Open the Pod Bay Doors

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 omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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/listener for privacy information.

Join venture capital heavyweights Paul Bassat, Co-founder of Square Peg Capital; Craig Blair, Co-founder of Airtree Ventures; and Kara Frederick, Partner at Reinventure, as they dive into Australia's evolving VC landscape. They discuss the passion-driven approach to entrepreneurship, emerging hot investment sectors like AI, and the transformed startup funding dynamics. The panel emphasizes the importance of building authentic relationships and the need for diversity in investment teams, all while navigating opportunities and challenges in the tech space.