Ep#6: The Evolving Role of VCs: Why Platform Teams Matter with Joel Connolly.

Welcome to Method, where we decode what it really takes to build and scale startups. I'm Andy Walsh, founder and strategist. Each week we'll bring you actionable insights and real stories. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to Startups Decoded. Today we're stepping into the world of venture capital, which is our first guest in this series. Super excited today to have creative director app Blackbird, who is a very large and successful Australian vc. It will be a hot topic today, but first, I'd love to welcome Joel.

Thank you so much, Andy. It's great to be here.

It's a really timely conversation. I think that what's happening in the world of VC right now, based off the last two years, the last five years, looking back at 2020 and the boom that happened with capital injection through to now, which is a very different game. But I think to give this a place to start, I'd love to rewind when you and I first met, because every story that I've had so far with my guests, it always has a great point of where it starts and a reason for being beyond what we do today. So we met back when we were both working in the music industry.

Yeah, Blackbird, Australian New Zealand vc. We invest in startups. We started off as a small fund. Like all funds start off as, I think the first funds that was raised, I wasn't around for this one, but it was, I think, $30 million. My bosses, the founders of Blackbird, Nikki and rick, you know, 500, the usual story, 500 meetings to get to $30 million over a couple of years. But they got there, so we started there. I joined as like employee number two and I started as head of community. We started to grow from there. We kind of. Our first phase of growth, I would say, was in response to the second and third funds that we raised. So they were around, I think like 150 million and then 250 respectively. And we started to build the team from there and kind of evolve our ideas around what Blackbird was to be, what our values were, what our place in the Australian startup community would be. And that's sort of taken us to now. Well, I think there's around about 70 employees now. We raised funds at about a billion dollars. Our last one was a billion. I think we're embarking on a fundraise soon, which I think we're shooting for a similar number. And yeah, it's just like it's changed quite a lot. We're quite a much bigger company, I would say. A lot more sure of our place in the ecosystem and community and what our role is in developing the Australian startup community. But yeah, it's been like really fun. Like when you're an early stage employee at something big and exciting that's growing, you have all this opportunity to learn and to grow and try new things. So been super rad. Anyway, I was like head of community. I can go through the whole thing if you like, but I'm now creative director and I also run a philanthropic arm which is called the Blackbird Foundation.

Yeah, and that's perfect. I don't think we need to go through the whole journey as far as what you've done. But even 10 years ago when you joined to think about community was very progressive at the time in the sense of funds and how they think about bringing on the right founders. From an investment point of view, obviously what you were doing was helping drive deal flow, building the Blackbird brand, which was brand new in market as well. And even in Australia, where the VC world is still pretty green at that stage. Right. There wasn't a lot of that happening.

Yeah, I mean there wasn't really. So I was first hired as head of community, like I said. And my. I really don't think anyone really knew what that could be. We knew that. I think Nikki, who's sort of the person who led hiring me, Nikki is one of the founders of Blackbird who. He had this vague notion that there was something to do with storytelling in that we could tell stories of founders in various ways and then that would help to grow the startup community in Australia because at the time it was very small. We had a few standout successes in previous years in Australia. We had obviously Atlassian was like the big kind of thing that's kind of started the venture industry. And as well as that, the startup community, having a shining, like beautiful company there as an example really helped Australians and Kiwis to see that we could build global businesses from Australia or New Zealand. And so like going into the community role, the very definite thing I had to do was run our. We had a startup festival called Sunrise. It was a conference. The idea was to tell stories of Australian founders because we didn't believe that most Australians knew the stories of people who were starting companies. So we had, at the time it was like Canva was just getting started, Safety Culture was just getting started. Culture amp was just getting started and plenty of others. Zoox was like not long after that, which was founded by an Aussie. And so the kind of the idea that you Would bring community into venture wasn't really well understood and I learned the community trade, like how to build community. I've been doing it in various forms and things that are adjacent to community building. In my previous career and you know, in my studies before that, what I found was the, the place that I had to go and learn was this community called cmx, which was community of community builders. And it really, it was founded by this dude, David Spinks and his idea was that there are a lot of people, particularly in startups who are hiring people to manage communities and run communities. So I went and learned how to do it from them. Couple of years later this group called VC Platform started up which is out of New York I think is where it began. And that was like a bunch of people doing it started being called Platform then and it was a whole bunch of like the value add things that VCs do. But really like it was a time that I like I didn't know where to go and there wasn't another VC in Australia who I could go learn from. No one else was doing it in our country and I could find very few people doing it overseas, particularly in the US until I found VC Platform. So yeah, it was super early and it was like I said, a super exciting time. Like getting to figure out what community means to vc, why you would do it, how it can impact the startup community that you operate within. It was like, it was cool.

Yeah. And if you look back now, people, Mike Cannon Brooks as a name is a household name right In Australia from Atlassian and obviously he's been really progressive in climate change action within Australia, investments that he's made with his foundation and being part of that. Do you think that some of that early success with the likes of Atlassian, Canva, et cetera was important for you in building out deal flow, in getting LP returns, et cetera. They're both like globally huge businesses now.

Oh yeah, well like you mentioned Atlassian and Mike. So Mike especially was really important to Blackbird. He was half our first fund. He, he and Nikki, my boss that I've mentioned a few times went to university together. So that was like one of the one connections that Nikki and Rick had. They knew a bunch, they knew a bunch of people but they were kind of like hungry, not proven. Mike was the one like significant, I would say person who they knew, who knew them quite well and trusted them. So that was really important like quite materially for Blackbird. And Mike's now the chairman of Blackbird. So we've got you know, obviously really long and important, great relationship with him. But, like, more important was this idea that, okay, Atlassian chose to build their company in Australia. Unlike a lot of startups previously in Australia, where they would, they would struggle to be able to raise money here, they would struggle to find talent. And so what they would end up doing is raise a tiny little bit here or just go straight to the U.S. you know, they try to get into Y Combinator or they just move their families or whoever that was doing it at the time to the United States. Lasting chose to build it in Australia, which was really exciting because it was, firstly, they did a great job of fostering a talent community in Australia, of going like there were. We've got great universities, lots of really smart kids were coming out of universities, but none of them really knew what it was to work for a startup. So they did. There was this perception that it was highly risky and that you wouldn't want to do it and that it's better to go in Australia. Like our culture is such that it's better to go and work in a really established business, like a large company that has a graduate program and a very clear career path and you can stay there for 20 years. Like that was the previous, you know, gold standard of what people wanted to do. So Atlassian did this great job of showing, actually you can come work at a startup, you can be really successful in that startup, you can learn a lot, you can learn quickly, you can progress quicker than you would in any of those other industries. And so that kind of started a talent community and ecosystem in Australia that we didn't have before. But then importantly, founders just behind Atlassian were able to see the example that Mike and Scott led, which was, you can build it from here. We can create a community where there's talented people, there are enough investors in Australia popping up and we, those investors now see that you can build a company from Australia that can be globally successful, so they're more willing to take risks. It took a while for institutional money to come in. It wasn't until, I think, our 2015 fund, where we got our first bit of institutional investment in our funds. But, you know, that's totally changed now. So the example of Atlassian was one, Canberra came next. All those others that I mentioned as well, such that everybody started to see that actually we can do this here. We can make really beautiful and interesting things. All the institutional funds, which are our superannuation funds, like our retirement funds, they all decided that it was worthwhile investing in where we Struggled to get any institutional investment in our first two funds. We've now got several, like, you know, several retirement funds investing in us that never would have considered it like six or seven years ago. So it has like the community's changed a lot. And all it's taken, it's taken a lot of work, but just the idea that you can set an example and show people rather than telling them, you can actually just show them by just like forcing it to happen.

