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Jobkeeper Update. Welcome to a special edition of Science meets VC podcast
Todays episode is less about science and more about economics and stimulus packages for the startups and investors
David Kenney, Partner at Hall Chadwick is going to give us an update about the Australian Government Stimulus package including the job keeper program
David is an old friend of has been an active supporter of Australia’s startup ecosystem
New legislation was passed last night, our discussions include updated eligibility criteria as of April 26th
This is not financial advice
David and I are not your accountants or lawyers
Please seek your own financial advice
PS Apologies for the sound quality, various WFH issues mean we cant get access to our normal studios -
Recorded Wednesday 25th of March 2020.
Last month most people had never heard of an epidemiologist now everyone thinks they are one.
We have a real Epidemiologist on the show, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, aka The Health Nerd talks COVID19.
What the key measures are when discussing epidemiology, wha
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The inside story of the creation of the Australian plant-based meat company V2 Food. From incorporation to millions of revenue shipping to 450 stores in less than 12 months.
Phil Morle Partner at Main Sequence Ventures and Nick Hazell CEO of V2Food.
We cover
New Product Announcements
How the company was formed
How they got to market so quickly
Their rapid expansion plans this year (already doing multi-millions in revenue)
Venture Science & what it means for Main Sequence Ventures
CSIROs role in Venture Creation as a science powerhouse
Full disclosure: Our fund Main Sequence Ventures helped create V2 Food and is a significant shareholder in the company.
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3 Short Interviews with a few of my favourite teams from the CSIRO ON Accelerator, Hydrogene, Quantum Brilliance and Redback Systems.
ON Accelerator is an accelerator program that takes University researchers and helps turn their technology into a product and launch a startup to get it out into the world.
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Super interesting discussion from an expert in the Nuclear field.
Dr. Mark Ho is a Nuclear Engineer at ANSTO (Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation) and President of the Australian Nuclear Association.
We talk
- How to reduce our reliance on coal-fired power plants, powering the country in a decade when they start to shut down.
- Small Nuclear Reactors
- The economics of Nuclear- What steps we need to take to get Nuclear Power in Australia.
- Nuclear reactors, how many are there globally, what % of the world's power do they generate
- Australia's Nuclear capability
- ANSTOs Nuclear medical business
- Safe storage of waste fuel
- How long does it take it to build a Nuclear Reactor- Who is leading the world (Hint think red)
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Our good friend Dominic Dirupo from Alphastation explains the process of making an Initial Public Offering or listing your tech, biotech or medtech company on the ASX.
We talk about all the steps that need to happen, the mistakes that entrepreneurs make, we discuss the costs, what companies are suited and not suited, traps for young players and steps you can take if you want to get ready.
http://alphastation.org/
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What can we grow? - Synthetic Biology is one of the most fascinating and promising technologies of the future. It offers the ability to grow all sorts of new materials, foods, pharmaceuticals and various chemicals at scale cheaper and faster than traditional methods.
I interview some of the worlds leading researchers in Synbio at the Australian and New Zealand Synthetic Biology Conference in Brisbane, including
- Professor Kirill Alexandrov Professor of Synthetic Biology at Queensland University of Technology https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/kirill.alexandrov
- Associate Professor Dr Claudia Vickers, Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform Leader https://people.csiro.au/V/C/Claudia-Vickers
- Matt Gardner CEO of the California Technology Council who is helping QLD build a new Synthetic Biology industry https://www.californiatechnology.org/mattgardnerbio
- Dr Madeline Mitchell CSIRO Plant Molecular Physiologist who is building new versions common plants including ironing free and coloured Cotton https://people.csiro.au/M/M/Madeline-Mitchell
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Dr Heba Khamis from Contactile - Giving sense of touch to Robots, we discuss robotics, learn how the hand and fingers work and why its so hard to for a robot to have the same sense of touch and feeling as a human.
We talk about how Heba and her team have engineered a solution to provide this sense of touch in a scalable flexible sensor.
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Dr Juxi Leitner CEO Founder of LYRO Robotics. Juxi and his team won the Amazon Robotics Challenge. We talk Robotics, Computer Vision and how he won the Amazon Challenge.
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Dr Farzane (Fary) Ahmadi founder of Laronix is on a mission to help sufferers of laryngeal cancer who have had a full Laryngectomy. Fary is building an artificial electronic voice box that works by taking sound from the throat and amplifying it with the mouth.
Laryngectomy is the removal of the larynx and separation of the airway from the mouth, nose and esophagus. In a total laryngectomy, the entire larynx is removed.
This is crippling for sufferers as it means you can't talk anymore and sufferers experience all sorts of social problems as a result.
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Interview with Dr Pete Ayre founder of CardioBionic manufacturer of the Bionic Heart LVAD. We cover Pete's first heart startup Ventracor, working with the Famous Heart Surgeon Dr Victor Chang, how they got their original heart into +400 patients and his new startup that is building a lower cost, simpler more mechanically reliable heart for the world.
