Inventia’s mission is to scale the creation of human tissue. This startup is creating some of the most powerful tools for advanced medical discovery today, and today we dive into how Inventia has been built from the ground up. Why an agile mindset was a “game changer” for building teams Breaking up a long term goal into smaller “units of progress”. How Inventia teams share responsibility for outcomes, not tasks. How technology is reshaping medicine. Inventia builds machines to bioprint human cells in 3D. These machines help forward-thinking drug discovery and medical research pioneers create human tissue for research and therapy that mimic real human tissue structures, rather than in environments that fail 90% of the time.Episode Highlights from Cameron & Aidan:“We tried to adopt an agile mindset and have outcome driven teams, so putting biologists, material scientists and engineers together in a team, and having really clear outcomes for the product to guide them. They can use all their different skills and experience and deliver something really incredible.” - Aidan“The technology that we’re developing is a fundamental shift in our ability to engineer biological tissue at scale, so it’s a big mission. We’re setting out to build a generational business. And we knew from the outset it was important to break that up into discrete horizons or units of progress.” - Cameron“We thought we had a product, but then we realised the printer was not the product, the product was what the customer takes out of it. It’s been that journey of learning more about what’s the actual product, and what our customer is going to get value out of.” - Aidan“The one thing I’d do differently is seek to get the product into the hands of more customers early on. The only way to truly iterate on the product and learn where the real value is is to work with as many customers as you can, and learn as much as you can from their usage and feedback.” - CameronLearn more about Inventia Life Sciences: https://bit.ly/3RhRjz6Cameron Ferris's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3TrHSz2Dr Aidan O'Mahony's Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3CDo2edGet in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below: https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq

A Managing Masterclass with Lauren Humphrey, co-founder of The Mintable The 5 dimensions of great people management Why soft skills are key (and aren't taught elsewhere) How the AI tool The Mintable is building assists managers in real time What the first thing each manager should do is How to let people go The Mintable gives managers the training, tools and community they need to succeed.Episode Highlights from Lauren:“50% of us will leave a job directly because of a manager, and one study found it takes 22 months for a direct report to recover physically and emotionally from the effects of a bad manager.”“The root of most hard conversations is that there wasn’t a clear expectation in place.”“The first thing you’ve got to do is define success. You have to know, at any given point, what success looks like for each of the people on your team. If you don’t, they will certainly not.”“At the Mintable we’ve got what we call the 5 dimensions of great management: Aware, Care, Prepare, Share and Dare.”“We call it strategic care: what are the key things that you need to learn about the people on your team to get the best out of them? Understand how someone likes to receive feedback, how they like to receive recognition.”Learn more about The Mintable:https://bit.ly/3JVRo9kLauren Humphrey's Linkedin:https://bit.ly/3K5nKi0Get in touch with Mason using his Blinq card below: https://bit.ly/3AqLYQq

S3 E1: Key Insights Covered 🧚‍♂️✅ Jarrod’s best operating lessons at UberEats.✅ Why product-market fit is the fundamentally wrong approach.✅ How to build virality into your product.✅ When Jarrod knew to leave UberEats to build Blinq full-time.Blinq is reimagining how professionals connect. Want to learn more? Read Blackbird's investment memo is here. Check out Blinq’s job openings here. Highlights from S3 E1 of Wild Hearts with Blinq Founder Jarrod Webb "[Uber] really helped me set the standard for what a generational company needs to do in terms of the output quality, the people that you hire and how you work." 🦄The intersection of "Market | Product | Channel | Model fit is an incredible framework for thinking about how to build a generational company... Product-Market fit is not the right way to think about building anything." 🔥“There are four factors that you need for virality. Firstly, you need a really short time to the “aha!” moment… Secondly, people need to be able to explain the product within one sentence... Thirdly, there needs to be a really broad value proposition… And finally, the product needs to get better the more of your network is on the product.” Businesses started reaching out, saying "hang on, we'll pay you" and Jarrod "realised [he] had a viral product with a bottoms-up SaaS component" to it. "After a few customers came onboard, I realised this actually has real traction, so I left Uber to work on this full time, and then grew a lot during 2021." 🐣Get in contact with Mason to share feedback, ask questions or share a pitch deck here.

