Craig Blair Podcast

In today’s episode, Managing Partner Craig Emanuel sits down with Craig Blair, Co-Founder and Partner of AirTree Ventures.

AirTee are the pinnacle of the Australian venture capital ecosystem. Craig has been a trailblazer in Australian VC, having been investing in startups with a list of successful exits from the 1990’s, prior to founding AirTree in 2014. With $1.3bn funds under management, AirTree’s portfolio includes many of Australia and New Zealand’s iconic technology companies. Craig has led investments in Canva, Pet Circle, Go1 and Employment Hero, which have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in investor returns at greater than 100x initial investment. Prior to AirTree, Craig was a Partner at Netus, a venture fund that delivered top decile returns to investors for years in succession. Prior to his VC career, Craig was a founder of several startups including Travelselect, Beamly Australia, and the founding chairman of Pet Circle. Craig spent his early career in strategy consulting and investment banking.  Outside of AirTree, Craig is an active philanthropist through the Blair Caffrey Foundation which supports indigenous, women’s and humanitarian causes and the arts. Craig holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Sydney, and an MBA from INSEAD, France.

During this podcast, Craig holds an in-depth discussion with Craig on how he sees the Australian VC industry, how AirTree select and manage their portfolio companies, through to the secrets of maintaining the right work/life balance.

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Please see the transcripts of the show below:

Craig Blair transcript

[00:00:00] Ryan Loehr: Welcome to the Exchange Podcast by EWL. As advisors to some of the most successful families in the country, Craig Emanuel, Tim Whybourne and I, Ryan Loehr, draw upon some of the best minds in the country. We believe that by exchanging ideas, we can deliver better advice and better outcomes for the families we work for.

[00:00:32] Ryan Loehr: Now, we're inviting you on this journey. In this podcast, We interview some of the country's best investment managers, business advisors, bankers, and founders to share their valuable insights. And our hope is that with better information comes better decisions, helping you to achieve more financially. 

[00:00:53] Craig Emanuel: Good morning and welcome to the latest podcast The Exchange by EW&L.

[00:00:58] Craig Emanuel: This morning I sat [00:01:00] down one on one with Mr. Craig Blair, the CEO and co founder of Airtree Ventures. Airtree has invested in Overlooks now more than 1. 3 billion, invested across a number of both Australia and New Zealand's most iconic Craig was a lead investor in investments in companies such as Canva, PetCircle, GoOne, and Employment Hero, all of which have delivered and returned hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to investors over the last number of years.

[00:01:32] Craig Emanuel: Each of those have also returned more than 100 times the original investment from inception. Prior to Airtree, Craig was a partner in Nettus, a venture fund that consistently delivered the top 10 percent of returns for investors for many years in succession. Prior to his venture capital career, Craig was the founder of several startups including Travel Select, Bingley Australia, and also the founding chairman of Pet Circle.

[00:01:55] Craig Emanuel: Craig spent his early career in strategy consulting and investment banking. [00:02:00] Outside of Airtree, Craig is an active philanthropist through the Blair Caffrey Foundation, which supports Indigenous, women's and humanitarian causes in the arts. Academically, Craig holds a Bachelor of Engineering. from the University of Sydney, and also an MBA from INSEAD France.

[00:02:18] Craig Emanuel: I hope you enjoy the discussion with Craig. Good morning and welcome to the latest podcast of the Exchange by EW& L. This morning it's an absolute pleasure to welcome Craig Blair. Founder and partner of Airtree, in person at Airtree's Sydney office in downtown Surry Hills. What an incredible space to visit.

[00:02:39] Craig Emanuel: Now, in brief, Airtree are one of, if not the most respected venture capital or early stage investors. With a nearly decade long history of financing, mentoring and growing an extensive list of Australia, and now some of the world's most successful companies. Right through from technology through to retail.

[00:02:59] Craig Emanuel: Now I've been really looking [00:03:00] forward to this discussion this morning, Craig, as we have a huge amount of respect for you personally, and more importantly, the business you founded Airtree. Now, listeners out there, we really enjoy these podcasts, um, and more importantly, tapping into great minds like Craig's to learn a lot, a lot about the business.

[00:03:17] Craig Emanuel: Today we'll be discussing a little bit about Craig's background, what drives him personally, while discussing some key thematics such as current threats and opportunities Airtree might face in the current environment, and drilling down into some unique strategies employed by Airtree compared to competitors.

[00:03:33] Craig Emanuel: I remember meeting Craig a number of years ago when he kindly gave his time to stand up at our annual client events and educate our clients about venture and early stage investing. I must say from personal experience, we're very impressed with Airtree's track record and more importantly, the ability to source, recruit and financially back some incredible companies.

[00:03:52] Craig Emanuel: So personally, I'm invested in Airtree, have been for a number of years as a probably a large list of our clients. So great to have this one on one [00:04:00] chat with you today, Craig. First, let's touch on a bit of personal background about yourself. Um, you are renowned, as I'd say, one of the most respected pioneers in your industry in Australia, little about yourself and what originally attracted you to work in venture.

[00:04:16] Craig Blair: Thanks, Craig. Uh, well, first, thank you for that very generous, uh, intro. And also thank you personally, but also your clients for choosing to back us. You know, I think it's that support doesn't. We take that responsibility seriously, so thank you for that. My background, I'm a country kid from Armidale, New South Wales.

[00:04:35] Craig Blair: I grew up on a farm there with a family of eight people with a pretty, kids with, six kids I should say, with a pretty freewheeling, free spirited life. Um, I'd spent some time living in Indonesia for a whole, um, with a family. So it was a bit of a sort of, Interesting, you know, um, environment where I was just forging my own way and meeting new people and understanding different races and languages and [00:05:00] animals.