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Todays guest is Dr David Snowden a University researcher turned successful entrepreneur
Dr David Snowden
David is the founder of Metamako a Sydney based high-speed switch networking company recently acquired by Arista Networks.
Before I ask you about your background I have let the listeners know back in 2011 you and your team at UNSW broke the Guinness World Book of Records for the worlds fastest solar-powered car, an amazing achievement at the time.
Tell us about what you had to do to get there, solar-powered vehicles are still pretty hard but in 2011 it would have been really hard to do.
You were the chief electrical engineer, what were some of the challenges you had to overcome and how long and did it take you and how many experiments did you need to run to build the right vehicle to get to the target speed?How did you get started in your career?
Tell us about Metamako, this is probably the most successful networking hardware startup in Australia that almost no one had ever heard of until you got acquired.
So what is a high-speed switch and how is yours different from the typical Cisco kit we can buy from a networking distributor?
HFT, exchanges, speed, why?
What is an FPGA & why do you use these vs the existing processors.
Tell us about how you got the business started and how you ended up selling your switches to major high-frequency traders in New York and Chicago?
What startup lessons have you learned about raising capital, scaling up and selling your business?
What do investors need to understand to invest in the hardware and networking space? What are the traps for young players?
What controversial thing do you disagree with the rest of your peers about?
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Today's guest is Stella Xu, our new Investment Associate at Main Sequence Ventures. She most recently worked for The Trade Desk, a hyper-growth Nasdaq listed company in the digital media space as a media trader. She is an expert in helping businesses scale their online acquisition. Stella has also been named as the 30 under 30 and a woman to watch by the online marketing authority site B and T.
Stella Xu, Investment Associate at Main Sequence Ventures
In this episode, Stella shared her experience in helping businesses grow revenue through real-time trading campaigns. She discussed the cost-efficient strategies startups can use to target their most relevant users with personal messages.
Tell us about how you got started?
So you are an expert in programmatic real-time trading of online advertising, when you get a new client how do you go about growing their business?
I know for one company you managed to increase their revenue 20x, without mentioning names how did you go about doing that?
So if I am a startup and I am getting started with digital marketing, what is my first step?
How do I make sure I don’t burn all my cash, some estimates indicate that 40% of VC money in Silicon Valley goes into Google and Facebook, how do I avoid burning my budget?
What are the top 3 things a new entrant needs to get right in their online marketing?
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Today's guest is David Jones, founder of Threatmetrix the Unicorn Australian company that many of you probably have never heard of, that very quietly sold last year to UK based Relx for $850 million USD.
David is an old friend of the Main Sequence Ventures team and we wanted to get him on the podcast to talk about the lessons he learned during the 14 years it took to get to an exit.
For the listeners who haven’t heard of Threatmetrix, outline what it did, how big it grew and what it sold for.
100 million transactions per day across 35,000 websites from 5,000 customers, housing one of the largest repositories of online digital identities in the world, encompassing 1.4 billion unique online identities from 4.5 billion devices in 185 countries.
Threatmetrix was not your first rodeo. What was your path into launching Threatmetrix?
Tell us how you got started? Did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur from school age?
Tell us about raising capital and managing that process over changes in the business, is there any lessons for the startups listening?
After many years you graduated as the CEO of Threatmetrix and became a board member, stopped working there day to day and started a few other businesses?
You seem to have emerged from it all still friends with everyone and with an amazing exit. This is often not what happens when a founder steps down as CEO. Tell us about that transition and how you managed it.
The startup space has changed a lot in 15 years, what do you think about the ecosystem now and what are today's challenges?
I believe you were still a significant shareholder in Threatmetrix when it sold, so presumably, you don’t have to worry about working for a living?
Yet you still seem to be super active in your new startups + angel investing. No temptation to call in Rich, tour the world? What is David Jones working on now?
How have you found the challenge of starting again?
You have graduated to becoming an investor in your own right, given your background what do you look for in an investment?
What are the common mistakes you see other founders and investors making?
What do you strongly or controversially disagree about with your fellow startup founders and investors?
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Today's guest is David Burt Executive Manager of the CSIRO ON Accelerator, Australia’s largest researcher accelerator ON is Australia's national science and technology accelerator program serving Australia’s 43 Universities, the CSIRO, and other publicly funded research institutes.
David is also on the NSW Committee for Economic Development (CEDA), is a Director at the not for profit environmental organisation Planet Ark and hosts the Good Starts podcast that explores how science is translated into new technology and products.
All of the partners at Main Sequence Ventures were involved in setting up the first few intakes of the ON program and we work pretty closely with the ON team with helping recruit and select researchers and some of the workshops, in the program seems to be going from strength to strength
Give us some background about CSIRO and ON
Tell us why the ON Program was established and the historyHow many researchers you have helped since the program was established?How was the program established? Government funding?What are the main programs you run?So there are dozens of accelerators out in the Australian ecosystem, what makes the ON program different?Why is it important to draw participants from the entire research sector?Getting research out of the lab: commercialisation through industry collaboration and launching new businesses Creating new industries, helping world-class research actually build a product and launch to the outside worldWhat has the ON Program achieved?