Yeah. And I. A few things in there that I'd love to sort of double down on a little bit. And I think it's really fascinating that it's that classic challenge of starting a fund. You know, doing the first raise is not easy for anyone and it's a lot of hard work. There's some people that have better networks than others that may find it slightly easier, but there's still a lot of hustle. And then you need to prove that you can drive returns, that you're investing in the right type of businesses, that you know how to support your founders. I've been fortunate to meet Nick and Michael from your team. I've been to some events at Atlassian here in New York. I'm with the Blackbird team in town and I hear conversations that they have and conversations myself and what they talk about now versus what it was for you back then are, are very different. So for your role, specifically in supporting the portfolio like in those first, call it two or three funds, were you actively working with your portfolio at that stage or was it more community focused and looking at sort of helping spread Blackbird's name and bring community together to create future opportunity?

Yeah. Great. So the strategy that I ended up coming up with, so head of community, was the role. I went on this journey over about a year and a bit to figure out what that meant, what the job of community was. And part of that was trying to, was recognizing that in Australia, because the ecosystem, the startup community, is so nascent, you as like someone with leverage in capital, you have a responsibility to not just drag a net through the ocean and pick up all the startups you can, you have a responsibility to build the ecosystem, to make sure it's rich and diverse. Four, not just for the good of our country, but for the good of your investors, of our investors, our LPs, who need us to keep finding 20, 30 companies a year to invest in that we think at the time of investment will return the fund. So we needed a rich and diverse community of founders. We needed to change some cultural things in Australia. So I mentioned before, young people didn't, not only did they not want to found startups, they didn't want to work in them either. And so there was part of my job as community was like, okay, let's like figure out what role Blackbird has to play in the startup community and then let's figure out what role I have to play building community amongst our founders. So it was a four pillar strategy. What I settled on was firstly we spend all this energy and effort trying to find the most brilliant, creative, wonderful people to invest in. They need help along the way. None of us are, you know, really experienced founders. The best people to help those people are other founders. So we've put this effort into finding them. Let's pull them together, let's build trust, let's build relationships such that they're willing to support each other and help each other as they grow. So that's like the fundamentals of like that pillar. How do we find, you know, build trust and relationships amongst the founders such that they'll want to support each other as they grow, such that we'll have more successful companies in the portfolio. And that like the, the meat and potatoes of that was like programming and content, lots of meetups, lots of like finding the problems that they were having within their own companies, finding other people with those problems, bringing them together around them, all that kind of stuff. Another strategy, another pillar to the strategy was lp. So investors. So we weren't getting institutional investors at the time, but we had like one institutional investor. But we did have maybe 100, 150 individual LPs who were like a large majority of them would really, actually they wanted to invest, but they also really wanted to be involved in startups in Australia. They wanted to be around founders, they wanted to be involved in the community, they wanted some kind of say. So the idea was if we build community amongst these people in much the same way that we do with our founders, they'll build a stronger affinity towards the Blackbird brand, they'll find more opportunities and ways to support our founders and then they'll be more likely to invest in subsequent funds. Because in the early days, like when you've got your first fund and your second fund, you've got a raise from people several times before you're returning any money to them. And often, sometimes returns don't materialize on paper until much later in the journey of a fund. Not always. Sometimes you get lucky and you have very early outlier successes. But quite often that's not the case. You just don't know is the point. So it's like, how do we foster those relationships? How do we make them more strongly connected to Blackbird? How do we give them some sense of ownership over the growth of the startup community in Australia? Same as the portfolio strategy. The meat potatoes was content programming, events writing, relationship building, network building. Then another pillar to the strategy was education. And it came out of this idea that we. One of the greatest challenges our founders were having was when we invest in them. First thing founders do when you give them money is go try hire people. There just weren't that many people to hire. They were having real trouble hiring. And, you know, that to me is a. It's a pipeline problem that starts years ahead. Like, you can't immediately solve the problem easily, but you can. If you're successful in changing attitudes and ideas of young people now, then in three to five years or two to five years, when those young people are coming up and looking for work and getting skills and experience, they'll start to consider startups as a legitimate path. So, man, I was like. And again, the goal of that was really simple. Convince people to go work at Canva as employee number 600, you know, and I used to do all kinds of stuff. I would run Sausage Sizzles outside engineering departments at unsw, trying to convince people to go work at Canva. And then I would drive a bus up to the university with all the people I met at the Sausage Sizzle. And I go, come in, I'll drive you to Propeller in Canva and Safety Culture and like, you know, Inventia and all these startups around Surry Hills in Sydney, trying to show them like, this is what it looks like, it's fun, it's cool, you can learn lots, give it a chance. And then the final pillar, which actually was its last bit was quite big, was how do we build ecosystem? So all of those things that I mentioned there build ecosystem, but specifically, what are we doing to grow the startup ecosystem and community in Australia? How do we get people to take startups more seriously? How do we get them to see invention, innovation, creativity as an important pillar to our economy? Because at the moment, if you don't know, Australia's economy is built largely on stuff we dig out of the ground. We don't refine it or make products from it or anything like that. We mostly dig it up and ship it away to other countries. So we need to build another pillar to our economy. We need innovation to be an important part of that. And so we need more people coming into startups. So how do we get them excited about it? How do we tell the story of Australia as an inventive, creative place where you can make stuff and be successful as well as live a good and rich life, which is what our country is most known for? And so that was like larger events. Like I mentioned before, I run a startup festival called Sunrise, which is trying to move it more towards like a cultural festival because the aim of it is cultural change. But so we would run that once a year. That's now a couple of thousand people over two days. We have three stages. So that's one activity. That was kind of what I did at first. And I'm just one person, right. So I wasn't doing all those things at once. I would like one quarter, I'd have two pillars going and I'd be doing some activity and then I'd have to sort of stop those until I got to the next quarter and finish those other two things so that I could start on the other stuff. That was like the beginning of it. And then over time, like, I don't run community now. We have a whole team of people that do that now and they're awesome at it. The strategy is kind of similar now. They're very focused on portfolio, less so on some of those other things because we now have an IR team to look after LPs. We have, you know, for the education piece, I run out charity, which is about creativity and young people and education. So that's kind of sorted. So bigger team. But I'd say, like, in a lot of respects, the ideas that. And the philosophy that we were using back then is kind of still in use today.