[00:05:00] Craig Blair: Um, so that was the base level, but I guess my journey into ventures being first and foremost, I started life as an engineer, actually building things. I worked on some projects, um, in civil engineering. So the Anzac Bridge. I still tell my kids that I built the Anzac Bridge all on my own when I drove it.

[00:05:17] Craig Blair: Uh, that's not true, obviously, but I was a part of that, um, as one of many, uh, projects. And really, I was just, I just learned to build things, organize people, get stuff done. Like, um, uh, and I had a bit of a career change. I sort of went overseas. I, I, I studied again. I had a business school called INSEAD in France and spent some time as a consultant banker and you know, I can do spreadsheets and album sheets, as you were sort of speaking before and PNLs and, and, uh, and definitely PowerPoint presentations, but that really wasn't my thing.

[00:05:52] Craig Blair: What really sort of floated my boat was being a founder and so I was lucky enough to found A travel, online travel company in [00:06:00] the first wave of the dot com era in the late 90s, we raised venture capital finance, we built a team, we shipped a product and we were, we were one of the, if not the leading sort of online travel player in UK and actually in Europe and we sold the business successfully, got out of the business and that was my first kind of entree into taking an idea, building something, taking some risks, making mistakes and creating this business that ultimately you.

[00:06:24] Craig Blair: Ended up selling out for a decent result for the investors. Did you take a public trade, Simon? We sold it into a public business, a public, a listed business called lastminute. com. So we didn't list ourselves, but we listed into them effectively. 

[00:06:38] Craig Emanuel: I remember the, uh, the dot, the dot, the dotcom boom very well like it was yesterday.

[00:06:41] Craig Emanuel: So in Australia's case, uh, you were able to buy anything with a dotnet, voicenet, davnet, and make an enormous amount of money. But there was all blue sky, but no earnings. 

[00:06:53] Craig Blair: And that's really instructive. Uh, you think about even today, we're probably going to talk about AI today, but like these, these are, these [00:07:00] frenzies tend to be fairly predictable.

[00:07:01] Craig Blair: Once you've seen them, there's a lot of hot air. There's a lot of hope. There's a few charlatans out there, but in amongst that, there are real businesses. And so I think that I was very lucky, you know, if you think about the dot com area, there's a lot of, a lot of business models just weren't ready or they were too early.

[00:07:15] Craig Blair: You know, I remember friends. Going off and doing boats and bulldozers and beds online just didn't work online, but travel was the one that worked because it was inherently productless. They went to, you know, went to electronic ticketing. There's a sort of data routing availability, both mathematical software problem to solve.

[00:07:33] Craig Blair: You're trying to show flights, if you like. And so it was, it was essentially, it did work. We actually were profitable. Actually in 1999 when the crash happened, or what 2000 should say when the crash happened, we were profitable. We were very uncool. 

[00:07:46] Craig Emanuel: Cycling forward a little post the tech, tech wreck, tech burn, um, since the infamous financial crisis of 2008.

[00:07:55] Craig Emanuel: There's been a huge emergence of private credit washing around the world, i. e. [00:08:00] non bank lenders. And as a result, the capital structure or stack has changed for most private companies. Do you see a bit of a blur between um, private equity, private credit and private debt? Do you sort of see, see all those in this effectively one melting pot?

[00:08:14] Craig Emanuel: Or in your case, your equity solely? Do you see that space going to be crowded and talk us through, if you see of, I guess, those industries merging together? 

[00:08:23] Craig Blair: I think of the three, it's definitely true that the private equity market is, is melding. You know, if you think about, um, our journey, we typically invest in a startup when it's very early.

[00:08:34] Craig Blair: It could be an idea. It could be like 10 people in a room, like it could be a million dollar check. And we, you know, if, if that business goes well, it'll go through this, you know, series A, B, C, D and so on too. hundreds of millions of dollars of capital raising, um, at some point in their journey, the company is either profitable or they can't be profitable.

[00:08:50] Craig Blair: So they're in control of the growth versus profitability trade off, you know, and, you know, they either choose to go for growth because it offers inherent defensibility or they choose [00:09:00] to show profit because they want to make sure that the financial discipline is on display. You know, somewhere between C stage venture capital, which is what our first fund does right through the growth stage venture capital, which is somewhere between a 10 and 100 million dollar check through to private equity, which is like 100 million dollar check to a billion dollar check that that starts to blur.

[00:09:20] Craig Blair: So I think if you look at. If you look at Canva right now, um, I think it's public knowledge, there's a tender process going on right now. Although, you know, we are investors in that as a growth stage venture capital alongside pre IPO investors like Templeton or T. Rowe Price or Fidelity. So we're all on the same stack at that point, but the journey starts with the early stage with us.

[00:09:44] Craig Blair: Private credit is different. That's a different, that's a different kettle of fish. 

[00:09:47] Craig Emanuel: Let's talk through about your, your portfolio construction if we can. So how important is geographic diversity, and particularly at the moment, you're seeing some dramatic and worrying tensions across the Middle East and Gaza, [00:10:00] argumentarily that has been the center of technology, disruption, venture capital raising, if you like, do you see that hindering the ability for business like Airtree to raise capital in this environment, or are you pretty isolated in the Australian ecosystem?

[00:10:14] Craig Blair: This is a great question. I think there's two sides of our business. So what we invest in, the companies we invest in, and where we get the capital from. The companies we invest in, we're a regionally focused venture firm. We only invest in Australia, New Zealand startups. Because it's here we have a great brand, we have a network of founders, other people, other founders want to join, we have a whole suite of services to help our founders.

[00:10:36] Craig Blair: Hi, people or community run communications campaign will learn from the best CFO all over the best CPO and have a portfolio. So that works. It's a club really works here. It doesn't work for founders elsewhere. So, so our bet is that Australia and New Zealand will continue to produce more and more world class companies.

