Niki Scevak is the founder of Australian accelerator program Startmate as well as a founding partner at VC Blackbird. He’s been passionately involved in the Australian startup sector since 2008 when he returned home from the USA.

Nico Chu is a very accomplished senior executive from the global IT corporate ranks. He has held senior global roles with companies like Expedia and Orbitz. His last corporate role was successfully helping to navigate Orbitz through their $1.5bn acquisition by Expedia. 

Gen is a remarkable young woman. Smart, driven, humble. She has demonstrated a remarkable ability in her short career so far to (ahem) “get shit done”. 

Rob is the CEO and founder of podcasting platform Whooshkaa. An accountant by background, Rob was formerly the CEO at Macquarie Radio Network before he left and threw himself into the startup world with Whooshkaa a couple of years ago. Whooshkaa as well as being the publishing platform for Open the Pod Bay Doors is also one of the best startups in Australia right now. Commercially and technically it is doing an amazing job. Rob is intelligent, focused, talented and super-humble. 

Jennifer Tejada is the CEO of Pagerduty, a company that provides (I’m quoting from their web site) – “full-stack visibility and actionable insights for better software and better customer experiences. ” It might sound niche, but this is a huge and growing area, especially with the way software is currently being developed, deployed and managed. 

We held an Innovation Bay event in Melbourne recently where we hosted Partners from three of the country’s best VCs (Airtree, Reinventure and Squarepeg). Between them they represent almost $750m of Venture Capital and have made around 60 investments between them. 

Terry Gold is the Managing Directors of Techstars in Adelaide. I don’t think he would mind being described as a “veteran” of this industry, having founded, run, sold, mentored many many companies over his “several” years in the sector.

On Thursday 13 July 2017, Jobs NSW announced the creation of the “Sydney Startup Hub”, a new, 17,000 sq m space dedicated to housing, and nurturing, much of Sydney’s startup community. Anchor tenants of Fishburners, Tankstream, Stone & Chalk and The Studio. Scheduled to open later in 2017. 

Slightly different episode format this week. This was recorded at an Innovation Bay event in Sydney, so we had the fun of recording at a live event in front of a studio audience. Please forgive the audio challenges around the Q&A section. Apart from a mis-joke about Paul growing up in Liverpool (he didn’t, but I actually thought he was serious when he said he did!) this is a great and fascinating chat with Paul.

Based in Western Sydney, Ed Husic was elected to the House of Representatives as the Federal Member for Chifley in 2010. Currently in his third term, he was re-elected to Parliament in 2016.

Over the course of Paul’s career he has built and sold four previous companies and has then become an active consultant and non-executive director of some major companies like Trade Me and iiNet. 

Elaine is Head of Venture Capital at Blue Sky and is responsible for the management of the Blue Sky venture capital fund and portfolio. Established in 2012, her division has over $100 million in assets under management across a broad range of industry sectors. Amongst her notable investments was a $25m injection into Vinomofo in April 2016.