To kick off the year we thought we’d let our co-founders, Ian Gardiner and Phaedon Stough interview one another. This year Innovation Bay celebrates 15 years of supporting Australian founders and the startup ecosystem. It’s been quite a ride from those initial gatherings of a few people in a dingy bar to a national community of over 3000 members spread across Australia.

Vanessa is the founder and CEO of Storreduce, an Australian deep-tech startup playing in the storage area. She moved the business to Silicon Valley a couple of years ago to be closer to her market. I caught up with her on a pretty noisy exhibition floor at AWS’s re:Invent customer event in Vegas. 

I caught up with Peter Nichol, the CEO of Instaclustr in Las Vegas during AWS’s re:Invent conference. Instaclustr is a Canberra-based software business offering managed solutions for Cassandra and other products. Might sound complicated and niche, but it’s an amazing business on an amazing fast-growth trajectory. 

Jeremy Kwong-Law manages Grok Ventures, which is Mike Cannon-Brookes’s family office fund. Jeremy has a law degree  from Sydney Uni, a stint at Macquarie bank as well as a foray into running his own startup a few years ago. This a fascinating story about how Jeremy got into venture, what a family office fund like this looks like, what their investment focus is.

Dr Michelle Perugini is an academic, entrepreneur, and an internationally renowned expert in health, medical research, advanced analytics, and cognitive AI. Her business, Life Whsiperer uses AI, computer vision and machine learning to better select healthy embryos for IVF, and ultimately improve outcomes for couples wanting to have children.

Slight change in format this week. Ian is off in Hawaii cycling up a volcano, so has handed the microphone over to his Innovation Bay co-founder Phaedon Stough.

Katherine is the founder and CEO of Brighte, a Sydney-based fintech startup. Its proposition is to lend to households looking to buy big-ticket items like solar panels, batteries, air conditioners, etc. A former Macquarie banker, she launched the business in late 2016. She has shown incredible traction and progress, having recently landed $3.5m in seed funding, including from Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian’s co-CEO).

Bill has had a long career in the startup and venture space. He was a co-founder at Blackbird Ventures (with Niki Scevak and Rick Baker). He has a huge passion for #DeepTechFounders and has now recently launched Main Sequence Ventures along with Phil Morle, Mike Zimmermann, Martin Duursma and Mike Nicholls. It’s a $100m fund part funded by CSIRO and part funded by the federal goverment.

Al is one of the new generation of Aussie VCs.  Tempus Partners was formed after his successful exit from ShippingEasy. He’s now launched a $40m fund investing in the best early stage and Series A opportunities.  It’s an awesome story and great to hear the insights from one of the best “emerging” VCs in Australia.

Alison brings some unique insights to the podcast this week. She’s done just about everything from early stage startups to a stint as a VC and now as a Director of Westpac and Cochlear (amongst other things!) She’s an amazing thinker and problem solver. I enjoy all my interviews, but this is definitely up there as one of my favourites.

Dan Cohen is an Australian serial entrepreneur. He successfully built and sold his first business Park Assist after a 10 year journey. In 2015 he co-founded Flare, a business redefining the employer-employee relationship. Has raised almost $10m locally, mostly from local VC Reinventure. 

Luke’s story, and by extension the story of SafetyCulture is fascinating – the epitome of startup hustle. It was so inspiring that Luke produced and paid for a movie about it (along with his buddies from Canva and Vinomofo). It’s appropriately called “The New Hustle” – if you haven’t seen it check it out – you’ll find it on YouTube.