Transparent VC by Tribe Global Ventures

Tribe Talkin’ Ep 7: Choosing the right investors

In this episode we deep dive into choosing the right investors, following reporting by Bronwen Clune and John McDuling from Capital Brief, about Dovetail turning down investment from Andreessen Horowitz when they raised $89million in the heady days of the Covid boom.
https://go.tribeglobal.vc/podcast/episode-13-tribe-talkin-ep-7-choosing-the-right-investors 
This got us talking about how founders need to choose the right investors, and share some experiences we’ve each had with regards to the good and the bad.
We discuss an article by Paul Smith talking about how we may coming out of a VC winter, and we talk about what we are seeing in terms of deal flow and valuations. The article also talks about the customers of B2B tech companies coming under pressure from the cooling economy, and we discuss common challenges in the B2B sales cycle generally.
We talk about how Robyn Denholm is using her considerable wealth and influence to back more women led tech ventures, although she says funding for female-led tech start ups has decreased over the past 12-18 months as a percentage of investment.
As part of this discussion, we have a slight diversion talking about how structure achieves strategy, and that there are always a range of factors often not acknowledged being the  foundations for the individual successes. We discuss some of these structural factors, and why one needs to be careful when successful people tell you why they think they were successful.  
Finally we close the episode discussing the upcoming Walter Isaacson biography on Elon Musk, and the various rather crazy stories that are already coming out. We tie a number of these stories back to lessons entrepreneurs and investors can learn.
For those interested in out B2B founder and investor offsite, here is the link: 
https://go.tribeglobal.vc/offsite 
As always we welcome any feedback, and would appreciate if you can leave and rating and a comment on the podcast before you go.
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Founder Focus Ep 5: Claudia Smith and Russell Smith of APLYiD.com

Today we chat with the cofounding team of APLYiD, Claudia Smith and Russell Smith.
https://go.tribeglobal.vc/podcast/episode-12-Russell_Claudia_APLYiD 
APLYiD is a portfolio company of Tribe, and provides world class KYC and AML solutions.
Claudia and Russell talk about their path to creating APLYiD which wasn’t their first entrepreneurial venture together – a repeating pattern we see in many successful co-founder relationships.
We talk about their decision to expand out of their first market, New Zealand, into the UK and the challenges they struck in this go-to-market strategy. As we have seen with other founders we have talked with on the podcast, what worked in their first market, didn’t necessarily work in their second. Claudia and Russel talk about what they learned, and what they would do differently with the benefit of hindsight. But as the podcast shows, they seek to learn quickly and fine tune as they go.
We talk about the temptation to scale sales teams too early before the marketing machine is really humming, as well as some growing pains associated with bringing investors, including us, on board.
We know it’s often challenging when founders bring on VC investors for the first time, and Claudia and Russell talk openly about the frictions they experienced. It was a reminder for us that people can experience the same event differently and we see this as an opportunity to look at what we can do to better support our portfolio companies in this transition.
This discussion goes into the role of an independent Chairman, and Claudia's and Russell's perception of the difference it has made to better supporting them and their team.
We hope you enjoy this episode, and as usual, we’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.
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Tribe Talkin’ Ep 6: Learning from Qantas

This episode is a deep dive on the challenges Qantas has been facing. While Qantas is unlike any company we invest in, we believe there are many lessons for our founders and investors to take away.In this episode we discuss: 
The challenges all companies face in trying to balance the short term vs the long term, and some examples of this conflict to navigate. 
How incentives drive behaviors, and some ideas for founders and investors in designing interlinked goals, KPI’s and remuneration systems to ensure healthy outcomes over the long term.
The reality that leadership changes often happening in a crisis, and how founders, executives and boards should think about setting the transition up. 
A deep dive into an organisational lifecycle model, and compare CEO’s and companies like Luke Anear of Safety Culture and Vanessa Hudson of Qantas in terms of the different realities their lifecycle locations will be creating for them. 
 
