How I joined The Flock
Becoming a scout for a $7bn VC firm
Most good stories don’t start with your spam email folder, but this one does. One day, whilst absent-mindedly browsing my emails I noticed a message marked spam with the subject line “Blackbird Flock Program”. It had been sitting unread for two weeks!
It was from Blackbird Ventures, a $7bn Australasian investment firm whose mission is to invest in wild hearts, with the wildest ideas, right from the beginning. They were inviting me to become part of their scout program, affectionately known as The Flock.
The Flock is a small group of Kiwi startup founders, operators and community builders entrusted by Blackbird to scout companies in the wild and bring them in to pitch for investment. This group of wild hearts benefit from guidance and coaching from Blackbird and the founders that receive investment reap the benefits of being a part of the Blackbird founder community.
The Flocker experience has been nothing short of incredible. I’ve had coaching and access to some of the world’s best venture investors, not to mention an insider view of how Blackbird operates over the past year. It’s helped me build my mental models for investing, understand how a world-class firm operates, and given me a community of like-minded people that I can rely on for life.
Talks and deep dives included the likes of Scott Nolan (Founders Fund), Sam Wong (Blackbird), David Ulevitch (a16z), Nick Crocker (Blackbird), Brad Feld (Foundry), Kylie Frazer (Flying Fox Ventures) and Rayn Ong (Archangel Ventures). Just incredible people and investors.
I also had the opportunity to attend pitches and contribute to decision-making on investments. Highlights included Excellent and founder Samantha Gadd, which Blackbird led the seed round for.
Most significantly, I wrote my own Flock cheque into Authsignal, a super exciting FraudOps automation tool. I’ll save the Authsignal memo for another post, but how good!
To wrap things up I also became a Limited Partner in Blackbirds 2022 funds which total $1bn across NZ and AU. This means I have a tiny stake in new investments that Blackbird makes from these funds and gain exposure to a whole new asset class.
There’s plenty more to write about off the back of this experience so please like, share, and subscribe! I’m going deep into investing and personal finance.
Hardy
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P.S. I even made an appearance on the new Blackbird website!
