My guest for Ep156 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Matt Browne, the Co-founder & Managing Partner of Black Nova Ventures.

Prior to becoming a VC, Matt was the Co-founder and CEO of DoneSafe, a cloud based safety platform that grew to over 1.5M paying users before being acquired by HSI in 2020.

He also Co-founded Whispli, a Y-Combinator alumni SaaS startup which clients including Qantas, Westpac and Oxfam.

Now, alongside being one of the founding members of Upflowy, Matt is also the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Black Nova Ventures. A $20M early-stage VC fund built for B2B technology startups.

Despite only recently announcing the launch their fund, they have already made 23 investments to date.

In this interview we discussed a range of topics including:
- Matt’s journey in launching, scaling and eventually exiting DoneSafe
- Dealing with co-founder breakups
- How to build investor conviction for pre-revenue or pre-product startups
- The rise of the Founder VCs 
- & much more!

Full show notes available at startupplaybook.co

Startup Playbook Podcast - Connecting you to the best entrepreneurs, investors and experts to help you grow your startup/ online business

Ep156 - Matt Browne (Co-founder & Managing Partner - Black Nova VC) on the rise of the Founder VCs

I'm delighted to be welcoming back David Shein, the Co-founder and General Partner of Our Innovation Fund, as my guest for Episode 157 of The Startup Playbook Podcast.

We last spoke on the podcast a year ago, where David shared his lessons and journey as the Founder of Com Tech, a business that over 14 years he grew to 1,400 staff before being acquired by Dimension Data for $1B.

We also spoke about David’s role as the Co-founder &amp; General Partner at our Innovation Fund, an early stage VC fund that has just closed it’s 3rd fund worth over $100M to invest in exciting Australian startups.

David is coming back on the podcast to discuss his recently published a book titled; “The Dumbest Guy at the Table: How I founded Australia’s first unicorn” to uncover many of the lessons he picked up from his time as a founder &amp; investor.

Not only is the book full of fantastic insights and lessons, the book is supporting a great cause as well with 100% of the proceeds from this book going to The Black Dog Institute to raise money for mental health research.

In this episode we discussed a wide range of topics including:
- The importance of keeping A players and how to deal with bad hires
- What David looks for in early stage investments
- Lessons from having legendary sports starts such as Bob Dwyer and Ian Chappel on the Com Tech Board
- Why founders should focus on simplicity
& much more

Full show notes available at startupplaybook.co

Ep157 - David Shein (GP - Our Innovation Fund) on lessons from building Australia's first unicorn

My guest for Ep158 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & CEO of Bellroy, Andy Fallshaw.

Andy, his brother (Matt) and sister-in-law (Lina) decided to get into business together and instead of launching 1 business, they ended up launching 9 businesses over the span of 2-3 years.

One of those companies was Bellroy, which launched in 2010 with their first product, the slim sleeve wallet.

Fast forward to today and Bellroy is the world’s leader in the carry category, having expanded out into multiple product ranges such as iPhone cases, AirPods cases and travel bags.

Despite having built a large global brand and experienced incredible 600-700% YoY growth over the last 11 years, they only took on external capital for the first time, 2 years ago.

In this episode we discussed a wide range of topics including:
- Why Andy's business philosophy is built on taking the stairs rather than the elevator
- How Bellroy applies agile development techniques when launching new products
- Why founders should build for resilience
- The deliberate and strategic evolution of Bellroy’s product range from a "hidden" wallet brand to products across a range of categories
- How to create the right environment and structure to get feedback
- & much more

Full show notes available at startupplaybook.co