Co-founder of Shoes of Prey has started a new company, Fable.Fable sells braised beef. With one caveat, the main ingredient is shiitake mushrooms.Michael Fox was a co-founder of Shoes of Prey - the business raised $30m, hired 100s of employees and was on a tear to give shoe lovers the chance to design their own shoes. In 2018 the business shut its doors. Shoes of Prey was hugely ambitious and Michael and his co founders Jodie and Mike, almost pulled it off!While working on Shoes of Prey as the co-founder and CEO, Michael read a book that would change his eating habits forever and unbeknownst to him, set him on the course of his next startup, Fable. The team at Blackbird is absolutely thrilled Michael dared to go again on another startup!In this episode we’ll hear from Michael on how this discovery turned into co-founding Fable, a plant based meats company that uses mushrooms to create alternative protein, like braised beef.We’ll hear about the magical properties of mushrooms and what lessons he’s leaning on from his Shoes of Prey journey.Blackbird’s Partner Rick Baker will share what stood out during Fable’s pitch, what's defensive about Fable’s business model and why Blackbird is excited to be working with Fable.And finally, Co-founder Jim Fuller will share his favourite Fable recipe and go-to mushrooms.Key Notes: “Society has lost the plot” when it comes to animal agriculture. Learn why. Mushroom meat can beat it’s animal equivalent. How? Heston Blumenthal describes Fable as “delicious, versatile and natural slow cooked meat alternative.” What lessons from Shoes of Prey apply to Fable's supply chain, R&D investment and manufacturing processes. Blackbird co-founder and Partner describes what's defensive about Fable’s business model. How to cook a Texan braised beef speciality using mushrooms. Buy Here:https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/90856/fable-plant-based-braised-beef

Vow's mission is building a better food system with more delicious, sustainable, equitable and interesting options. They are resurrecting past culinary delights long forgotten by history via synthetic biology, and in essence, reinventing food from the ground up.Tim and George are two scrappy founders who show anything is possible with the right drive and determination. If they are successful in their mission, Vow will become a cellular-agriculture powerhouse with many brands under their umbrella. Don't forget to subscribe.Episode interviews: George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, co founders of Vow, and Samantha Wong, partner at Blackbird. Key topics covered: The next agricultural revolution Science meets automation behind Vow’s approach Inside look into how Vow made a proof of concept with $60K instead of millions of dollars The software principles helping Vow recreate a new category of food Culture and leadership when working from a lab Why farmers won’t be displaced from the next agricultural revolution The best of Tim and George: “We've seen the ethical problems, environmental problems, and most recently the opportunity for viruses to jump from animal, to animal, to human and the huge consequences of global pandemics that come from animals.” “We're able to re-imagine what's possible and have exciting new flavours and totally different foods to what we've been producing using traditional agriculture.” What do we bring to this? It was that imagination. It was that idea that we don't have to think about this and the terms that our ancestors did. And we can start to build for a future where we don't associate animals and meat anymore. “10 years from now, if you walk into the supermarket or a restaurant, no matter which country you're in, you're going to have an option of eating cultured meat.” “Over time it’s going to become the dominant category because you have all of the advantages of animal products without any of the disadvantages of animal production.” “We were going out and acquiring biopsies by calling up farms and doing crazy stuff and almost getting in trouble with the law and the process.” “George and I self-funded that whole thing...for about $60,000 Australian dollars, we got to our first proof of concept. That's generally how much you would spend on one or two pieces of equipment in the lab.” “We wanted to prove that not only could you do it and it could be done, but also that two people with relatively basic science backgrounds could pick something up like that, leverage the incredible intelligence of people around them and just apply pure hustle and get it started.” “The cost of the inputs for cultured meat are going to drop precipitously and as they do the cost of manufacturing infrastructure will drop as well.” “We’re creating a house of brands that is driven by a product-market fit engine with human-centered design principles underlying that.” “We focus on building up individuals to be their best selves. It's creating the team that we dreamed of, and it's allowing the people on our team to grow and be so much better than they even imagined.” “We want a future where people see the unveiling of a new food in the same way that they think about an iPhone.” “We have an opportunity right now at the nexus of this next kind of agricultural revolution to be the country that supports that innovation. And so we have this really rich, massive, massive opportunity to increase the Australian GDP around this brand new technology.” Samantha Wong on Vow:

Flavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit. In the second episode of Wild Hearts, host Mason Yates speaks to Fleet Space co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth.Key topics covered: How the next industrial revolution will be in space. The unique challenges facing space start-ups. The small data revolution. The importance of having a focused market. What Fleet did to shorten their customer feedback loop. Why a CEO has to be everywhere. The best of Flavia Tata Nardini: "Focus is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the startup world.” “A lot of people talk about big data, we hated the word, it was just bullshit. So we called it a small data revolution. Just get a little piece of data. The smart data.” “The [space] industry has got ninety percent awareness of everything that’s deployed. They just make decisions in a way that is not right. We want to change this, we want to give [everyone] full visibility. The problem has always been that connectivity was not present or super expensive.” “We decided to fire all our customers that were tiny and focus like crazy in working with big energy companies and others.” “You need to be a believer, you need to believe [in your product] in the first five to six years like crazy.” “You cannot let people build you a product [and think] they will build it for you the way you wanted it. You have to be there. You have to do it. You have to show them the path.” Niki Scevak on Flavia Tata Nardini and Fleet: “The ability to do something you could not do before to this huge industry, and to make it a hundred X cheaper was incredibly exciting." “As much as it was about space, it was about the opportunity to build a telecommunications network for a tiny amount of money.” “When you compare space startups to software startups, the disadvantages are around feedback loops." “How Flavia in particular has wrangled people from around the world … I think it’s just incredible coordination and project management to get things to happen with not a lot of money and certainly with not a lot of structure." “You have to divorce the outcome of something from the weighted probability of doing it.” “You need to keep shooting. Luck is a process, you have to expose yourself to be lucky.”

Tim Doyle, co-founder of seed-stage company Eucalyptus, has spent $35M across political campaigns, mattresses and now healthcare. Before Eucalyptus, Tim was the Head of Marketing at Koala.In this conversation, Tim talks about how he allocates capital, how Eucalyptus captures attention, where to extract value where others can’t see and how to acquire customers.Later on in this episode, you’ll hear from Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Ventures. He was one of the very first believers in Eucalyptus and he’ll provide an investors lens on what others can learn from Eucalyptus.Key topics covered: The problem with Direct to Consumer companies. The importance of GTM focus in an Australian context. Ways you can allocate capital as a non technical founder. How to unlock talent in your organisation. Why you should spend 10% of your monthly marketing spend on testing. The biggest fundamental shift in customer acquisition, advertising and branding in the last decade. The best of Tim Doyle: “In Australia, there aren’t a huge number of Venture back-able consumer product opportunities, there’s just not that many billion dollar product opportunities, but there's a lot of 50 to 100 million dollar ones that more or less exist on the same infrastructure.” “What’s the actual thing you’re going to earn the right to exist on to begin with and how are you going to talk about that? If you can’t do that, you’ll never even get in. Do something dumb and focused and deliver on it really well, build your business around that and earn the right to do other stuff.” “Price the externalities of a staff member to understand their true value.” “The shorter the distance between your junior dev. and the customer the better the decisions that junior developer will make.” “The gap between designer and customer is as short as possible.” “Branding is iterative.” “In a world where feedback is so real, fast and clear, sitting around and psychoanalysing your customers and thinking about what the best piece of creative for them is, is a complete waste of time. You may as well just increase the speed at which you test and then back the winners extremely hard and trust the iterative system that you’ve built to continue to learn and get better at acquiring customers over time.” “A media model is constantly hungry.” “You’re always value investing. Every decision you make is, ‘Can I extract more value out of this than I have to pay for it?’ It's super true in media buying. TV /Advertising companies don’t understand the price of their own inventory because they negotiate over lunch. If you have a better system for deriving value than they have, then you can extract the value they can’t see.” Nick Crocker on Tim Doyle “Tim was the best marketer and marketing thinker that I’d met in the time I had been investing.” “Eucalyptus is an anomaly in that they did everything they said they would and that's rare.” “The thing that I always felt with Tim, and that I know that Niki felt the first time he met Tim, was that he was an original thinker. And there is very little original thought in the world, period.” “When you learn something new, really new and unique from someone, it's just a magical moment in this job.”

A preview of what's to come.Wild Hearts is a podcast dedicated to sharing the real stories of founders - the passionate few taking giant leaps forward.In this series, we’ll uncover the stories of founders navigating their way through the often messy and difficult ups and downs of building a business. We’ll share lessons from founders who are knocking at the door of success. Founders who are on the front line of innovation. The ones in the weeds with their customers, the learn it alls. The founders with laser focused, unrelenting ambitions.There’s a bias in covering the success stories of founders -in telling the stories of the big winners after they’ve done the hard yards.You won’t find that in this podcast.What you will find are stories of grit and potential. Founders running at milestones, fast. You’ll discover the ones that move the fastest, win. If you want to hear from those founders, then this podcast is for you.We’ll also hear from the investors who have backed them. The first believers, who are trying to earn a court side seat to the best business stories of our time. Each episode, these investors will share their everything from first impressions of the founders, to what made their story worth investing in.At Blackbird, we believe those in the front row seat have the best view of the game, and the right context to make great investment decisions.