[00:10:55] Craig Blair: Our job is to intercept them early, get a decent stake in them early, help them grow. And as they grow, you know, [00:11:00] they become part of our portfolio. So that hasn't, that hasn't changed. We're unashamedly regionally focused and we really do believe Australia and Zealand is a great place to start global companies.

[00:11:10] Craig Blair: As you've seen, it's through the canvas and go ones and the last things in the world. So that doesn't change. And if anything, that's probably, that's, that's even more advantageous in this. Environment or global turmoil. A lot of people wanna live here. You know, we, we are getting sort of founders who wanna move here, you know, staff that wanna move back to here.

[00:11:26] Craig Blair: People want to be here. Obviously lifestyle, vision and safety reasons, but also there's just an incredible array of career opportunities here. Um, you know, if you had a, we were sitting here even 10 years ago, someone was gonna. Uh, you know, Twitter or, or open AI to come and take a great job at Employment Hero, that would've if that job didn't work out, they're moving their family over here and back again.

[00:11:49] Craig Blair: Well, now if that doesn't, doesn't work out, they can take another job down and run down the road here from another eight in Unicorn. So that, I think that's becoming more relevant. On the capital side of things, that's, that's interesting story. You know, we, [00:12:00] we are about 90 percent Australian capital focus.

[00:12:04] Craig Blair: Um, half that's institutional backings here, half, you know, people like yourselves. Um, we are noticing more and more interest from, from international investors who want to invest in this Australian story. And they're doing that for a few reasons. One is they're just seeing results. You know, earlier funds are performing well.

[00:12:21] Craig Blair: We're top 5 percent of the world in terms of returns from our funds. So they're seeing returns and speaking for themselves. But secondly, the turmoil you were alluding to is starting to affect their investment thesis. They don't, you know, the people are pulling out of China, obviously. Middle East is a tricky area.

[00:12:37] Craig Blair: Um, so, so, and, and, and India probably hasn't shown. It's full potential after a lot of capital going there. So Australia actually is a, is a beneficiary of a people sort of turning that where else in the world can you build these, can you build, um, world class companies? We haven't seen it yet, but there's certainly a lot of interests.

[00:12:53] Craig Emanuel: Let's touch on the investment committee process still. So remember an analogy of private equity number of years ago. [00:13:00] Some describe private equity as portfolio of 20 different portfolio companies, otherwise described as 20 children in your family and if you had a family of 20 children, actually some of the children your favorites with parents would admit that and There will always be some black sheep Straight on the long path, fail school, whatever.

[00:13:21] Craig Emanuel: And, uh, usually most of the time it's the black sheep that transform into the dark horses. Shoot the lights out, do well, um, and naturally those sort of dark horses are typically those with the most character and stubbornness not to give up. Um, you've now seen a lot of these children in your funds. So, um, any particular black sheep which have transformed the dark horses, um, out of the left field.

[00:13:44] Craig Blair: It is. I mean, it's true. Like in any fund, we take, we take somewhere between 20 to 30 investments. We do early stage and, and, uh, you know, the history says it's pretty obvious. 25 investments, you know, three to five will end up being [00:14:00] very big companies to one or two of them in a very, very big companies. And the other 20, you know, there might be a third of their portfolio who just won't make it.

[00:14:07] Craig Blair: That's the risk we're taking off. They won't, they won't, they won't fail, but you might get your money back or half your money back. And so that's the risk we're taking as investors. That's the risk you're taking your, as you're a founder. But the reason the fund works is because we've got this power law, which is the power law is the most important concept in Venture Australia.

[00:14:24] Craig Blair: One or two companies will generate 80 Okay, yeah, 80 20 rule, okay. It's a function in any investment portfolio, not just venture, but it's more pronounced in venture because the variability is so high. So we're all about power law, we're all about these big successes, but you've raised a good point. The mistake I think you can make in venture is like, if, oh, you just, you just focus on those successes and you forget the ugly ducklings.

[00:14:46] Craig Blair: And I think that's In my experience, that's a bad strategy for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's deeply unfair. Like, there are founders out there who just take a bit longer to get there. And there's many stories, I'm not going to go into specifics, but there are many [00:15:00] stories of companies who have just taken a long time to get there.

[00:15:02] Craig Blair: They crawl in for a lot longer. They crawl for a long, exactly, good analogy. Um, and we joke, these overnight successes, sometimes like seven or eight years to come to fruition. So, um, equally, we're seeing companies going from zero to ten million dollars, or Actually zero to a billion dollars and fall from grace.

[00:15:20] Craig Blair: So this is not a sure path. I think you'd be very, it's a very humbling environment we're in. So, you know, firstly, don't judge too quickly. Give people time. But secondly, um, if, if a founder or company is struggling, that's when they need help. And the, and the, and the damage you can do in Danadventure is to sort of put all your energy into the, into the exciting ones that are working and neglect the ones that just And so we, we take a very conscious effort to put resources and help around companies that just might be in an early stage or might just be taking a bit longer, whether it's us as leads on the board, whether it's our portfolio support team, helping the founder of the team, hire people or think about new strategies, just to try and give them a nudge.

[00:15:58] Craig Emanuel: There's a list out there. Look, um, [00:16:00] angel investing for a different venture. Let's say angel investing typically is. Here's a check, stand back, arm's length, watch over the top. But in your case, particularly with managing 20 30 portfolio companies, there's more of I guess of a helicopter approach. You're hovering over the top.

[00:16:16] Craig Emanuel: How much time do you spend to physically have to handhold, jump in? Um, actively take board seats, get involved in governance, is it every single, um, deal that you're involved hands on with most weeks? 

[00:16:30] Craig Blair: Um, it's very hands on, but it's a very, it's a very good point. Like, we're not passive capital. The thing that distinguishes venture capital from most other asset classes, like, going back to this power law, we want to get into the best companies, the best founders, and often they're choosing us, not the other way around.

