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Adam Gilmour: We took the risk first. Then the government came.
Most founders wait for perfect conditions. Not Adam Gilmour. He started Gilmour Space before Australia even had a space agency.On July 30, that bet paid off. Australia's first launch permit. Fourteen seconds of flight. Right in the middle of the pack globally - SpaceX took four attempts to reach orbit.Those 14 seconds proved everything that mattered: cleared ranges, ground systems working, hold-down claws releasing 45 tons of thrust flawlessly. Stage zero validated. And a month earlier? A 100kg satellite reached orbit, found in under 8 hours instead of the expected 2 weeks, still working 130+ days later."For a satellite company, that would've been massive," Adam says. "But we're a rocket company, so no one gives a shit."Adam knew the regulations would change. He knew government support would come. "We took the risk first. Then government comes. I knew they would come." He started building anyway: 240 people in Queensland doing rockets, satellites, and hypersonics that foreign investors "cannot believe."This episode takes you inside launch day: the orchestra of mission control, time vanishing in the final countdown, the moment Eris leapt off the pad. Adam talks about why he's building satellite buses to fix broken market economics, the path to dual-listing on the ASX and US exchanges, and going around the moon in 10 years.If you're building deep tech from Australia and wondering whether to wait for perfect conditions, Adam's already answered that question."Stay tuned. Smoke and fire."
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Alex Wyatt: When seven years of platform work becomes seven-week product cycles
Most robotics companies die trying to build their first product. Alex Wyatt spent seven years building the platform so the second product took seven weeks.When August Robotics launched their exhibition robot in November 2019, it blew up - standing ovation, early revenue, real momentum. Then COVID hit. Exhibitions banned globally for 23 months. Zero revenue. Total cliff.But under that first robot was something almost no robotics company ever builds: a platform: autonomous navigation accurate to 3mm, custom localisation, fleet coordination, modular architecture. The long, painful, expensive work that many startups can't survive.Then it paid off.→ Seven weeks from concept to prototype for their drilling robot→ Google as their first demo and customer→ 50,000 holes drilled across US data centres→ DeWalt partnership unlocking entire tool ecosystems→ More robots spinning out in months, not yearsAlex is also opening an AI and data centre in Melbourne, choosing to build the next layer of August's platform from Australia, not just Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.This episode breaks down the real hardware platform playbook: robot collaboration that collapses workflows, de-risking with hyperscaler customers, and why the "third way" of robotics creates network effects in physical space. Alex also talks about surviving 23 months of zero revenue, going from Blackbird LP to portfolio founder, and why he waited a decade for the timing to actually be right.If you're building hardware from Australia, fundraising deep tech, or wondering when long-horizon bets actually flip into growth - this is the one.
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Nikki Brown: When you stop being a cog, you become the machine
Nikki Brown is a Cambridge graduate who quit a dream job at Google after mere months. "I wasn't happy being a cog in a machine," she says. So she built her own.Today, Nikki is co-founder and CEO of Cartesian, an AI-native platform backed by Blackbird that turns SaaS ecosystems into retention and growth engines. Cartesian's AI agents analyse user needs in real-time, detect buying intent, and connect users with the right ecosystem partners at exactly the moment they need them. No cold emails. No spray and pray. The result: users get personalised solutions, platforms deliver value, partners grow.Nikki is building AI that works like she does: accumulating context and using it to connect meaningfully at the right moment. Finance gave her systems thinking. Tragedy gave her clarity. 120 conversations gave her deep customer insight.In this episode, Nikki joins Mason to share why team beats idea every time, why relationships, not data, are the real moat, and why the foundations of sales never change: "People buy from people."This one's for anyone questioning whether their "non-traditional" background disqualifies them - or wondering if their lived experience might just be the context that matters most.
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The Robotics Inflection: Why This Time Is Different (ft. Joe Harris, Alloy)
There’s a graveyard of robotics companies—billions torched on beautiful demos we’ve all seen before, but never felt. This episode explains why the economics, the software, and the demand curve have finally flipped—and how Alloy plans to fuel the winners.Joe Harris returns to Wild Hearts—but this time as a founder. An engineer by training (ML for telecoms), operator by practice (Eucalyptus growth & product), and obsessive systems thinker, Joe unpacks why robotics is finally crossing from hype to inevitability. We trace the structural shifts powering the moment—collapsing hardware costs, foundation-model intelligence, and urgent customer pull—and the hard lessons from failed vertical farming plays that recalibrated what reliable automation actually demands. Joe introduces Alloy, a horizontal data and observability platform for robotics teams: find the 1% of mission data that matters, surface edge cases, track reliability toward “four-, five-, six-nines,” and shorten the loop from failure → fix → redeploy. If you’re building, buying, or betting on robots, this is the market map and playbook for the next decade.What you’ll learnThe three real drivers: cost curves, capability (VLM/VLA), and customer pullReliability as the business model: why 99% isn’t enough—and how teams get to 4–6 ninesData, not demos: robots emit GB/min; how to isolate the 1% that changes outcomesHorizontal vs. vertical: what failed in indoor/vertical farming and whyAlloy’s wedge: multimodal search (images, time series, logs), “scenarios,” alerts, and instant mission summaries to accelerate deployment and reduce unit costsTeam & culture: hiring for speed, humility, and learning in a field moving weeklyChapter guide (timestamps)00:00 First operator-to-founder return: Joe’s path (engineer → Atlassian → Eucalyptus → Alloy)02:00 Maker roots: coding tutorials at 12, early internet leverage03:30 Many small businesses → the “one-thing, 10–20 years” decision08:30 Why now for robotics: cost curves + reusable rockets as mindset shift10:45 Vertical farming post-mortems: unit economics, reliability, scale errors13:40 Reliability is everything: from 99% to 99.999% in the physical world15:45 The data firehose: GB/min, multimodal chaos, and missing tooling18:40 Operator-to-robot ratio as the core unit economic lever21:10 Selling into robotics: design partners, security, and data heterogeneity23:15 Common data primitives (perception, time series, logs) + ROS-driven formats24:30 Why LLMs aren’t enough: context-window limits & multimodal encoding27:00 Alloy’s product: natural-language search, similarity, “scenarios,” real-time alerts28:50 Instant mission summaries vs. days of manual analysis29:30 Edge AI tailwinds: Jetson class hardware, cheaper sensors (LiDAR/IMUs)30:30 VLAs explained: from perception → plan → act (and why smoothness matters)32:10 The pace of change: weekly breakthroughs, staying on the frontier33:40 Distribution & adoption: enterprise first; consumer follows reliability35:40 Safety and necessity: underwater, heavy industry, logistics37:15 Autonomy acceptance: the “first Waymo ride” unlock43:00 Ideal customers: high throughput, real deployments, cloud telemetry44:50 ICP discovery playbook: questions that qualify real readiness45:50 Team design: missionary talent, humility > hubris, learn-fast culture46:40 Macro lens: robotics as a deflationary lever & company formation boom48:00 Jobs & leverage: from decoding info → higher-order coordination50:05 The Alloy analogy: the coal-shoveler that keeps the engine running
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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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