I’d like to invest in your company
Expanding The Surface Area of Serendipity
Expanding The Surface Area of Serendipity
Last year, Blackbird co-hosted an event with StartupVic, and two months later, I invested in a founder I met on the day (they’re still in stealth mode, more to come on their story soon).
I want to open up to that serendipity again.
Historically, I have invested in one company out of every 25 I properly get to know.
I’m opening 25 spots in my calendar in August to meet 1:1 with founders and learn about what they are working on.
If this works, I’ll make an investment at the end of it.
Note: Applied (a Blackbird portfolio co.) blinds my rating of applications to ensure everyone that applies is on a level playing field.
I’d like to invest in your company
Each year, I make 1–2 high conviction investments where I typically join the board and begin a multi-year journey with the founders.
By source, my investments have come from my own networks (Shape, Eucalyptus), colleagues (Dovetail), angel investors (Applied), existing Blackbird founders (Stealth), Startmate (Morse Micro, Stealth), Blackbird LPs (nura), and from events we hosted (Stealth).
For my next investment, I want to expand beyond my these networks, and open up to serendipity.
Investment Size
I’m open to doing small investments ($100-$500k) but the first cheque-size for my last five investments in $AUD has been:
$800,000
$2,900,000
$800,000
$1,750,000
$1,000,000
The dream of course is to follow that first cheque with tens of millions of dollars of investment over time, and I’ve had the opportunity to do that twice so far.
Kinds of Founders
We published What Blackbird Looks For In Founders in March, 2017, and it still holds true today.
Investing is a very personal thing. When I make an investment, I want to be confident I’ll be excited to take a founder’s calls at all times of day, on any topic, for many years to come.
We are what we repeatedly do, so the best way to explain what I like to invest in, is to explain who I’ve invested in so far.
Here are all the investments I’ve made (in reverse-chronological order, and excluding three companies still in stealth). For each, I’ve listed three brief observations about what first drew me in.
Dovetail: Dovetail helps researchers feel like superheroes by letting them analyse data, collaborate on insights, and build a research repository.
Benjamin and Brad raised the bar for me on what product-obsessed founders look like.
The founders bootstrapped the company for 2+ years before raising venture funding.
By the time we met them, they’d found hundreds of paying, happy customers all over the world with just a product people loved, and no sales team.
Eucalyptus: Eucalyptus is building a conglomerate of Australia’s most loved healthcare brands.
Tim and I got to know each other for two years before we invested (explained on the Wild Hearts podcast).
Tim raised the bar for me on how to understand brands, marketing, and distribution.
The founding team: Tim (CEO), Benny (Operations), Charlie (Product), and Alexey (Finance) was one of the most fully formed I’d ever seen in terms of their complementary skills.
Morse Micro: Morse Micro is building a long-range, low-power, highly secure chip.
Michael and Andy were two of the best chip engineers in the world when they went through Startmate in 2017. They’d previously built the chip that was in all our iPhone 6s.
They were the kind of people you’d trust to guard your life savings — two founders of the highest integrity and humility.
Because of this combination of expertise and personal quality, they recruited extraordinary people to join their team in the early days, like the inventor of wi-fi, Neil Weste.
Applied: Applied removes CVs from the hiring process, and helps companies like Blackbird blind-assess potential hires on their suitability for open roles. This results in 96% retention at year one for people hired through the Applied platform.
Founders Kate and Rich spun Applied out of the UK Government’s legendary ‘nudge unit’, inspired by Cass Sunstein’s book of the same name, and brought applied science (no pun intended) to hiring in a way we’d never seen before.
When we first saw the product in early 2018, the depth of their thoughtfulness in creating an experience that honoured the job applicant’s experience shone through.
When Kate spoke about the importance of blind-hiring, you could sense the visceral passion she had for Applied’s mission.
Nura: nura makes the world’s best sounding headphones.
nura’s product demo in 2016 was still the best I’ve ever experienced. I could have easily been one of the amazed faces in their reaction video:
The craftsmanship, and obsession with the details of the headphones was inspired. It took the founders all moving to China in the company’s early days to make this detail a reality.
The ambition to go after the global premium headphone market was wild, but the passion customers showed for the Kickstarter campaign gave us a glimpse of what might be possible.
Culture Amp: Culture Amp is amplifying the experience of work for millions of people around the world.
Although I didn’t make Blackbird’s first investment in Culture Amp, I joined the board in 2018 when Blackbird led the Series D funding round. Culture Amp is the company that defines a category (engagement) that didn’t exist ten years ago.
Didier is one of the best Australian CEOs, and has become a champion globally for the importance of company culture.
Once you’ve understood your company through the Culture Amp lens, you can never revert to your old gut feel ways.
Shape Analytics: Shape Analytics was a real-time intelligence and predictive analytics solution for workforce data that Reflektive acquired in 2018.
Tuhin and Phil were both engineers by background, and obsessed with product above all else.
They’d both worked together previously at Gumroad and struck that wonderful balance of one builder: one storyteller.
We loved the mission of helping leaders understand their organisations through data, and not feel.
And for the three companies still in stealth — all three have mission-obsessed founders, who deeply understand the depth and complexity of the problems they’re solving, and the customers they’re serving.
The investments I’ve made are in different sectors, with different business models, and very different challenges. But the founders all share a mission-focussed, customer and product obsession that’s infectious.
If any of the above resonates with you, let’s meet.
Applications close Tuesday, July 31 — Apply Here Now.