[00:16:46] Craig Blair: And they choose us because they want to be part of this club. They want to have these supports, these partners on this journey, John. So I think there's a contract that we kind of really signed together as being partners on this journey when they choose us over other venture firms. And then once you've done [00:17:00] that, then you've got to deliver on those contracts.

[00:17:01] Craig Blair: And so, to answer your question, we do a lot. So about, about a third of our portfolio we're sitting on the board. Um, if, if we don't sit on the board, we are actively, we have a lead, a lead partner who's helping that founder navigate. Anything from, you know, capital raising, hiring a team, a strategy, introductions to customers.

[00:17:21] Craig Blair: We have a, our fastest growing team here is what we call Portfolio Success. So it's a team of people who are just trying to take best practices across a portfolio. Our portfolio is about 110 companies now, so we have 110 companies. So if you've got a question, you're a founder, you know, what's the best way to structure an ESOP?

[00:17:39] Craig Blair: Or can anyone help me think about who I, a lawyer I should hire in, in the US, I mean in the US or, that, that can be fed into the group and we can get the answers back in again. If you're thinking about who's, um, if you're trying to level up your financial controller into what does a great CFO look like, well guess what, we can plug them into a CFO group and say this is what great looks like.

[00:17:57] Craig Blair: So there's a bunch of work around trying to level everybody up [00:18:00] in the portfolio. And the last thing we do is we have a whole team here which looks at the benchmarking across the portfolio. If you're a company in the early stage or mid stage or later stage and you want to know how you're tracking margins, growth, net dollar retention, churn, we can show you what that looks like, what good looks like, what great looks like, and what not great looks like.

[00:18:17] Craig Blair: So that you can benchmark yourself against others. 

[00:18:20] Craig Emanuel: Benchmark, do you have to necessarily then sort of look over the, look over your neighbor's fence if you like to see what competitors are doing? Is that important? Is what the benchmark against?

[00:18:27] Craig Blair: It is. So when we benchmark, you benchmark at companies against our portfolio of a hundred odd companies and we benchmark across the global companies.

[00:18:34] Craig Blair: And so you get two numbers there and you can say, here's where you are versus entry portfolio. Here's where you are versus the global SAS benchmarks. Being a founder is tough. You sort of head down. But in 60 years of the day, just putting, enabling you to get up and say, How am I going? And it says benchmarks.

[00:18:47] Craig Emanuel: Let's talk through the life cycle of business really from inception through to ideally a successful exit. Everything from the governance, leverage at the right time, cost cutting, coincidentally walking into your building a little while ago, [00:19:00] walked up a staircase and you've got an incredible array of um, books in your library here and one of the ones which stood out was Barbarians of the Gate, which I did read during the university days in the 90s and um, no doubt your industry has changed a lot since then.

[00:19:14] Craig Emanuel: It's no longer slice and dice, cut costs, leverage as much as it can. But at the moment, um, the environment you probably see it in, it's difficult to find deals. Deal flow is pretty slow, I'm hearing. Is that more, I guess, an argument of portfolio companies a little bit expensive to cut checks for, and more importantly as well, the number of deals out there is becoming limited.

[00:19:37] Craig Emanuel: You look through, again, the numbers on the sheer volume of capital raised in venture in Australia of last couple of years. I read the numbers in down almost 70 percent the last two years. So capital raising has been very slow. Environment because of cost of capital has gone up so hard. But it talks through, you see at the moment, pulling the trigger on a great deal is because of the [00:20:00] valuation argument or just there's not too many deals out there to deploy.

[00:20:03] Craig Blair: To answer that question again, you've got to come back to are you in the early stage or the later stage market? It's very different if you're investing in a C stage investment where it's, you know, valuations, 10 to 15 million. And you're getting 20 percent stake in the company. Um, that market has never been more buoyant.

[00:20:21] Craig Blair: We are seeing about 1, 500 companies a year. Last year, we did 14 new, net new investments in that space. So we're investing at a, as a fastest pace as we ever have in that space. And importantly, valuations have come back. You know, that's one of the metrics we have is what stake in that company we, we get.

[00:20:39] Craig Blair: We have the highest stake in companies now that we have had since our. Very first fund which is a reflection of valuations coming back the competitive pressures come off But there's just as many sales. So that that's a very buoyant market like And and business has not stopped there at all It is true in the later stage market.

[00:20:59] Craig Blair: That's where you're saying the [00:21:00] dollar investment come off It's not secondary what sex party secondaries, but it's if you're raising a Yeah, 50, a hundred, 200, 300 billion round, and in from 2000 and you 20 to 22, which are frankly just ludicrous times. We had a lot of international capital coming in. Hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds.

[00:21:20] Craig Blair: We, you know, probably unfair to call it tourist capital, which is jacked up prices, jacked up valuations, and it was very unhelpful for the sector. That's all gone back to people doing the day job, so. Uh, and so you've seen, you've seen that slow down dramatically. Uh, and so in that space, it's true that there's, there's less deals being done.

[00:21:39] Craig Blair: The, the valuations have come off a lot, uh, and we have seen, in fact, we've written two checks last year that we saw the same company. In the, in the bubble period, and we invested at or below the valuation they were in the bubble period, but their business is three or four or five times as big. So valuation has dramatically dropped their, um, uh, deal flow [00:22:00] has dropped, valuations have dropped and, and check, check sizes have dropped.

[00:22:03] Craig Blair: So we actually think that's, that's good because I think, you know, in the, in the, in the bubble period, we're very mindful of. Peaks and frothy markets. We've seen a lot of them before in our time. So we, we really did try and focus on discipline. We weren't immune to it, we made a few mistakes to be honest, but we, we did try and, you know, hold back on high value companies and we're seeing them again now at a better, better deal.

