00:00Martha, really great to have you with us and congratulations on the raise.
00:04Why was there so much enthusiasm?
00:05Because in some circles, Australia is sort of known as the anti-tech market, right?
00:09Is that an unfair misconception?
00:12Yeah, I think what has been really awesome with this fundraise is seeing not only the
00:16local allocators who have backed us for a long time, but also these global allocators
00:20recognise that the Australian and New Zealand ecosystem is capable of producing these very
00:26large global companies, so within our portfolio of Canva, Airwallex, Halter, Massive Rising
00:32Star, Cyquantum, Base 10, others, and exit them to global markets as well.
00:38That has been an important part of what drove the success of this fundraise and also confidence
00:43from the global markets in our local ecosystem, being able to turn that into cash distributions,
00:48which we've done really successfully over the last two years.
00:51So the next step, what are you focusing on?
00:52I know we talked a little bit about AI, which is obviously a very broad stroke at this point,
00:56particularly with the heightened scrutiny over what is actually investment and what's
01:01actually going to return profits.
01:02What sort of lens, I'm curious, are you looking at?
01:05Yeah, so with our fund, our strategy is to go as early as possible.
01:09It's a large fund, but we really sweat finding those founders at idea stage, pre-product,
01:16and definitely pre-revenue is quite common these days as well.
01:21And so we're looking for things that will be potentially enormous five to ten years from
01:26now.
01:27Within AI, we're sort of a little bit cautious, I would say, around the AI for X profession
01:34categories and are looking further up the stack, right into the chip layer.
01:39A good example of that is a portfolio company of ours called Sienta, which is working on high
01:46bandwidth memory interconnects between chips, which is going to be really, really critical
01:49to the AI build-out.
01:51And so we love those infrastructure layers.
01:54But equally, I would say we're spending as much time outside of AI or adjacent to AI.
02:00Industries are going to be beneficiaries of the AI technologies that get built.
02:07So that includes within healthcare and biotech, robotics and industrial applications, and also
02:15agentic commerce.
02:15So this might be the moment for stable coins or blockchain-based payments to become mainstream.
02:22So there are some of the areas that we're spending our time.
02:25But we'll be guided by founders.
02:28The outlier founders from Australia and New Zealand is what we're really all about.
02:31Yeah.
02:32And I am sort of interested in how you go about finding these founders, if you will, and determining
02:38kind of the assessment of potential, right?
02:40Because this stat actually really impressed me.
02:42Since 2000, Australia has produced 1.22 unicorns for every billion dollar invested.
02:47This is actually the highest ratio globally.
02:49So this kind of idea that it's a bit player or an anti-tech, that we only have miners and
02:57non-tech firms dominating, is a bit of a misconception, right?
03:01So is it about sort of having more government support or funding to be able to get a little
03:09bit more of a higher profile view on this?
03:11Well, so, you know, given the success of the ecosystem, we actually think, you know, there's
03:17so much reason to be optimistic.
03:20But in terms of, you know, what we look for and how we find them, you know, as everybody
03:26knows, Australia and New Zealand is a population of 35 million people, and a very small percentage
03:31of those will go on to be founders.
03:32But we're a very young and diverse population.
03:36Successive ways of migration and strong university systems mean we produce founders with quite
03:42unique experiences and the ability to design products and distribute, so design go-to-market
03:48market for the whole world from the beginning.
03:52Obviously, Atlassian and Canva really pioneered that, right?
03:55You plug in your credit card and you have a software subscription.
03:58You're not relying on a salesperson to come and take you out to lunch and so on.
04:02And they really pioneered that go-to-market motion as well as international products, so
04:06multilingual, localized products very early.
04:09But now we're seeing successive waves of founders do that.
04:13Airwallex would be a great example.
04:15But within healthcare, for example, we have a portfolio company, Heidi Health.
04:20If you go to a GP these days, most likely your consult is being powered with the AI that
04:27Heidi has built.
04:29And that's a sort of three-, four-year-old business.
04:31But they have worked out how to design a product for all different sorts of payer systems,
04:37insurer systems, regulatory frameworks for 110 countries from the very beginning and localize
04:44that in different languages for all of those markets, as well as learn how to sell them
04:49to 110 countries.
04:50That's very different to if you're a US-based VC.
04:54You know, that market is so enormous.
04:56You can just focus on nailing the US market and conquering that.
05:01But it turns out that if you can build a company for the rest of the world from the very
05:06beginning,
05:06that's also a very big market.
05:08And as the eucalyptus exit that we did earlier this year to hims and hers, a $1.2 billion exit
05:15to a NASDAQ-listed company, to merge this Australian-born rest-of-world leader with the
05:22US leader, it makes for a very attractive M&A target, but also a standalone business.
05:29And I think the global allocators with this fundraise have really sort of started to understand
05:36that narrative.
05:37You don't have to just be in the US or China.
05:39There are these global businesses being born outside of those two places.
05:44It's interesting when you talk about the impact of waves of immigration, right?
05:46I do wonder, how do you compare the founder mindset in terms of the cultural system, the
05:53social system, the funding ecosystem that exists here compared to the US?
05:58Do you think changes would help encourage more of that pipeline?
06:03I honestly think the thing that makes a difference is seeing others go before you and succeed.
06:09What a difference it made to see Mike and Scott from Atlassian List and then Mel and Cliff
06:14from Canva and then now Jack Zhang from Airwallex and Lucy succeed on the global stage.
06:21That is what is really inspiring to the next generation of founders.
06:26And I would say the second thing is every time you have a company scale to thousands of
06:31employees, some of those employees want to go out and start a company themselves.
06:36They've learned how to build companies in this really unique way.
06:40They're ambitious.
06:41They want to do better than who came before them.
06:43And that's why I think there's never been a more exciting time to be investing in venture
06:48in Australia and New Zealand.
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