Don, Aaron and Jack unpack a big week in venture, AI and building companies.

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In today's episode, I sit down with Kirstin Hunter, CEO of Birchal, the equity crowdfunding platform that, over 8 years since equity crowdfunding became legal in Australia, has facilitated more than $241 million across 338 successful crowd-sourced funding offers, from over 140,000 individual investments. We were also joined by Dom Pym, a significant shareholder in Birchal, who also co-founded Up, Australia's highest rated bank. Dom invests through his family office Euphemia, plus he's just launched Triple Bubble, Australia's first dedicated fintech fund.

Now I recently became a shareholder in Birchal myself, which came out of a bus ride with Dom where he laid out why he keeps investing, the changes he's pushing for, and what a future looks like that resolves the issues investors in crowdfunding campaigns have experienced to date.

Regular listeners will know we've talked about equity crowdfunding on Transparent VC a number of times. It's an industry still maturing, and it needs to solve a number of issues so it can better serve the founders and investors it's trying to connect. We think it has a role to play in the ecosystem and are keen to help get it right.

That conversation on the bus with Dom led to a discussion with Kirstin, who'd not long taken over as CEO, and I felt there was good alignment on the issues that need to be resolved, so I wrote a cheque and here we are.

We get into who crowd-sourced funding actually suits and who it doesn't, areas that have needed to be improved, and how angel, VC and crowdfunding can work together.