Danielle Strachman has built her whole career around a hard question: how do you spot someone who's going to do something extraordinary before there's any proof they will? She started as a school principal, helped build the Thiel Fellowship, and now runs 1517 Fund, backing founders without degrees and scientists most institutions won't go near. What she looks for is almost embarrassingly simple. Can this person not stop talking about the thing they're obsessed with? If the answer's yes, she'll ask for a Venmo handle and send $1,000 before the call is over.

It's an instinct with a track record. Ethan Thornton was seventeen when 1517 handed him a small grant to tinker in his garage. A year later, that became a $100,000 grant to start his defence tech company, Mach Industries. A year after that, Sequoia was in.

Most of our Wild Hearts guests this season are founders and builders. This one sits on the other side of the table, with the person who decides who gets backed. There's another twist: it's Joel Connolly, Creative Director and Head of the Blackbird Foundation, behind the mic. Back in June 2025, 1517 flew him to San Francisco to open their Fellowship Summit. Earlier this year, Blackbird flew Danielle out to speak at their startup festival, Sunrise.

Joel and Danielle get into what actually makes a weirdo worth backing, why she won't measure the return on last month's grant, how 1517 makes a call when the whole team disagrees, and why she thinks of the job as "homeschooling CEOs".

🎧 [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 📸 [@wildheartspod]

Before Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks had a website, a company name, or a single piece of content published, she cold-messaged the COO of the Gates Foundation on LinkedIn. And they funded her.

It’s a pattern that runs right through both this episode and everything Phoebe has built since. The media company reaching 3.5 million people a month, the women's sports show on TV, the podcasts in categories nobody expected young women to care about, and the book built on cold emails to the chiefs of staff of Nelson Mandela, Jacinda Ardern, Justin Trudeau, Tony Blair, and Kamala Harris.

Most of us have started something without knowing quite what we were doing - no map, no contacts, figuring it out as we went - that part is familiar. The difference with Phoebe is what she did next. Because when her finger was hovering over the send button, she pressed it. And that one habit repeated relentlessly is how Missing Perspectives got funded, how The Right Hand got written, and how a blog on Squarespace became one of ANZ's most interesting media companies.

In this conversation with Kate, Phoebe talks about what the beginner's mind actually unlocks, why data will force you to kill the things you love and why you should let it, and what the chiefs of staff to the world's most powerful leaders taught her about trust, loyalty, and the one quality that makes or breaks any working relationship.

Jess Richmond thinks the premium on technical founders is about to flip. Building is cheap enough now that anyone can ship a bookkeeping app in a week. What's scarce, she argues, is having actually lived the problem: reconciled the transaction, sat in the procurement meeting, knows exactly what a customer will and won't trust.

She pitched Blackbird on Sumday with a screenshotted SharePoint site. Four years on, she's betting the company on government agencies, the buyers with the least patience for anyone who hasn't already done the work of understanding how they operate.

Kate sits down with Jess to talk about why not knowing venture capital's unwritten rules might have made her braver rather than naive, the $50,000 supplier decision that never accounted for its own emissions, and how she reverse-engineers a buyer's psychology before she ever mentions the product.

Sagalee Omer looked around at the world he grew up in and decided to build the one he needed. Not metaphorically. Bikes for kids with no way to get around. Free therapy for a community that didn't talk about it. A storytelling platform to put everyday people on screen. A basketball tournament that's raised over $100K to fund it all. Four projects, one mission: young people who are seen, heard, and have the infrastructure to become who they are.

The ambition is the same as any founder on this show. So is the discipline - knowing what to ship, when to push, and when to stop. What's different is who's investing: not a cap table, but a community. Sagalee is still in his twenties, came up through Blackbird Foundation's Protostars program, and has thought harder about identity, mission, and building for the long term than most people in this industry with a decade on him.

Theia Gabatan from Blackbird Foundation sits down with Sagalee to talk about where the mission came from, what founders can take from building without institutional backing, why he calls himself a director not a founder, and the belief he holds that most people don't.