So insightful. And I think that breaking it down into the pillars is helpful because it allows people to understand about what kind of things you're thinking about day in, day out, how you build strategic plans longer term, but then also the value that it drives going into that and unpacking it a little bit further. One of the things that you said then there was very much around building community, which is obviously future pipeline. It creates investors that go into that, it creates returns. It's ideally, it's sort of fueling the whole investment and sort of VC economy for young startup founders to be able to have it. So they feed each other is what I heard you say there. Like you need to be able to have those founders feel like that there is an opportunity in Australia that they're able to build a startup, they can scale it globally from Australia and have success and you've got the perfect case study now written through that time. So fast forward to today. What are some of the key challenges that you'll probably dealing with now when you're thinking about your plan in 2025?

I have a kind of unique role at Blackbird. I do a few different things. What I think about a lot, we have this internal kind of, well it's actually one of our external kind of values is decades, not days. The idea is that when we make decisions we try and think quite like with a, with a large kind of view and that like that comes to life through our funds. Like the VC strategy is a longer term investment strategy across the board, wherever you do it. So there's that. But then also like I spent a lot of time thinking about what needs to become true in Australia for Blackbird and the other funds in Australia to be successful over the next 20 or 30 years. Because we've had this success now, we've created a lot of momentum, a lot of energy. Young people now are like self organizing and froth into work in startups. Like there are entrepreneurial societies in every single university. So a lot of like the energy and the culture and the cultural attitudes. Attitudes have changed quite a lot there, there's now a lot of money in the ecosystem. There's three other funds like us plus a bunch of like I'm saying, I'm calling them mid tier but I'm only talking about fund size, certainly not in output or in you know, success investing. But you know there's three funds who have got upwards of 6,700 million to a billion dollars. So there's plenty of capital in the market. All of this is short term kind of stuff. Like it means that over the next five years, maybe 10, we're going to have a lot of stuff happening. And I spend a lot of time thinking about well what about the 10 plus 20 plus 30 beyond that. And that's not to say I'm like some long term genius but I think a lot about my work, where I can have success in my work and where I can be most successful for Blackbird. And when I think about the things that need to change in Australia, the way that I can affect change is through cultural change in our country. And that sounds really big and gnarly but all it means is like just changing people's, changing some people's ideas about what Australia is, what you can do from Australia and what we are capable of as Australians and Kiwis. You know I just mentioned all these things just before. Like no one wanted to work at startups. There weren't any VCs in Australia. You know the reasons for all of those things? We didn't have a startup community. The reasons for all of that, when you boil it down, are cultural. It's to do with our. Our attitudes, our ideas of ourselves, our identity. Dude wrote a book in the 60s about this called the Lucky country and people use that word incorrectly now. Like isn't Australian we lucky we live in the lucky country? He wrote it as like if you read the book is this scathing critique of Australian culture and society. It was brutal and it's still to this day. A lot of the things he wrote about are true. Heating government, which is a prime minister of ours in the 90s, tried to fix it through a cultural policy that's like a top down solution. We're going to have our first cultural policies called Creative Nation. I don't think it worked. I don't think it did anything such that when we were starting up, Australia still wasn't inventing or making things. We were subscribers to Netflix, we weren't creators of this stuff on it. You know, we had no cultural influence beyond our own borders. We're not making stuff out of the things we dig out of the ground. We're still quite prosperous as gdp. We're one of the richest companies in the GDP per capita. We're one of the richest company countries in the world. But as a sophistication index, like if you go and look, there are sophistication index. So the cleverness of an economy. But we are like way down in the 60s, 70s for a country that has such a safe lifestyle, such good safety nets, climate that is moderately okay relative to other places in the world. Even though we've got climate change coming down and that's causing us problems like it is everybody else. It's an incredibly safe place to live. We have great education. So what's the problem? Like why aren't we the greatest inventor of the greatest stuff in the world? Why is. When you ask anyone in any country what their idea of an Australian is, they'll talk about up until recently, they'll say, they'll talk about Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin. Like lampoons of the Australian character, not the Australian identity at all. Now they'll say Bluey. But that's the first thing. Like that's the first true representation of one type of Australian and one version of Australia. But it's real. And it's the first time that anyone outside of our shore has ever been able to have any idea about what Australia is about and what it is to be Australian. And so the reason that we didn't have a startup community is cultural. Like we just don't have the like cultural change that we need. Cultural change as described by Donald Horn in 1964 as Truckton. People have been talking about it forever. It's like a tired old like debate. And so when I think about it I'm like, we at Blackbird and other people in our startup community, so some of the other VCs and other people who have been participating in the startup community, RLP is founders who have given back to the community. In the last 10 years we've seen this sort of cultural change that was described or hoped for by hitting in the 90s, by hauling in this is like we've seen it like we have changed people's ideas about what they can achieve, we've changed their level of ambition. We've not asked exactly, but the startup community as a whole and Blackbird as an actor in the startup community has played a role in changing those attitudes, changing the culture, changing the values, the belief systems such that we now have a really rich and diverse community where we're seeing thousands of companies pitch us every year, right? Like we, there is enough space for three large funds plus a ton of other funds in the market. Like how many people in the strange startup community? Probably 10,000, 20,000 maybe like Bunnings employs 54,000 people. We don't need to get too many more people in the startup community or too many more people subscribing to some of the, I guess the values of the startup ecosystem that we have in order for the like attitudes and the culture of our nation to change. And so I think about that like we're not going to do it by ourselves, but how can we create and build things that make people believe that they can be creative, that they can make stuff that they don't have to, just that. But then also like I spent a lot of time thinking about what needs to become true in Australia for Blackbird and the other funds in Australia to be successful over the next 20 or 30 years because we've had this success now, we've created a lot of momentum, a lot of energy. Young people now are like self organizing and froth into work in startups. Like there are entrepreneurial societies in every single university. So a lot of like the energy and the culture and the cultural attitudes, attitudes have changed quite a lot there, there's now a lot of money in the ecosystem. There's Three other funds like us, plus a bunch of, like I'm saying, I'm calling them mid, tier, but I'm only talking about fund size, certainly not in output or in, you know, success investing. But you know, there's three funds who have got upwards of 6,700 million to a billion dollars. So there's plenty of capital in the market. All of this is short term kind of stuff. Like it means that over the next five years, maybe 10, we're going to have a lot of stuff happening. And I spend a lot of time thinking about, well what about the 10 plus 20 plus 30 beyond that. And that's not to say I'm like some long term genius, but I think a lot about my work, where I can have success in my work and where I can be most successful for Blackbird. And when I think about the, the things that need to change in Australia, the way that I can affect change is through cultural change in our country. And that sounds really big and gnarly, but all it means is like just changing people's, changing some people's ideas about what Australia is, what you can do from Australia and what we are capable of as Australians and Kiwis. You know, I just mentioned all these things just before, like no one wanted to work at startups. There weren't any VCs in Australia. You know the reasons for all of those things. We didn't have a startup community. The reasons for all of that, when you boil it down, are cultural. It's to do with our, our attitudes, our ideas of ourselves, our identity. Dude wrote a book in the 60s about this called the Lucky country and people use that word incorrectly now. Like isn't Australian. We're lucky, we live in the lucky country. He wrote it as like if you read the book is this scathing critique of Australian culture and society. It was brutal and it's still to this day. A lot of the things he wrote about are true. Keating government, which is the prime minister of ours in the 90s, tried to fix it through a cultural policy. So that's like a top down solution. We're going to have our first cultural policies called Creative Nation. I don't think it worked. I don't think it did anything such that when we were starting up, Australia still wasn't inventing or making things. We were subscribers to Netflix, we weren't creators of the stuff on it. You know, we had no cultural influence beyond our own borders. We're not making stuff out of the things we dig out of the ground. We're still Quite prosperous as gdp. We're one of the richest companies in the GDP per capita. We're one of the richest company countries in the world. But as a sophistication index, like if you go and look, there are sophistication index. So the, the cleverness of an economy. We're like way down in the 60s, 70s, like, it's for a country that has such a safe lifestyle, such good safety nets, climate that is moderately okay relative to other places in the world, even though we've got climate change coming down and that's causing us problems like it is everybody else, it's an incredibly safe place to live. We have great education. So what's the problem? Like, why aren't we the greatest inventor of the greatest stuff in the world? Why is. When you ask anyone in any country what their idea of an Australian is, they'll talk about. Up until recently, they'll say, they'll talk about Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin, like lampoons of the Australian character, not the Australian identity at all. Now they'll say Bluey. But that's the first thing. Like, that's the first true representation of one type of Australian and one version of Australia. But it's real. And it's the first time that anyone outside of our shore has ever been able to have any idea about what Australia is about and what it is to be Australian. And so the reason that we didn't have a startup community is cultural. Like, we just don't have the like, cultural change that we need. Cultural change as described by Donald Horn in 1964 as Truckton. People have been talking about it forever. It's like a tired old, like, debate. And so when I think about it, I'm like, we at Blackbird and other people in our startup community, so some of the other VCs and other people who have been participating in the startup community, RLP is founders who have given back to the community. In the last 10 years, we've seen this sort of cultural change that was described or hoped for by skating in the 90s, by hauling in the seas. Like, we've seen it. Like we have changed people's ideas about what they can achieve. We've changed their level of ambition. We've not asked exactly, but like the startup community as a whole and Blackbird, as an actor in the startup community has played a role in changing those attitudes, changing the culture, changing the values, the belief systems, such that we now have a really rich and diverse community where we're seeing thousands of companies pitch us every year, right? Like we, we, there is enough space for three large funds plus a ton of other funds in the market. Like, like how many people in the Australian startup community? Probably 10,000, 20,000 maybe like Bunnings employs 54,000 people. Like with, like we don't need to get too many more people in the startup community or too many more people subscribing to some of the, I guess the values of the startup ecosystem that we have in order for the like attitudes and the culture of our nation to change. And so I think about that like we're not going to do it by ourselves, but how can we create and build things that make people believe that they can be creative, that they can make stuff that they don't have to just be passive consumers in the world that they can actually create the products that people subscribe to?

