How did two first time founders get so wise?

Paying customers in four countries within weeks of launch. Firms signing pilot agreements before a product existed. Advisers calling Marloo life-changing. Not useful, not efficient, life-changing.

The secret? Going slow to go fast.

Hardy and Shak met at Sharesies where they helped build one of New Zealand's most loved brands, before starting something of their own. But instead of jumping straight to building, they spent six months in the ideas maze finding the right problem - exploring roofing, trade finance, retiring businesses. They built a 20-point framework, then threw it away. "Frameworks don't find markets."

When they landed on financial advice, they embedded inside firms for days - watching, listening, earning trust - until they were certain this was an industry where they could build in for years to come. But even then, they didn't start coding. They kept refining until they could describe Marloo in three simple steps. Crystal clear. If they couldn't communicate it simply, they weren't ready to build it.

Most founders build first and figure out how to explain it later. Hardy and Shak did it backwards. And that's why, when they finally launched, the product sold itself.

Because they'd gone so deep on the problem, they could design for global from day one. Not because they got lucky, but because they'd built that way on purpose.

Hardy runs the company from London. Shak builds from New Zealand. They disagree often and think that's the point. Tension resolved, then they move. No relitigating. Just trust.

Marloo is just getting started. Remember the name.

This is our last episode of 2025. We'll be back in the new year. Happy holidays.

This is the most technical episode we've ever done. Listen anyway.

Yes, there are acronyms. Yes, you'll learn what a chiplet is. Worth it.

But here's what you'll actually get: one of the best founder conversations we've recorded. Not because of the tech—but because of the humanity inside the tech.

Last year, Syenta had six weeks of cash left. No term sheets. The technology her team was building? The world's biggest semiconductor manufacturers said it was impossible. Two weeks later, she had four offers on the table. Now she's backed by the US government, Singapore, and Arizona.

What changed? Not the tech. The story.

"When you're trying to do something inauthentic—that is not your DNA as a founder—you're not gonna raise money," Jeka says. "Lately I haven't been selling at all. I've been just talking to people about what we do."

This episode is about falling in love with a problem so completely you move across the world to solve it. It's about building a team that burns the boats. It's about sharing your vulnerable vision before you feel ready. It's about being proud to be a tall poppy when Australian culture tells you to shrink.

The semiconductor stuff? It's actually fascinating once Jeka explains it. (AI chips sit idle 40% of the time because the wiring can't keep up. Her tech fixes that. Potential impact: 1% of global emissions saved.)

But even if you skip every technical detail, you'll walk away with lessons about fundraising in brutal markets, building culture through failure-sharing rituals, and going straight to the top instead of pushing from the bottom.

We've included a glossary in the episode description if you want it. You probably won't need it.

Most founders wait for perfect conditions. Not Adam Gilmour. He started Gilmour Space before Australia even had a space agency.

On July 30, that bet paid off. Australia's first launch permit. Fourteen seconds of flight. Right in the middle of the pack globally - SpaceX took four attempts to reach orbit.

Those 14 seconds proved everything that mattered: cleared ranges, ground systems working, hold-down claws releasing 45 tons of thrust flawlessly. Stage zero validated. And a month earlier? A 100kg satellite reached orbit, found in under 8 hours instead of the expected 2 weeks, still working 130+ days later.

"For a satellite company, that would've been massive," Adam says. "But we're a rocket company, so no one gives a shit."

Adam knew the regulations would change. He knew government support would come. "We took the risk first. Then government comes. I knew they would come." He started building anyway: 240 people in Queensland doing rockets, satellites, and hypersonics that foreign investors "cannot believe."

This episode takes you inside launch day: the orchestra of mission control, time vanishing in the final countdown, the moment Eris leapt off the pad. Adam talks about why he's building satellite buses to fix broken market economics, the path to dual-listing on the ASX and US exchanges, and going around the moon in 10 years.

If you're building deep tech from Australia and wondering whether to wait for perfect conditions, Adam's already answered that question.

"Stay tuned. Smoke and fire."

Most robotics companies die trying to build their first product. Alex Wyatt spent seven years building the platform so the second product took seven weeks.

When August Robotics launched their exhibition robot in November 2019, it blew up - standing ovation, early revenue, real momentum. Then COVID hit. Exhibitions banned globally for 23 months. Zero revenue. Total cliff.

But under that first robot was something almost no robotics company ever builds: a platform: autonomous navigation accurate to 3mm, custom localisation, fleet coordination, modular architecture. The long, painful, expensive work that many startups can't survive.

Then it paid off.

→ Seven weeks from concept to prototype for their drilling robot

→ Google as their first demo and customer

→ 50,000 holes drilled across US data centres

→ DeWalt partnership unlocking entire tool ecosystems

→ More robots spinning out in months, not years

Alex is also opening an AI and data centre in Melbourne, choosing to build the next layer of August's platform from Australia, not just Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.

This episode breaks down the real hardware platform playbook: robot collaboration that collapses workflows, de-risking with hyperscaler customers, and why the "third way" of robotics creates network effects in physical space. Alex also talks about surviving 23 months of zero revenue, going from Blackbird LP to portfolio founder, and why he waited a decade for the timing to actually be right.

If you're building hardware from Australia, fundraising deep tech, or wondering when long-horizon bets actually flip into growth - this is the one.

Nikki Brown is a Cambridge graduate who quit a dream job at Google after mere months. "I wasn't happy being a cog in a machine," she says. So she built her own.

Today, Nikki is co-founder and CEO of Cartesian, an AI-native platform backed by Blackbird that turns SaaS ecosystems into retention and growth engines. Cartesian's AI agents analyse user needs in real-time, detect buying intent, and connect users with the right ecosystem partners at exactly the moment they need them. No cold emails. No spray and pray. The result: users get personalised solutions, platforms deliver value, partners grow.

