Wild Hearts Blackbird Ventures

Forget what you think you know about building a new e-commerce experience because Carted sees the world differently. It’s a world where the merchant is no longer the only focus for commerce innovation.

In this episode, we talk to Holly Cardew, Carted’s Founder, about how they are changing the future of shopping by standardising and organising the world’s products into a shoppable knowledge graph.  
 
In Carted’s new ecosystem, shoppers are at the centre, and non-traditional commerce platforms will become the new vehicles for the world’s best contextual shopping experiences. As with all big, hard things - the journey is not linear. We touch on the beginnings of their product graph API with permissionless integrations and standardising a billion products, how that led to building a new multi-merchant contextual commerce experience for publishers - and then to where they are today with their consumer-facing API implementation, Swurl. 
 
All of these forked paths have led the team to exactly where they need to be.

Reshaping education and employment, with Tom Brunskill, Co-Founder of Forage
Forage is on a mission to transform career education and employment. By offering job simulations from leading companies, they enable students to gain real-world skills and experience, enabling them to make more informed decisions about the career they pursue. This innovative approach challenges traditional recruitment methods, focusing on education first to create a more inclusive and diverse talent pool.

✅ How Tom’s unique upbringing primed him to tackle the problem
✅ Transitioning from being an “unhappy lawyer” to founder
✅ Finding the formula for selling to enterprise clients
✅ The challenges of building a category-defining company
✅ The “holy grail” of personalised education

Want to learn more?
Episode Highlights from Tom:
"Instead of hiring first and training second, you should actually be using software that educates the candidate pipeline first and then using that pool of talent and the signals that are surfaced in that experience to hire exceptional candidates"​

“We’re category defining, we’re painting a different future for what recruitment can look like, and that’s challenging. These companies have recruited in a very specific way for a very long time, and it can be challenging to will that future into existence.”

"I hope that education does become more responsive to workplace needs... It's about how do you broaden the surface area of luck for young people to end up in roles that do stimulate them"​

Unlocking a new way of living with Toby Thomas-Smith, Co-Founder of Kiki
Kiki is on a mission to revolutionise the way we live and connect. By leveraging the power of existing social ties, their unique peer-to-peer subletting platform enables users greater flexibility to travel, helping unlock new lifestyles, friendships and savings.
✅Growing a “cult-like” community around the ethos of subletting
✅Lessons from early mistakes launching in New Zealand
✅Launching in New York: Kiki’s global vision

Episode Highlights from Toby:
“If we can pull this off, we're gonna change how a billion people live, and unchain a billion people from their rent.”

“Stop trying to boil the whole ocean. Find one rock pool. Boil the hell out of that rock pool… Build an ocean of rock pools… That’s why we ended up pivoting from the whole of Sydney, just to Bondi.”

[In the app] “Every single thing you see is intentional. For example… the first thing we push is the name of the person whose place it is. Person. This is not fucking Bondi bubble pad. This is Jenny's home, you know, Jenny's actual home… it's about people, it's about the connection.”

“We've literally had people run up to me in the street, cry in my arms, because they got to see their grandma for the last time before she passed away. Because they were able to go back and see her because they didn’t have to pay rent while they were gone.”

“New York is literally in crisis, it couldn't be worse to be honest. You know, people are paying 2. 5 times more rent on average than people in Sydney.”

❤️‍🔥Episode 6, Season 4
“Ship less, but better”, with Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail

✅Lessons from working at Atlassian
✅Detention & Sparring: “sacred rituals” of Dovetail’s design team
✅Balancing product simplicity with new features
✅Design thinking & the “double diamond” framework

Dovetail is on a mission to help the world improve the quality of everything. Dovetail’s customer insights hub allows teams to quickly analyse research data and share insights collaboratively, helping thousands of teams build better products by helping them understand their customers. 

Episode Highlights from Lucy:
“Everything is a design problem! It’s just a way to solve problems.”

“We have a few rituals that are sacred to the design team. One we call Design Detention, and the other is Design Sparring… They’re two pretty standard rituals that a lot of design teams have, usually they’re called collaboration & critique.”

“We have a ratio of about 1 designer to 6 engineers, and that feels like a good ratio for us. At Atlassian I think it was 1 designer to 8 engineers… so it just depends on the company culture and how fast the engineers move.”

“Once you have a product and you have users, you get so many feature requests, and it’s really easy to just build everything that everyone asks you to build. But you have to be quite thoughtful about what problem that is solving, how does that fit into your existing feature set?”

Searching the way we think with Jesse Clark, co-founder of Marqo

✅Lessons from working at Stitch Fix and Amazon
✅What it means to be truly “developer first”
✅The decision to make Marqo open source
✅Who will be the winners and losers of the AI revolution
 
Marqo is building a revolutionary framework that provides search functionality to developers, allowing their applications to search anything - text, images, video, audio - with human-like understanding. Marqo makes it possible to do things that were hard or impossible with keyword search, and is poised to completely reshape how we search.

Episode Highlights from Jesse:
“The amount of data is increasing exponentially. A lot of it is unstructured, it’s messy. We’re going to need to be able to search this data, machines will need to be able to search it.”

“We’ve got this tagline: search the way you think. You’re able to communicate very fluently, have it understand, and retrieve really relevant results.”

“Nothing exists today without open source. There’s certainly that somewhat altruistic motivation to give something back after being such a beneficiary. But it’s also just a very good way to get feedback and iterate very fast.”

“We’ve already seen the commoditisation of a lot of these technologies around LLMs. We’ve been very cautious about where we invest on that, because a lot of it is very hard to defend, it becomes commoditised. It’s a race to the bottom and the companies just become marketing companies basically. That’s fine, but that’s not necessarily what we want to do.”

Contact Mason here.

EdApp is changing workplace education and training with accessible and engaging mobile learning which leverages microlearning and gamification. By using a freemium model, and through their partnerships with NGOs such as the United Nations, EdApp is empowering and educating millions of learners around the world.

✅ Deciding to join SafetyCulture rather than raise venture capital
✅ Importance of thinking global from day one
✅ Hiring the hungry, not the proven
✅ Advantages of freemium model  

Episode Highlights from Darren:

“We have set out to disrupt workplace education, and what we learned very early on is that workplace education and training is fundamentally broken.”

“We then began to see that the need stretches far beyond the workplace… And so we began to look at the opportunity as being able to really change the way people learn at work, but increasingly… to also make that available to people as individuals.”

“The United Nations came on board to use the platform to educate in places like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sub-Saharan Africa, and that’s now spread into UN Women, UNAIDS, UNITAR, all their initiatives around climate change etcetera, are all being driven out through EdApp.”

 “We sent fresh graduates, one to New York and one to London to go and establish an office there… We were like, “Here’s a plane ticket, good luck.” And what we achieved from that was just so immense.”