You know, that's great. And I think that the, what you've tapped into there for me, which is really interesting from an Australian perspective, is that by supporting the Australian entrepreneurs and founders with ideas, you're able to change an economy by yourself to a certain degree. And that's a sweeping statement. But I think as far as the companies that are being created, the wealth has gone back into Australia, the returns from your funds that have gone back into the hands of Australian investors, that then have capital and a liquid to be able to reinvest back in. And I saw recently that you sold a large portion of your canvas shares and from memory I feel like it was like 900 million. So if you think about distributing that even with internal carry, from a partner perspective, et cetera, there's a lot of that money that goes out back into people in Australia that can then support the next generation of founders. So you need that sort of flywheel effect to take shape. And then when you have people who are at high school, at university and thinking about career paths, it's on their radar because they see the headlines and they see the change that's being made. Because the alternative is that you have a brain drain, right? You have people that are smart, ambitious, looking for opportunity and they'll pack up and they'll go to Europe or they'll go to Southeast Asia, they might go to America, but they're finding places that either have bigger capital availability, bigger population base, etc, but there's no reason, and I look at Canva and Atlassian, again, just for today's conversation, have demonstrated that that's not the case, that you can do it out of Australia. So I think that that's really powerful and I'm sure, that and I don't know how often your team would do this. Like if you were to reflect of where Blackbird started 10 years ago to where you're at now, like there's been a seismic shift that you've created. It's not been by yourself, but you've definitely been, you know, the front of the pack and driving that change.

Yeah, you know, like part of the Australian character maybe criticism of it is that you try and like exercise humility at every point. And I like, you know, I know that we haven't done it by ourselves, but I'm also really proud that I think we have had a big impact on those things that I talked about. Not just us, you know, a whole bunch of people working towards it. But I think, you know, there was a point where VC in Australia could have been something totally different. Like it could have been like previously we've had had VC industry in Australia and it's been very corporate, very private equity, not very founder friendly. That's like a general criticism that like not just me, but a lot of. I didn't live through it, I wasn't involved then. But that's the, they're the stories that get told about that time in VC in the 2000s, I guess. And it could have gone a similar way. Like I think, you know, Blackbird came in and we had this really strong belief that founders are a center of everything. Like we got to do everything we can to support them. Like it sounds tired now, but saying like a founder kind of first approach. Every VC says that now, but I think they say that now because us and a few others helped to create that culture in the community. So we not only help to shape startups, but you can like if you like if you're intentional about it, you do have a role to play and you can affect change within your own industry. Especially like it's one of the advantages of starting when we did is that it was a, in many ways a fresh kind of slate. We, we had the option to kind of, you know, to shape it in the way that we felt it needed to be. And yes, I am proud of it. I am like, I think, I think us and others, but like Blackbird to a large extent has done a really admirable job of creating a community that is like, that is good and rich and healthy and diverse and fun.

