Wild Hearts

Blackbird Ventures
  • 4.7 (12)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

Wild Hearts is the podcast that reveals the real-time lessons from the founders and operators changing the world.

  1. 2 days ago

    Why the future of intelligence is both open and closed. Baseten’s Mudith Jayasekara and Charlie O'Neill

    This week Kate hands over the mic to Saron Berhane, who leads Blackbird's deep tech programme. She was recently in San Francisco and sat down with two Australians who had to move to the Bay Area to do the sort of work they wanted to do. Which is both their personal experience and one of their main arguments in this episode. Australia's problem in AI isn't compute. It's that the smartest people here go into quant trading or get on a plane, and nobody has built them a reason to stay. Baseten is where they landed. It's an AI infrastructure and production-grade inference platform, the layer that lets engineering teams deploy, scale and optimise machine learning models. Sydneysider Tuhin Srivastava co-founded it, and it recently raised a$1.5B Series F led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, Blackbird and Spark Capital. Mudith Jayasekara and Charlie O'Neill are Baseten's Co-Heads of Model Training. Before that they founded Parsed, a mechanistic interpretability lab that Baseten acquired. Mudith trained as a doctor. Charlie started in law and philosophy and wanted to study English literature. Neither took the path you'd draw if you were designing someone to run model training at a company like this, and both think that's the point. The conversation is wide-ranging and deeply technical. Saron takes them through what's actually happening inside the open source ecosystem right now, which is stranger and more hopeful than the usual framing allows. Sitting underneath all of it is one question. When everything difficult gets commoditised, what's left? The training recipe is now roughly the same everywhere. Post-training has gone from a specialist problem to something a small team can attempt. The friction on running an experiment has mostly gone. What's left is taste, and having enough of the right people in one room.

    Why the future of intelligence is both open and closed. Baseten’s Mudith Jayasekara and Charlie O'Neill

  2. 8 Sept

    The company OpenAI and Google call when a user is in a crisis: Elliot Taylor, Founder of Throughline

    Content note: this episode discusses suicide, self-harm and family violence. Support details are at the bottom of these notes. Before Elliot Taylor was a tech founder, he spent fifteen years sitting with people on the worst days of their lives. He ran community homes. He had kids sleeping on his couch after they’d been kicked out of their homes. His place became a safe house for people leaving violent relationships. And the longer he did it, the clearer it got that the model he was working inside couldn't reach the scale the problem was actually at. So he went looking for a more scalable way to have impact, and to his own surprise he founded a startup. Throughline builds the infrastructure that connects people to the right mental health or online harm support the moment they go looking for it. Someone tells ChatGPT they don't want to live anymore. Someone searches Google for a way out of a violent relationship. Throughline is the layer that gets them to a real service in their own country and their own language, one that's actually open when they call. In this episode, Kate asks what he's learned building a company in a place most founders would never think to look. They get into why fear, rather than any shortage of services, is what stands between a person and help. How you experiment when being wrong isn't an option. What it's like building product while the laws that govern it are still being drafted around you. And how you look after a team who spend their days reading the hardest things people write. Elliot's ambition is to build the biggest mental health intervention the world has ever seen. If you need support: Lifeline 13 11 14 (Australia), 1737 call or text (New Zealand), 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732 (Australia, family and sexual violence).

    The company OpenAI and Google call when a user is in a crisis: Elliot Taylor, Founder of Throughline

  3. 1 Sept

    Canva's first Chief Algorithms Officer on what the data misses - with Nirmal Govind

