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We were very clear early on in main sequence that the earlier we could get involved...
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the better.
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Many of our companies get trapped in the second valley of death, because there's a second valley of death as well as the first valley of death.
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The first one is just a zero to one the business and not Flander.
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The second one is when you want to build a spaceport, build a factory, my analogy is it's the steam engine for the mind.
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When you apply that to stuff,
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You know, you say, well, if I can, if my mind is 100 times more powerful, and then I can make a factory, or I can make things differently, or I can put rockets into space, and then I can figure out what I can get from space.
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And maybe some of the more dirty stuff can go up into space and all the things that you might be imagining.
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The AI is going to fuel that on a timeline, what we thought might happen geopolitically over the next, yeah, between now and 2050.
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But then we did it for quantum computing.
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We did it for biotech and we did it for healthcare.
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But what gets really interesting is when you go, if quantum computing's doing that and AI's doing this and biotech allows us to do this all at the same time,
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Oh, my God.
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StoryWork is brought to you in partnership with Slingshot.
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Slingshot are Australia's creative media experts, and having worked successfully with them for years, I'm thrilled to have them on board.
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You're listening to a DM podcast.
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Well, hi, friends.
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My name is Matt Jones.
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Welcome to episode five of StoryWork.
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If you've been here before, welcome back.
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If this is your first time, you've missed some great conversations with Don Pym, Zara Seidler, Michael McQueen, Allegra Spender.
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Please go back into the archive.
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There's so much there.
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And today's episode is absolutely proof of why I felt this podcast was such an important and
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We think of story as something that comes after the serious work has been done, after the company exists and the strategy is set and the product and the science is proven.
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But I'm fascinated by the role that story can play before the fact, how story is something that makes those realities possible.
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And nowhere is this more true than in the world of deep tech.
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And don't worry, if you're not sure what deep tech is, you can just listen on because today's guest is Phil Maul, the co-founder of Main Sequence Ventures
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Main Sequence is a venture capital firm that invests in Australian deep tech, science and innovation and does it in partnership with the really extraordinary CSIRO.
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Now, Phil's had a super interesting life.
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He started in theatre and the performing arts and then he stopped resisting his passion and his talent for technology.
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He became the chief technology officer of Kazar in the noughties.
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And from there, things accelerated.
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Quite literally, he created one of the first startup accelerators in Australia.
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It may be that for a lot of people in Australia, Phil is one of the most significant business leaders that you've never heard of.
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But for people in the world of tech startups and venture capital, Phil is an absolute legend.
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It's a great conversation.
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I hope you enjoy it.
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Phil Moore, welcome to StoryWork.
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Thanks for being here.
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Awesome to be here, Matt.
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Thanks for having me.
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So I want to pull apart a bit of an understanding of you and how you got here.
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And it seems to me that you clearly know an enormous amount about tech, about deep tech, about possibility, about what's on your T-shirt, supercharging, industrial productivity, changing the world.
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But you also have a deep passion for storytelling.
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And I suspect from your CV that that goes all the way back to the fact that your education started not in engineering or not in finance, but in performing arts, which is an unusual territory to then go on and become a leader in the world of venture.
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So tell me a bit about how that has shaped who you are today.
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Yeah, my first career for the first 10 years of my life was I was the theatre director.
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And I had my own theatre company that was based in London and in Western Australia.
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And we were touring around with these productions that we invented and imagined and created.
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And there's a few things that you have to do.
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I mean, first of all, from a business perspective, you have to do an awful lot with an awful little.
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And that includes keeping a team together.
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So we had the same ensemble of people working together.
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more or less for 10 years and um you know people don't stick together if they don't feel some cohesion and some common idea so why is the world a little bit better because we all just do this work every day even though no one's paying us properly right so you sort of already got that happening
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Then you've got this reality of how theatre is marketed.
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And so you would get that slot at the Sydney Festival or at Sydney Theatre Company more than a year before you've even...
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figured out how the heck you're going to make this thing.
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And so what you do is you tell a story, you try and imagine it, and then you articulate it in a way that you think will entice people to come along and just see what you've made.
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And you do that before you've got any clue how you're actually going to make that happen.
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And I've always said to people, I think it's an amazing analogy for startups.
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And when I pivoted, if you like, from the arts into doing what I do today, I actually thought it was I would have to do a sabbatical every year to go and make art and make theater to just get it out of my system.
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Otherwise, I'd go a little bit crazy.
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But actually...
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I realized that I can just do what I do with a different medium.
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There's a terrific book by an author called Bruce Chatwin called The Song Lines.
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Have you read this book?
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It's a book about the songs that Aboriginal people tell to actually navigate through different places.
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There's this beautiful chapter where Bruce Chatwin is in a land cruiser in the Northern Territory and they're driving along
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and he's with a handful of elders in the Land Cruiser.
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And they all start singing faster and faster and faster.
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And he notices this and says, why are you singing faster?
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And they say, well, because we want to get there faster.
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And the observation that he learned is they're not singing about the world they can see, they're singing the world into existence.
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Wow.
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And I think one of the reasons the arts is such a powerful training ground is you have nothing else.
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So whether you're like a theater director, an actor, a painter, a dancer, whatever it is that you're doing, you do not have any of the resources that a business would normally have, which is, well, why don't we just pay this guy like $150,000 a year and then get him to go and do that job?
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and and so you sort of live your life around deploying resources action equals value creation you know that's this is how we make things you can't do that in the arts you have to just you have to try and conjure up the next step of value with all that you have which is yourself and your words and your
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you know, and a cardboard box, some sellotape, and some, you know.
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And your version of technology.
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Yeah, that's right.
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Whatever it is.
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However rudimentary that may be.
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So tell me, where did the theatre career, the theatre journey, where did it peak?
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So it peaked at the end of the 90s.
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There's a couple of different dynamics that happened.
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First of all, I always used to think,
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the next one will be easier this is a classic story of artists you know like when we do the next one we'll be paid a little bit more money it'll be a little bit less painful our reputation will have grown sufficiently that it's a little bit less lumpy we'll already have the next booking and unfortunately it's just much harder than that it's always always difficult and so i was feeling that a little bit
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But probably more importantly, I've always been somebody that actually enjoys being in this dual world of technology and art.
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And so today I'm the weird person in venture capital and quantum physics that's talking about what picture do we need to put there or that kind of thing.
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So I've always lived in those two worlds.
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And so one of the ways I actually put bread on the table while I had my theatre career was I was visually creating websites and things like that for people.
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And then I thought, you know, people introduced other technologies so you could make the picture change when you move the mouse over it and do little things like that.
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So I got sucked into being a software engineer.
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Eventually I was just programming things.
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And so I did end up becoming a programmer.
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And for most of the 90s, it was possible to do that as a kind of dual track career and to make a little bit of money, learn the skills myself as I went along.
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But we really got to the end of the 90s and it was kind of you've got to pick your train, either let that train go and be an amateur forever or like jump on it.
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and and and see what happens and maybe do a sabbatical every year like i mentioned a bit earlier and uh i just just the opportunity to get onto the internet craze at the time was just so so compelling that i so tell me how did how did you jump on board so talk about your first sort of step into the world of startup and and creating some of your own in the internet era
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Yeah, so I went to where the streets are paved with gold.
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So I moved from Perth to Sydney, where it was all happening.
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You know, in those days of newspapers, you know, if you remember, the Australian newspaper was like as thick as a telephone directory on Tuesdays, I think it was, because that's when all the classified...
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all the job ads happened and and it was it was going crazy over here and um we moved over and i got a job as a game designer so that's yeah so i sort of felt like i was still doing my uh the more artistic side of the um uh the digital side of things i continued to sort of learn my craft and um yeah become a you know a leader in the technology field so it
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The last business that I worked on as an employee in one of these digital companies was a new business which had just launched in the Netherlands at the time called Kazar, which was part of the file sharing revolution with Napster being the sort of leading company.
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software at the time and they they moved the company to Australia and I was offered the chief technology officer job and that was my first you know real sort of pinnacle technology job and interestingly that was all about empowering artists I was still at empowering artists and that might seem very weird being a software platform that was famous for copyright infringement
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you've not just lived, but you've worked through these multiple eras of possibility.
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And we get excited about some things that never really show up materially.
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And then other things like the democratizing of music, the sort of creation of, as you say, the infinite jukebox, absolutely do materialize.
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To what extent do you look at what's happening now with AI and go, I have seen this all before?
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And to what extent do you think there is something new about this era of energy and possibility that is different to those ones that have gone before?
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I think this era is both excitingly and frighteningly more powerful than anything we've seen before.
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The ability for people to be more creative than they've ever been, to invent more things than they've ever invented before.
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I think is just off the charts in terms of what's going to happen.
