Darren Winterford, Founder of EdApp, discusses disrupting workplace education, thinking global from day one, and the advantages of a freemium model. EdApp is empowering and educating millions of learners worldwide, including through partnerships with NGOs like the United Nations.

Welcome back to another episode of Wild Hearts. One Blackbird described this week's episode as ‘My favourite episode yet. Laura is incredibly charismatic, I was riveted from start to finish!’Outtakes: ✅ How cyber threats are shifting with the rise of AI✅ The value of authenticity when community-building ✅ A step by step guide to protecting your cyber borders✅ The power of storytelling for teaching and learningWithin the episode, we explore the shifting landscape of cybersecurity, where software developers are not just creators but custodians of security. Delving into the historical disconnect between CISOs (Chief information security officers) and engineering teams and how bridging this gap can enhance security measures in larger organisations.The growing awareness around third-party dependency risks - a concern that has prompted businesses to reflect on their exposure. Drawing an intriguing analogy, Laura likens each new piece of software or technology to adopting a puppy, bringing with it responsibilities and potential challenges that need to be managed.A key highlight is Laura’s vision for the future, where every software developer dedicates time to security. She shares SafeStack’s mission to protect companies of all scales, by empowering software teams worldwide to weave security throughout the development cycles. Listen to hear how SafeStack will reach 13 million software developers, getting them to enjoy one hour of security every fortnight, regardless of the amazing technology they’re building all through the power of storytelling.Episode highlights from Laura Bell Main: “And what I realized was that to sell to people who were essentially just like me, I needed to. Sell to people like me and I wouldn't pick up a cold call, and I don't care about your marketing emails as pretty as they are.”“What we needed to be was authentically in the community sharing value with no strings attached. We needed to give people the chance to explore the product in a way that they, you know, they could do their research before they came to talk to someone.”“The teeny, tiny, scrappy little three people things. They need to do security too, and they've got no budget. Trying to sell to them is just, that's silly. Don't do that,  give them the free version. Give them just some essentials. They can get started. And that goodwill and that standing, cultivates with them. They grow with it. And so, as they grow, our hope is that they will grow into us.”“It's hard and every country has its own culture with doing this, so there's a lot to learn, but it's quite freeing now that we are able to say, Hey, we don't need to behave like the playbook security company. We can just be the company we need to be to get to our particular audience.”“Yeah.  it goes through how we teach, right? nobody wants to sit there and be bored to death by training. The best way to teach, especially when it's something to do with risk is stories.”“I'm really mission driven. I dunno whether it came from that before or I was already there, but it's, it's really empowering to go to work every day knowing that you're doing something that's bigger than yourself.”“I'm genuinely nerdily excited about technology. I, I feel like all of the things I used to read as a kid are coming to life in front of me, the good and the bad. And, yeah, I think it's a pretty cool time to be a technologist”

Joe Harris, CCO of Eucalyptus, discusses lessons on scaling Eucalyptus as Head of Growth, a framework for building your growth function, misalignment in team design and frustration, the four main areas of greatness as a leader, tackling attribution challenges, and the importance of being hungry and coachable.

Levi Fawcett, co-founder of Partly, shares the step-by-step guide to building a marketplace. He discusses the importance of making mistakes, how New Zealand can compete with Silicon Valley, and the distinction between process and framework. Partly aims to reimagine the automotive industry with three solutions. The episode covers rocket launching experiences, learning from past mistakes, challenges of the car parts industry, and building the marketplace model.

Changing the conversation on sexual wellness with Lucy Wark, founder of Normal (live Sunrise edition)✅Challenges of creating a hardware product✅Helping people overcome shame and stigma✅Building a brand beyond a visual identity✅Investing in your own mental health✅Reaching your audience where they areWith its range of sex toys and sex education resources, NORMAL has reimagined the sex shop into an online experience that is fun and informative, with the mission of empowering absolutely anybody to explore their sexuality free from stress and stigma. In this special live episode of Wild Hearts, founder of NORMAL Lucy Wark spoke with me on stage at Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival.Episode highlights from Lucy:“More than 1 in 5 searches on the internet is about sex. There’s an incredibly large organic interest in this topic.”“As a culture, we have a long history of religious and cultural ideas about sex being sinful, sex being something that should only exist inside marriage, or should only exist for the creation of children.”“It’s not like selling toilet paper or mattresses. You’re trying to help people tackle quite deep psychological stigma.”“Things like libido, desire, arousal, changes in the body, sexual dysfunction, relationship skills, and sex while ageing, sex in menopause, there is this enormous suite of challenges for which we are incredibly poorly prepared for by formal sex education.” “A brand is not a logo and colours. To build authentic brands that mean something to people, is about a lot more than just building a visual identity.”“I think having practices like therapy are incredibly helpful investments in yourself as a founder, and an operator, and just a good human being to be around, so that’s been probably the highest ROI thing I do.”

