Wild Hearts

If you're here for commentary on the Pope, Trump, or the geopolitics of frontier AI - this isn't that episode. If you're here for the unfiltered view from the people actually building Claude - stay.This one is for the builders, the tinkerers, and the curious. Two of the people behind Claude - not here for governments, the press, or the Vatican. Instead, here to zero in on what they're seeing, and how you can get more from AI, however you're using it. Katelyn Lesse runs engineering for Anthropic's Claude Developer Platform. Angela Jiang runs product. They're the people closest to what builders are actually doing with the technology and are exactly the kind of spark people they'll tell you every team needs.What they're seeing: teams that transform overnight because one person in them is genuinely obsessed. Founders who move with the model instead of against it. A shift from "content is king" to "context is king" that most people haven't caught up to yet. And a clean slate advantage - available to anyone willing to look at an old problem as if it's never been solved before.

After 77 episodes and eight years at Blackbird, Mason Yates is signing off as host of Wild Hearts. This is his final episode - just eight minutes, no fanfare and true to how he hosted: generous with the floor, light on his own voice.Mason started Wild Hearts in 2020. Lockdown. Sourdough. Tiger King. Across the six seasons since, Mason has sat down with founders building mind control for cows, sending toaster-sized satellites into orbit, and chasing a million-qubit quantum computer. Holding the mic through the 2021 supernova, the 2022 correction, the survivor years, and the deep tech wave defining this moment.There's one question he's asked nearly every founder along the way: what gives you the most energy? In this episode he walks back through the answers that have stayed with him - Melanie Perkins, Tim Doyle, Tom Kelly, Flavia Tata Nardini - and shares three lessons from 77 episodes on the craft of interviewing.And then he hands the show over to Kate Glazebrook.If you've been listening since 2020, this one's a love letter to the archive you helped build. If you're new, it's the perfect doorway in.Thank you, Mason. From all of us.

Min-Kyu Jung was a corporate lawyer who taught himself to code because he saw a problem that needed solving. Three years later, Ivo is winning enterprise deals against vendors with much bigger names, with clients like Uber, Netflix, Shopify, and Reddit choosing them in head-to-head bake-offs.How does an unknown startup from New Zealand win those deals? Min-Kyu stopped coding for three months to talk to 400 people. He went all-in on in-house legal teams while competitors hedged. He built features over weekends to save deals, then spent years on details others ignored.In this conversation with Mason Yates, Min-Kyu shares why being unknown became an advantage, what it takes to win trust with lawyers, and why going deep on one thing beats being everywhere at once.

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 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 yearsAlex 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.

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.What you’ll learnThe three real drivers: cost curves, capability (VLM/VLA), and customer pullReliability as the business model: why 99% isn’t enough—and how teams get to 4–6 ninesData, not demos: robots emit GB/min; how to isolate the 1% that changes outcomesHorizontal vs. vertical: what failed in indoor/vertical farming and whyAlloy’s wedge: multimodal search (images, time series, logs), “scenarios,” alerts, and instant mission summaries to accelerate deployment and reduce unit costsTeam & culture: hiring for speed, humility, and learning in a field moving weeklyChapter guide (timestamps)00:00 First operator-to-founder return: Joe’s path (engineer → Atlassian → Eucalyptus → Alloy)02:00 Maker roots: coding tutorials at 12, early internet leverage03:30 Many small businesses → the “one-thing, 10–20 years” decision08:30 Why now for robotics: cost curves + reusable rockets as mindset shift10:45 Vertical farming post-mortems: unit economics, reliability, scale errors13:40 Reliability is everything: from 99% to 99.999% in the physical world15:45 The data firehose: GB/min, multimodal chaos, and missing tooling18:40 Operator-to-robot ratio as the core unit economic lever21:10 Selling into robotics: design partners, security, and data heterogeneity23:15 Common data primitives (perception, time series, logs) + ROS-driven formats24:30 Why LLMs aren’t enough: context-window limits & multimodal encoding27:00 Alloy’s product: natural-language search, similarity, “scenarios,” real-time alerts28:50 Instant mission summaries vs. days of manual analysis29:30 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 frontier33:40 Distribution & adoption: enterprise first; consumer follows reliability35:40 Safety and necessity: underwater, heavy industry, logistics37:15 Autonomy acceptance: the “first Waymo ride” unlock43:00 Ideal customers: high throughput, real deployments, cloud telemetry44:50 ICP discovery playbook: questions that qualify real readiness45:50 Team design: missionary talent, humility > hubris, learn-fast culture46:40 Macro lens: robotics as a deflationary lever & company formation boom48:00 Jobs & leverage: from decoding info → higher-order coordination50:05 The Alloy analogy: the coal-shoveler that keeps the engine running

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.

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. Everyone laughed - but beneath the laughter was a serious undertone that they were onto something big. Something that would be game changing. So they kept building.That bet on infrastructure became one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world, now moving $200 billion annually and adding $100 million in recurring revenue every quarter.In this episode, Lucy shares why building two products simultaneously defied conventional startup wisdom, how hiring for intellectual curiosity beats credentials, and what it means to scale from zero to 1,800 people without losing speed. She also reflects on the power of ambitious predictions, staying simple at massive scale, and why resilience matters more than perfection.