Yeah. And I love watching outside in. Unfortunately I wasn't one of those early investors into the fund, otherwise my life today might be a little different. But that's the world of Venture. Right. It's. You can't always be involved in everything. It's easy to look back. But one of the things that I also want to talk about there, and we covered it a little bit, is I've got pretty good relationships here in New York with Austrade, the Australian government and also New Zealand Trade. And both of those government bodies based here in the US are helping founders who have started in Australia move to the US understand things around visas, setting up company structures, finding customers, partners, etc. Are you involved in that process with some of your portfolio companies in that expansion at a global scale? And do you have a global network that you'll sort of helping tap them into?

Great question. This sort of taps into, I think like there's a few different strategies VC can take when it comes to building platform or you know, as you call it. There is like a real service orientated approach where you, I think like some of the bigger kind of well known firms that do it Quite well are a 16Z. They'll hire a ton of experts. Here's a policy expert, here's like a head of data science, he's our head of like engineering. We'll hire essentially like the best people we know to go out there and support our founders in that. In that way. Blackbird's taken the opposite approach, which is, well, not the opposite, it's just a different strategy which is we're not going to be a service orientated company. Like we're going to use community as the main driver for that support for founders. So do we help them get established and set up overseas? We do, but we're also not experts in that. So our, you know, general strategy is to like, if a founder is saying I want to go and move and set up shop, you know, set up a sales and marketing office in New York, we will like introduce them to Austrade or we will introduce them to other founders who have recently done it. That'll be the type of support that we, that we do. We are putting an effort into building our global, I guess community of people essentially like really great Australians, Kiwis who we know doing great work internationally outside of our shores. So we've in the last year we've had this like Blackbird world strategy is what we're calling it where we know that there are some of the best and most talented Aussies and Kiwis leave to go and do because they're ambitious and they want to go and work in some of the biggest exciting cities in the world. And so what we're trying to do is figure out who those people are and where they are and build a community such that, you know, when it comes to it, if anyone's starting companies, we can support them. If any of them want opportunities to work in companies, we can support them. What is generally to bring together, like some of the most exciting Aussies and Kiwis we know that are out there so that they can like, know each other in the same way that we've done it in Australia.

Yeah. Nice. And I'm like you, part of the VC platform community and I've met some really great people and going to events and there's a lot of sort of challenges and opportunities that everyone collectively sees. And one of the challenges is once you have a large portfolio, it's literally impossible to support every company in your portfolio from a platform perspective. Right. So within that you're looking at what are the things that I can do that can be scaled and utilized. So if I have, if I have a lesson on something that I'm working on, a project and maybe it's a supplier, whatever that can be, there's a shortcut that's available to other people. So it's how you have a library of resources to be able to share and let other people access that collective knowledge. I always use the analogy of every boat rises in the tide, but there's also like time and capital restraints from your side to be able to do that fully. So it's a really tough balance because you've invested a lot of money into these companies and you obviously not leaving them to their own devices, but you're limited with the impact that you can have directly.

Yeah, the old. It's a classic conversation that you have whenever you get together with people who work in platform, in vc. How do you scale, how do you have more impact across more people? Because as you get further on, it's not just more founders that you're investing in. All of those founders grow bigger and bigger teams. I think the first thing I'd say is really recognize what you can and can't do. I think it would be really generous to say that all vcs can meaningfully impact the trajectory of their startups outside of giving them money. I think it's somewhat true that we can support and help or like push in the right direction, but the reality is like the business of growing a really successful and large company is the job of the founder. And that's why we've chosen the community approach and the network approach as opposed to a service orientation. Like a be clear. I don't think any one strategy is right. You got to pick what's right for your, for your portfolio in the market that you're in. When you're building a portfolio like a platform strategy, you've got to really deeply understand not just what the challenges of your portfolio are and the challenges of your immediate community, but you got to understand what you are able to do better than others. Like is there something unique that you as a firm can do that any of the other firms can't provide? Because from a founder perspective they've got like how many VCs on their cap table? Right. How many people have got platform strategies? How many talent people are there in each fund? I think you've like, I think that's, that would be the harder thing about operating in a much more crowded market like New York or San Francisco. Like that's not, it's not our problem in Australia. We don't have to worry too much about that. But I think like whatever strategy you choose, if you go down the, I guess the service orientation, you're always going to reach a problem with scale. If your fund is successful and let's say you're successful, like your role in helping your fund to grow and be successful, like the reward you get for that is like everything you build breaks and you find it more impossible as you go on to have impact. So that's why we felt community is like the right thing. Like our viewers that our founders are going to like, we don't want them to look to us for the answers for things. We want them to look to each other. We want the heads of product in each company to look to each other for support and guidance. And we want, you know, if they're trying to hire someone really, really great, we want them to be able to call another founder and go, you hired this last year like you've got one person, but there must have been heaps of others in there. What can I learn from you? Are there other people in the pipeline that we can, you know, maybe speak to that would be appropriate or that would be good for us? Like that's the sort of, that's the thing that we hope for and we do like these, I will say these strategies of Blackbird are evolving. Like we've just rebooted our talent, our network which is, you know, we're trying to like scale those efforts by building it sort of almost like a two sided marketplace. We have our founders here and people who want to work in Blackbird companies. A huge like network of both of those things and we try and match them up and there's someone at Blackbird who's working on that. And so that's like, is a little bit more of a scalable service orientation. But like the reality is like that in my view the only scalable way that you can do these things is community. And community is scalable. Non scalable community is not actually scalable. Like figure the community. The more work it requires to maintain and keep it rich and diverse, the bigger the team needs to be like, you can't have one community person and that community person can scale from 100 person community to a 5,000 person community. Like it's just not how it works. But it is, it is in my view the most scalable way that you can help.