[00:22:26] Craig Emanuel: Looking back, um, still on the topic of books, um, I'm not sure if you've ever read the book Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers. Um, if you've read that book before, I remember reading the book back in the nineties and for listeners out there, it's a pretty incredible book to read. So a bit of background, Jim Rogers back in the nineties was one of Wall Street's most successful hedge fund traders, commodity traders, and um, otherwise known as the Indiana Jones of venture in the nineties.

[00:22:53] Craig Emanuel: And um, he, uh, through the job and through the talent because he'd made so much money. And, um, he, back at that time, he ended up [00:23:00] buying himself a small, um, Mercedes Benz SLK, little tiny, two door, two seat convertible. Still holds the world record for driving around the world. And, and seeing the most number of countries in such a short period of time.

[00:23:14] Craig Emanuel: Amazing story. But, um, at that time, um, he was, I guess, viewed as a visionary of God because spending so much time on grassroots in the world, he did foresee and predict the Chinese economic boom, the commodity boom, then returned to America and, um, then set up another fund, which was ultra successful. So interviewing so many different portfolio companies over, over, for example, I think you mentioned your mind interview.

[00:23:38] Craig Emanuel: Yeah. Upwards of 000 companies a year and only back 1 percent of those, which is an enormous number. The Italians have to be, I guess, pretty sort of predictive or forecasting or, as they get back to the grassroots analogy, like Jim Rogers used. 

[00:23:53] Craig Blair: That's interesting. We are definitely investing with a forward looking lens, you know, an investment horizon typically in the [00:24:00] early stage.

[00:24:01] Craig Blair: The business, if it's going to work, you won't find out, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, some of the ten years. You know, our funds are ten year closing funds. That's a long time, right? So I think just thinking about that, just thinking about compound interest in that space is difficult. We do try and have a view on where we think the world is going, not necessarily from macroeconomics and interest rates, that's, we leave that for people like yourselves, but I think we do think about what, how markets might be shaped by technology software, but we have to be very careful to not, not think we're in Nostradamus, you know, I think if you start to become a futurist, I think that's a death knell for VC's, so I think we have a view on where the world's going, we have a view on where we think might be some issue spaces, the most soon.

[00:24:41] Craig Blair: Interesting patterns are from the founders. What are we seeing in the market? You know, to your point, like your analogy of the on the ground. What are you saying? What is what's working? What's not working? Well, that doesn't look interesting. I've seen that before. And that's just as constantly stress testing biases.

[00:24:54] Craig Blair: Things you see before you like, is it good or bad bias? Yeah. Um, some patent recognition there. Like three [00:25:00] steps is working before that might work now to try and get a lens on. This is where the big bets might might be worth making. 

[00:25:06] Craig Emanuel: AirTree, founded in 2014. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. It's a 10 year anniversary this year.

[00:25:11] Craig Emanuel: Yeah. Yeah. Just a question. So obviously back at that time, so that was just post financial crisis for years afterward and markets had recovered at that time. He had global equities on a, probably the biggest bull run scene in history. Remember, um, the listed market at that time, the low of the S& P 500, 9th of March, 2009, S& P level of 666 points, number of the devil, that was a low.

[00:25:33] Craig Emanuel: And at that time S& P 500 strapped on a gain of. 600 percent over the following decade. So, um, perfect time for our tree to be born. I'm one of the biggest bull markets in history. How important it is, I guess, for a business like yours in venture, no doubt it's pretty closely correlated to public markets, but is it driven more, I guess, by, by confidence in the broader economy?

[00:25:54] Craig Emanuel: Um, I was surprised to see you say earlier that even allowing for the fact that the capital raising has dropped two thirds. [00:26:00] You've seen your industry normalize, if you like, but just talk us through, uh, how close in line do you think your industry is to public markets? 

[00:26:08] Craig Blair: I don't profess to be an expert in public markets, but there's no question, like, you know, there's companies we're working with, compete with companies that are part of it.

[00:26:14] Craig Blair: On valuations. So, valuations of capital. And there, and there's no question, you know, interest rates plays a role on our cost of capital for sure, as it cycles. Um, so I think in the short term you see, you know, when, when, when money was free interest rates were low, you saw exuberance and so that's like, that's a market cycle we see, which wasn't, wasn't just venture, but venture saw that a lot and I think a lot of flight to risk capital.

[00:26:37] Craig Blair: And so we saw. money coming in, we saw valuations increase, we saw founders raise rounds they probably shouldn't have at valuations that were unjustifiable and then probably burnt too much money. And so, so, so, so, so we've seen a short term, those are those, but we've seen that through, you know, 2000 crisis, the GFC, the COVID crisis.

[00:26:57] Craig Blair: So we've seen a few of these. [00:27:00] But I think when we think about an investment game at the early point, technology should, should look through that. If you've got, if you've got an innovation, if you've got a seriously defensible business. Software is making a material impact. It's creating value to a sector or changing the way people can buy or, or sell goods or changing is making a company more efficient or it's offering a new service for health professionals that, that exists where their interest rates are zero or 5%.

[00:27:28] Craig Blair: Um, and I think to use your, I don't think science, if you're looking, if you look at how that's played out, if you just. Just in our, in our world, we've seen companies, you know, we've, we've seen companies 40, 50x in that 10 year period. Our, our first fund is, is worth, um, more than 10 times the fund. It's a 53 percent IRR.

[00:27:47] Craig Blair: We've returned half of that in cash. This is real, real businesses. But if you look in the public market, it's the same thing. I think I just did a piece yesterday for our 10 year anniversary. We're looking at our original deck, [00:28:00] which we presented to our investors. It was a little bit squirmy to look at this deck from 10 years ago.

[00:28:04] Craig Blair: But. One of the things we were worried about was this valuation exuberance. This thing I think was too expensive and it was interesting. I think, you know, Uber has, has, has gone from like a 10 billion devaluation to a hundred billion valuation. You know, Airbnb went from $2 billion to 20. These were 10 x these companies and we thought they're expensive.