Harrison.ai is partnering with leading healthcare companies to build AI products at never-before-seen speeds in the industry 🤓“If you look at the health system across the world, inequality and the capacity of the system are going to be the biggest problems of our time.”“The 20th century in medicine was the century of the molecule… but I believe that the 21st century is going to be about zooming out and looking at the healthcare system as a whole.”Dr. Aengus Tran is on a mission to improve the standard of care for a million people every day.💙 Saving a million lives a day with Dr. Aengus Tran and Samantha WongHighlights from S2 E6 of our Wild Hearts podcast with harrison.ai co-founder Dr. Aengus Tran and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong: How harrison.ai built a product in 18 months that is now used for 1 in 4 chest x-rays in Australia 🤯 What Aengus learned from Vietnam's “Father of computer science.” 👨‍💻 The simple math behind the biggest problem of our century 😱 The inevitable future of the healthcare industry according to Samantha Wong 🤓

FL0 supercharges back-end engineers with the power of a low-code format, letting developers build 20x faster. The team is pioneering a new category in software engineering, “Dev Acceleration as a Service”."Fl0 is a lego kit of blocks for modern engineers. Developers can assemble these blocks together, then build and ship complex applications without needing to code.” says Dale the co-founder of FL0.They’re pioneering a new category in software engineering, “Dev Acceleration as a Service”.Highlights from S2 E4 of our Wild Hearts podcast with FL0 co-founder Dale Brett and Blackbird Principal Tom Humphrey: How 10 years of building startups led to the unique insight that created FL0 🧐 Finding product-market fit in 2021 🦸‍♀️ How FL0 is thinking about its GTM alongside pioneering a new category 🏃‍♀️ How to use fundraising to build a village of support around your startup 🏘 A framework for thinking about GTM right at the beginning. Here is the blog Tom & Mason referred to. See FL0's job openings here.

Building the best teams of the future means celebrating the silent heroes who hold teams together, understanding who isn’t receiving the support they need, and practicing diversity, equity, and inclusion intelligently“We’re in this engineering effectiveness space… but the culture, the people side, that’s the heart of it for us. The outputs and how we measure them, that’s a function of how the people are doing.”Multitudes is using data to create happier, higher-performing teams.Find the teams jobs board here: https://www.multitudes.co/careersHighlights from Season 2 Episode 3 of Wild Hearts with Multitudes co-founder Lauren Peate and Blackbird partner Samantha Wong What Lauren learned about teamwork and culture from four years running a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy. How Multitudes found product-market fit and built culture into their team from day one. How to recognise the silent heroes in your teams who give feedback, mentorship, and improve everything. How leaders can embrace the uncomfortable to make meaningful change in workplaces. How a parallel fundraising process helps startups raise quicker.

Welcome to the second coming of Vow! Today, we speak with George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, co-founders of Vow, as well as Ellen Dinsmoor, Vow’s Head of Operations, and Samantha Wong, a General Partner at Blackbird Ventures.This team is revolutionising cuisine by tapping into the vast biosphere of potential foods that humanity has been unable to sustainably farm. Through synthetic biology, they lift this limitation and pave the way for a third agricultural revolution, one that is ethical, abundant, and importantly, irresistibly delicious.Since our last episode with Vow, they have more than doubled in team size and have continued to crush the technical challenges before them with blistering speed.Listen in to today’s show to hear how George and Tim are building a dream team of technical and non-technical talent, their fresh approach to product building, and how the future of cultured meats is developing.“For us this is going to be about connecting the depths of biology with the depths of food science, to make foods that outpace anything that animal meats have in terms of their sensory and performance enhancing attributes.”We also chat with Head of Operations Ellen to discover how Vow have approached technology to bring their team to new heights.“How do we not just automate things, but how do we use technology to make people super humans?”Finally, we’ll speak with Blackbird Partner Sam Wong to learn how she’s thinking about the future of food, what she’s most excited about with Vow, and how her investment thesis has evolved in light of this.Head to Vow's jobs board to see the open roles below:https://www.vowfood.com/careers