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And obviously, I'm very fortunate in my work to be able to, you know, really go deep into these things and experience it.
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And it's not just the AI world.
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Think of that as like a tool.
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I was saying to someone the other day, my analogy is it's the steam engine for the mind.
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You know, we had...
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you know pre-industrial revolution we were we were all having to you know physically toil in the fields to make anything and we we linearly produced things um and then the steam engine came along and just we could 100x what any one human can do and we had some disruption for a
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highly productive world that we've got today.
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And then this is the first time we've really got that for our minds as well.
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So we've got a whole new, you know, adjustment to make as people to see what we can do.
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But coming back to how we began this conversation, when you apply that to stuff...
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You say, well, if my mind is 100 times more powerful and then I can make a factory or I can make things differently or I can put rockets into space and then I can figure out what I can get from space.
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And maybe some of the more dirty stuff can go up into space and all the things that you might be imagining.
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The AI is going to fuel that.
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But about two years ago, I ran a workshop and it was called Forces to 2050.
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And the objective of the workshop was to bring together thinkers who are leaders of deep tech companies...
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So we had founders of quantum computing companies, satellite companies, rocket companies, biotech companies, healthcare, AI, of course.
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And what we did is we tracked on a timeline what we thought might happen geopolitically over the next – yeah, between now and 2050 –
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But then we did it for quantum computing, and we did it for biotech, and we did it for healthcare.
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And they were just making their best guess at what will land on what timeline.
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And, of course, in their own minds, they've got their chapter of the story that kind of goes all the way through.
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You go, wow, like quantum computing, that's really interesting.
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Well, that's going to be able to do...
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and humanity will be different when we're using it commonly.
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But what gets really interesting is when you go, if quantum computing's doing that and AI's doing this and biotech allows us to do this all at the same time, oh, my gosh, like, what are we going to do?
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So what humans are going to be able to do with technology over the next 20 years is going to be quite phenomenal.
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And what you're describing there is a shift in the conditions of the system.
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Yeah.
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It's not just individual people looking at individual parts of the system and an individual technology thinking we can do something incredible.
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It's what happens when those dots connect.
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Yes.
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This seems to me to be one of the big themes of your career post-Kazaar, where you found Polonizer, one of, as I understand, the first incubators of startups in Australia at a time when the startup infrastructure was bare bones.
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Yeah.
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And then we'll get to main secrets in a bit.
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But to what extent have you, over time, realized that your role is also to help people connect these dots and see the whole system possibility, not just the individual pieces?
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Yeah.
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Well, when we had finished Kazar, we – and when I say we, I worked with a man who's now a very good friend of mine, Mick Lubinskas.
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And Mick was heading up marketing at Kazar and I was heading up technology.
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And we just had this phenomenal experience, you know, operating a platform which had 30 million people a day on it, which gave us a unique experience both in the marketing and the technology to really understand, you know, how to put these things into the world and then how to work with consumers at that level.
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And that was a very unusual thing at the time in Australia in particular.
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And when we'd finished doing Kazaa, we thought that was good.
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It's actually good being in a startup.
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It's great just being at the frontier, being able to say, what if we did this and what if we did that?
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And then actually build it in your job and let's go and join another startup.
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And we kind of looked around and there really weren't any.
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This is, you know, the beginning of the 2000s.
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And in fact, your startup had almost been an import from Netherlands.
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So it had to some extent started and it rebooted here.
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A hundred percent.
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And so really what we had in terms of startups at the time was we had a small handful of the early media companies starting to do their online versions of websites.
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We had…
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When we founded Polonizer, Atlassian was founded pretty much at the same time.
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Canva was years away from being created.
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I think the entire pool of venture capital in Australia was smaller than one of our funds at Main Sequence only these days.
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So there was basically no money, no ecosystem, no support.
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And I, as an old man of the industry, I try and tell this story a lot to people that, you know, I'm often on panels and people want to say, well, what do we need?
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You know, it's so terrible in Australia.
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We don't have all the support.
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It's like...
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It's going really well.
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You have no idea.
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It's all happening.
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To the formation of Polonizer, Mick and I just couldn't find anywhere we wanted to work.
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So we had to just scratch our own itch and we decided we would create a company that made companies.
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And we could see that there was a need for that.
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There were people that did want to make companies, but they didn't know how to begin or where to find the people.
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And so that's where Polonizer came about.
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I've sat through quite a few corporate innovation workshops, let's call them that.
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And I remember one a couple of years ago.
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Some particularly bad ideas are being thrown around.
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I said, look, I don't want to be rude, but let me ask you this question.
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If this workshop was to end right now and the bosses who are paying for it offered any of you the chance to buy any of these ideas for a dollar,
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Would you buy it?
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Yeah.
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Would you then invest your own money in building it?
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And if the answer is no, why are we packaging this up and sending it upstairs?
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And it's just because you don't have any ownership in this.
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Yeah.
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You're ticking the box.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And also, like, I'd often say to people when we do pitch events at Pollonizer, we'd have these beautiful events every Friday.
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where we'd like share the ideas back over some drinks and just really just get into it as a group.
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And I'd always ask two questions.
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Like, first of all, I'd just say, which is the best?
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Like, what do you think?
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What are you most excited by?
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And then the second question was, which would you, like, just take something painful.
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Like, if you've got a mortgage, what would you take 10% of your mortgage off and invest into this company and risk it?
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Or sell your car or something that hurts you?
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Like, what would you, now what would you invest in?
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And almost every time it was a different company.
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And that's the problem with innovation theater.
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You kind of, you get really excited about it.
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an idea but there's no kind of uh you wouldn't put yourself behind it that was an interesting learning take me through then how that like that experience with pollinizer combined with that light bulb combined i guess with the existence of the csiro which is a really unusual and extraordinary thing australia has that most countries don't have what's then what are the steps that go from those different light bulbs and data points and they come together as main sequence
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The founding idea for Main Sequence was from the observation that we have statistically some of the best R&D in the world by a number of different measures.
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But actually when you measure, at least at the time, when you measured Australia as a commercialization vehicle, I think we were level with Thailand or something, like 75th or something like that, some very, very poor number.
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Yeah.
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So for one reason or another, we weren't commercializing.
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We had siloed innovation happening that was kind of trapped in its own kind of language and motivated by publishing, not by making companies, which is very different to what you'd see at Stanford University with Silicon Valley around it and Boston with MIT and all the innovation around that.
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And so the thesis was, what if we had a venture capital fund that actually knew what to do and knew how to help?
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And that fund operated at the same time as the explosion of innovation that was then happening because of On Accelerator, which continued to grow.
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Because of On Accelerator, all the universities wanted their own accelerator programs.
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And that's now super – 10 years later, that's incredibly rich innovation.
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environment of accelerators incubators venture studios you know their own funds inside the universities so just just everything just starts to sort of bubble up and um uh and get more dynamic over time in main sequence itself we the first unlock was really how do you how do you envision the commercial opportunity that this technology can actually deliver and
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And so we were very clear early on in main sequence that the earlier we could get involved, the better, so that businesses don't spend time stuck in what we call the first valley of death, where people say, I think I'll start a company, and then they leave the university or they try and create it inside the university, and they're...
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and they just don't get escape velocity.
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It just gets stuck trying to find the resources, the ideas, trying to convince people.
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So we try and zero to one a company very, very quickly and get involved, and then we have to keep going along to help the company have everything.
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I love that notion of avoiding that valley of death and generating the escape velocity to get out of it.
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To what extent does that trappedness often come down to latching onto the wrong story too soon and then trying to stand up that story?
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And to what extent... Or not having a story.
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Right.
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Right.
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Or having an accidental story because you don't think a story is important and you just tell people what your technology is and you assume that everyone, of course, will understand that that's radically valuable and everyone will start throwing money at you.
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not what happened so there's kind of a yeah i think one of the things which has always been difficult uh but gets easier again as as we get find our language and our muscle as a community is working with customers and industry even when you you're still three years away from being able to sell them anything
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which is common in deep tech, but still getting out there and saying, this is what I'm building and this is why it's valuable and here's what the world's going to be like on the other side of it.
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And then you realise you could just need to sort of adjust your path a little bit over to here because actually that story is much more interesting, but it means we have to make something just a little bit different.
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then the whole business changes.
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But the story is what was the navigator through the whole journey.
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I find this fascinating.
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I think this sort of notion that the act of telling your story creates this feedback loop that helps you then refine and focus.
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But that also depends on whether you've told...
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a good story and trying to define the difference to, well, it didn't resonate because I just told the story terribly versus I told the best story I could, but it turns out that story is not a compelling one.
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And it seems to me there are a couple of obstacles there to storytelling.
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One is that people confuse ambition with strategy.
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They sort of they'll sort of yell from the from the main stage.