    Nirmal Govind has spent thirty years trying to predict human behaviour, and he keeps finding the edges of it. He joined Netflix when the company still had two original shows to its name, and over the decade that followed his work spread into almost every corner of the business: the engineering that makes a video start playing the moment you hit play, the quality checks on content arriving from studios, and eventually the data behind what a company spending twenty billion dollars a year should actually make. He is now Canva's first ever Chief Algorithms Officer. One of the things his team ran was a test on artwork. Each time a new show launched they would put a batch of different images in front of viewers to see which one made people stop and click, and internally, colleagues would call it in advance. These were people who had spent years studying what audiences do, and they had strong instincts about what would land. Most of the time they were wrong. Human taste, it turns out, is not something you get much better at guessing just because you have watched it closely for a long time. Kate and Nirmal spend a good while in that territory, in the places where the data runs out. There is a lovely example of a director who chose to open the second episode of a show by continuing a battle scene from the first, with no titles and no credits, just straight back into it. Twenty minutes in, the opening credits finally rolled, and the team watched a wave of people leave in the middle of the episode. Obvious in hindsight. Credits mean an ending, and the audience took the hint. In this episode, Kate talks with Nirmal about what a Chief Algorithms Officer actually does all day, why an algorithm should let you finish a two-minute job and leave, what happened when he asked an AI tool to size up an opportunity and the answer came back three times off, and plenty more.

    Canva's first Chief Algorithms Officer on what the data misses - with Nirmal Govind

  4. 25 Aug

    Rarely is your first idea your best idea, with Mitti's Luke Anear

    Luke Anear began his working life as a private investigator, sitting in cars and filming people who had been injured at work. He'll tell you it was the coolest job he ever had. It was also where the problem found him. He was watching people whose lives had been altered by something preventable, paid by the system that let it happen. Once he understood he was part of the problem, he had to become part of the solution. That was 2004, in a garage on the northern outskirts of Townsville. No software industry, no co-founder, about 30 computer science graduates a year coming out of James Cook University. Twenty-one years later, Mitti has passed a billion dollars in revenue since it began. It took a long time to get here. Luke is unusually honest about the things they tried that didn't work: the training platform he built in 2007 that he describes as a bad version of PowerPoint, the document management system in 2010, the telemarketers ringing businesses to ask if they wanted safety paperwork. The checklist app that made the company's name didn't arrive until 2012, eight years in. "Rarely is your first idea your best idea." The simplicity everyone recognises now came out of years of unpicking every jurisdiction and every industry until there was something small enough to be useful. In this episode, Kate Glazebrook talks with Luke about the store manager who replaced a 700 question checklist with one question asked three times a day, why an industry that hasn't changed since 1666 is the biggest thing Mitti is building, what it means to rebuild a company in six months when AI writes 90% of your code, why that led them to hire more human experts rather than fewer, and the two years since he stepped down as CEO because, in his words, he was cooked.

    Rarely is your first idea your best idea, with Mitti's Luke Anear

  5. 18 Aug

    The “Boring” Things That Actually Make Money - with Atlassian’s Rae Wang

    When Rae Wang started at Microsoft in the early 2000s, the company culture valued aggression and intensity. Someone punched a hole in a wall. Someone kicked a door until it came off its hinges. People threw chairs out of conference rooms. The people responsible for these outbursts were celebrated as legends. Rae did more than just survive the tumult, she thrived, and stayed long enough to see the culture become less destructive and more collaborative. A decade later, Rae joined Google as a Product Manager for Google Cloud, and today Rae is Head of Product, Enterprise at Atlassian. Her time leading teams in some of the world’s largest tech companies has given her a remarkable vantage point on how the tech industry has evolved over the last 20+ years. In particular, Rae excels at the “boring” and often unglamorous things tech platforms need to survive at scale: security, reliability, compliance, and all kinds of key infrastructure that no one notices until it stops working. In this episode, Kate Glazebrook talks with Rae about how she’s seen tech culture evolve over the years, why AI can build you an app but can’t handle security compliance, what improv comedy has taught her about conflict resolution, and plenty more. 🎧 [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 📸 [@wildheartspod]

