Wild Hearts

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.”

Welcome back to another episode of Wild Hearts. One Blackbird described this week's episode as ‘My favourite episode yet. Laura is incredibly charismatic, I was riveted from start to finish!’

Outtakes: 

✅ How cyber threats are shifting with the rise of AI

✅ The value of authenticity when community-building 

✅ A step by step guide to protecting your cyber borders

✅ The power of storytelling for teaching and learning

Within the episode, we explore the shifting landscape of cybersecurity, where software developers are not just creators but custodians of security. Delving into the historical disconnect between CISOs (Chief information security officers) and engineering teams and how bridging this gap can enhance security measures in larger organisations.

The growing awareness around third-party dependency risks - a concern that has prompted businesses to reflect on their exposure. Drawing an intriguing analogy, Laura likens each new piece of software or technology to adopting a puppy, bringing with it responsibilities and potential challenges that need to be managed.

A key highlight is Laura’s vision for the future, where every software developer dedicates time to security. She shares SafeStack’s mission to protect companies of all scales, by empowering software teams worldwide to weave security throughout the development cycles. 

Listen to hear how SafeStack will reach 13 million software developers, getting them to enjoy one hour of security every fortnight, regardless of the amazing technology they’re building all through the power of storytelling.

Episode highlights from Laura Bell Main: 

“And what I realized was that to sell to people who were essentially just like me, I needed to. Sell to people like me and I wouldn't pick up a cold call, and I don't care about your marketing emails as pretty as they are.”

“What we needed to be was authentically in the community sharing value with no strings attached. We needed to give people the chance to explore the product in a way that they, you know, they could do their research before they came to talk to someone.”

“The teeny, tiny, scrappy little three people things. They need to do security too, and they've got no budget. Trying to sell to them is just, that's silly. Don't do that,  give them the free version. Give them just some essentials. They can get started. And that goodwill and that standing, cultivates with them. They grow with it. And so, as they grow, our hope is that they will grow into us.”

“It's hard and every country has its own culture with doing this, so there's a lot to learn, but it's quite freeing now that we are able to say, Hey, we don't need to behave like the playbook security company. We can just be the company we need to be to get to our particular audience.”

“Yeah.  it goes through how we teach, right? nobody wants to sit there and be bored to death by training. The best way to teach, especially when it's something to do with risk is stories.”

“I'm really mission driven. I dunno whether it came from that before or I was already there, but it's, it's really empowering to go to work every day knowing that you're doing something that's bigger than yourself.”

“I'm genuinely nerdily excited about technology. I, I feel like all of the things I used to read as a kid are coming to life in front of me, the good and the bad. And, yeah, I think it's a pretty cool time to be a technologist”

Lessons on Scaling Eucalyptus as Head of Growth and frameworks for leadership with CCO, Joe Harris.

A layer-by-layer framework for building your growth function 

Misalignment in team design and how that manifests into frustration 

The four main areas of greatness you need as a leader

How to tackle the gnarliest beast of any business: Attribution

Today’s episode is special. It marks a new era for Wild Hearts, where we will shine a light on world-class operators.

The goal is to reveal the lessons, tools, benchmarks and metrics that have surfaced from building and scaling world-class companies. And today’s episode will be all about growth from a company synonymous with it, Eucalyptus, a healthcare technology company building digital experiences for patients. Joe Harris started at Euc as the first growth lead hire, he became the head of growth and now he’s the Chief Commercial Officer.

Eucalyptus builds higher touch, higher quality healthcare experiences for the world. They’re one of the fastest-growing companies that Blackbird has ever funded. Within their first few years, the team has launched and grown four brands reaching over 700,000 people in Australia, UK and Germany.

Behind this, quite frankly, insane growth is a team of some of Australia’s most talented, creative and driven operators, and one of those is Joe Harris. Joe started at Euc in 2020 as a Growth Engineer, quickly moving up the ranks to the Head of Growth and then finally as the Chief Commercial Officer. This rapid progression happened in less than three years, as Joe described it:

“If you had said, I will give you a million dollars. If you can get within like 20% of the correct answer of what's gonna happen to you over the next three years, I would somehow owe you money” 

In this episode of Wild Hearts, Joe walks us through what exactly a growth team is, the step-by-step framework for building your own growth function, how to become a great leader (and coach people around you to become one too), Also quick lessons learned about ineffective solutions that were not going to have the expected impact, and how to address such situations.

Episode Highlights from Joe:

“When we first launched software, it was the most complex personalization journey that we had at the business at the time. Because it's an individually compounded treatment per patient, that is a much harder proposition to have people understand, especially coming from a cold start of never even having heard of it before.”