[00:28:22] Craig Blair: Two, 2014, Amazon, uh, apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were worth a combined value at market cap of $1 trillion in 2014. So it's, it's not just, it's not just a venture, it's like this is, this is a technology just wreaking havoc. And they're profitable by the way, is that those companies, those four companies I mentioned in the public markets have been pretty much all the profits generated on the NASDAQ in 10 years.

[00:28:48] Craig Blair: So it's not just growth, it's profits that they've been producing. So I think we're seeing that technology is, is, is able to drive through market cycles if you're prepared to take a long term view. And create these incredibly [00:29:00] large, defensible businesses. Um, our job is in the meantime to navigate the sort of two or three year market cycles and make sure you're not spending too much money, you're managing costs, you're trying to grow product, grow defensibility, um, and, and, and hopefully come out the other end.

[00:29:14] Craig Emanuel: Interesting on the analogy you so of using a forward lens, because remember reading a, um, a headline might've been on the, the A FR about a year ago. The title was that SaaS is Dead. Yeah. And I thought, wow. Yeah. I would have never thought of that before, but in some way that, that software as a service, it's, it's old tech, which generally leads me into, I think, a topic you spoke about earlier, AI, artificial intelligence.

[00:29:37] Craig Emanuel: Interested to see this morning, just shortly after the U. S. markets closed, that NVIDIA released its profit result, and it was, um, way above expectations. As a result, NVIDIA is up 7 percent in aftermarket trade. But the markup in video is unbelievable. I think it breached the three trillion dollar valuation mark.

[00:29:53] Craig Emanuel: But look, artificial intelligence, I would agree it's probably one of the most dramatic technology changes we may see in our lifetimes. It's [00:30:00] been promoted as that. Then back in the old 90s, uh, the tech boom, um, facial recognition. The emergence of data in cloud and the sheer amount of data which AI needs to survive is incredible in itself.

[00:30:12] Craig Emanuel: But do you see how AI is a positive and negative in the fact that some economists out there are predicting that AI will be bad for the economy because of job disruption, great for margins, but talk us through, I guess, in your view, AI, the net results for your business and probably the economy, if we can.

[00:30:29] Craig Blair: So I think the first point is, is AI is just another platform shift and I think, you know, I think it is true to say it is certainly one of the most interesting, potentially one of the most profound platform shifts we have that will potentially change our day to day lives, you know, the way you run businesses and create entirely new business models, but it is just another shift and we've seen this Platform shift before we saw in the dot com when I did my first startup in the late 90s, we saw the shift in mobile, which dramatically changed how you think [00:31:00] about how you use, you know, communication, how you create a whole new business models.

[00:31:04] Craig Blair: Who would have thought? The mobile platform shift would have birthed a company like Uber, which is basically a ride sharing business. Well, it's only possible because of mobile. Then we saw the platform shift into SaaS. Our deck from 10 years ago talked a lot about, sort of, big data, which is a real buzzword.

[00:31:22] Craig Blair: And the drivers behind big data, which was like bandwidth costs coming down, storage costs coming down, computer costs coming down, which means computers are going to actually Businesses and people's wanted more stuff and then when how do you deliver more data more they wanted to run their business more effectively They wanted to drive more efficiencies that and then that sort of it was a precursor to the explosion of sass 10 years ago So sass was the last one cloud computing next one and now we've got AI I think the first job is our job is to sell out the signal from the noise There's a lot of noise out there.

[00:31:52] Craig Blair: There's a lot of Things that say AI, they're not really AI, and we've got to just remember, this is just software. It's a very [00:32:00] interesting software, don't get me wrong, and it's got to be right, but it's just on the software layer. We are almost certainly over, overestimating the short term implications and probably overestimating the long term impacts.

[00:32:10] Craig Blair: This is the kind of thing we all do as a society when you have these platform shifts. The herd mentality, um, you think it's gonna happen tomorrow. It generally under delivers on those expectations. And then if the platform is true, it will come out the other end. You go, where, how did we get an Uber, for example, out of mobile.

[00:32:28] Craig Blair: That's who you look back on it. Is it positive or negative? I think it's definitely positive for sure. Um, I think it's positive for businesses. society, us as investors, there are no, there's no question there's some like, there's regulatory protections we need to put around there so we can actually manage this well.

[00:32:45] Craig Blair: Um, what we spend a lot of time as investors, where does it, where do the actual values flow? Because in this platform, who actually captured the value, you know? So you look at cloud computing, uh, there was a lot of value around SAS, which is true, but there's a lot of value captured [00:33:00] by the AWS as well, the underlying infrastructure, which we can't invest in.

[00:33:05] Craig Blair: So in AI, our view is AI has a lot of value in recruiting incumbents. If you're an incumbent and you can, you've got millions of users, you've got a large database, you can build applications on top of the LLMs to service your customers, you're going to be well placed to capture a lot of value there.

[00:33:20] Craig Blair: Canvas has done that, for example. Canvas is one of the portfolio companies. It's a, it's a, you know, very large business. They've actually got 10 feature AI features that they've built into the platform, sitting on top of other large language models to do everything from like, how do you take text to write, put in a small text prompt, it'll write you an essay to text to image, put in a small text image, it'll draw you an image.

[00:33:44] Craig Blair: You can insert in your presentation or your Instagram post. So they've got 10 of these images, 10 of these features. They're building days, innocent days, so they are, they are beneficiaries of AI and they're not a start up. 

[00:33:57] Craig Emanuel: So they do generative as opposed to predictive, so they're generating [00:34:00] before we're- OK.

[00:34:00] Craig Blair: Yeah, so you can go in there and say, I did it before, you know, I'd like to write a post on a surfer who's wearing a tuxedo and eating a taco, and it wrote me an essay on that and why that could be interesting, and then they say, well I want to turn that into an image, you can turn that into an image using AI, and then you can say, well that image or that Uh, into a Instagram post or a presentation mode so you can use machine learning to try and generate content based on very small prompts.

