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.

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]

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]