Nikki is building AI that works like she does: accumulating context and using it to connect meaningfully at the right moment. Finance gave her systems thinking. Tragedy gave her clarity. 120 conversations gave her deep customer insight.

In this episode, Nikki joins Mason to share why team beats idea every time, why relationships, not data, are the real moat, and why the foundations of sales never change: "People buy from people."

This one's for anyone questioning whether their "non-traditional" background disqualifies them - or wondering if their lived experience might just be the context that matters most.

There’s a graveyard of robotics companies—billions torched on beautiful demos we’ve all seen before, but never felt. This episode explains why the economics, the software, and the demand curve have finally flipped—and how Alloy plans to fuel the winners.

Joe Harris returns to Wild Hearts—but this time as a founder. An engineer by training (ML for telecoms), operator by practice (Eucalyptus growth & product), and obsessive systems thinker, Joe unpacks why robotics is finally crossing from hype to inevitability. We trace the structural shifts powering the moment—collapsing hardware costs, foundation-model intelligence, and urgent customer pull—and the hard lessons from failed vertical farming plays that recalibrated what reliable automation actually demands. Joe introduces Alloy, a horizontal data and observability platform for robotics teams: find the 1% of mission data that matters, surface edge cases, track reliability toward “four-, five-, six-nines,” and shorten the loop from failure → fix → redeploy. If you’re building, buying, or betting on robots, this is the market map and playbook for the next decade.

• The three real drivers: cost curves, capability (VLM/VLA), and customer pull
• Reliability as the business model: why 99% isn’t enough—and how teams get to 4–6 nines
• Data, not demos: robots emit GB/min; how to isolate the 1% that changes outcomes
• Horizontal vs. vertical: what failed in indoor/vertical farming and why
• Alloy’s wedge: multimodal search (images, time series, logs), “scenarios,” alerts, and instant mission summaries to accelerate deployment and reduce unit costs
• Team & culture: hiring for speed, humility, and learning in a field moving weekly

00:00 First operator-to-founder return: Joe’s path (engineer → Atlassian → Eucalyptus → Alloy)

02:00 Maker roots: coding tutorials at 12, early internet leverage

03:30 Many small businesses → the “one-thing, 10–20 years” decision

08:30 Why now for robotics: cost curves + reusable rockets as mindset shift

10:45 Vertical farming post-mortems: unit economics, reliability, scale errors

13:40 Reliability is everything: from 99% to 99.999% in the physical world

15:45 The data firehose: GB/min, multimodal chaos, and missing tooling

18:40 Operator-to-robot ratio as the core unit economic lever

21:10 Selling into robotics: design partners, security, and data heterogeneity

23:15 Common data primitives (perception, time series, logs) + ROS-driven formats

24:30 Why LLMs aren’t enough: context-window limits & multimodal encoding

27:00 Alloy’s product: natural-language search, similarity, “scenarios,” real-time alerts

28:50 Instant mission summaries vs. days of manual analysis

29:30 Edge AI tailwinds: Jetson class hardware, cheaper sensors (LiDAR/IMUs)

30:30 VLAs explained: from perception → plan → act (and why smoothness matters)

32:10 The pace of change: weekly breakthroughs, staying on the frontier

33:40 Distribution & adoption: enterprise first; consumer follows reliability

35:40 Safety and necessity: underwater, heavy industry, logistics

37:15 Autonomy acceptance: the “first Waymo ride” unlock

43:00 Ideal customers: high throughput, real deployments, cloud telemetry

44:50 ICP discovery playbook: questions that qualify real readiness

45:50 Team design: missionary talent, humility > hubris, learn-fast culture

46:40 Macro lens: robotics as a deflationary lever & company formation boom

48:00 Jobs & leverage: from decoding info → higher-order coordination

50:05 The Alloy analogy: the coal-shoveler that keeps the engine running

You don't have to be the founder to build the future.

When Andrea Quinn made the leap from fashion merchandising to tech, she didn't start a company. She joined one. Today, she's VP of Go-To-Market Operations at Halter, New Zealand's newest unicorn, which just raised $155 million at a $1.55 billion valuation.

Not every path into building the future looks like a founder origin story. Some of the most crucial work happens when you join the right company at the right moment and help turn ambition into execution. Andrea's doing exactly that - scaling the GTM motion as Halter accelerates across Australia and the United States.In this episode, Blackbird Partner Sam Wong sits down with Andrea to explore how operators translate skills across industries and build the engines that power billion-dollar companies. From her Commercial Equation framework to practical AI applications in sales, Andrea breaks down what it actually takes to scale a startup from the inside.

This episode is for: founders building GTM, operators inheriting messy funnels, and anyone wondering if they need to start a company to build the future.

Because the answer is no. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is join the rocket ship and help build the engine.

When storytelling meets startup energy, magic happens.

In this week’s episode, Xavier Collins, co-founder of Wonder, joins Mason to explore how technology is tearing down the old gates of Hollywood, and what happens when anyone, anywhere, can tell stories that move the world.

Backed by Blackbird and LocalGlobe, Wonder is building an AI-native creative studio reimagining how films are made, who gets to make them, and what “production” even means. Xavier shares how AI can help the 90% of scripts that never get made finally see the light of day - from resurrecting forgotten footage to helping bold new voices get their first break.

We dive into instinct versus analytics, courage versus consensus, and the scrappy startup mindset redefining creative industries. It’s a story about belief, innovation, and the people daring to create what others think impossible.

This episode is for anyone who’s ever had a story they’ve wanted to tell, a dream they’ve wanted to build, or an idea they’ve been told was too crazy to work.

Because when content becomes infinite, the only thing that matters is the quality of the story - and your story might just be next.