The tipping point of believability with Mary Minas and Freya Berwick, co-founders of Sense Of Self✅How to build an audience before launching✅Overcoming the adversity that arrives with launching a bathhouse during COVID✅Leaning on your values as a decision making tool✅Challenges in finding investors aligned to Mary and Freya’s visionSense Of Self came out of Mary and Freya’s dream to create an Australian space that would draw on global practices to meet modern wellness needs in an inclusive way. The result is Sense Of Self, a contemporary bathhouse and spa with beautiful design and a big mission.Want to learn more? Listen to the 8th episode of Season 3 of our Wild Hearts podcast. 👇Episode Highlights from Mary and Freya:“We have a motto, come as you are, take what you need. And we really stick with that.”“We built an audience in two ways… Building an audience through events, holding panels and getting experts together and having conversations about social connection, belonging, and our values, and from that we grew an audience as well as an incredible understanding of the ways in which people access these feelings and what they mean to our audience. And secondly, digital marketing.”“Our audience was everything to us. Because we’d built this audience, and then we were like, shit, we’ve got to put our money where our mouth is, no one is really believing in us, so we signed a lease.”“We got to the tipping point of believability. Before that we were treated like these two young girls with this big idea of a day spa. And we were like, no, it’s very different from that, and it was only once we had a site, we had customers, and we were absolutely obsessed with it because we’d put everything we have into it that we passed that point where people took us seriously.”“We thought about everything from the customer’s perspective, and the way that we thought about the customer was someone coming in quite vulnerable, and how we made them feel “held”, but having their boundaries positively pushed.”“It’s really key to our model to bring these curated, new experiences to people.”

Transforming the world’s experience of work with Samantha Gadd, co-founder of Excellent✅How expectations of employees have evolved✅Being “customer obsessed” vs “employee obsessed”✅Giving employees an opportunity to shape their work lives✅Strategies to avoid burnout✅Challenging early days of creating a community of EX designers✅Employee branding: the promise you make to your peopleExcellent’s mission is to transform people’s experience of work, to enable a world where missions are accomplished by employees who love what they do. Founded in 2021 as a course in Employee Experience (EX) Design, Excellent has become a global platform.Episode Highlights from Samantha:“Step one is always discovery. Organisations always say, what’s the first thing we can do? And I say: ask your people. Getting those really objective insights so you can take a very well informed step forward and invest in things that are actually going to make a difference.”“Our mission is really exciting: we want to transform the world’s experience of work. When I talk to people about that, people want to be on board. We’ve actually had customers ask us when we’re looking for talent in their country, can we please join?”“There’s data that shows the most trusted entity in someone’s life is the organisation they work for, not the government or the news or their church. And so, employees are coming to work for far more than just a job, they’re looking for community and somewhere to really belong.”“My personal vision is that every employee has the opportunity to contribute to decisions that impact them, or has the opportunity to contribute to their own employee experience.”“In particular if you’re in a startup or a growth company, you’ve got to be really real about that proposition that people are joining you for. Often it’s crazy, it’s a wild ride, and so you’re looking for people who want to be on that.”

Ross Chaldecott, co-founder of Kinde, reveals the secrets to building a 100-year business. He emphasizes the importance of solving problems for the long term, fostering a culture of experimentation and learning from failure. They also discuss the power of trust and empowerment in building a scalable platform. Additionally, they highlight their SEO strategy and their goal of empowering all founders through better infrastructure and support.

Unleashing your Zilla with Hartley Pike, co-founder of Sitemate✅ Lessons from the Startmate Accelerator: “The incline on the learning curve was immense”✅ “Daylighting”: solving issues in the company through radical transparency✅ “Drafting”: following in the wake of a more established company✅ Reframing Sitemate’s weaknesses as their biggest strengths✅ Sitemate’s vision for the future of engineers in the built worldSitemate builds software for the built world. Its vision is to enable the human race to build roads, bridges and buildings faster than we build software.Episode Highlights from Hartley:On traveling to San Francisco for Startmate: “The incline on the learning curve was immense. I remember about halfway through the trip we sat down and processed what we’d learned in the last two days, and it felt like a mini lifetime of learnings crammed into 6 meetings over 2 days.”“The Zilla analogy comes from… how quickly and how big an individual and the team around them can grow… One day when you grow up you’ll be stomping around, causing mayhem for a bunch of companies you’re scared of right now because you think they’re big and undefeatable, and one day you’ll be their Godzilla tearing down their buildings.”“We basically had wounds in the business all over the place, and the process to fixing those was sending a monthly update. We started doing it in May 2018, we’re never going to miss a month, and there’s going to be no filter. It’s going to show all the scabs.”“We went through a really hard hiring stage, there was a period of time where I had to basically become the interim CTO… and we cycled through 3 or 4 failed engineering hires, and we eventually just kept improving and iterating on our process. We now have this quite insane hiring flow, where the first 3 steps of the process are completely automated.”“Our fundamental belief is that engineers in the built world in the future will operate in a similar way to how technology teams operate today. They’ll all be using best in class tools, real time, highly configurable, fast to deploy, that are seamlessly interconnected.”Learn more about Sitemate here

Duncan Anderson, co-founder of Edrolo, discusses unlocking the capacity of human minds, building 'content technology', and creating a love of learning. He believes that improving education can fundamentally change humanity by increasing the number of people who can teach themselves new things. The podcast explores the power of writing, meta cognition, preventing the impact of being wrong on creativity, and improving education through innovative resources.