My guest for Ep169 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Jax Vullinghs, Partner at AirTree Ventures. Jax has had a fascinating career to date. She studied History at University before making the non-obvious leap into the world of investment banking at Merrill Lynch. After 2.5 years she decided to join an early stage startup called Listable (before rebranding to Kalo). Kalo went on to raise significant funding rounds by some of the world’s biggest VC funds. In 2018 she moved to Australia and joined AirTree Ventures, one of the leading VCs in Australia, as a Partner of the fund. In this jam packe ..read more

My guest for Ep168 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & Co-CEO of Shippit, Will On. Will and his co-founder Rob started Shippit in 2014. They raised $500K as their first funding round bringing in a number of strategic investors on board when it was just the two of them in the business. Fast forward 8 years later and Shippit now has a 200+ strong team and recently raised a $62m Series B2 funding round led by Tiger Global and Tidal Ventures. In this interview we covered a range of topics including: navigating the challenges of early stage startups lessons from Shippit’s Co ..read more

My guest for Ep167 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Justin Lipman, Partner at EVP. Justin started his career in Finance working inside organisations like Credit Suisse, EY and Investec before taking the plunge to join EVP in the very early days of the Venture Fund. The team spent the first year advising startups before raising $25M for their first fund. Fast forward 7 years later and EVP now has over $250M in funds under management. Unlike other funds that open their investment mandate as they grow, EVP has doubled down on it’s focused investing approach by only investing in B2B software a ..read more

My guest for Ep166 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Dan Krasnostein, Partner at Square Peg Capital. Dan began his career in management consulting before making the switch to joining Seek in strategy roles. After spending 4 formative years at Seek, Dan was ready for a change and despite in his own words not knowing too much about Venture Capital, ended up joining Paul Bassat and the team at Square Peg Capital as their first hire. Fast forward 10 years and Square Peg is one of the leading Venture Funds in Australia with over $3B in funds under management and a stellar portfolio of companies ..read more

My guest for Ep165 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Glenn Rogers, the Co-founder & CEO of Float. Glenn and his Co-founder Lars started Float 11 years ago to solve some of the resource management issues they were seeing through their work at a New York based agency, Razorfish They tried to raise capital at the start of their journey but were rejected by every VC fund and investor they spoke to, leading them to bootstrap the business and to operate it on the side of their full time roles in New York. Fast forward to today and Float now employs over 40 people globally and has grown the bu ..read more

My guest for Ep164 of The Startup Playbook Podcast, was Chris Hitchen the Co-founder & Managing Partner of Possible Ventures. Possible Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund that invests in frontier technology. Their approach in investing early, with a high cadence and investing globally has resulted in an incredible portfolio of over 100 startups which includes the likes of Sport NFT trading card startup Sorare. Possible Ventures was one of the earliest backers of the company writing a $50K cheque into company that had 5 people and 1 team signed on hailing from the 3rd division ..read more

My guest for Ep163 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Jaddan Comerford, the Founder & CEO of Unified Music Group and Partner at Side Stage Ventures. Jaddan started Boomtown Records as a 17 year old to help launch the record for his own band. Fast forward 20 years later and he is now the Founder and CEO of Unified Music, a leading independent music company that provides a range of services including artist management, recorded music, publishing, live events and merchandise to a diverse roster of local and international artists including Vance Joy, Violent Soho and Northlane. Most recently ..read more

My guest for Ep162 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Dan Peters, the Managing Director of Clearco Australia. Clearco is the world’s largest Ecommerce investor. They provide revenue based financing options to Ecommerce businesses with their data driven approach to investment decisions providing capital to 8x as many female founders as traditional venture capital funds and 25x as many POC. In this episode, Dan and I talk about Clearco’s investment approach in market as well as some of his insights as a 2x founder, initially in the early 2000’s with Cleardocs, a company he sold to Reuters, and ..read more

My guest for Ep161 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Partner at TEN13 VC, Steve Baxter. Steve is best known for his role on TV as a “Shark” on Australia’s Shark Tank, but prior to this he had a highly successful career as an entrepreneur. In this episode we cover his journey and lessons from his early career including him how he left high school at 15 to join the army, launch SE Net as a 24 year old in a highly competitive environment before selling the company to OzEmail in the year 2000 and much more! We also dive deep into Steve’s main role as a Partner at TEN13 VC and discuss his in ..read more

My guest for Ep160 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & CEO of Kasada, Sam Crowther. Sam launched Kasada as a 19 year in 2015 to help protect businesses from bots. Fast forward 7 years and the company is now used by many Fortune 50 companies and has gone on to raise $39M in funding from leading international and local investors such as Reinventure, Our Innovation Fund and Malcolm Turnbull (the former Prime Minister of Australia). Despite all of these successes, there have also been plenty of challenging moments and in this interview Sam shares some of those challenges incl ..read more