Blackbird's Tom Humphrey: Bootstrapping, exiting & investing in the next wave of tech

The Good Money Podcast

Moving from startup land to VC, Tom Humphrey is building out a new function at Blackbird, one of the most prolific APAC VCs. He details the struggle of bootstrapping startups and also where he feels the next wave of tech investment lies.

The Good Money Podcast brought to you by Cape; an Australian neobank Background on Tom Tom’s background spans across operational executive, entrepreneur and more recently an investor and advisor to a number of startups. Tom’s journey to becoming a partner at Blackbird might look like a familiar one having gone down the classic career path of management consulting and later in his career gaining an MBA.

Tom spent many years in Silicon Valley, where he built out Canopy, that was later acquired. Prior to Canopy, Tom was an Operations Executive of one of the original pre-Groupon discount stores in Ourdeal.com back in 2010. Over a 12 month period he was with the company as they scaled from a handful of staff to over 85, from and from 0 revenue to $25 million. As they went into hyper growth they exited to a joint venture between channel 10 and newscorp Fair to say that a 1 year timeline to exit is not so common! We had the chance to chat to him about his past experiences.

Who are Blackbird? Founded in 2012, now 35 people, Blackbird are one of the APAC regions most prolific technology VCs. Their most recent $650million fund is sector agnostic, heavily investing into a wide range of Australian and New Zealand based startups. Tom recounts the story of how they raised from tech founders for the first fund. They were one of the first $250k cheques into Canva, as well as others such as Xoox, Safetyculture, CultureAmp, to name but a few. That’s a lot of unicorns to be supported by one fund!