Wild Hearts

Jess Richmond thinks the premium on technical founders is about to flip. Building is cheap enough now that anyone can ship a bookkeeping app in a week. What's scarce, she argues, is having actually lived the problem: reconciled the transaction, sat in the procurement meeting, knows exactly what a customer will and won't trust.
She pitched Blackbird on Sumday with a screenshotted SharePoint site. Four years on, she's betting the company on government agencies, the buyers with the least patience for anyone who hasn't already done the work of understanding how they operate.
Kate sits down with Jess to talk about why not knowing venture capital's unwritten rules might have made her braver rather than naive, the $50,000 supplier decision that never accounted for its own emissions, and how she reverse-engineers a buyer's psychology before she ever mentions the product.

Sagalee Omer looked around at the world he grew up in and decided to build the one he needed. Not metaphorically. Bikes for kids with no way to get around. Free therapy for a community that didn't talk about it. A storytelling platform to put everyday people on screen. A basketball tournament that's raised over $100K to fund it all. Four projects, one mission: young people who are seen, heard, and have the infrastructure to become who they are.
The ambition is the same as any founder on this show. So is the discipline - knowing what to ship, when to push, and when to stop. What's different is who's investing: not a cap table, but a community. Sagalee is still in his twenties, came up through Blackbird Foundation's Protostars program, and has thought harder about identity, mission, and building for the long term than most people in this industry with a decade on him.
Theia Gabatan from Blackbird Foundation sits down with Sagalee to talk about where the mission came from, what founders can take from building without institutional backing, why he calls himself a director not a founder, and the belief he holds that most people don't.

In 2017, Mick Liubinskas got one line from an old basketball mate: "maybe it's time you got in the game." He'd just moved to the US, read the IPCC reports for the first time, and had three kids under seven. But he couldn't unsee it, so he got in the game.
Nine years on, Mick leads Climate Salad - a community of 800 Australian climate tech founders and operators that he deliberately chose to keep lean when it could have grown. He knows the funding volatility, the long hardware timelines, the challenge of selling Australian innovation to Australians who'd sooner trust the same thing from a US startup. But when three founders in the same week told him their sales cycles were getting shorter, he almost cried.
What this conversation gets into is the tension in climate tech right now: how do you hold genuine conviction about an existential problem while speaking a language that CFOs, customers and markets can actually act on? And what happens when you finally make peace with what kind of builder you actually are instead of the one you assumed you were supposed to be?
Kate sits down with Mick to talk about why he walked away from a tech career to work on climate, what he learned from building and deliberately shrinking a community, the one leading indicator that tells him the tide is turning, and what he changed his mind about.

Most of us remember what it's like to want to be in a room we're not allowed into.
For Phoebe Pincus, that room was startups. Before she became CEO of Startmate, she was writing heartfelt cover letters to startups who never wrote back, wanting in with no warm intro and no way through the door. And so when someone said yes, she never forgot what that felt like and it's shaped everything she's built since.
Today Phoebe leads Startmate, the community-driven seed fund that has touched over 10,000 founders, operators and investors across the ANZ ecosystem. She's also the co-founder of Cheeky Run Club, an amateur running podcast that hit a million downloads in two years by doing one thing: making people feel like they belonged as runners.
In this episode, she talks about what it actually takes to build a community people genuinely belong to, not just show up to. What she looks for in the founders most likely to succeed and the trap that even the best fall into. Why making it easier to build products is quietly creating a generation of founders who've stopped talking to customers. And why everything that looks like a threat to the startup ecosystem - hacker houses, closing accelerators, VCs going earlier - looks to Phoebe like good news.
In a world drowning in bad news, Phoebe looks at the same facts as everyone else and chooses to see opportunity. We love it.

When Nick Rudder's co-founder left and went back to Australia, Nick was alone in the US. His wife was pregnant with twins. Their health insurance wouldn't cover the pregnancy. He had almost no budget and no product. He could have gone home. He didn't.
Sphere - now backed by a16z - builds international tax compliance for the fastest-growing software companies in the world. Most of their customers have never had a compliance platform before. They're moving too fast to have built one, which means Nick isn't up against a competitor. He's becoming the function they don't yet have.
How you get from "everything is on fire" to "a16z writes the check" is the episode. The 60 discovery calls before a line of code. The Figma prototype he sold until a customer told him to grow up. The AI he built to reason over trade law while the old guard said it couldn't be done.
Kate sits down with Nick to talk about what it takes to rebuild from nothing and what the fastest corner of the market actually demands right now.