Wild Hearts

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 pa...

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 system...

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...

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”...

When Michelle Battersby launched Sunroom, she set out to change the game for women creators, building a platform where they could earn freely, safely, and on their own terms. Five years, three funding rounds and one pandemic later, she did just that. Thousands of creators made life-changing income, and Sunroom was acquired by Fanfix.

From the emotional weight of leadership to the surprising financial realities of building something ...

When Lucy Liu co-founded Airwallex in 2015, she was flying around the world opening bank accounts in person and carrying bags of security tokens. Global businesses are digital. But finance was stuck in the past.

For three years, Airwallex burned money building invisible infrastructure no one believed in yet. Her co-founder drew a “really ugly unicorn” on a whiteboard predicting ten-times growth when they had zero revenue. ...

Procreate co-founder James Cuda has spent more than a decade obsessing over one thing: the brushstroke. From hacking the iPad 1 to run at 60fps, to turning a side project into the world’s leading creative app, James has built Procreate on a radical philosophy: simplicity, permanence, and creative freedom above all else.

In this episode of Wild Hearts, James joins Mason to share why the company never took VC money, how “flow state” s...

What if you could take the most mysterious force in physics—and make it useful?

In our final  episode of this season of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Pete Shadbolt, co-founder of PsiQuantum, a company racing to build the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer. But this isn’t a conversation about quantum theory. It’s about execution. Engineering. Scaling. Building something that moves humanity forward - not in ...

What if planning dinner wasn’t a chore—but something you looked forward to? In this episode, Wild Hearts guest host, Silk Kadala - investor at Blackbird - chats with Anna Guerrero, founder of Clove, a beautifully designed cooking app that’s reimagining how we cook at home.

You might know Anna from her nine years scaling the creator marketplace at Canva—but it was a stint as a pasta chef in the Dolomites that ultimately se...

What’s it like to be employee number one at two of the most iconic tech companies of the past two decades?

In this episode of Wild Hearts, guest host and investor at Blackbird, Maddy Guest sits down with Kate Vale; Google and Spotify’s first hire in Australia. 
From launching Google out of her lounge room to scaling Spotify into a household name, Kate shares behind-the-scenes stories of tech history in the making, the ...

What happens when a side project becomes a platform used by over 75 million people—yet  the founder feels like they’re losing control of it?

In this special live episode of Wild Hearts , Linktree co-founder and CEO Alex Zaccaria joins Mason Yates on stage at Sunrise Australia to unpack the messy, inspiring story behind one of Australia’s most iconic tech exports. 

From unpacking Alex’s early creative ...

What makes a team thrive?

According to Harry Flett, it's not just strategy or shipping speed; it’s how you make people feel. In the latest Operator episode of Wild Hearts, Harry, VP of Product, takes us behind the scenes at Tracksuit, where high-output product culture meets silliness, storytelling, and some surprisingly heartfelt moments. We explore Harry’s frameworks for thinking clearly, building with velocity, and de...

The internet is drowning in ‘slop’- and George Howes has a fix.

The former creative lead at Eucalyptus believes the solution to this ‘creative problem’ starts with a feedback loopand ends with a new kind of intelligence.

After leading one of Australia’s fastest-growing startups through a wave of performance marketing breakthroughs, George walked away to build something better. That “something” became Magic Brief: a t...

What motivates a founder to shift from building a billion-dollar edtech unicorn to manufacturing missiles? And what happens when your career becomes a response to something deeply personal — the kind of world your kids might grow up in?

Vu Tran is a doctor, a co-founder of Go1, and now the co-founder of Black Sky Industries — Australia’s first scalable missile and solid rocket motor manufacturer. In this episode, Vu ope...

What happens when you pack a carry-on, fly across the world, and try to scale a healthcare startup in one of the world’s toughest markets?

In the latest episode from our Operator series of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Jesse Creighton, Director (US), Heidi Health.

Jesse shares what it really looked like to launch the company’s American expansion — from hosting awkward dinners with two doctors at a 20-person table to...

What does it take to achieve nuclear fusion in less time than it takes to build a traditional power plant prototype? In this episode of Wild Hearts, we’re joined by Ratu Mataira, CEO of OpenStar, a company that just hit the crucial "first plasma" milestone in a staggering 16 months. 

We unpack the misconceptions surrounding fusion, the unique design of OpenStar’s levitated dipole reactor, and why the pathway to commerci...

How do you take a scientific hunch and turn it into a breakthrough that could change medicine forever?

In this episode of Wild Hearts, we sit down with Elise Jenkins, co-founder of Opto Biosystems, to discuss the journey of building a first-in-class brain implant that merges neurotechnology with oncology. 

🎧 Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to learn.

We explore the highs and lows of moving from academia to a high-st...

In this episode we cover:

✅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 anybod...

What happens when a 10-second TikTok video changes everything overnight? For Annabelle Hay, co-founder and CEO of CLUTCH, it meant selling out 5,000 units in hours, navigating a manufacturing disaster, and scrambling to scale. 

In this episode, Annabelle shares the rollercoaster journey of building a consumer brand from scratch, the unexpected lessons of going viral, and the challenges of breaking into retail.

In thi...