Welcome back to Season Two of the Wild Hearts podcast. To kick off the season, we’re speaking to our very first guest on this podcast: Tim Doyle, co-founder of Eucalyptus, a startup that dreams, builds and runs digital healthcare companies.Want to join Eucalyptus? Find the jobs board here.Episode interviewees: Tim Doyle, co-founder of Eucalyptus and Nick Crocker, General Partner at BlackbirdKey topics covered: The challenges and opportunities of healthcare Which experiments are helping Eucalyptus scale beyond 100 people How the company's ambition has grown over the past year The best of Tim Doyle: "If you can make medical information accessible and engaging, you can empower better decisions at a much earlier point. "If you don't maximise the amount of time that your organisation is fully stocked and ready to work on the problem that you're trying to solve at the hardest level, then you probably rob yourself of the chance to solve that problem by the time you next need to go back out to market" "One of the things about being a founder of a company is that you realise how much better people in your organisation are at most things than you are very quickly." "Our philosophy on marketing is that if you product enough stuff in enough channels, often enough, then you lower the cost of doing that, and then the best stuff will outperform the average stuff by a thousand percent." The best of Nick Crocker: "The execution is pretty spectacular. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's stunning to watch." "Visionary founders are most impactful when they're partnered with an operational psychopath...someone who's completely true, completely across everything and fearless in throwing themselves into unknown, dense, difficult to understand areas." Growing 10% in your first month is very different to growing 10% in your 24th month" "It's not just people buying ads. It's a growth engineering team...a resource allocation team in a really complex problem space."

In the midst of a global pandemic, company culture has never been more important. Teams are spread out over countries and cities, navigating zoom calls, slack channels and calendar invites. In this climate, the mental well-being and performance of employees is pushed to its limits.Culture Amp is on a mission to improve the quality of work for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Today, over 3000 companies use their software to monitor how their teams are feeling. This way, managers can put their fingers on the pulse of culture and implement real actions to change the way people work."You can boil HR down to one thing - can we get our senior people to have difficult conversations with other people?"In our final episode for the year, we will hear about how key company values helped lead Culture Amp to unicorn status, the data insights gained from monitoring thousands of companies worldwide, and Blackbird’s relationship with the company.Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe - we'll return with new episodes in 2021.Episode interviewees: Didier Elzinga, CEO and co-founder of Culture Amp, Chloe Hamman, Director of People Science at Culture Amp, and Nick Crocker, Partner at Blackbird.Key topics covered: Culture Amp's defining moments Data insights into company culture around the world How Blackbird has evolved to invest in larger companies The best of Didier Elzinga: "Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled" "It's actually much harder to get people to care about your product than it is to build it" "Our mission is not to sell X thousand copies of software - selling X thousand copies of software is part of the way we deliver our mission" "You have to think about how your values can be weaponised" The best of Chloe Hamman: "People want to be in places where they can grow and develop, over and above a clear career path" "If you're not giving your employers clear job previews, they are more likely to leave" "The best managers check in on a weekly basis with their employees" "It's not about changing what your organisation does, it's about communicating more widely about why and how you are doing thi

Halter is a fenceless farming startup. They're creating mind control technology for cows. An engineer by trade and dairy farmer by birth, Halter CEO Craig Piggot is familiar with the relentless demands of farming.“The day in the life of a farmer is you’re up at 4:30am every morning, even on Christmas morning, nothing waits for you.”That’s about to change. Halter has developed an IoT wearable collar that can direct and move cows from any location on Earth. In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Craig on the future of farming and creating a culture of radical honesty, and from investor and Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck on the biggest mistakes NZ entrepreneurs make, and what convinced him to invest in Halter.Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.Episode interviewees: Craig Piggot, CEO of Halter and Peter Beck, investor and founder of Rocket Lab.Key topics covered: How to create a culture of radical honesty The future of farming Why a bottom-up hierarchy allows you to move faster The best of Craig Piggot: "Instead of thinking heaps about it, just got out there and do it. The tools humans have are so powerful - you can build, test and iterate pretty much anything." "Our vision is to unlock the connection between humans and animals for a better world." "Things unsaid are as bad as lying." "We want to spend just as much time designing the culture as we do our product." The best of Peter Beck: "You don't create big things on Monday to Friday, eight to five, it just does not happen." "The biggest mistake NZ entrepreneurs make is claiming their idea is world-class without actually going into the world to test whether it's world-class." "There's more cows on the planet than people." "Your company is not a logo or brand, it is 100% who you hire."