Lastly, we discuss the challenges of having to navigate a company through a crisis, while also fielding a media firestorm which applies daily pressure on every word, behaviour and decision. We pose some strategies for how companies should operate in this unique situation.As always we’d love to hear from you, and we’d really appreciate if you could leave a quick rating on the podcast.
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Tribe Talkin’ Ep 5: Making Dysfunctional Boards Functional

Today’s deep dive segment looks at the issue around functional vs dysfunctional boards, and discusses an article we’ve released with some ideas and processes to help solve issues such as:
Poor communication between the board and management
Lack of respect
Destructive conflict
Self-interested behaviours
We know fish rot from the head, so a well-functioning board is very important to the overall health of a company. https://tribeglobal.vc/dysfunctional-to-functional-boards/ 
Before we get to this deep dive topic, we recap on an earlier episode where we discussed our personal preference for co-founding teams. This was in response to some listener feedback we received. It gave us an opportunity to clarify the context of our sharing of these ideas, and provide a bit more detail on our co-founder and sole founder position. We really appreciate all feedback and would love to hear from more of you.
This discussion provided a great segway to reviewing the final episode of ‘Founder’, which featured the journey of Brighte's sole founder Katherine McConnell. 
We loved this episode as it was a return to looking at healthy entrepreneurship, with an entrepreneur who is trying to do something noble in the pursuit of facilitating a faster uptake of renewable energy, whilst fully integrating with her family and taking them on the journey.
We also look at a nuance of Katherine being called a sole founder, partly being enabled by her husband stepping up and taking a more active role at home and with the family, re-enforcing our view that significant others are often enabling co-founders of a business.
We review some recent news topics including:
Continued reports that tech talent is flooding onto the market, and the importance of having frameworks to help hire for cultural fit over experience.
The challenges of start-ups doing deals with the big 4 accounting firms, following an example reported where PwC would retain non-dilutive equity and a retainer fee of $5 Million for general promotion. And in rather tenuous fashion, we manage to connect Taylor Swift’s own journey to global stardom to this situation. 
We discuss the amazing rise of Nvidia in terms of earnings and share price growth on the back of the AI boom, and what founders can take away in terms of building their own high performing culture.
There are calls for more regulation of AI in Australia, to ensure safe and responsible practises are developed. 
And finally Bardee is back in the news, a company which raised $5 Million in 2021 following reports of its continued financial struggles, with one report implying that Blackbird stepping off the board darkens Blackbird’s reputation as founder friendly. We don’t see this as fair and share our thoughts on this implication in the context of our deep dive subject around the functioning of boards.
As always we’d love to hear from you, and we’d really appreciate if you could leave a quick rating on the podcast.

Founder Focus Ep 4: Susannah George of Urban List

This week’s Founder Focus guest is Susannah George, Founder of Urban List. Urban List is a compass for those who live like it matters, and provides trusted recommendations in areas such as food and drink, entertainment, style, health and even pets.
Their trusted tips power billions in annual spend— serving 30,000 recommendations across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore every hour. Urban List was named Australian Media Brand of The Year in 2021 and 2023, and you’ll see why.
Susannah shares her early journey into entrepreneurship going to work with her father in the family business in Bundaberg. Finishing university, she headed overseas to Paris and LA, and Susannah shares how these experiences created the foundations for launching Urban List.
This episode is not just interesting lessons and stories, Susannah shares some really actionable ideas that founders can use to scale their own businesses. Susannah shares a framework she uses to create a culture and environment that supports finding the right people, and the organisational ingredients to bring them together to achieve their ambitious vision and mission.
This episode is also a master class in finding early product market fit, and the goals Susannah chose when setting out to confirm if she was on the right path or not. Susannah provides great insight into content marketing and customer acquisition strategies, and walks through creation content that drives action.
Susannah says it took 10 years to figure out her operating system and how to make each interconnecting flywheel spin faster, and there’s a lot we think founders from all walks of life can learn from her journey.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we did and as always, we welcome any comments and feedback.

