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.