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It's, you know, Startmates Demo Day, which is a wonderful event.
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But they'll they'll talk about the ambition for the company they want to build rather than the strategy that creates the real sense of conviction and credibility.
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They can do it.
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And then they will confuse growth for a story.
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They'll say, well, since I started chasing this ambition, I've grown 10 times.
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Yeah.
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How do you give people the confidence to take long enough to tell the full story?
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You know, we live in a world where you're told you're going to present no more than five slides.
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Or the CEO is coming in and they've got a very short attention span.
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And yet you and I both know that the guy who runs the most exciting quantum computing business in Australia is...
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is willing to take his time and stretch the horizon out 25 years before coming back.
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But most people will be freaking out at the thought that they're just going to have someone scrolling on their phone in front of them because they've lost their interest after 30 seconds.
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How do you develop the confidence to actually spin a yarn and tell a story?
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The way I like to do it, whether it's like a three-minute pitch or you've got an hour with somebody or you've got an afternoon with somebody,
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The model needs to begin with the reason to be excited about what's going to happen for the duration of the conversation.
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Put it out there to the extent that they're both excited and they're also thinking...
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I don't believe this person, but I want to know.
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I want to hear the story.
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And then it's really important that you tell the story.
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That actually gets us to that point that gets the person believing that that's possible.
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But it's the horizon that makes it worth doing it.
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And one of the things we've learned this year in Main Sequence is just a great example of that.
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is many of our companies get trapped in the second valley of death because there's a second valley of death as well as a first valley of death.
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The first one is just a zero to one the business and not Flander.
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The second one is when you want to build a spaceport, build a factory, you have to stop spending millions of dollars and start spending hundreds of millions of dollars
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You need to show the capital markets in particular that the customer markets are backing you.
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Whereas now what our companies have started doing is doing deals which actually –
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put on the public horizon.
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So the customer and the startup announce what they're gonna do together over the next five or 10 years even.
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And then they actually have all the stages and the waypoints to actually get there and it's in the construction of the deal.
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I think this is such a powerful example of the role that Story can play right at the beginning, at the formation of a company.
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How important it is to make the possibility for your business tangible, the future that you want to bring into view.
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Deep tech is just an extreme example of that.
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It's a category where it can take years, even decades.
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to turn the science, the technology into a commercial business.
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But all of us have to try and make that future tangible.
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Story is a way of almost sending a postcard back from the future to your team, to your investors, to your first believers to say this is what we're building.
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What I love about what Phil's added here, though, is the role that a partnership can play.
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Now it's not just you saying this is the future we're going towards.
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It's you in partnership with your customers.
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It's a shared ambition, a shared belief
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in a future that can be made real.
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Let's listen to a recent example from Main Sequence.
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So as an example, we have an amazing company called Samsara Eco.
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They're the first company in the world that could do infinite recycling of plastic, including nylon in clothing and things like that.
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And they announced a deal which is with Lululemon, one of the biggest clothing companies in the world,
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to recycle 20% of their fibers, which is billions of dollars worth of value.
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Now, they haven't given Samsara Eco billions of dollars today, but everyone can see that's the trajectory.
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One of the biggest movement creators in the whole industry has committed to that trajectory.
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end state on the horizon and then that's pulled in everybody to actually help that company get there and that's building a big factory and it's all it's all going to happen so i'm really interested to hear about the work that you're trying to do i think it's called the feed 10 billion and and this sort of more sort of existential planetary mission so tell me about that rather than saying we invest in
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um you know technologies like food companies or in this case we'll say we're investing in a challenge area which is a challenge for the planet what is what is the challenge this planet needs to solve for and then that helps us to understand what are the technologies we need to find in the people that can actually rise to that challenge
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and feed 10 billion people is basically the idea that we need to make enough food to feed 10 billion people over the next couple of decades and we need to do that while using half of the planet that's the the idea so if you look at this this concept of planetary boundaries so how much water are we using how much nitrogen is running off into the
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oceans, you know, how much carbon are we putting into the atmosphere?
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And, yeah, if you look at a map of the planetary boundaries caused by food production, you would think food production is a very natural thing.
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It's stuff in the ground, it's animals, but it's emissions intensive, and there is no future where we're just making twice as much stuff in the way that we make it today.
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It's one of the early insights for me, joining Main Sequence and being so close to CSRO, who are one of the groups that have been doing this for more than 100 years, actually using science for that magic of us just having things that we want in the supermarket whenever we want to go to the supermarket.
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And so that's how we run the whole program.
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That's how we've looked for the people and the ideas and the technologies that can actually solve that.
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And so, for example, we've got a company called V2 Food, which, you know, that was the whole idea.
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It's the version two of food.
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Like if you actually try to think again about what food is –
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How do you – what do they do?
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What do they actually make?
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And, yeah, they came into existence through the plant-based meat craze and they're now the sort of biggest company of that kind in the region.
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But one of the founding ideas was this – as we go to feed 10 billion people,
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Most of that growth is actually going to happen in developing markets.
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It's going to happen in Indonesia.
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It's going to happen in Nigeria.
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It's going to happen in the Philippines where, especially in Africa, people don't eat that much meat today.
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But they want to.
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If they can get enough meat there, they'll eat enough meat.
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But then the emissions are just going to go through the roof.
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And so how do we kind of solve for that?
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And then especially how do we feed people in Africa if the price of meat is also going through the roof?
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What has that then taught you about the importance of framing, of the way you contextualize, about whether you talk about plant-based meat or plant-based protein, whether you talk about being for accessibility to meat or whether you are against animal products?
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Talk about what you've learned about the importance of not just framing wants but also staying focused.
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light on your feet to how attitudes are changing and how people are responding to a particular framing of a possibility that's a that's an excellent question because i and i think having plant-based meat as an example is a really good one because
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It's an example of where storytelling went very wrong and because the framing was wrong.
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When we started V2Food, our idea was we should do it as part of the meat industry.
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It's just another meat and together we should sell more meat.
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That's all about making twice as much food.
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and there's just so much diversity, so many opportunities for collaboration.
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For example, you have farmers that grow livestock also grow soy, and so the same farmer can be actually making money from animal meat and plant-based meat.
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All of our manufacturing and V2 food happens in the meat industry where meat is processed.
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And that was by design because our framing was, this is just another kind of meat, it's for everyone to grow, it's for everyone's abundance, and everyone's going to make money along the way and consumers will benefit.
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Of course, the actual narrative, which became the dominant narrative, was end animal agriculture.
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And there were some particularly militant declarations that this industry would come along.
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They self-declared themselves enemies of anyone involved in animal agriculture, which, of course, in countries like Australia and the U.S., that's red-rag to a bull, where we have such important industries here.
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which are all around animal agriculture.
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So they effectively made an enemy of somebody that wasn't actually an enemy in the hope that they would build an army of consumers which would move over from one to the other.
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That didn't happen.
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Meanwhile, they made an enemy that was very effective at telling an anti-story that sort of neutralized anything anyone was trying to do.
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This is a really interesting topic, the idea of having an enemy as a business.
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I think it can be really powerful.
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What Phil's talking about here is the danger of making the wrong enemy, the danger of picking an enemy that effectively can alienate a lot of your potential customers.
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We went through this at Four Pillars.
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We decided to make alcohol-free spirits.
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Now, clearly we couldn't be anti-alcohol because our main business was making gin.
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So we made our enemy low quality.
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and poor flavor.
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We said to people, you shouldn't have to choose between having a drink and drinking well.
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Now you can have both.
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We jumped on the alcohol-free bandwagon.
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We actually called the product bandwagon.
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But in every business, picking the right enemy, getting that right can be a really powerful way of animating your brand story.
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Go all the way back to episode one.
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Dom Pym didn't say the enemy for up is other banks.
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He said the enemy is the lost relationship people have with money, and we want to change that.
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So pick an enemy, just pick the right one and don't alienate your customers as you do it.
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I've got one more question.
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Imagine if your career took one more leap and weirdly you went from the world of deep tech to big boardrooms and you decide I'm going to spend some time in the world of corporate.
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The opposite of energized startups.
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Hundred year old companies have been doing the same things the same way, returning shareholder value, having to report every month, every quarter to the ASX.
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Often environments that are designed for steadiness and not designed for disruption, not designed for moonshots, but designed for safely, you know, delivering on their promises.
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would you try and bring to those environments what is the number one learning that you would put into your backpack to to take into that safer less risk friendly environment yeah i think it's a world i'm actually very excited about and i think it's it's the idea of bringing experimentation to that environment
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and still I think what we do well in venture is we do things which are implicitly risky but they have a big outcome so you that's it I mean I would say you can't do anything impactful without taking a risk but that it's not recklessly done there's a sort of practice around it where you're you're running experiments and the experiment could be a story does that resonate the experiment could be
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A pilot plan, the experiment could be an early version of the business with a small subset of the customers, whatever.