[00:34:26] Craig Blair: So incumbents take a lot of the value. We do think there's an application layer in machine learning tooling. There's a few areas we've invested in. We're pretty excited about it. I think we have to be very mindful of, of, of where, just, just because AI is on a deck doesn't mean it's investable. You've got to look beneath the hood and say, why does this make this business actually long term sustainable?

[00:34:46] Craig Blair: How do they actually win against these large incumbents?

[00:34:48] Craig Emanuel: Our industries carry some similarities, if you like. So in our case, um, as advisors to our clients, we're advising them to typically buy a portfolio, spread across all different asset [00:35:00] classes, that be from bonds to equities to private markets. So there's a slight difference for our industry in the fact that, um.

[00:35:05] Craig Emanuel: We're investing for the long term and effectively the runway is almost, uh, unforecast. In your case being in private equity, there's two, I guess, simple paths to your business. On the transaction side, there's a buy and a sell. Firstly, if you can talk us through the pressure if you've raised capital and deals, deals are pretty scarce at the moment.

[00:35:25] Craig Emanuel: The pressure deal with on from LPs or investors to deploy capital if there's not too many deals around. Pressure from you on investing in companies. In second as well, the pressure you might see it in the fund you have at the moment in exits as well, planning on exit. So talk us through your method on thinking on, on the bias on the sales side, because yeah, it's not that, that simple to deal with.

[00:35:47] Craig Blair: Interesting. That I think this is a, this is a framework, which I think venture has a lot of learning to do. I think, in venture you, you know, it's, it's one of the best jobs in the world, right? You get to meet founders, you get to invest in the company, you get to see your own [00:36:00] corners. Um, but the mistake that can be made in venture is you.

[00:36:03] Craig Blair: You forget, you're great at the venture part, but you're not so great at the capital part, which is getting out of the business. I'll come back to that. Um, do we have pressure from our LPs, our investors, to, to put money to work? No, no, we don't actually. I think, I think, you know, investors generally invest.

[00:36:20] Craig Blair: They know it's a 10 year time frame. We have a 10 year, um, close end fund. Typically, we have up to five years to invest that money. We typically invest that money somewhere around two or three years. And that's pretty typical for funds globally. And then, in the last span. So we've, the first investments up to two or three years, the last seven odd years in the fund, we're doing, we're using reserves, we're sort of doubling down on the winners.

[00:36:44] Craig Blair: Sometimes we're fixing the ones that aren't working, back to our ugly duckling. And then we're exiting somewhere around year seven, eight, nine, 10 of the five year cycle to think about exiting companies. And that exiting part is, is really important in a venture. It's a serious responsibility. People give us our capital, we've [00:37:00] got to give it back.

[00:37:01] Craig Blair: With a large return that justifies the risk they've taken. We have a process where we institutionalize. Every month we look at exits. We look at what we can do at which companies we should be getting out. What we do to that company, with that company, to try and help it get in a position to sell. We think about our portfolio in three buckets in terms of how we exit.

[00:37:20] Craig Blair: Whether it's a fund returner which we want to ride for a while. Whether it's a middle returner we want to engineer an M& A. Whether it's one that's just not working, where we've got it turning zeros into ones. And what we're trying to do is provide as much discipline on that back end, the exiting part of it as, as, as the front end.

[00:37:38] Craig Blair: But it's fair to say it's not one that's done well in the venture. And I think, I think unfortunately that's being found out. A lot of funds now are getting pressure for their LPs to show, show us some cash returns. And I totally understand that pressure. We are fortunate in our, in our, our first fund, as you say, it's coming up to 10 year vintage.

[00:37:56] Craig Blair: We've given back, you know, three and a half times the money back. [00:38:00] 50 percent return. Our investors are largely happy there and we've got a, we, we communicate very clearly where, where we're selling and where we're holding and why we're doing that with them. That's our oldest fund. Our second oldest fund is a 2016 fund.

[00:38:11] Craig Blair: That's got about four, three, three years left to run on that fund. We are actively looking at providing liquidity. I think it's fair to say in these markets, it's not, it's not a great time to get liquidity. So you've got to be, you've got to be very sort of. It's tactical about that. Is it valuations or the I think in the, if you think about a portfolio, again going back to one or two companies, funds in a portfolio are going to be big dollar plus companies.

[00:38:36] Craig Blair: They're growing at 50 percent round. They're very valuable companies. Your, your, your exit route there is either an IPO or a trace sale. And so that's largely been shot. And you really don't want to sell those winners too early. Because they're going to do the work on the fund. Then you've got the middle rank of the fund, which might return somewhere between 1, 2, 3x of their capital in.

[00:38:56] Craig Blair: It's a good investment, not great. They are generally [00:39:00] mergers in M& A, and this market is just not a lot of M& A going on, so that's the one that suffered the most. And then turning zero is the one you can do that, but that's generally M& A as well. So I think in a world where M& A is suppressed, people are really thinking twice about buying companies and merging companies.

[00:39:16] Craig Blair: It's very hard to get out of those type two, bottom two markets. 

[00:39:19] Craig Emanuel: You mentioned, um, double down, double down on winners, um, but assuming then maybe you don't double down on losers, which is almost the exact reverse approach that we take, for example, in managing client portfolios, which almost sounds illogical because last year was a great year for everyone.

[00:39:35] Craig Emanuel: Um, the previous year, everything lost money other than cash. The year 2023 was completely reverse that. Cash was losing everything else made money. I think luckily with us. whether it was by pure luck or chance, we're invested in actually two, number one or two of Australia's highest performing funds, one being Hyperion, and it performed last calendar year more than 70 percent for the year.

