David Shein first emigrated from South Africa to Australia in 1986. 9 months after touching down he founded his company Com Tech, a specialist supplier of networking and communications products. He grew the business for 14 years and eventually sold it to Dimension Data for over $1bil.

Kristo Käärmann is the co-founder and CEO of TransferWise, a peer-to-peer international money transfer business. Kristo Käärmann cofounded TransferWise in London in 2011 with fellow Estonian Taavet Hinrikus, the first employee at Skype. Since then, the business has amassed over 8 million customers and moves more than US$5 billion every month. TransferWise has 2,200 employees in 14 global offices and is valued at US$3.5 billion.

In this episode our panel covers ANZ funding news, including raises by Jig Space, Pyn and XYSense, as well as relevant local and global news. Some key topics include Blackbird’s new fund, the BigCommerce IPO, and the government’s mandate that Google and Facebook pay for news. We also talk about COVID-related news such as Atlassian and Facebook’s new WFH policies, some good COVID stories you might have missed, and the big dip in hotel transactions.

Tom Humphrey is an experienced Aussie entrepreneur and Partner at Access Ventures, a venture capital fund based in Denver, Colorado that invests in early stage technology companies. Before joining Access, Tom helped grow two successful startups, OurDeal and Kanopy. He was COO of OurDeal, a “group-buying” ecommerce website in Australia and helped scale the business to a successful exit to News Corp. Tom was also COO/Director of Sales of Kanopy, a B2B video streaming platform that he saw through an exit to L2 Capital in 2018, delivering a 14x return to investors.

arah Nolet is one of Australia’s leading agriculture technology (agtech) experts. She’s the founder and CEO of AgThentic, an agtech strategy and advisory firm, and the co-founder of Tenacious Ventures, Australia’s first dedicated agrifood tech VC firm. Sarah also hosts the podcast “Agtech – So What” which tells the story of innovators at the intersection of agriculture and technology.

In this episode our panel covers both ANZ happenings and global headlines. Some local topics covered include local funding news, people moves, the best Aussie employers of 2020 and TikTok scrutiny from the Australian government. We also talk about world news like the international boycott Facebook movement, Bitcoin scammers, and COVID app woes around the globe.

Stephen Thompson is a founding partner and managing director of Brandon Capital Partners, the largest life science healthcare fund in Australasia. Brandon Capital raised their first fund in 2007 with the mission of commercializing Australian medical research. Stephen and his co-founder noticed that Australia was home to loads of world-class medical research but didn’t have the weight of local capital to bring projects through to market, so they stepped in in to provide the funding and expertise to get ideas out of the lab and into the global market.

We’re joined this week by Vuki Vujasinovic, Founder & CEO of global PR and communications agency Sling & Stone. The agency has quite the rockstar client roster; some current clients in the US, AU and NZ include Twitter, Uber, Xero, Hubspot, CultureAmp, Slack, Stripe, CSIRO, Domain…the list goes on. The agency launched in 2010 and exclusively works with disrupters, challengers, and entrepreneurs, helping tell their story to the world with comms campaigns that blend tech and creativity.

This week we cover the latest funding news and discuss hot topics like the impact of the Victorian COVID-19 outbreak on the startup sector, India and potentially the US banning Tik Tok, venture reports on funding throughout the pandemic, and Tesla’s surge in valuation. We also talk about Who Gives a Crap’s $6M donation to charity in the wake of TP panic-buying, the government’s investment in cybersecurity, toxic workplace culture, and the classification of Huawei and ZTE as “National security threats” by the US.

We cover funding news, the acquisition of self-driving startup ZOOX by Amazon, the federal government’s big investment in cyber security, Atlassian’s announcement of brand new headquarters at the Sydney Innovation and Technology Precinct, Canva’s latest $8.6 billion valuation, the future of coworking, and Sydney’s dropping in the startup ecosystem ranking.

am Chandler is the Founder and CEO of Nitro, a software company developing commercial software used to create, edit, sign, and secure Portable Document Format files and digital documents. Nitro is Australian-founded and is now listed on the ASX and headquartered in downtown San Francisco, with offices in Melbourne, Australia; Dublin, Ireland; and London, England.

We cover the latest funding news and discuss the Black Lives Matter movement and how tech companies have responded, such as IBM’s decision to stop selling facial recognition software to police. We also discuss startup job losses and revenue hits as reported by VC firms, what type of help startups will need post-Job Keeper, and the recent rapid progress of telehealth due to COVID.