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And that's what allows us to really find the next big thing.
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And to do that without destroying what might be a big part of the business that you've already got.
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And I do spend quite a lot of time with boards helping people sort of think their way
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through that if you look at some of the biggest companies in the world today that have come out of venture capital i mean you know the you know the invidia's the google's the the facebook's amazon i mean amazon's a great example like who would have thought a bookshop would become a computing platform or you know i need a
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that they have an agility to thinking about, to spotting a market opportunity and moving a part of their business.
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Like they didn't sacrifice selling books or selling other stuff.
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And they have a wonderful storytelling discipline.
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I remember reading how one of Jeff Bezos' mandates to his team where if you want to come and pitch a big idea, you have to write the press release.
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You have to tell me when we get it right and we launch it,
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Write the story.
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And if you can't tell me what story will energize the world and be on the front page of the New York Times, why would we go after it?
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And it's a wonderful discipline.
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So I've got a question.
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I've spent most of my career trying to be the dude in the room with a T-shirt.
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Today I wore a jacket.
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When did you realize that you could be a grown-up in the world of business and still wear T-shirts to work every day?
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Well, some days I do wear jackets, I must confess, but I feel like the more grown up I try and dress, actually, the more old I feel and look.
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So I sort of try and keep myself carrying the message.
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And actually, I quite often wear startup t-shirts because it actually triggers a conversation.
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I'm very frequently stopped.
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at airports and waiting in a taxi queue and things like that for like, what's the story with your t-shirt?
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There's one that I wear that says moonshot country, really large and really large letters on it.
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And, and I, and that, that's kind of by design because we want to start a story, but that's about, you know, we're, we're telling a story in our work at the moment around how the next generation of big disruptive companies are actually going to rise in,
379
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in the regions, and the regions have felt a little bit cast aside for the last couple of decades, whilst the cities rise and digital technology goes crazy.
380
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But, you know, if you want to launch rockets, if you want to build the next generation of manufacturing capacity, all that's happening out in the regions, and we need to sort of celebrate that and get the regions excited.
381
00:41:21.915 --> 00:41:23.517
But the T-shirt tells the story.
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00:41:23.877 --> 00:41:28.040
So these frontiers, do you think of Australia as a moonshot country?
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Because I feel that there were times when maybe we didn't believe that we could be the place where the moonshot came from.
384
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That's a story that we have to tell, and we have to tell that to each other.
385
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I mean, the actual story we've been telling the world for the last, I think as long as we can all remember, is we are where things come out of the ground and we sell them to the rest of the world quite cheaply to make valuable things that we then buy back.
386
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And we allowed ourselves to say, well, Australia is a small country.
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We can't have big companies here in Australia because the population just isn't big enough.
388
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But that's a story and a narrative that I kind of reject.
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And we reject that at Main Sequence because we think...
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We have incredible ideas here.
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The future is definitely going to be powered by ideas that manifest in the world.
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And they will – and Deep Tech, where we work, is science-driven –
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companies they are going to spread all over the world and um and that is i think our next the next australian story should be one of the frontier and how australian ideas actually powered that frontier it is fascinating to me this notion of how
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your story can be either an enabler or a constraint.
395
00:42:49.380 --> 00:42:53.443
And I'm listening to you and you're talking about the future is going to be powered by ideas.
396
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And I'm thinking, well, it's going to be powered by ideas that have the physical space and the natural resources to bring those ideas to life.
397
00:43:00.968 --> 00:43:10.914
And, you know, you're just talking about Australia and our scale and our abundance and what, you know, in the air and in the ground and in nature, our natural advantages, you pair those with ideas.
398
00:43:10.934 --> 00:43:13.216
That's a pretty powerful story that we can bring to life.
399
00:43:13.356 --> 00:43:13.836
Yeah.
400
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Only if we believe in it.
401
00:43:14.997 --> 00:43:18.841
And you're getting me pretty excited right there, how you sort of retold it back to me.
402
00:43:18.881 --> 00:43:26.988
Because I think it is that combination of ideas and actually having the resources to do something material with those ideas.
403
00:43:27.068 --> 00:43:32.273
And, of course, ideas are becoming cheaper and cheaper to produce.
404
00:43:32.513 --> 00:43:36.657
And the tools that we've got superpower are our ability to sort of...
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think of better ideas and to validate our ideas and share ideas better than we've ever been able to do before to a scary degree.
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But then some countries will be able to do something with those ideas and manifest them.
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And Australia, because we have those resources, which we're telling a terrible story about today, we can do something with that.
408
00:43:59.712 --> 00:44:00.593
It's interesting, right?
409
00:44:00.953 --> 00:44:05.957
We're sitting here in a podcast studio and just a few desks away are the guys who do the Batuta Advocate.
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I remember The Onion in America did this great piece.
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They sort of spoofed a TED Talk where a guy stood up with a vision for cars that didn't pollute.
412
00:44:13.503 --> 00:44:15.524
And he finished by saying, well, that's my big idea.
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It's someone else's problem to make it.
414
00:44:17.606 --> 00:44:19.908
And it sort of reminds you more than ever now in this world of...
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00:44:20.368 --> 00:44:24.909
generative AI, ideas can to some extent get cheaper and cheaper and more abundant.
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And the question is, can you harness a great idea to a great ability to get that idea made?
417
00:44:31.790 --> 00:44:34.231
Well, and this is why you need a good story, right?
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00:44:34.291 --> 00:44:43.233
Because I was speaking to one of our ministers in the government, and he said to me,
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I'm just so frustrated that we had one of the first computers in the world at CSIRO when computers were invented.
420
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And yet, why didn't we have Silicon Valley?
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Why didn't we have Taiwan?
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00:44:58.618 --> 00:45:00.199
And the answer is quite simple.
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For one reason or another, we just did not lean in to the revolution that was happening.
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We didn't have belief and conviction.
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We didn't put money down.
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We didn't take risks with our industry.
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And so now you come to today and you say, well, what do we need to do to actually not make that mistake again in the future?
428
00:45:21.789 --> 00:45:24.311
And stories are incredibly powerful to do that.
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00:45:24.331 --> 00:45:30.276
And I often say to government folks that we work with quite a lot, they say, like, what can we do?
430
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And of course, money is always a good thing.
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00:45:34.018 --> 00:45:34.278
But...
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00:45:35.119 --> 00:45:41.823
What they can do more powerfully is tell a consistent, exciting story.
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We talk a lot about missions.
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What's the mission we're on?
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00:45:46.966 --> 00:45:49.008
What do we actually want to achieve as a country?
436
00:45:49.568 --> 00:45:53.511
Because all these ideas take more than one force to get it done.
437
00:45:53.871 --> 00:45:54.991
Where's the money coming from?
438
00:45:55.012 --> 00:45:57.033
What's the connection to existing industry?
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00:45:57.553 --> 00:46:00.495
What are all the industries that need to come together to make this thing work?
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00:46:00.755 --> 00:46:18.662
happen who are the innovators where are they in the universities what causes them to raise their head up and look over the horizon and then see someone that can help them and missions help that stories help that and So what is that story and we come back to moonshot country again?
441
00:46:18.722 --> 00:46:20.503
It's like well, what is it possible?
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00:46:20.523 --> 00:46:20.563
I?
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00:46:21.304 --> 00:46:32.481
that industries which are abundant in other places, powered by fossil fuels in China or Thailand or in Brazil or in the United States...
444
00:46:34.068 --> 00:46:36.409
the new versions of those don't exist yet.
445
00:46:37.030 --> 00:46:41.492
Like, is it possible they should happen here first?
446
00:46:42.573 --> 00:46:47.616
And stories are how people understand what is possible.
447
00:46:48.216 --> 00:46:59.623
I really hope we can find some of that in government, some of those stories that excite us as a nation to sort of build the next couple of decades of opportunity for us all.
448
00:46:59.643 --> 00:47:00.844
Phil, keep doing the good work.
449
00:47:01.064 --> 00:47:01.484
Thank you.
450
00:47:01.504 --> 00:47:02.565
It's been great to be here, Matt.
451
00:47:05.968 --> 00:47:08.329
StoryWork was brought to you in partnership with Slingshot.
452
00:47:08.930 --> 00:47:11.871
As you've heard in today's episode, stories really matter.
453
00:47:11.951 --> 00:47:15.213
And there is no story more important than the one you tell your customers.
454
00:47:15.813 --> 00:47:20.775
But finding the right time, place, channel, and medium through which to tell that story is critical.
455
00:47:21.156 --> 00:47:23.297
And that's where my great friends at Slingshot come in.