“The most important thing is the broadening of the mind or the breaking of barriers. And that is the final kind of frontier for a leader.”

“I think there is nothing more profoundly impactful than being hungry, being coachable like it's a compounding engine that you're building with that”

“If I sum [leadership] up, it's to bring clarity, derive the process, coach the next generation of process builders or leaders, and then breaking the barriers and, and helping people expand their, their solution.”

“When I think about setting out metrics to do a split test, honestly it can be done on any metric because a split test is a mechanism to test the change in a metric. So in these examples, we would be looking at basic completion rates of things.”

“The team needs to be accountable for the work that they do, but they must have agency over the thing they're accountable for.What the violation of that looks like is a team who's accountable for the conversion rate of like this part of the experience, but they actually can't push code or change the service or change anything about it.”

“And don't get me wrong, like those are not my wins. Those are the team's wins. I'm there as a facilitator. I'm there to like be a mechanic, like with the wrench and fix when there's a blockage, right? But ultimately, like they're doing the heavy lifting now.

Mason's Blinq

The step-by-step guide to building a marketplace with Levi Fawcett, Co-Founder of Partly. 

How making mistakes can lead to finding the right problem

Realising that New Zealand can compete with the Silicon Valley's

The importance of learning the process vs. framework distinction 

Building conviction through learning-oriented mental models

Partly's mission is to reimagine how the world interacts with vehicle parts in smarter ways that build a more connected and lasting world. To achieve this, Partly offers three solutions: PartsPal; an auto parts inventory and fitment management tool, Partly Marketplace; the #1 way to buy and sell parts around the globe, and UVDB - the Universal Vehicle Database.

In the first episode of our latest season of Wild Hearts, Partly co-founder and CEO Levi Fawcett chats to host Mason Yates about his journey to finding the ‘right problem’, lessons learned from failed startups, and the importance of not hiring yourself.

Episode Highlights from Levi Fawcett

"Process is not bad. It's just overused a lot and we prefer to think of things as a framework. A process implies a step-by-step thing that you do and follow mindlessly, a framework just gives you a way of thinking about things and that's the important distinction."

"Understanding that mission, how much a team can do and it is possible from New Zealand, right? [At Rocket Lab], we were the second private company in the world to put something into space. There was SpaceX and then there was us... That certainly raises the bar in terms of understanding what's possible, and realizing we can absolutely compete with the Silicon Valleys of the world. "

"AllGoods was just this huge series of mistakes, not understanding what competition actually means, why you should avoid it, what a network effect is, why scaling demand on a marketplace is not valuable at all, how margins work, why taking a small chunk of a big margin makes a lot more sense etc."

"As we dug a little bit deeper, we realized there's nearly 2 trillion USD spent every year on these parts. Actually, this is not a local New Zealand problem. This is a global problem. A problem that was mostly unsolved for technical reasons as opposed to business reasons. When we applied all the things we'd learned at AllGoods around the business in terms of is this a defensible business with a large long-term moat? The answer was definitely yes."

"One of the most important things is don't hire yourself. As the company scales, you need more specialists."

Mason's Blinq

Changing the conversation on sexual wellness with Lucy Wark, founder of Normal (live Sunrise edition)

✅Challenges of creating a hardware product

✅Helping people overcome shame and stigma

✅Building a brand beyond a visual identity

✅Investing in your own mental health

✅Reaching your audience where they are

With its range of sex toys and sex education resources, NORMAL has reimagined the sex shop into an online experience that is fun and informative, with the mission of empowering absolutely anybody to explore their sexuality free from stress and stigma. 

In this special live episode of Wild Hearts, founder of NORMAL Lucy Wark spoke with me on stage at Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival.

Episode highlights from Lucy:

“More than 1 in 5 searches on the internet is about sex. There’s an incredibly large organic interest in this topic.”

“As a culture, we have a long history of religious and cultural ideas about sex being sinful, sex being something that should only exist inside marriage, or should only exist for the creation of children.”

“It’s not like selling toilet paper or mattresses. You’re trying to help people tackle quite deep psychological stigma.”

“Things like libido, desire, arousal, changes in the body, sexual dysfunction, relationship skills, and sex while ageing, sex in menopause, there is this enormous suite of challenges for which we are incredibly poorly prepared for by formal sex education.” 

“A brand is not a logo and colours. To build authentic brands that mean something to people, is about a lot more than just building a visual identity.”

“I think having practices like therapy are incredibly helpful investments in yourself as a founder, and an operator, and just a good human being to be around, so that’s been probably the highest ROI thing I do.”