Yeah. And here in New York there's one that springs to mind is Primary Ventures who are one of the VC funds that I respect the most as far as the work that they do, who they're investing in, but also their process. And they're probably one of the most platform forward VC funds that I've come across. And I think it's roughly 2/3 of their team are platform teams and one of those is a dedicated HR division. So you've got a chief of staff and a group of people who are actively building a pipeline of talent. So when they invest and they're an early stage fund when they're investing, they're able to pair people up and what that does is escalates that scale potential. Right. Because one of the biggest challenges you have in early stage as a founder is finding the right person from a culture perspective, but also from a skill set. Someone who is prepared to work for equity or work for not much money and some equity. And they're a very different type of person to someone that you hire. Once you get probably series BC stage where you've got more structure, more process metrics, et cetera. And it's a little bit more controlled than that early sort of growth hacking stage that happened. So for them it's sort of an investment to be able to drive a faster growth rate and get them to the next stage. And I think it's, for me it seems like a smart bet, but it's also limited to scale. Right. You can only do so much, but measuring that is a tricky part. And I don't want to go too much into measurement and trying to rationalize what you're doing because we're coming up to time. But I, I'm always curious about different people's approach to platform and community. Because the reality that I see as well is that say your average success rate of a Fund sits between 5 to 10% of your companies that you invest in actually make it through. It's already a pretty cutthroat industry. Right. There's a. And I guess an accepted part of it is that if you flip it the other way that 90% of those startups will fail. And fail I hate as a term. I try to find another word to use there. Sometimes there's things out of your control, sometimes you've built a great business, it just doesn't get enough traction. Competitors come in, a major tech company comes in and just eats your lunch when they launch a new feature the day after tomorrow that you've been building for years. There's a lot of things out of your control. So I guess for me, I. I'd find that sort of trying to be pragmatic and accepting that is tough. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like the first thing I'll say is I'm not known at Blackbird for caring really hard about precise measurement. I think like, so my views are. So my views are not commonly held used within Blackbird. So the answer I give here are Blackbird answers. But I think like what you're trying, what you talked about there, you hit on something really interesting about just the nature of our industry of vc and that's like the randomness of it all. They're the like I've just reread Fooled by Randomness, which is the Taleb book from a few years back. So my ideas are pretty biased. I'm going to be do a bad job of parodying him. But so much of it is random like and the like your success as an investor is random. The timing of your fundraisers can like be really affected by randomness. The. There's so many things like that are outside of your control and we build the model to account for that. Like you have a portfolio of things, you raise a ton of money and the idea is you only need a couple of like home runs. So the model is built to account for the randomness. But I think like as to how you deal with that as a like someone who's building platform. I've learned over the years that like you like can rip all your hair out. I don't have much left, but you can rip all your hair out trying to like find ways to measure direct correlation to your work and your fund success. So the fund success is like winning the best deals, you know, having the best Returns raising the right amount of capital. Like those are the fund success terms. So drawing a really neat correlated line between one activity that you've done, say it's help a founder hire a really great executive, right? So that thing, the effect of that might be that that founder you've supported tells 10 of their friends who you know, then tell a couple of their friends. And that affects like a brand and reputation point of view of you and your firm that you're able to actually help hire really great executives. There's no way to neatly tie that action that you did to the next two round two funds away where you're able to like win some deals that you know you might not have won, where you're not great at helping hire executives. It's really hard to draw that line. It's correlation that's really hard to show. Correlation is like the, is what you're going for. The causation is like drawing a neat line between the action that you've taken and the success of your fund in some meaningful, measurable way, you've won this deal, you've like raised more capital, whatever. Like as a platform professional, you do things that increase like ultimately like it's brand building stuff is what you're really doing, brand building work that increases the reputation of your firm, that helps you win better deals, that helps you raise more money, et cetera, et cetera. So to measure those things, like I find there is no perfect, perfect way to do it, but you can find proxies for it. One of the questions I was always really fond of, we do founder surveys every year and it was indicative that I was heading in the right direction this question, but the question is you ask in the survey, I chose Blackbird because like, like in large part because of the community efforts. So community is one of the main reasons or your platform offers one of the main reason. I chose Blackbird. So difficult to actually have a yes in that, that box there because there are so many reasons like fundamentally they want money, they want networks, they want to be able to grow a company really quickly. But if you build a really great platform offering, be it like on the server side, be it on the community side, and they identify that like a founder says, I'm going to take money from you over another firm because I know that people's ideas about what they can achieve, we've changed their level of ambition. We've not us exactly, but the startup community as a whole. And Blackbird, as an actor in the startup community has played a role in changing those Attitudes, changing the culture, changing the values, the belief systems, such that we now have a really rich and diverse community where we're seeing thousands of companies pitch us every year. You've got a great talent network or because I know that you've got great founders in your portfolio and I want to learn from them and get to the right. Like, we, we. There is enough space for three large funds plus a ton of other funds in the market. Like, like how many people in the Australian startup community, probably 10,000, 20,000 maybe like know them. Like if you can get to a point where a founder recognizes that actually knows about it and then identifies. Bunnings employs 54,000 people. Like with, like, we don't need to get too many more people in the startup community or too many more people subscribing to some of the, I guess the values of the startup ecosystem that we have in order for the like attitudes and the culture of our nation to change. And so I think about that like we're not going to do it by ourselves, but how can we create and build things that make people believe that they can be creative, that they can make stuff that they don't have to just be passive consumers in the world that they can actually create the products that people subscribe to. You know that when they're trying to find the fund to take money from. And then we'll say it to you later on, that's great.

And I think that the, what you've tapped into there for me, which is really interesting from an Australian perspective, is that by supporting the Australian entrepreneurs and founders with ideas, you're able to change an economy by yourself to a certain degree. And that's a sweeping statement. But I think as far as the companies that are being created, the wealth has gone back into Australia like it's.

Almost an impossible task. That to me is like, that was like a great proxy.

Another one, the returns from your funds that have gone back into the hands of Australian investors that then have capital and a liquid to be able to reinvest back in. And I saw recently that you sold a large portion of your canvas shares and from memory I feel like it was like 900 million. So if you think about distributing that, even with internal carry from a partner.

Perspective that I use for, we've just hit on for Sunrise, which is the Startup Festival. It sounds so simple.

But the Golf, et cetera, there's a lot of that money that goes out back into people in Australia that can then support the next generation of founders. So you need that sort of Flywheel effect to take shape. And then when you have people who are at high school, at university and thinking about career paths, it's on their radar because they see the headline.

All of the festival is to grow the startup community in Australia. There are other goals, but that's one of the main kind of things we do. We really just.

And they see the change that's being made. Because the alternative is that you have a brain drain. Right. You have people that are smart, ambitious, looking for opportunity and they'll pack up and they'll go to Europe. Well, I'll go to Southeast Asia, they might go to America, but they're finding places that either have bigger capital availability, bigger population base, et cetera. But there's no reason. And I look at Canva and Atlassian again just for today's conversation have demonstrated that that's not the case, that you can do it out of Australia.

Simply track new attendees versus old attendees and you're never going to be able to go. All right, we had more news.

So I think that that's really powerful and I'm sure that. And I don't know how often your team would do this, like if you were to reflect of where Blackbird started 10 years ago to where you're at now. Like there's been a seismic shift that you've created. It's not been by yourself, but you've definitely been, you know, the front of the pack and driving that change.