456
00:47:24.097 --> 00:47:29.561
Slingshot pride themselves on developing creative media strategies to propel their clients further, faster.
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00:47:30.141 --> 00:47:39.087
You can find out more about the brilliant work that Slingshot does, helping brands find their audiences, tell their stories and achieve their objectives at slingshot.com.au.
458
00:47:39.387 --> 00:47:49.153
And talking about finding out more, you can find out more about this and every episode of StoryWork, including all the show notes and all of my key learnings from every conversation over on Substack.
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We were very clear early on in main sequence that the earlier we could get involved...
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the better.
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Many of our companies get trapped in the second valley of death, because there's a second valley of death as well as the first valley of death.
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The first one is just a zero to one the business and not Flander.
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The second one is when you want to build a spaceport, build a factory, my analogy is it's the steam engine for the mind.
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When you apply that to stuff,
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You know, you say, well, if I can, if my mind is 100 times more powerful, and then I can make a factory, or I can make things differently, or I can put rockets into space, and then I can figure out what I can get from space.
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And maybe some of the more dirty stuff can go up into space and all the things that you might be imagining.
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The AI is going to fuel that on a timeline, what we thought might happen geopolitically over the next, yeah, between now and 2050.
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But then we did it for quantum computing.
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We did it for biotech and we did it for healthcare.
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But what gets really interesting is when you go, if quantum computing's doing that and AI's doing this and biotech allows us to do this all at the same time,
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Oh, my God.
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StoryWork is brought to you in partnership with Slingshot.
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Slingshot are Australia's creative media experts, and having worked successfully with them for years, I'm thrilled to have them on board.
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You're listening to a DM podcast.
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Well, hi, friends.
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My name is Matt Jones.
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Welcome to episode five of StoryWork.
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If you've been here before, welcome back.
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If this is your first time, you've missed some great conversations with Don Pym, Zara Seidler, Michael McQueen, Allegra Spender.
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Please go back into the archive.
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There's so much there.
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And today's episode is absolutely proof of why I felt this podcast was such an important and
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We think of story as something that comes after the serious work has been done, after the company exists and the strategy is set and the product and the science is proven.
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But I'm fascinated by the role that story can play before the fact, how story is something that makes those realities possible.
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And nowhere is this more true than in the world of deep tech.
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And don't worry, if you're not sure what deep tech is, you can just listen on because today's guest is Phil Maul, the co-founder of Main Sequence Ventures
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Main Sequence is a venture capital firm that invests in Australian deep tech, science and innovation and does it in partnership with the really extraordinary CSIRO.
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Now, Phil's had a super interesting life.
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He started in theatre and the performing arts and then he stopped resisting his passion and his talent for technology.
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He became the chief technology officer of Kazar in the noughties.
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And from there, things accelerated.
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Quite literally, he created one of the first startup accelerators in Australia.
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It may be that for a lot of people in Australia, Phil is one of the most significant business leaders that you've never heard of.
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But for people in the world of tech startups and venture capital, Phil is an absolute legend.
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It's a great conversation.
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I hope you enjoy it.
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Phil Moore, welcome to StoryWork.
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Thanks for being here.
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Awesome to be here, Matt.
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Thanks for having me.
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So I want to pull apart a bit of an understanding of you and how you got here.
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And it seems to me that you clearly know an enormous amount about tech, about deep tech, about possibility, about what's on your T-shirt, supercharging, industrial productivity, changing the world.
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But you also have a deep passion for storytelling.
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And I suspect from your CV that that goes all the way back to the fact that your education started not in engineering or not in finance, but in performing arts, which is an unusual territory to then go on and become a leader in the world of venture.
47
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So tell me a bit about how that has shaped who you are today.
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Yeah, my first career for the first 10 years of my life was I was the theatre director.
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And I had my own theatre company that was based in London and in Western Australia.
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And we were touring around with these productions that we invented and imagined and created.
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And there's a few things that you have to do.
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I mean, first of all, from a business perspective, you have to do an awful lot with an awful little.
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And that includes keeping a team together.
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So we had the same ensemble of people working together.
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more or less for 10 years and um you know people don't stick together if they don't feel some cohesion and some common idea so why is the world a little bit better because we all just do this work every day even though no one's paying us properly right so you sort of already got that happening
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Then you've got this reality of how theatre is marketed.
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And so you would get that slot at the Sydney Festival or at Sydney Theatre Company more than a year before you've even...
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figured out how the heck you're going to make this thing.
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And so what you do is you tell a story, you try and imagine it, and then you articulate it in a way that you think will entice people to come along and just see what you've made.
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And you do that before you've got any clue how you're actually going to make that happen.
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And I've always said to people, I think it's an amazing analogy for startups.
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And when I pivoted, if you like, from the arts into doing what I do today, I actually thought it was I would have to do a sabbatical every year to go and make art and make theater to just get it out of my system.
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Otherwise, I'd go a little bit crazy.
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But actually...
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I realized that I can just do what I do with a different medium.
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There's a terrific book by an author called Bruce Chatwin called The Song Lines.
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Have you read this book?
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It's a book about the songs that Aboriginal people tell to actually navigate through different places.
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There's this beautiful chapter where Bruce Chatwin is in a land cruiser in the Northern Territory and they're driving along
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and he's with a handful of elders in the Land Cruiser.
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And they all start singing faster and faster and faster.
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And he notices this and says, why are you singing faster?
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And they say, well, because we want to get there faster.
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And the observation that he learned is they're not singing about the world they can see, they're singing the world into existence.
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Wow.
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And I think one of the reasons the arts is such a powerful training ground is you have nothing else.
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So whether you're like a theater director, an actor, a painter, a dancer, whatever it is that you're doing, you do not have any of the resources that a business would normally have, which is, well, why don't we just pay this guy like $150,000 a year and then get him to go and do that job?
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and and so you sort of live your life around deploying resources action equals value creation you know that's this is how we make things you can't do that in the arts you have to just you have to try and conjure up the next step of value with all that you have which is yourself and your words and your
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you know, and a cardboard box, some sellotape, and some, you know.
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And your version of technology.
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Yeah, that's right.
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Whatever it is.
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However rudimentary that may be.
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So tell me, where did the theatre career, the theatre journey, where did it peak?
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So it peaked at the end of the 90s.
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There's a couple of different dynamics that happened.
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First of all, I always used to think,
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the next one will be easier this is a classic story of artists you know like when we do the next one we'll be paid a little bit more money it'll be a little bit less painful our reputation will have grown sufficiently that it's a little bit less lumpy we'll already have the next booking and unfortunately it's just much harder than that it's always always difficult and so i was feeling that a little bit
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But probably more importantly, I've always been somebody that actually enjoys being in this dual world of technology and art.
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And so today I'm the weird person in venture capital and quantum physics that's talking about what picture do we need to put there or that kind of thing.
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So I've always lived in those two worlds.
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And so one of the ways I actually put bread on the table while I had my theatre career was I was visually creating websites and things like that for people.
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And then I thought, you know, people introduced other technologies so you could make the picture change when you move the mouse over it and do little things like that.
94
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So I got sucked into being a software engineer.
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Eventually I was just programming things.
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And so I did end up becoming a programmer.
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And for most of the 90s, it was possible to do that as a kind of dual track career and to make a little bit of money, learn the skills myself as I went along.
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But we really got to the end of the 90s and it was kind of you've got to pick your train, either let that train go and be an amateur forever or like jump on it.
99
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and and and see what happens and maybe do a sabbatical every year like i mentioned a bit earlier and uh i just just the opportunity to get onto the internet craze at the time was just so so compelling that i so tell me how did how did you jump on board so talk about your first sort of step into the world of startup and and creating some of your own in the internet era
100
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Yeah, so I went to where the streets are paved with gold.
101
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So I moved from Perth to Sydney, where it was all happening.
102
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You know, in those days of newspapers, you know, if you remember, the Australian newspaper was like as thick as a telephone directory on Tuesdays, I think it was, because that's when all the classified...
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all the job ads happened and and it was it was going crazy over here and um we moved over and i got a job as a game designer so that's yeah so i sort of felt like i was still doing my uh the more artistic side of the um uh the digital side of things i continued to sort of learn my craft and um yeah become a you know a leader in the technology field so it
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The last business that I worked on as an employee in one of these digital companies was a new business which had just launched in the Netherlands at the time called Kazar, which was part of the file sharing revolution with Napster being the sort of leading company.
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software at the time and they they moved the company to Australia and I was offered the chief technology officer job and that was my first you know real sort of pinnacle technology job and interestingly that was all about empowering artists I was still at empowering artists and that might seem very weird being a software platform that was famous for copyright infringement
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you've not just lived, but you've worked through these multiple eras of possibility.