Tribe Talkin’ Ep 4: Entrepreneurial Power

Welcome to episode 4 of Tribe Talkin', by Tribe Global Ventures, the B2B VC.
We discuss the next episode in the series 'Founder', which showcases Fred Schebesta, the founder of comparison website, Finder, which sees 10million visits globally each month.
We discuss the painful journey some founders often go through on their path of self-discovery, and the consequences of this journey for themselves and those around them. Within this we look at rule breaking as a common entrepreneurial pattern, as well as a tendency to sometimes blow shit up, physically, and metaphorically.
We discuss an article on Equity Crowd funding that puts forward an argument that people may be being taken advantage off, especially with very high valuations. We unpack why this may not be true.
We talk about telco’s wanting to start charging content providers like Netflix for internet usage in addition to the end subscriber who are already paying. A trick that seems to be like asking car companies to pay for the roads the cars they make are driving on.
Finally, we discuss a recent by Ronan Farrow article that discusses the significant power wielded by entrepreneurs, as they scale their businesses much faster than regulation can keep up. Specifically, this article looks at Elon Must hand his interactions in the Russia/ Ukrainian conflict, and how this single person holds entire countries in the palm of his hand.
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Founder Focus Ep 3: Luke Anear of Safety Culture

Today’s Founder Focus guest is Luke Anear of Safety Culture https://safetyculture.com/.
You know you’ve built an outlier business when investors are constantly knocking on your door to invest, including an offer of $500 Million at a $5 Billion valuation. But you’re probably also an outlier founder by knocking back that offer, and 99% of other offers too.
This is very much a story behind the story type episode where Luke shares how he and his team managed to go from $0 to $1 Million revenue, then $1 Million to $100 Million in just a few short years, with sights now firmly set on $1 Billion and $10 Billion in revenue. A big ambition, but believable given the confidence he demonstrates and the foundations built to support that growth.  
Luke shares how not only his role in Safety Culture has transitioned over time, but how he himself has grown, and shares experiences that helped cultivate humility, self-awareness and vulnerability.
There are a number of prescriptive examples that founders can use within their teams to challenge people to achieve results they never thought were possible, and how to build resilience to deal with the inevitable times of up and down.
We talk about the pros and cons of starting out in a regional area, and why their headquarters ultimately moved to Sydney. We also discuss journalism and the reporting of start-ups in general, along with ASIC’s rules around the reporting of private company information and the effect that can have on an ecosystem.
Now there’s a bonus bit included at the end that came out of the usual post podcast discussion thanking our guests for their time. We’ve included this as it’s an important message to remind founders they aren’t alone in a range of mental health experiences that can be par for the course in this chosen endeavour.  
We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed creating it, and as always we’d love to hear any thoughts and comments.  Go to www.tribeglobal.vc

Tribe Talkin’ Ep 3: Diversity in STEM- The Lifeblood of VC

Welcome to Tribe Talkin' Episode 3. 
This week we talk about Safety Culture raising $34 Million at a $2.7 Billion valuation, $600 Million higher than their last raise. This bucks the trend we’ve seen in valuations and we discuss some interesting aspects of the Safety Culture story. And spoiler alert! We have the Founder, Luke Anear on next week’s Founder Focus episode and we’re looking forward to a deep dive.
We see Safety Culture's raise as a signal that the markets are in a good place We also talk about Rokt moving towards its IPO. Their "party" culture is also under the microscope at the moment, and we talk about how such cultures are being currently viewed.
We discuss episode 2 of the series “The Founder”, featuring Canva and its founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrect and Cameron Adams. We unpack the parts of the story we found most interesting, and try and distil lessons for entrepreneurs to consider in their own journey.
Other news includes Airtree warning there will be more failures, and why we think it’s interesting they felt compelled to even do that, given the business we are all in.
We talk about the Openview Partners report into VC valuations, which provides some really interesting insights into the current valuation trajectory, as well as visually demonstrating which companies get the highest valuations and why.
https://openviewpartners.com/2022-saas-benchmarks-report/
This report provides an excellent dataset on the growth rates achieved with companies that have diversity in their management team.  This is an excellent segue way into our deep dive subject which is diversity in STEM, and the recent draft recommendations from the Diversity in STEM review which was published this week.
https://www.industry.gov.au/science-technology-and-innovation/diversity-stem-review
Whilst diversity and equality is a core value of Tribe, STEM industries are the lifeblood of the companies we invest in. As such, this is an extremely important topic for VC investors, and the founders we invest in.
As always we appreciate feedback, and don’t forget to leave a rating whilst you’re here.
www.tribeglobal.vc 
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