Taken over 2000 researchers through industry engagement trainingNew companies 5113 companies raised $36m Approximately 220 jobs created270 mentors have helped, its probably the biggest mentor program in AustraliaWhat are the top / most interesting research projects?
Emescent - 25 jobs - crazySilentium Defence - 15+ new jobs all funded via revenuePainCheck $200m+ market cap on the ASX; $12m 20+ jobsRapidAIM - magic founding team with world-leading technologyWhat are the common mistakes you see researchers make when they first join the program?
What is the main takeaway from the ON program if Im a researcher, why is that important?
What's the future for the ON program?
The original Federal Government Budget runs out in May next year and needs to be extended to allow the mission to continue. We will never get the chance again to build a pan Australian researcher program like the ON program.
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Today's guest is Professor Michael Biercuk, Michael is a quantum physicist, innovator, and Director of the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney and founder of Q-CTRL one of Australia's first Quantum Computing Startups.
Professor Michael Biercuk
We talk Yoctonewtons, Quantum Computing, transitioning from Professor/Researcher to entrepreneur and a big announcement.Michael is a quantum physicist, innovator, Director of the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney and Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems.
Michael is also the founder and CEO of Q-CTRL, a quantum technology company. Full disclosure Main Sequence Ventures was one of the original lead investors in Q-CTRL.
Michael was educated in the United States, earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Harvard University.
He held a research fellowship at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and has served as a consultant to US Defence Agency DARPA, helping to steer government venture investments in advanced technology.
Michael is probably one of the most public & outspoken researchers turned Entrepreneurs in Australia he has spoken at TEDxSydney and appeared on ABC's Q&A & The Drum.
What is a yoctonewton and how do you measure it, given it had never been measured before how would you know you had measured it and what would you compare it to? Its is like measuring the power of a light to move.
You built your own experimental Quantum computer, I have seen it in the lab and it is a thing of engineering beauty.
What are the basic building blocks for a quantum computer? How do you start?
How does it get its instructions, whats the code stack look like? How does it store the results?
Presumably, we have to write code differently to work in Probabilistic vs deterministic?
Qubits vs Bits - what's the difference?
How do you build a machine that can create a Qubit what’s the media and method (Silicon, Photonics?) and how do you get multiple Qubits to work together in the one machine?
Tell us about Decoherence and Quantum Control?
What are the key challenges with quantum computing and what is QCTRL doing to solve these challenges?
What environmental conditions do we need to make these work?
Do you envisage room temperature quantum, does physics prevent this & does room temperature really matter?
There are a few different types of Quantum computers, tell us about the different types and how they differ?
Tell us about some of the early quantum applications? chemistry, physics, finance?
Interim markets, Quantum Sensing, timekeeping, encryption?
What do investors need to know about quantum computing?
You have been a researcher for a reasonable chunk of your career, how have you found the transition to entrepreneur?
You have a love affair with watches, why & is there anything else mechanical that you love?
What do you disagree with the rest of your quantum researchers?
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Professor Alistair McEwan
BE/BComm MEng(Res), Sydney, Australia. Ph.D., Oxford, UK. MIEEEAinsworth Chair of Technology and InnovationSchool of Biomedical EngineeringCerebral Palsy AllianceChief Investigator - ARC Training Centre for Innovative BioEngineeringLecturer at The University of Sydney teaching biomedical devices and instrumentation
Today's guest is Professor Alistair McEwan who is a prolific prototyper of medical devices especially around the brain and sensing the bodies various different signals.Alistair did his PhD at Oxford and was a Research Fellow at University College London, Marie Curie Research Fellow at Philips Research.
Alistair is an expert in prototyping and developing medical devices.
If I was looking to prototype a medical device he is probably the first guy I would turn to.
I met Alistair a few years ago when he had a team in the Sydney University INCUBATE startup accelerator and he is constantly developing new equipment to measure parts of the body.
Alistair talks about the brain and how his new equipment uses Electrical Impedance Tomography which measures electrical conductivity, permittivity, and impedance to map out structures in the brain, he also talks about the devices he has built in partnership with the Gates Foundation.
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Dr Samantha Khoury & Dr Nham Tran are researchers at the University of Technology Sydney, as well as holding research fellowships with Stanford and The Chris Obrien Lifehour
They have recently commenced the startup journey as co-founders launching miSerumDX - which is a Liquid Biopsy Cancer Diagnostics tool that they have had very promising initial results and are in the process of commercialising the test.
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Meat George Peppou founder of cultured meat startup VOW, George is creating a new type of lab-grown meat and has successfully cultured and grown pig cells in the lab.
As a guy who can make real bacon in a lab George is set to be one of the world most popular people.
This episode covers everything you might have wanted to know about alternative proteins, the market, regulatory hurdles and what unique types of meat we might be able to culture that we simply can't get today.
My apologies in advance for the sound quality, my mic failed so my voice is a bit quiet but George is loud and clear.
