Open The Pod Bay Doors

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 omnystudi

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/list

We held an Innovation Bay event in Melbourne recently where we hosted Partners from three of the country's best VCs (Airtree, Reinventure and Squarepeg). Between them they represent almost $750m of Venture Capital and have made around 60 investments between them. Fascinating discussion covering the background of Australia's VC sector, where it has got to now, some of the upcoming trends and what the future holds. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Terry Gold is the Managing Directors of Techstars in Adelaide. I don't think he would mind being described as a "veteran" of this industry, having founded, run, sold, mentored many many companies over his "several" years in the sector.Terry was an awesome interview subject. Smart, caring, passionate. We discussed his background in the US, how he ended up as a core member of the early Boulder, Colorado tech community and how he eventually landed up in this amazing job in the up-and-coming tech colossus of Adelaide. Who is in the program, how it's structured, and what he expects from it. Enjoy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Thursday 13 July 2017, Jobs NSW announced the creation of the "Sydney Startup Hub", a new, 17,000 sq m space dedicated to housing, and nurturing, much of Sydney's startup community. Anchor tenants of Fishburners, Tankstream, Stone & Chalk and The Studio. Scheduled to open later in 2017. David Thodey is the Chairman of Jobs NSW and managed to squeeze in this special episode of the podcast straight after the announcement. David was CEO at Telstra from 2009 to 2015. Under his tenure Telstra's market cap doubled and, according to Crikey, "not only restored its tattered reputation but improved it."He is currently Chair of CSIRO and JobsNSW, and has a wealth of experience as a technology industry executive.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Slightly different episode format this week. This was recorded at an Innovation Bay event in Sydney, so we had the fun of recording at a live event in front of a studio audience. Please forgive the audio challenges around the Q&A section. Apart from a mis-joke about Paul growing up in Liverpool (he didn't, but I actually thought he was serious when he said he did!) this is a great and fascinating chat with Paul.Paul has over a decade experience in investment, venture capital and startups. He started at Goldman Sachs before becoming the Investment Manager for the $400m Tulla Family Office. For the past 2.5 years, Paul has been a Venture Partner at AirTree Ventures, a $250M Venture Fund.Today, he's building Spaceship, a tech-focused Super Fund offering a diversified portfolio with tech at its core, built for those with long investment horizons. Spaceship is looking to completely change the future of Superannuation for young Australians.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Based in Western Sydney, Ed Husic was elected to the House of Representatives as the Federal Member for Chifley in 2010. Currently in his third term, he was re-elected to Parliament in 2016.Before entering Parliament, he held a number of roles within the public and private sector including National President of the Communications Electrical Plumbing Union. Prior to this he was employed with Integral Energy (now Endeavour Energy); a major national energy retailer and NSW based electricity distributor.We managed to keep the discussion as non-political and partisan as we possibly could. And remarkably didn't even mention Donald Trump once.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the course of Paul's career he has built and sold four previous companies and has then become an active consultant and non-executive director of some major companies like Trade Me and iiNet. In 2014, Paul McCarney and Danny Gilligan (one of the founders of VC Reinventure) founded Data Republic with a mission to change the way organisations exchange data - to make it safer, more secure and more scalable.This is a complicated area, which we cover in some detail.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Elaine is Head of Venture Capital at Blue Sky and is responsible for the management of the Blue Sky venture capital fund and portfolio. Established in 2012, her division has over $100 million in assets under management across a broad range of industry sectors. Amongst her notable investments was a $25m injection into Vinomofo in April 2016.Elaine is a proud Brisbane native and a huge champion of Queensland's startup sector. She has a strong academic foundation holding a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Adelaide.  She is actively involved in Australia’s professional venture capital community, as a member of AVCALs venture capital stakeholder committee and as a member of the investment committee of ANUConnect Venture Capital, the Australian National University’s venture capital fund.I took the podcast studio on the road with me and visited Elaine's Brisbane office for this awesome and insightful chat.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The sharp-eyed amongst my listeners will have noted the reference to "2001 - A Space Odyssey" in the title of this podcast. Whilst certainly no HAL 9000, Andrea Boyd is one of the controllers of the International Space Station, albeit from the relative comfort and safety of Cologne, Germany, Planet Earth.Andrea was visiting Australia to help lobby for the establishment of an Australian Space Agency (plus some other things). I managed to catch up with her and her busy schedule to hear how a girl from Adelaide has made it so far in the Space Industry. And what we might expect in the future from Australia's nascent Space Sector.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daniel is one of the most successful Venture Capitalists in Australia. He is a founder of Airtree Ventures, a technology-focused venture capital company. Prior to Airtree Ventures he was the Founding Chairman of netus (a technology investment company acquired by Fairfax Media in 2013) and prior to this role he founded Australia's largest internet investment company, ecorp. The returns to investors from all of these funds were nothing short of extraordinary - eg Netus invested in and exited nine companies over a six-year period, delivering a 4x cash-on-cash return to investors. Prior to that he held several senior executive roles with Microsoft, including reporting to Bill Gates and running the APAC region for Microsoft. He was recently appointed to the federal government's "Innovation and Science Australia" Board. He is a noted and vocal philanthropist, and currently serves on the Sydney Theatre Company Board and the advisory boards for the UNSW Australia Business School and the University of Sydney Medical S