    The “Boring” Things That Actually Make Money - with Atlassian’s Rae Wang

  6. 11 Aug

    Jennie Rogerson: Work really hard and actually love it

    Few companies show up on "best place to work" lists as consistently as Canva despite running at a level of ambition that would flatten most teams. Jennie Rogerson is the person responsible for holding that combination together. She's Canva's Chief People Officer but she didn't come up through HR. She started as an EA to founders Mel and Cliff, became their chief of staff, then was handed the job of making Canva the best place to work. She's openly sceptical of the high-performance-culture language most of Canva's peers reach for. She's made caring an explicit, unembarrassed part of how the company operates. And despite around 300,000 job applications a year, Canva still won't anchor its hiring to credentials. Kate sits down with Jennie to talk about the interview challenge that got her the job (it involved the founders' anxious dog), why she thinks culture is never a system, "cheese grating" her own ideas with the people most likely to shred them, and what it actually takes to scale a culture people want to stay in. 🎧 [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 📸 [@wildheartspod]

    Jennie Rogerson: Work really hard and actually love it

  7. 4 Aug

    Danielle Strachman: Weirdos worth backing

    Danielle Strachman has built her whole career around a hard question: how do you spot someone who's going to do something extraordinary before there's any proof they will? She started as a school principal, helped build the Thiel Fellowship, and now runs 1517 Fund, backing founders without degrees and scientists most institutions won't go near. What she looks for is almost embarrassingly simple. Can this person not stop talking about the thing they're obsessed with? If the answer's yes, she'll ask for a Venmo handle and send $1,000 before the call is over. It's an instinct with a track record. Ethan Thornton was seventeen when 1517 handed him a small grant to tinker in his garage. A year later, that became a $100,000 grant to start his defence tech company, Mach Industries. A year after that, Sequoia was in. Most of our Wild Hearts guests this season are founders and builders. This one sits on the other side of the table, with the person who decides who gets backed. There's another twist: it's Joel Connolly, Creative Director and Head of the Blackbird Foundation, behind the mic. Back in June 2025, 1517 flew him to San Francisco to open their Fellowship Summit. Earlier this year, Blackbird flew Danielle out to speak at their startup festival, Sunrise. Joel and Danielle get into what actually makes a weirdo worth backing, why she won't measure the return on last month's grant, how 1517 makes a call when the whole team disagrees, and why she thinks of the job as "homeschooling CEOs". 🎧 [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 📸 [@wildheartspod]

    Danielle Strachman: Weirdos worth backing

  8. 28 July

    Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks: The rules she never learned and why that's the point

    Before Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks had a website, a company name, or a single piece of content published, she cold-messaged the COO of the Gates Foundation on LinkedIn. And they funded her. It’s a pattern that runs right through both this episode and everything Phoebe has built since. The media company reaching 3.5 million people a month, the women's sports show on TV, the podcasts in categories nobody expected young women to care about, and the book built on cold emails to the chiefs of staff of Nelson Mandela, Jacinda Ardern, Justin Trudeau, Tony Blair, and Kamala Harris. Most of us have started something without knowing quite what we were doing - no map, no contacts, figuring it out as we went - that part is familiar. The difference with Phoebe is what she did next. Because when her finger was hovering over the send button, she pressed it. And that one habit repeated relentlessly is how Missing Perspectives got funded, how The Right Hand got written, and how a blog on Squarespace became one of ANZ's most interesting media companies. In this conversation with Kate, Phoebe talks about what the beginner's mind actually unlocks, why data will force you to kill the things you love and why you should let it, and what the chiefs of staff to the world's most powerful leaders taught her about trust, loyalty, and the one quality that makes or breaks any working relationship.

    Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks: The rules she never learned and why that's the point
See All (104)

4.7
out of 5
12 Ratings

About

Wild Hearts is the podcast that reveals the real-time lessons from the founders and operators changing the world.

Information

  • Creator
    Blackbird Ventures
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    104
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Blackbird Ventures
  • Show Website
    Wild Hearts

You Might Also Like