Yeah, you, you know, like part of the Australian new attendees here. Why was that? Was it this activity here that we did? Was it this type of marketing? Was it this sort of program character? Maybe a criticism of it is that you try exercise humility at every point. And I like, you know, I know that we haven't done it by ourself, but I'm also really proud that I think we have had a big impact on those things that I talked about. Not just us, you know, a whole bunch of people working towards it. But I think, you know, there was a point where VC in Australia could have been something totally different. Like it could have been. I mean, it could be really hard for you to know precisely why, but directionally that question will help you know that you've been doing the right things and you should keep experimenting and looking at the stuff you're doing and try to decide for yourself. Like previously we've had had VC industry in Australia and it's been very corporate, very private equity, not very founder friendly. That's like a general criticism that I like. Not just me, but A lot of I didn't live through it, I wasn't involved then. But that's. They're the stories that get told about that time in VC in the 2000s, I guess. And it could have gone a similar way. Like, I think, you know, Blackbird came in and we had this really strong belief that founders are a center of everything. Like we gotta do everything we can to support them. Like, it sounds tired now, but saying like a founder kind of first approach. Every VC says that now, but I think they say that now because us and a few others helped to create that culture in the community. So we not only helped to shape startups, but you can, like, if you, like, if you're intentional about it, you do have a role to play and you can affect change of what, what's working. So I guess in summary, it's impossible to show the exact. It's impossible to do within your own industry. Especially like, it's one of the advantages of starting when we did is that it was a, in many ways a fresh kind of slate. We, we had the option to kind of, you know, to shape it in the way that we felt it needed to be. And yes, I am proud of it. I am Like, I think we, I think us and others, but like Blackbird to a large extent has done a really admirable job of creating a community that is like, that is good and rich and healthy and diverse and for measurement that's really precise in our profession. And so you've got to find proxies and then you've got to build up enough experience.

Yeah, and I love watching outside in. Unfortunately I wasn't one of those early investors into the fund. Otherwise my life today might be a little different. But that's the world of venture, right? It's. You can't always be involved in everything. It's easy to look back. But one of the things that I also want to talk about there, and we covered it a little bit, is I've got pretty good relationships here in New York with Austrade, the Australian, Australian.

Government, variants of knowledge and within your own kind of self, such that you can draw conclusions.

And also New Zealand trade and both of those government bodies based here in, in the US are helping founders who have started in Australia move to the US understand things around visas, setting up company structures, finding customers, partners, et cetera.

Are you involved from those very basic proxies yourself?

And I think that like what you're trying to in that process with some of your portfolio companies in that expansion at a global Scale and do you have a global network that you're sort of helping tap them into?

Great question. This sort of taps into I think like there's a few different strategies VC can take when it comes to building platform or you know, as you call it. There is like a real service orientated approach where you, I think like some of the bigger kind of well known firms that do it Quite well are a 16z the a ton of experts.

He's a policy consolidate though is a complicated process and there's no common way of doing platform expert.

He's like our head of data science, he's our head of like engineering. We'll hire essentially like the best people we know to go out there and support our founders in that, in that way. Blackbird's taken the opposite approach which is, well not the opposite, it's just a different strategy which is we're not going to be a service orientated company. Like we're going to use community as the main driver for that support for founders. So do we help them get established.

And set up of supporting your portfolio at large, how you build community? It's everyone does it differently, right?

Overseas we do, but we're also not experts in that. So our you know, general strategy is to like if a founder is saying I want to go and move and set up shop, you know, set up a sales and marketing office in New York, we will like introduce them to Austrade or we will introduce them to other founders who have recently done it. That'll be the type of support that we, that we do. We are putting an effort into building. Right.

So I think that what you shared though are some key things to consider if you're doing a global, I guess.

Community of people essentially like really great Australians, Kiwis who we know doing great work internationally outside of our shores. So we've, in the last year we've had this like Blackbird world strategy is what we're calling it where we know that there are some of the best and most talented Aussies and Kiwis leave.

To go and do your first fund in your vc thinking about where you bring people on and the role they.

Play because they're ambitious and they want to go and work in some of the biggest exciting cities in the world. And so what we're trying to do is figure out who those people are and where they are and build a community such that you know, when it comes to it, if anyone's starting companies we can support them. If any of them want opportunities to work in companies, we can support them.

What is general is a big consideration and you don't know that straight out of the gate.

Like what Generally to bring together like some of the most exciting Aussies and Kiwis we know that are out there so that they can like know each other in the same way that we've done it in Australia.

Yeah. Nice. And I'm like you, part of the VC platform community and I've met some really great people and going to events and there's a lot of sort of challenges and opportunities that everyone collectively sees. And one of the challenges is once you have a large portfolio it's literally impossible to support every company in your portfolio from a platform perspective. Right. So within that you're looking at what are the things that I can do that can be scaled and utilize what those people are. Right.

It's one of the first things I think GPS have to decide on. Capital is not.

So if I have. If I have a lesson on something that I'm working on a project and maybe it's a supplier, whatever that can be, there's a shortcut that's available to other people. So it's how you have a library of resources to be able to share and let other people access that collective knowledge. I always use the analogy of every boat rises in the tide. But there's also like time and capital.

Restraints from differentiated vc. Is a sales game like your money the ability for you to raise a.

Fund your side to be able to do that fully. So it's a really tough balance because you've invested a lot of money into these companies and you obviously not leaving them to their own devices but you're limited with the impact that you can have directly.

