 52% of the world’s GDP spent on wage

Rebecca Schot-Guppy is the Director of Investment Leverage and Portfolio Management at IAG Firemark Ventures. Previously, Rebecca was the CEO of FinTech Australia, where she made a significant impact on the ecosystem. Prior to Fintech Australia, she worked as a Community Manager at Stone & Chalk. Rebecca found her way into the world of venture through her background in law and biomed. She is a passionate and knowledgeable member of the startup ecosystem with many insights to share.Ian & Rebecca discuss…- Rebecca’s path into the startup world- Why Rebecca chose to work on the venture side of the startup ecosystem- Rebecca’s role and impact at FinTech Australia- Australia as a Fintech powerhouse- IAG Firemark Venture’s thematic investments- The growth of the the VC sector in Australia- The Firemark Collective and its teams..and more!Quickfire Recommendations- Book: Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi- Podcast: 7am Podcast- News Source: AFR & The Guardian- App: Superhero- Produc