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And we get excited about some things that never really show up materially.
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And then other things like the democratizing of music, the sort of creation of, as you say, the infinite jukebox, absolutely do materialize.
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To what extent do you look at what's happening now with AI and go, I have seen this all before?
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And to what extent do you think there is something new about this era of energy and possibility that is different to those ones that have gone before?
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I think this era is both excitingly and frighteningly more powerful than anything we've seen before.
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The ability for people to be more creative than they've ever been, to invent more things than they've ever invented before.
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I think is just off the charts in terms of what's going to happen.
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And obviously, I'm very fortunate in my work to be able to, you know, really go deep into these things and experience it.
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And it's not just the AI world.
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Think of that as like a tool.
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I was saying to someone the other day, my analogy is it's the steam engine for the mind.
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You know, we had...
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you know pre-industrial revolution we were we were all having to you know physically toil in the fields to make anything and we we linearly produced things um and then the steam engine came along and just we could 100x what any one human can do and we had some disruption for a
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highly productive world that we've got today.
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And then this is the first time we've really got that for our minds as well.
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So we've got a whole new, you know, adjustment to make as people to see what we can do.
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But coming back to how we began this conversation, when you apply that to stuff...
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You say, well, if my mind is 100 times more powerful and then I can make a factory or I can make things differently or I can put rockets into space and then I can figure out what I can get from space.
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And maybe some of the more dirty stuff can go up into space and all the things that you might be imagining.
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The AI is going to fuel that.
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But about two years ago, I ran a workshop and it was called Forces to 2050.
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And the objective of the workshop was to bring together thinkers who are leaders of deep tech companies...
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So we had founders of quantum computing companies, satellite companies, rocket companies, biotech companies, healthcare, AI, of course.
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And what we did is we tracked on a timeline what we thought might happen geopolitically over the next – yeah, between now and 2050 –
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But then we did it for quantum computing, and we did it for biotech, and we did it for healthcare.
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And they were just making their best guess at what will land on what timeline.
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And, of course, in their own minds, they've got their chapter of the story that kind of goes all the way through.
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You go, wow, like quantum computing, that's really interesting.
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Well, that's going to be able to do...
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and humanity will be different when we're using it commonly.
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But what gets really interesting is when you go, if quantum computing's doing that and AI's doing this and biotech allows us to do this all at the same time, oh, my gosh, like, what are we going to do?
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So what humans are going to be able to do with technology over the next 20 years is going to be quite phenomenal.
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And what you're describing there is a shift in the conditions of the system.
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Yeah.
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It's not just individual people looking at individual parts of the system and an individual technology thinking we can do something incredible.
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It's what happens when those dots connect.
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Yes.
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This seems to me to be one of the big themes of your career post-Kazaar, where you found Polonizer, one of, as I understand, the first incubators of startups in Australia at a time when the startup infrastructure was bare bones.
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Yeah.
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And then we'll get to main secrets in a bit.
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But to what extent have you, over time, realized that your role is also to help people connect these dots and see the whole system possibility, not just the individual pieces?
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Yeah.
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Well, when we had finished Kazar, we – and when I say we, I worked with a man who's now a very good friend of mine, Mick Lubinskas.
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And Mick was heading up marketing at Kazar and I was heading up technology.
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And we just had this phenomenal experience, you know, operating a platform which had 30 million people a day on it, which gave us a unique experience both in the marketing and the technology to really understand, you know, how to put these things into the world and then how to work with consumers at that level.
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And that was a very unusual thing at the time in Australia in particular.
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And when we'd finished doing Kazaa, we thought that was good.
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It's actually good being in a startup.
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It's great just being at the frontier, being able to say, what if we did this and what if we did that?
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And then actually build it in your job and let's go and join another startup.
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And we kind of looked around and there really weren't any.
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This is, you know, the beginning of the 2000s.
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And in fact, your startup had almost been an import from Netherlands.
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So it had to some extent started and it rebooted here.
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A hundred percent.
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And so really what we had in terms of startups at the time was we had a small handful of the early media companies starting to do their online versions of websites.
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We had…
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When we founded Polonizer, Atlassian was founded pretty much at the same time.
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Canva was years away from being created.
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I think the entire pool of venture capital in Australia was smaller than one of our funds at Main Sequence only these days.
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So there was basically no money, no ecosystem, no support.
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And I, as an old man of the industry, I try and tell this story a lot to people that, you know, I'm often on panels and people want to say, well, what do we need?
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You know, it's so terrible in Australia.
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We don't have all the support.
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It's like...
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It's going really well.
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You have no idea.
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It's all happening.
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To the formation of Polonizer, Mick and I just couldn't find anywhere we wanted to work.
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So we had to just scratch our own itch and we decided we would create a company that made companies.
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And we could see that there was a need for that.
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There were people that did want to make companies, but they didn't know how to begin or where to find the people.
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And so that's where Polonizer came about.
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I've sat through quite a few corporate innovation workshops, let's call them that.
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And I remember one a couple of years ago.
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Some particularly bad ideas are being thrown around.
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I said, look, I don't want to be rude, but let me ask you this question.
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If this workshop was to end right now and the bosses who are paying for it offered any of you the chance to buy any of these ideas for a dollar,
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Would you buy it?
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Yeah.
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Would you then invest your own money in building it?
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And if the answer is no, why are we packaging this up and sending it upstairs?
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And it's just because you don't have any ownership in this.
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Yeah.
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You're ticking the box.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And also, like, I'd often say to people when we do pitch events at Pollonizer, we'd have these beautiful events every Friday.
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where we'd like share the ideas back over some drinks and just really just get into it as a group.
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And I'd always ask two questions.
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Like, first of all, I'd just say, which is the best?
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Like, what do you think?
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What are you most excited by?
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And then the second question was, which would you, like, just take something painful.
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Like, if you've got a mortgage, what would you take 10% of your mortgage off and invest into this company and risk it?
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Or sell your car or something that hurts you?
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Like, what would you, now what would you invest in?
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And almost every time it was a different company.
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And that's the problem with innovation theater.
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You kind of, you get really excited about it.
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an idea but there's no kind of uh you wouldn't put yourself behind it that was an interesting learning take me through then how that like that experience with pollinizer combined with that light bulb combined i guess with the existence of the csiro which is a really unusual and extraordinary thing australia has that most countries don't have what's then what are the steps that go from those different light bulbs and data points and they come together as main sequence
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The founding idea for Main Sequence was from the observation that we have statistically some of the best R&D in the world by a number of different measures.
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But actually when you measure, at least at the time, when you measured Australia as a commercialization vehicle, I think we were level with Thailand or something, like 75th or something like that, some very, very poor number.
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Yeah.
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So for one reason or another, we weren't commercializing.
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We had siloed innovation happening that was kind of trapped in its own kind of language and motivated by publishing, not by making companies, which is very different to what you'd see at Stanford University with Silicon Valley around it and Boston with MIT and all the innovation around that.
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And so the thesis was, what if we had a venture capital fund that actually knew what to do and knew how to help?
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And that fund operated at the same time as the explosion of innovation that was then happening because of On Accelerator, which continued to grow.
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Because of On Accelerator, all the universities wanted their own accelerator programs.
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And that's now super – 10 years later, that's incredibly rich innovation.
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environment of accelerators incubators venture studios you know their own funds inside the universities so just just everything just starts to sort of bubble up and um uh and get more dynamic over time in main sequence itself we the first unlock was really how do you how do you envision the commercial opportunity that this technology can actually deliver and
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And so we were very clear early on in main sequence that the earlier we could get involved, the better, so that businesses don't spend time stuck in what we call the first valley of death, where people say, I think I'll start a company, and then they leave the university or they try and create it inside the university, and they're...
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and they just don't get escape velocity.
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It just gets stuck trying to find the resources, the ideas, trying to convince people.
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So we try and zero to one a company very, very quickly and get involved, and then we have to keep going along to help the company have everything.
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I love that notion of avoiding that valley of death and generating the escape velocity to get out of it.
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To what extent does that trappedness often come down to latching onto the wrong story too soon and then trying to stand up that story?
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And to what extent... Or not having a story.
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Right.
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Right.
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Or having an accidental story because you don't think a story is important and you just tell people what your technology is and you assume that everyone, of course, will understand that that's radically valuable and everyone will start throwing money at you.
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not what happened so there's kind of a yeah i think one of the things which has always been difficult uh but gets easier again as as we get find our language and our muscle as a community is working with customers and industry even when you you're still three years away from being able to sell them anything
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which is common in deep tech, but still getting out there and saying, this is what I'm building and this is why it's valuable and here's what the world's going to be like on the other side of it.
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And then you realise you could just need to sort of adjust your path a little bit over to here because actually that story is much more interesting, but it means we have to make something just a little bit different.