In 2017, Mick Liubinskas got one line from an old basketball mate: "maybe it's time you got in the game." He'd just moved to the US, read the IPCC reports for the first time, and had three kids under seven. But he couldn't unsee it, so he got in the game.

Nine years on, Mick leads Climate Salad - a community of 800 Australian climate tech founders and operators that he deliberately chose to keep lean when it could have grown. He knows the funding volatility, the long hardware timelines, the challenge of selling Australian innovation to Australians who'd sooner trust the same thing from a US startup. But when three founders in the same week told him their sales cycles were getting shorter, he almost cried.

What this conversation gets into is the tension in climate tech right now: how do you hold genuine conviction about an existential problem while speaking a language that CFOs, customers and markets can actually act on? And what happens when you finally make peace with what kind of builder you actually are instead of the one you assumed you were supposed to be?

Kate sits down with Mick to talk about why he walked away from a tech career to work on climate, what he learned from building and deliberately shrinking a community, the one leading indicator that tells him the tide is turning, and what he changed his mind about.

Most of us remember what it's like to want to be in a room we're not allowed into.

For Phoebe Pincus, that room was startups. Before she became CEO of Startmate, she was writing heartfelt cover letters to startups who never wrote back, wanting in with no warm intro and no way through the door. And so when someone said yes, she never forgot what that felt like and it's shaped everything she's built since.

Today Phoebe leads Startmate, the community-driven seed fund that has touched over 10,000 founders, operators and investors across the ANZ ecosystem. She's also the co-founder of Cheeky Run Club, an amateur running podcast that hit a million downloads in two years by doing one thing: making people feel like they belonged as runners.

In this episode, she talks about what it actually takes to build a community people genuinely belong to, not just show up to. What she looks for in the founders most likely to succeed and the trap that even the best fall into. Why making it easier to build products is quietly creating a generation of founders who've stopped talking to customers. And why everything that looks like a threat to the startup ecosystem - hacker houses, closing accelerators, VCs going earlier - looks to Phoebe like good news.

In a world drowning in bad news, Phoebe looks at the same facts as everyone else and chooses to see opportunity. We love it.

When Nick Rudder's co-founder left and went back to Australia, Nick was alone in the US. His wife was pregnant with twins. Their health insurance wouldn't cover the pregnancy. He had almost no budget and no product. He could have gone home. He didn't.

Sphere - now backed by a16z - builds international tax compliance for the fastest-growing software companies in the world. Most of their customers have never had a compliance platform before. They're moving too fast to have built one, which means Nick isn't up against a competitor. He's becoming the function they don't yet have.

How you get from "everything is on fire" to "a16z writes the check" is the episode. The 60 discovery calls before a line of code. The Figma prototype he sold until a customer told him to grow up. The AI he built to reason over trade law while the old guard said it couldn't be done.

Kate sits down with Nick to talk about what it takes to rebuild from nothing and what the fastest corner of the market actually demands right now.

There are people who think about culture. And then there's Didier Elzinga.

Fifteen years running CultureAmp. 7,000 organisations. A front-row seat to how culture forms and fractures - the writedowns, the departures, the hard conversations that don't make it into announcements. During this episode, Didier draws on Buddhist philosophy, Buckminster Fuller, spiral dynamics, Brené Brown and more. Not as decorations but as working tools for a CEO who has spent two decades in the room when things go wrong and when they go right. He knows the difference between organisations that are succeeding and ones that are performing success.

That's the vantage point he brings to AI. Not the model specs or the market positioning. The human question: what happens to culture, identity, and the way we work together when the tools change this fast? Who holds the values of an organisation when part of its team isn't human? And does context - the real context, the stuff that lives in a company's bones - survive the remaking?

He also has a question he's been considering that has nothing to do with AI. The one every founder eventually faces, usually alone. When your identity and your company have been the same thing for twenty years - who are you when that changes?

Kate sits down with Didier to go there. On culture, on AI, on what a leader owes the people who follow them. And on what, exactly, is worth protecting.