Yeah the old it's a classic conversation that you have whenever you get together with people who work in platform in vc. How do you scale? How do you makes you no different to anyone else who's raised a fund. There is at that point where you've raised it other have more impact across more people. Because as you get further on it's not just more founders that you're investing in. All of those founders grow bigger and bigger teams. I think the first thing I would say is like really recognize what you can and can't do. I think it would be really generating your own personal reputation and brand as a gp. There's literally nothing else that separates you from any to say that all VCs can meaningfully impact their trajectory of their startups outside of giving them money. I think it's somewhat true that we can support and help or like push in the right direction. But the reality is like the business of growing a really successful and large company is the job of the founder. And that's why we've chosen the community approach and the network approach as opposed to a service oriented. Like your million dollars is no different from someone else's million dollars. You gotta find the reasons for that issue like a be clear. I don't think any one strategy is right. You gotta pick what's right for your, for your portfolio in the market that you're in. When you're building a portfolio like a platform strategy, you've gotta really deeply. And that's why platform is so valuable. Because platform is the place where you can find those reasons. The alternative is you don't do platform and you rely really heavily on the network and brand and reputation of your actual investors. But that's fragile. Like it can change at the drop of a hat. Investors can understand not just what the challenges of your portfolio are and the challenges of your immediate community, but you got to understand what you are able to do better than others. Like is there something unique that you as a firm can do that any of the other firms can't provide? Because from a founder perspective, they've got like how many VCs on their cap table, right? How many people have got. Platform strategies come and go. An investor's reputation can change overnight. Like if you build like you've got to find a way for you got to find some reason for founders to be able to pick your fund over any other fund. And so when you're very first starting out, I believe that's one of the first things that you should establish is like, what are our values? What do we care about? How are we going to stand out? What's going to be different about us? Why a founder is going to choose us above anybody else. And it can't be like we're founder first because. No. How many talent people are there in each fund? I think you've like, I think that's, that would be the harder thing about operating in a much more crowded market like New York or San Francisco. Like that's not, it's not our problem in Australia. We don't have to get everybody's founder first. It can't be like, you know, we've got like, I've got heaps of experience as an investor. Worried too much about that. But I think like whatever strategy you choose, if you go down the, I guess the service orientation, you're always going to reach a problem. With scale. If your fund is successful and let's say I'm a great Investor, that's something LPs care about. Founders could give less of a shit about that. Like, you know, like your reputation is legitimate. It's a legitimate thing to say. Founders would choose us because I was a founder myself, I had a $20 billion exit. So people are going to want to take money from me because of my experience. That's legitimate. You're successful. Like your role in helping your fund to grow and be successful. Like the reward you get for that if you're in that bucket. High five. Congratulations. But I'll say that there is fragility in that still. And that is like everything you build breaks and you find it more impossible as you go on to have impact can change. And with the measurement stuff like just going back to that the other trap that people get caught in. So that's why we've felt community is like the right thing. Like our view is that our founders are going to like. We don't want them to look to us for the answers for things. We want them to look to each other. We want the heads of program is believing. If you believe that you can measure precisely and show causation between activity and outcome. In our profession, I just think like, I just think that's like you need to company to look to each other for support and guidance. And we want, you know, if they're trying to hire someone really, really great, we want them to be able to call another founder and go, you hired this last year. You're not right. It's really hard to do. And what that leads people down. Trying to prove that. Exactly. Trying to measure something. An engineer or a data scientist would measure it. When we're really operating in the humanities is what we're doing. Trying to measure that. Like you've got one person, but there must have been heaps of others in there. What can I learn from you? Are there other people in the pipeline that we can like lead you to find metrics that will shape your product offering in ways that you probably don't, you know, maybe speak to that would be appropriate or that would be good for us. Like that's the sort of that's I want or didn't intend to like it's really important to have a clear understanding of what like the thing that we hope for and we do like these, I will say these strategies that blackbird are evolving. Like we've just rebooted our talent, our network, which is, you know, we're trying to like scan what the impact is you're going for and then finding something that will indicate that you're heading in the right direction. Trying to find an exact thing. Like what's an example? I could think of like a talent offering. Right. Like if you've got like all those efforts by building a sort of almost like a two sided marketplace place we have our founders here and people who want to work in a talent like a portal where people can come and see what the jobs in your portfolio are and you're measuring the knockbird companies, a huge like network of both of those things and we try and match them up and there's someone at Blackbird who's working on that number of hits on that page every day that tells you that people are finding the site, tells you nothing about the quality of people and you might go, well great, let's optimize for hits on this site. So you start doing all the things that you need to do to increase the number of people landing on the site. And that's like an indicator. But what happens if you're funneling like high volumes. And so that's like, is a little bit more of a scalable service orientation. But like the reality is like that in my view the only scalable way that you can do these things is community. And community is scalable. Non scalable community is not actually scalable. Like bigger the community the more workers are bad people to your founders. Like it can have adverse effects that you're not prepared for if you pick the wrong thing to make requires to maintain and keep it rich and diverse. The bigger the team needs to be like you kind of one community person. Anyway, sorry, keep this guy and that community person can scale from 100 person community to a 5,000 person community.

Like it's much good stuff in this. Unfortunately we are coming to time but it's been such an informative chat for me as well and it just makes me realize that you and I need to talk more regularly about these things.

Because it's not how it works but it is in my view the most scalable way that you can help.

Yeah. And here in New York there's one that springs to mind is Primary Ventures who is I think the comparison between markets is fascinating. Some of the real life insights. One of the VC funds that I respect the most as far as the work that they do, who they're investing in, but also their process and they're probably one of the most platform forward VC funds that I've come across and are really important to be able to share as well about how people approach this and definitely appreciate your time. So, Joel, thank you for joining me today. It's been an absolute treat.

Thanks for having me, man. It's been super fun. I appreciate you having me. Yeah, thank you.

I appreciate the honesty. It's a beautiful thing. I think it's roughly 2/3 of their team are platform teams and one of those is a dedicated HR division. So you've got a chief of staff and a group of people who are actively building a pipeline of talent. So when they go, Joel, thank you again. You're on Startups Decoded. My name is Andy Walsh. Thank you for joining me. Invest and they're an early stage fund. When they're investing, they're able to pair people up and what that does is escalates that scale potential. Right. Because one of the biggest challenges you have in early stage as a founder is. Please follow Share Give me lots of big five star ratings. Always welcome. Look forward to joining you next week, but thanks again. See you soon. Finding the right person from a culture perspective, but also from a skillset, someone who is prepared to work for equity or work for not much money and some equity. And they're a very different type of person to someone that you hire once you get probably series B, C stage, where you've got more structure, more process metrics, et cetera. And it's a little bit more controlled than that early sort of growth hacking stage that happened. So for them, it's sort of an investment to be able to drive a faster growth rate and get them to the next stage. And I think it's, for me, it seems like a smart bet, but it's also limited to scale. Right. You can only do so much. But measuring that is a tricky part. And I don't want to go too much into measurement and trying to rationalize what you're doing because we're coming up to time. But I'm always curious about different people's approach to platform and community because the reality that I see as well is that say your average success rate of a Fund sits between 5 to 10% of your companies that you invest in actually make it through. It's already a pretty cutthroat industry. Right. There's a, an I guess an accepted part of it is that if you flip it the other way that 90% of those startups will fail. And fail I hate as a term. I try to find another word to use there. Sometimes there's things out of your control, sometimes you've built a Great business. It just doesn't get enough traction. Competitors come in, a major tech company comes in and just eats your lunch when they launch a new feature the day after tomorrow that you've been building for years. There's a lot of things out of your control. So I guess for me I'd find that sort of trying to be pragmatic and accepting that is tough, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like the first thing I'll say is I'm not known at Blackbird for caring really hard about precise measurement. I think like, so my views are. So my views are not commonly held to use within Blackbird. So the answer I give here aren't Blackbird answers. But I think like what you're trying, what you talked about there, you hit on something really interesting about just the nature of our industry of vc. And that's like the randomness of it all. They're the like I just reread Fooled by Randomness, which is the telev book from a few years back. So my ideas are pretty biased. I'm going to be do a bad job of parroting him. But like so much of it is random. Like and the like, your success as an investor is random. The timing of your fundraisers can like be really affected by randomness. The there's so many things like that are outside of your control. And we build the model to account for that. Like you have a portfolio of things, you raised a ton of money and the idea is you only need a couple of like home runs. So the model is built to account for the randomness. But I think like, as to how you deal with that, as a, like someone who's building platform, I've learned over the years that like you like can rip all your hair out. I don't have much left, but you can rip all your hair out trying to like find ways to measure direct correlation to your work and your fund success. So the fund success is like winning the best deals, you know, having the best returns, raising the right amount of capital. Like those are the fund success terms. So drawing a really neat correlated line between one activity that you've done, say it's help a founder hire a really great executive, right? So that thing, the effect of that might be that that founder you've supported tells 10 of their friends who you know, then tell a couple of their friends and that affects like a brand and reputation point of view of you and your firm. That.