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then the whole business changes.
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But the story is what was the navigator through the whole journey.
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I find this fascinating.
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I think this sort of notion that the act of telling your story creates this feedback loop that helps you then refine and focus.
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But that also depends on whether you've told...
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a good story and trying to define the difference to, well, it didn't resonate because I just told the story terribly versus I told the best story I could, but it turns out that story is not a compelling one.
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And it seems to me there are a couple of obstacles there to storytelling.
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One is that people confuse ambition with strategy.
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They sort of they'll sort of yell from the from the main stage.
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It's, you know, Startmates Demo Day, which is a wonderful event.
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But they'll they'll talk about the ambition for the company they want to build rather than the strategy that creates the real sense of conviction and credibility.
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They can do it.
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And then they will confuse growth for a story.
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They'll say, well, since I started chasing this ambition, I've grown 10 times.
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Yeah.
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How do you give people the confidence to take long enough to tell the full story?
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You know, we live in a world where you're told you're going to present no more than five slides.
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Or the CEO is coming in and they've got a very short attention span.
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And yet you and I both know that the guy who runs the most exciting quantum computing business in Australia is...
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is willing to take his time and stretch the horizon out 25 years before coming back.
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But most people will be freaking out at the thought that they're just going to have someone scrolling on their phone in front of them because they've lost their interest after 30 seconds.
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How do you develop the confidence to actually spin a yarn and tell a story?
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The way I like to do it, whether it's like a three-minute pitch or you've got an hour with somebody or you've got an afternoon with somebody,
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The model needs to begin with the reason to be excited about what's going to happen for the duration of the conversation.
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Put it out there to the extent that they're both excited and they're also thinking...
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I don't believe this person, but I want to know.
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I want to hear the story.
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And then it's really important that you tell the story.
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That actually gets us to that point that gets the person believing that that's possible.
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But it's the horizon that makes it worth doing it.
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And one of the things we've learned this year in Main Sequence is just a great example of that.
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is many of our companies get trapped in the second valley of death because there's a second valley of death as well as a first valley of death.
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The first one is just a zero to one the business and not Flander.
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The second one is when you want to build a spaceport, build a factory, you have to stop spending millions of dollars and start spending hundreds of millions of dollars
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You need to show the capital markets in particular that the customer markets are backing you.
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Whereas now what our companies have started doing is doing deals which actually –
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put on the public horizon.
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So the customer and the startup announce what they're gonna do together over the next five or 10 years even.
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And then they actually have all the stages and the waypoints to actually get there and it's in the construction of the deal.
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I think this is such a powerful example of the role that Story can play right at the beginning, at the formation of a company.
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How important it is to make the possibility for your business tangible, the future that you want to bring into view.
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Deep tech is just an extreme example of that.
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It's a category where it can take years, even decades.
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to turn the science, the technology into a commercial business.
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But all of us have to try and make that future tangible.
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Story is a way of almost sending a postcard back from the future to your team, to your investors, to your first believers to say this is what we're building.
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What I love about what Phil's added here, though, is the role that a partnership can play.
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Now it's not just you saying this is the future we're going towards.
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It's you in partnership with your customers.
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It's a shared ambition, a shared belief
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in a future that can be made real.
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Let's listen to a recent example from Main Sequence.
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So as an example, we have an amazing company called Samsara Eco.
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They're the first company in the world that could do infinite recycling of plastic, including nylon in clothing and things like that.
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And they announced a deal which is with Lululemon, one of the biggest clothing companies in the world,
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to recycle 20% of their fibers, which is billions of dollars worth of value.
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Now, they haven't given Samsara Eco billions of dollars today, but everyone can see that's the trajectory.
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One of the biggest movement creators in the whole industry has committed to that trajectory.
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end state on the horizon and then that's pulled in everybody to actually help that company get there and that's building a big factory and it's all it's all going to happen so i'm really interested to hear about the work that you're trying to do i think it's called the feed 10 billion and and this sort of more sort of existential planetary mission so tell me about that rather than saying we invest in
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um you know technologies like food companies or in this case we'll say we're investing in a challenge area which is a challenge for the planet what is what is the challenge this planet needs to solve for and then that helps us to understand what are the technologies we need to find in the people that can actually rise to that challenge
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and feed 10 billion people is basically the idea that we need to make enough food to feed 10 billion people over the next couple of decades and we need to do that while using half of the planet that's the the idea so if you look at this this concept of planetary boundaries so how much water are we using how much nitrogen is running off into the
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oceans, you know, how much carbon are we putting into the atmosphere?
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And, yeah, if you look at a map of the planetary boundaries caused by food production, you would think food production is a very natural thing.
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It's stuff in the ground, it's animals, but it's emissions intensive, and there is no future where we're just making twice as much stuff in the way that we make it today.
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It's one of the early insights for me, joining Main Sequence and being so close to CSRO, who are one of the groups that have been doing this for more than 100 years, actually using science for that magic of us just having things that we want in the supermarket whenever we want to go to the supermarket.
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And so that's how we run the whole program.
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That's how we've looked for the people and the ideas and the technologies that can actually solve that.
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And so, for example, we've got a company called V2 Food, which, you know, that was the whole idea.
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It's the version two of food.
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Like if you actually try to think again about what food is –
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How do you – what do they do?
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What do they actually make?
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And, yeah, they came into existence through the plant-based meat craze and they're now the sort of biggest company of that kind in the region.
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But one of the founding ideas was this – as we go to feed 10 billion people,
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Most of that growth is actually going to happen in developing markets.
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It's going to happen in Indonesia.
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It's going to happen in Nigeria.
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It's going to happen in the Philippines where, especially in Africa, people don't eat that much meat today.
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But they want to.
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If they can get enough meat there, they'll eat enough meat.
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But then the emissions are just going to go through the roof.
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And so how do we kind of solve for that?
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And then especially how do we feed people in Africa if the price of meat is also going through the roof?
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What has that then taught you about the importance of framing, of the way you contextualize, about whether you talk about plant-based meat or plant-based protein, whether you talk about being for accessibility to meat or whether you are against animal products?
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Talk about what you've learned about the importance of not just framing wants but also staying focused.
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light on your feet to how attitudes are changing and how people are responding to a particular framing of a possibility that's a that's an excellent question because i and i think having plant-based meat as an example is a really good one because
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It's an example of where storytelling went very wrong and because the framing was wrong.
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When we started V2Food, our idea was we should do it as part of the meat industry.
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It's just another meat and together we should sell more meat.
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That's all about making twice as much food.
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and there's just so much diversity, so many opportunities for collaboration.
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For example, you have farmers that grow livestock also grow soy, and so the same farmer can be actually making money from animal meat and plant-based meat.
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All of our manufacturing and V2 food happens in the meat industry where meat is processed.
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And that was by design because our framing was, this is just another kind of meat, it's for everyone to grow, it's for everyone's abundance, and everyone's going to make money along the way and consumers will benefit.
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Of course, the actual narrative, which became the dominant narrative, was end animal agriculture.
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And there were some particularly militant declarations that this industry would come along.
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They self-declared themselves enemies of anyone involved in animal agriculture, which, of course, in countries like Australia and the U.S., that's red-rag to a bull, where we have such important industries here.
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which are all around animal agriculture.
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So they effectively made an enemy of somebody that wasn't actually an enemy in the hope that they would build an army of consumers which would move over from one to the other.
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That didn't happen.
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Meanwhile, they made an enemy that was very effective at telling an anti-story that sort of neutralized anything anyone was trying to do.
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This is a really interesting topic, the idea of having an enemy as a business.
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I think it can be really powerful.
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What Phil's talking about here is the danger of making the wrong enemy, the danger of picking an enemy that effectively can alienate a lot of your potential customers.
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We went through this at Four Pillars.
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We decided to make alcohol-free spirits.
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Now, clearly we couldn't be anti-alcohol because our main business was making gin.
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So we made our enemy low quality.
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and poor flavor.
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We said to people, you shouldn't have to choose between having a drink and drinking well.
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Now you can have both.
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We jumped on the alcohol-free bandwagon.
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We actually called the product bandwagon.
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But in every business, picking the right enemy, getting that right can be a really powerful way of animating your brand story.
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Go all the way back to episode one.
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Dom Pym didn't say the enemy for up is other banks.
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He said the enemy is the lost relationship people have with money, and we want to change that.
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So pick an enemy, just pick the right one and don't alienate your customers as you do it.
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I've got one more question.
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Imagine if your career took one more leap and weirdly you went from the world of deep tech to big boardrooms and you decide I'm going to spend some time in the world of corporate.
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The opposite of energized startups.
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Hundred year old companies have been doing the same things the same way, returning shareholder value, having to report every month, every quarter to the ASX.
