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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are of some of our recent editions.

🏦 Mercury rising: Our interview with Immad Akhund.
🌍 Deel Speed: What the future of work looks like today.
🛠 Building in public: Athyna’s 2023 year in review.

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LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Niki Scevak - Co-Founder & Partner at Blackbird

Niki is a co-founder of Blackbird, ANZ’s most prestigious investment firm with the dream to be a generational owner of generational companies born from Australia and New Zealand. Prior to Blackbird, he founded Startmate, an accelerator that helps nerds with ideas become great CEOs and build global startups.

His eye for innovation and dedication to supporting ambitious entrepreneurs has led to successful investments in high-growth tech companies such as Canva, Zoox, and SafetyCulture.

Before Blackbird, Scevak had a successful career as a tech entrepreneur, co-founding two startups.

What is your main day to day job as Partner at Blackbird?

My role is to find and believe in wild hearts with wild ideas right from the very beginning. Great founders deeply care about the problem they are solving, and are uniquely placed to solve it. A wild heart is a founder who is doing their life’s work.

Blackbird exists to be the first believer in these people, to invest in the seed round of tomorrow’s great companies and then, for the very best, provide millions of dollars so they can succeed at every stage that follows.

Explain your philosophy around leadership? How do you think about it?

We have three philosophies we live by at Blackbird. First one is hungry not proven since we hire people who we believe have a learn-it-all mindset, not those with the strongest resume.

The second is bottoms-up, not top-down; we try to empower people to come up with their own ideas and work with a high level of autonomy, rather than set in-depth tactics and meticulously follow each metric of success.

The third key idea is #FoundersHelpingFounders; the best people to help founders are fellow founders, and there is greater value in connecting those people or creating ways for them to build community with each other rather than the more paternalistic, “we know best” attitude to founder support.

How do you build culture?

One of our values is to make our kids proud: to do everything with integrity, in a way that we’d be happy to tell our kids about. We try to maintain a high level of transparency within the team to nurture this sense of ownership and shared vision, as well as continuing to keep the community we serve at the centre of everything we do.

For instance, having startup founders join our off-sites and town hall meetings, building opportunities for Blackbird team to shadow portfolio operators or learn from their experience, and encouraging them to take part in community programs and events.

A couple of years ago and as Blackbird had grown from 10 to 50+ people, we realised we needed to define the “Blackbird way” of doing things. We developed a set of Operating Principles - a way for every Blackbird to be able to have an internal compass for making decisions with more autonomy and less ambiguity.

Some of these operating principles, like ‘All in Together’ refer to continuing to act like a scrappy startup, where everyone takes out the trash or will roll their sleeves up to get the job done, while others, like ‘Pain is Progress’ reflect our belief in leaning into our mistakes and failures rather than shying away from them.

Note: The full list of Blackbirds values below. The process and framework can be found here.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire all-star talent?

Just as Blackbird wants to help Australia and New Zealand’s most ambitious founders succeed, we want to bring on ambitious people to help us achieve that vision. Our team come from diverse backgrounds—many have founded or worked in startups themselves—and have empathy for the rollercoaster of building technology companies.

Venture capital is notorious for its gender imbalance, and Blackbird hasn’t been immune from this—at the end of 2019, we had a team of 3 women and 10 men. We’ve still got work to do, but we’re making progress - for example, over the past few years we’ve been using a portfolio company, Applied, that de-biases the application process by removing any identifying information from candidates (eg; name, ethnicity, career experience) and this process has really helped us grow a diverse, high-performing team - with over 50% women across the business as of March 2023.

It’s amazing what happens when you simply focus on identifying the best person for the job and remove the noise that leads to biased and gut decisions—diversity comes as a natural outcome.

How do you set goals?

We use an Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) approach to goal-setting at Blackbird. We set our OKRs annually, resetting them each financial year, and we set both company level and team level OKRs.

Blackbird’s OKRs are reviewed on the three speeds of our OC - annual, quarterly, and monthly. Each of these speeds is built on two components: a source of truth and a ritual. And we like OKRs.

We haven’t tried any others but I would say we started badly with OKRs and each year have tried to progressively get better and better and are now approaching what I would call average.

We ran a session with our friend Ryan Panchadsaram for the Giants online series in 2020, where he shared the Do’s and Don’ts of OKRs and how to make the most of them within your organization.

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

Blackbird is hybrid and always has been; we have offices in Sydney, Auckland and Melbourne and team members across Australia and Aotearoa in places like Orange, Wellington, Brisbane and more. We’ve always believed that flexibility is key to our culture and while we have annual rituals such as offsites to bring everyone together, we want our team to have the flexibility to work wherever they want.

What ideas are you excited by right now?

I’m most excited about things I haven’t seen before. By the time there is a category, the best seed investments will have likely been made. I love to see a company right when it is started, not when it has a product or revenue. Having said that, I am diving deep into use cases in biology outside or healthcare. I love autonomous vehicles and robots of all kinds. Most of all I love strange and unique ideas and the wild heart founders that make them happen.

How do you view AI’s adoption in the future? Skynet or utopia?

No way! With any technology leap forward, the fight or flight part of our brain is immediately activated, trying to judge whether we will get killed or lose our jobs. When what happens time and time again is that technology brings the cost of something down dramatically, which means it gets opened up to more and more of society and creates an abundance of activity from what was previously tiny levels of activity.

AI has the chance to be one of the greatest technology leaps forward of our time!

What is the #1 measure you look for to tell you a startup will be successful?

The depth of customer happiness. Has their working life been transformed? Do they use the product religiously? Do they shout their love from the rooftops of social media?

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

Always be thinking what is the one thing that matters. And always be constantly adjusting your calendar to match that, so your actions can be the same as your words.

And that's it! You can pitch Blackbird here, learn about their portfolio here, and follow more from Niki on LinkedIn and Twitter at the links mentioned.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Einstein said; “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.” Bernard Arnault agrees.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

The Startup Podcast had a pretty cool chat with Michael Houck, author of the Houck’s News media brand. We all know, like it or loathe it, that the idea of a ‘founder brand’ is more important than ever now.

Houck is very well positioned to talk about your online reputation after growing his own brand and newsletter audience to over 100k in a flash.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you—hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️