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 decades, but now. Pete shares why 300 or 3,000 qubits won’t cut it, and why a million is the magic number. We explore the technical marvels (and madness) involved in the team’s journey: superconducting detectors millimetres from red-hot heaters, lasers brighter than a trillion photons, and a cryostat that throws out the chandelier model altogether. But most of all, this is a story of ambition. Of leaving behind prestigious academic careers, raising a billion dollars, and assembling a team of physicists, welders, aerospace engineers, and cryo-specialists to take one shot at building something historic. In this conversation, we cover: 🚀 Why PsiQuantum is chasing 1 million qubits—not 300, not 3,000🏗️ What it takes to move quantum computing from theory to hardware—with welders, chip designers, and aerospace engineers 📉 Why academia can be a trap—and how PsiQuantum built an anti-academic company culture 🌐 The real-world applications of quantum computing: from designing drugs to revolutionising materials science 👩‍🔬 How team DNA, not just tech, shapes PsiQuantum’s ability to scale and execute ⚙️ Why quantum computing isn’t a mass adoption tool - and why that’s perfectly okay 🔥 How engineering targets that once caused mutiny are now being hit daily This episode concludes our fifth season of Wild Hearts. Over the past 40 weeks, it’s been our honour to chat to the founders and operators shaping the world we live in. If you’ve enjoyed the conversations, we would be grateful if you could like, subscribe, and share our program with other wild hearts. Wild Hearts will take a short break, and will return to all streaming platforms later this year. From everyone at the Wild Hearts team, thank you!

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 leadership lessons that stuck, and why her latest career act is all about investing in women. In this conversation, we cover: 📞 The cold call from Google that changed her life and brought her to the global tech world—and tech in APAC 🚀 What it was like to launch Google Australia from her lounge room 🌍 Why Spotify was a harder sell than Google—and how she got artists on board 💡 The cultural rituals that helped Kate build high-performance teams across two giants 🔥 The one mistake most startups make when scaling their teams globally 📈 Why she co-founded a VC fund to back female tech founders during the pandemic 🎯 What Kate looks for in a founder, and the red flags that kill the deal This episode is a fascinating look behind the scenes at some of the earliest experiences of bringing global tech companies to Australia, and how these experiences have shaped Steph’s career and investing approach.

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 designing for both customers and teammates. In this episode, we cover: 💬 The power of the say-do ratio and how reputation is built through consistent follow-through 🧠 Why burnout often stems from being “too helpful”—and how Harry’s learning to step back 🌳 The leaf-branch-trunk-root framework that’s helping Harry delegate and build ownership ⚖️ Why great product leadership requires balancing 10,000-foot thinking with shipping the next feature ✍️ How writing is Harry’s superpower—and why it’s essential for clarity in teams, strategy, and scaling 🏆 The hiring philosophy that helped Tracksuit hire the best people This episode is a playbook for leaders—whether you're in product, people, or operations—who want to scale with clarity, delegate with intention, and build a culture that people genuinely want to be part of. It’s packed with insights on communication, prioritisation, and the kind of leadership that drives real momentum.

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 opens up about the moral tipping point that drove him into defence, the vulnerability he sees in Australia’s current military setup, and why he believes our future depends on becoming, in his words, “an echidna — small, underestimated, and far too prickly to bite.” This is a conversation about personal mission, national security, and the power of bringing startup speed to one of the slowest-moving industries on the planet. In this conversation, we cover: 🏥 The emotional toll and grounding power of Vu’s continued work as a doctor in Logan 🚀 How Black Sky Industries is tackling lethality and building solid rocket motors at scale 🛡️ What Vu means by “making Australia an echidna” — a defence philosophy grounded in self-reliance and deterrence 💣 Why no one wants to touch “the pointy stuff” — and why Vu’s choosing to anyway 🌍 How Australia’s current reliance on foreign defence suppliers makes us vulnerable — and what needs to change 💡 Lessons Vu took from scaling Go1 into a unicorn — and what he’s left behind at Black Sky 📈 Why defence tech is the next trillion-dollar market opportunity — and why Vu wants more founders to enter the space. This episode is a raw and revealing look at how one founder is turning personal responsibility into national-scale impact — and why Australia needs more entrepreneurs willing to tackle the hardest problems.

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 commercial fusion might be shorter -and more valuable - than most people think. 🔍 In this conversation, we cover: ⚡ How OpenStar achieved first plasma in just 16 months—years faster than competitors 💥 Why fusion isn’t “30 years away” anymore—and never really was 📉 How misconceptions about cost, scale and safety are holding the industry back 🔩 The engineering breakthrough that allows OpenStar to iterate faster 🧪 Why their first product won’t be a power plant—and what it might be instead 🏥 Medical isotopes, nuclear waste and imaging: the early use cases for fusion 🔧 “Always include a crank”: how failure tolerance fuels rapid learning 🚀 The startup mindset behind building a trillion-dollar fusion company This episode goes beyond fusion hype; it’s a candid look at how OpenStar is breaking barriers in one of the world’s hardest engineering challenges.