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Often environments that are designed for steadiness and not designed for disruption, not designed for moonshots, but designed for safely, you know, delivering on their promises.
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would you try and bring to those environments what is the number one learning that you would put into your backpack to to take into that safer less risk friendly environment yeah i think it's a world i'm actually very excited about and i think it's it's the idea of bringing experimentation to that environment
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and still I think what we do well in venture is we do things which are implicitly risky but they have a big outcome so you that's it I mean I would say you can't do anything impactful without taking a risk but that it's not recklessly done there's a sort of practice around it where you're you're running experiments and the experiment could be a story does that resonate the experiment could be
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A pilot plan, the experiment could be an early version of the business with a small subset of the customers, whatever.
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And that's what allows us to really find the next big thing.
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And to do that without destroying what might be a big part of the business that you've already got.
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And I do spend quite a lot of time with boards helping people sort of think their way
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through that if you look at some of the biggest companies in the world today that have come out of venture capital i mean you know the you know the invidia's the google's the the facebook's amazon i mean amazon's a great example like who would have thought a bookshop would become a computing platform or you know i need a
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that they have an agility to thinking about, to spotting a market opportunity and moving a part of their business.
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Like they didn't sacrifice selling books or selling other stuff.
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And they have a wonderful storytelling discipline.
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I remember reading how one of Jeff Bezos' mandates to his team where if you want to come and pitch a big idea, you have to write the press release.
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You have to tell me when we get it right and we launch it,
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Write the story.
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And if you can't tell me what story will energize the world and be on the front page of the New York Times, why would we go after it?
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And it's a wonderful discipline.
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So I've got a question.
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I've spent most of my career trying to be the dude in the room with a T-shirt.
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Today I wore a jacket.
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When did you realize that you could be a grown-up in the world of business and still wear T-shirts to work every day?
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Well, some days I do wear jackets, I must confess, but I feel like the more grown up I try and dress, actually, the more old I feel and look.
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So I sort of try and keep myself carrying the message.
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And actually, I quite often wear startup t-shirts because it actually triggers a conversation.
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I'm very frequently stopped.
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at airports and waiting in a taxi queue and things like that for like, what's the story with your t-shirt?
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There's one that I wear that says moonshot country, really large and really large letters on it.
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And, and I, and that, that's kind of by design because we want to start a story, but that's about, you know, we're, we're telling a story in our work at the moment around how the next generation of big disruptive companies are actually going to rise in,
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in the regions, and the regions have felt a little bit cast aside for the last couple of decades, whilst the cities rise and digital technology goes crazy.
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But, you know, if you want to launch rockets, if you want to build the next generation of manufacturing capacity, all that's happening out in the regions, and we need to sort of celebrate that and get the regions excited.
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But the T-shirt tells the story.
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So these frontiers, do you think of Australia as a moonshot country?
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Because I feel that there were times when maybe we didn't believe that we could be the place where the moonshot came from.
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That's a story that we have to tell, and we have to tell that to each other.
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I mean, the actual story we've been telling the world for the last, I think as long as we can all remember, is we are where things come out of the ground and we sell them to the rest of the world quite cheaply to make valuable things that we then buy back.
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And we allowed ourselves to say, well, Australia is a small country.
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We can't have big companies here in Australia because the population just isn't big enough.
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But that's a story and a narrative that I kind of reject.
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And we reject that at Main Sequence because we think...
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We have incredible ideas here.
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The future is definitely going to be powered by ideas that manifest in the world.
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And they will – and Deep Tech, where we work, is science-driven –
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companies they are going to spread all over the world and um and that is i think our next the next australian story should be one of the frontier and how australian ideas actually powered that frontier it is fascinating to me this notion of how
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your story can be either an enabler or a constraint.
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00:42:49.380 --> 00:42:53.443
And I'm listening to you and you're talking about the future is going to be powered by ideas.
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And I'm thinking, well, it's going to be powered by ideas that have the physical space and the natural resources to bring those ideas to life.
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00:43:00.968 --> 00:43:10.914
And, you know, you're just talking about Australia and our scale and our abundance and what, you know, in the air and in the ground and in nature, our natural advantages, you pair those with ideas.
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00:43:10.934 --> 00:43:13.216
That's a pretty powerful story that we can bring to life.
399
00:43:13.356 --> 00:43:13.836
Yeah.
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Only if we believe in it.
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00:43:14.997 --> 00:43:18.841
And you're getting me pretty excited right there, how you sort of retold it back to me.
402
00:43:18.881 --> 00:43:26.988
Because I think it is that combination of ideas and actually having the resources to do something material with those ideas.
403
00:43:27.068 --> 00:43:32.273
And, of course, ideas are becoming cheaper and cheaper to produce.
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00:43:32.513 --> 00:43:36.657
And the tools that we've got superpower are our ability to sort of...
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00:43:37.357 --> 00:43:45.243
think of better ideas and to validate our ideas and share ideas better than we've ever been able to do before to a scary degree.
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But then some countries will be able to do something with those ideas and manifest them.
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And Australia, because we have those resources, which we're telling a terrible story about today, we can do something with that.
408
00:43:59.712 --> 00:44:00.593
It's interesting, right?
409
00:44:00.953 --> 00:44:05.957
We're sitting here in a podcast studio and just a few desks away are the guys who do the Batuta Advocate.
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I remember The Onion in America did this great piece.
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They sort of spoofed a TED Talk where a guy stood up with a vision for cars that didn't pollute.
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And he finished by saying, well, that's my big idea.
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It's someone else's problem to make it.
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00:44:17.606 --> 00:44:19.908
And it sort of reminds you more than ever now in this world of...
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00:44:20.368 --> 00:44:24.909
generative AI, ideas can to some extent get cheaper and cheaper and more abundant.
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And the question is, can you harness a great idea to a great ability to get that idea made?
417
00:44:31.790 --> 00:44:34.231
Well, and this is why you need a good story, right?
418
00:44:34.291 --> 00:44:43.233
Because I was speaking to one of our ministers in the government, and he said to me,
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I'm just so frustrated that we had one of the first computers in the world at CSIRO when computers were invented.
420
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And yet, why didn't we have Silicon Valley?
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Why didn't we have Taiwan?
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00:44:58.618 --> 00:45:00.199
And the answer is quite simple.
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For one reason or another, we just did not lean in to the revolution that was happening.
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We didn't have belief and conviction.
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We didn't put money down.
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We didn't take risks with our industry.
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And so now you come to today and you say, well, what do we need to do to actually not make that mistake again in the future?
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And stories are incredibly powerful to do that.
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And I often say to government folks that we work with quite a lot, they say, like, what can we do?
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And of course, money is always a good thing.
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But...
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00:45:35.119 --> 00:45:41.823
What they can do more powerfully is tell a consistent, exciting story.
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We talk a lot about missions.
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00:45:45.285 --> 00:45:46.926
What's the mission we're on?
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What do we actually want to achieve as a country?
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Because all these ideas take more than one force to get it done.
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00:45:53.871 --> 00:45:54.991
Where's the money coming from?
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00:45:55.012 --> 00:45:57.033
What's the connection to existing industry?
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What are all the industries that need to come together to make this thing work?
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happen who are the innovators where are they in the universities what causes them to raise their head up and look over the horizon and then see someone that can help them and missions help that stories help that and So what is that story and we come back to moonshot country again?
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00:46:18.722 --> 00:46:20.503
It's like well, what is it possible?
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I?
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that industries which are abundant in other places, powered by fossil fuels in China or Thailand or in Brazil or in the United States...
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the new versions of those don't exist yet.
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Like, is it possible they should happen here first?
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And stories are how people understand what is possible.
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I really hope we can find some of that in government, some of those stories that excite us as a nation to sort of build the next couple of decades of opportunity for us all.
448
00:46:59.643 --> 00:47:00.844
Phil, keep doing the good work.
449
00:47:01.064 --> 00:47:01.484
Thank you.
450
00:47:01.504 --> 00:47:02.565
It's been great to be here, Matt.
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StoryWork was brought to you in partnership with Slingshot.
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As you've heard in today's episode, stories really matter.
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And there is no story more important than the one you tell your customers.
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But finding the right time, place, channel, and medium through which to tell that story is critical.
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00:47:21.156 --> 00:47:23.297
And that's where my great friends at Slingshot come in.
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00:47:24.097 --> 00:47:29.561
Slingshot pride themselves on developing creative media strategies to propel their clients further, faster.
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You can find out more about the brilliant work that Slingshot does, helping brands find their audiences, tell their stories and achieve their objectives at slingshot.com.au.
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And talking about finding out more, you can find out more about this and every episode of StoryWork, including all the show notes and all of my key learnings from every conversation over on Substack.
