Joe Harris has been dabbling since he was 12 - YouTube channels, NFT agencies, creatine gummies, a yoga studio. At Eucalyptus, he scaled the company from $3M to $170M but never fully committed to just one thing. The question haunted him: What could he do if he actually locked in?Earlier this year, he got his answer: Alloy, backed by Blackbird and engineers from the world's leading robotics companies who've lived the problem he's solving. Because when every robot has a story, they need someone to listen.That's where Alloy comes in.Robots produce a gigabyte of data per minute. When something breaks, engineers spend days manually searching through footage, sensor readings, and text logs to find the issue. With Alloy, they just search "battery overheating" or "arm failed to grip" in plain English. Problem found in seconds, not days.In this episode, Joe joins Mason to share why robotics is the next infrastructure wave, why even the bulls are underestimating how big it gets, and why we're not going to have 100 years of progress this century - we're going to have 20,000.This is for operators considering the leap, anyone who's been dabbling without committing, and people who want to understand robotics without a PhD.Because this is what happens when you finally lock in.
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Andrea Quinn: The operator behind a unicorn's growth engine
You don't have to be the founder to build the future.When Andrea Quinn made the leap from fashion merchandising to tech, she didn't start a company. She joined one. Today, she's VP of Go-To-Market Operations at Halter, New Zealand's newest unicorn, which just raised $155 million at a $1.55 billion valuation.Not every path into building the future looks like a founder origin story. Some of the most crucial work happens when you join the right company at the right moment and help turn ambition into execution. Andrea's doing exactly that - scaling the GTM motion as Halter accelerates across Australia and the United States.In this episode, Blackbird Partner Sam Wong sits down with Andrea to explore how operators translate skills across industries and build the engines that power billion-dollar companies. From her Commercial Equation framework to practical AI applications in sales, Andrea breaks down what it actually takes to scale a startup from the inside.This episode is for: founders building GTM, operators inheriting messy funnels, and anyone wondering if they need to start a company to build the future.Because the answer is no. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is join the rocket ship and help build the engine.
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Xavier Collins: The AI studio unlocking the future of storytelling
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.
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Lessons from the climb: Michelle Battersby on building Sunroom
When Michelle Battersby launched Sunroom, she set out to change the game for women creators, building a platform where they could earn freely, safely, and on their own terms. Five years, three funding rounds and one pandemic later, she did just that. Thousands of creators made life-changing income, and Sunroom was acquired by Fanfix.From the emotional weight of leadership to the surprising financial realities of building something from scratch, Michelle shares the unfiltered truths of the founder journey - the highs, the hard parts, and the freedom that comes with letting go. Maddy Guest, from Blackbird’s investment team and host of the finance podcast So Invested, joins Michelle to unpack what those lessons teach us about resilience, risk, and redefining success.This is a story about ambition and endurance — and the lessons that only reveal themselves when you decide to climb.
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From zero to US$6.2 Billion: Lucy Liu on the Airwallex strategy that broke global payments
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.
New Zealand