[00:39:56] Craig Emanuel: So three times NASDAQ. And we're in the process of talking through [00:40:00] clients about banking some gains here and shifting out of the underperforming assets. But it sounds like you take the reverse approach. We can't take the concentrated risk, but in your case, sounds like you're happy to. Double down on winners and not so much keep funding the losers.

[00:40:13] Craig Emanuel: Is that more the approach you take on that? Because in that case, you'd build up a bit of concentrated risk, wouldn't you, on top heavy on the winners?

[00:40:19] Craig Blair: I had never thought about it in that context. I mean, you're right. I had to get my, my portfolio outside of Airtree, it's about diversification, balanced risk.

[00:40:27] Craig Blair: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we are about constant, concentrating. the capital into the, into the business, so to speak, because, because the power was so great, you know, it came back to an early point. You can see the success. You can see the success. Often these companies, you have an inside running of the company, you have unfair information advantages.

[00:40:43] Craig Blair: These are not public. It's a jock on a horse. Exactly, exactly. And you have what's called pro writer rights. So, these are rights we have to invest in the next round, or the following round, or the following round. So when we invest in a company, we have a 15 percent stake in a company. We have the right to invest in 15 percent every round.

[00:40:58] Craig Blair: Going forward, [00:41:00] that is worth a lot of money. You just can't be outta these bounds. Okay. At, at a discount or No, not the same valuation, but, but you know, if you try to get into some of the top performing companies right now, you're not a current investor. You can't get in there. So we have a right and the information advantage and a relationship advantage, which means we can put money to work in these, these things are going, that's why you end up concentrating your investments in those ones that are working.

[00:41:21] Craig Blair: Um, I think it's the opposite side. We have the opposite problem often. Yeah. When you're. That not all these companies work, you're on the board, you, you've fallen in love with the idea, you've been on the journey with the founder, you really have fallen in love with your gifted child, right? And so when it's not working, the temptation is to keep putting money into it, when actually the, the right thing for the company is to like, we just need to rethink this, this plan here.

[00:41:44] Craig Emanuel: I was surprised to hear recently that um, the world's largest sovereign fund, The Norwegian Sovereign Fund, CEO Nikolaj Tangen, it is by far the largest sovereign fund in the world, manages close to 3. 5 trillion in assets established in the early 70s. The sheer [00:42:00] size of that, that fund is a behemoth. So for me, I think they, they own more than 5 percent of all listed equities globally.

[00:42:07] Craig Emanuel: They own 15 percent of all listed equities across Europe, but they're unable to invest in any private markets or venture. Which surprised me. Um, they're waiting for formal approval from the Norwegian government. It's been coming for years, but so is Christmas. But broadly speaking, I think we are personally very excited at private markets and venture ourselves.

[00:42:24] Craig Emanuel: And we've been allocating maybe up to 30, 40 percent of our allocation across our client base in time to part of the market, but in your case, um, industry demographics and specific. So. Um, do you see the Australian economy as a crowded space to your market, scope for growth? And if it does become crowded, uh, your mandate to kind of step outside of Australia geographically talk us through the plans for entry for the next 10 years, if you're still in this chair in 10 years time.

[00:42:52] Craig Blair: Well, hopefully I am. I think I've, you know, I think I love this job and it's an honor to be able to manage people's capital and hopefully return that with a [00:43:00] lot of interest and returns. It's also, you know, just a privilege to work with founders. I want to be here for 10 years time. I think you've made a good point there about private capital and then the broader economy like the AirTree's journey.

[00:43:11] Craig Blair: One of the big changes that's happened in technology in the last 10 years is great companies either don't go public or they go public much, much later. So if you look at the Amazons and the Facebooks and they all went public at, you know, Amazon went public at 250 million market cap. So the idea of you raise venture capital funding.

[00:43:30] Craig Blair: You make it 5, 10 times, 20 times your money, you get public at 100, it captures for the public market. That doesn't happen now. We have companies that are 25 billion dollars, you know. Our companies will get to multiple billions of dollars before they even think about listing. And why is that? Your first question is a very sophisticated capital stack in the private space.

[00:43:50] Craig Blair: You can raise, if you're a great founder, you can raise a round in a couple of weeks. You can do a secondary round, a primary round in a couple of weeks. You can raise them from investors who aren't going to be looking at your [00:44:00] quarterly earnings. They're going to take a longer term growth view in the business.

[00:44:03] Craig Blair: Um, so you don't need it for capital. Um, you, you, you align yourself with investors who are taking a long term view, align with you, not quality earnings. Um, you can get liquidity for your staff, for your early investors, and that happens now. So, and, you know, frankly, a lot of founders just don't want to be public market CEOs until they have to.

[00:44:22] Craig Blair: So I think that the sad truth is, um, what we've seen is a tremendous amount of value created by technology companies that's all captured in the private space. And sadly, it's all captured by privileged people like you who can get access to our funds. Your mum and dad investors who are in the public market are just not getting that, that, that thing.

[00:44:44] Craig Blair: Um, unless you're a super innovation investor, which are obviously investors in our fund. Edgley's views going forward, I think we, we don't want to just get bigger for the sake of it. We've never done that. We've actually always raised funds that were sized. Because we thought that's where the investment opportunity is.

[00:44:59] Craig Blair: [00:45:00] Our core fund investments, our seed fund investment funds has been the same size now for four, four sizes. I can't, we're not going to raise a bigger fund because we can. We've always run back capital and cut back capital to. Because we think it's, we want a lot of discipline. We want to have the right size fund, not the biggest fund.

[00:45:16] Craig Blair: So, um, so I, I don't think we grind for the sake of it. We, we, we strongly believe that venture is such a hard game. You've got to get to a quarter of returns to be, to earn the right to be here in 10 years time. And you have to get there by having a very disciplined investment thesis, a very clear market focus.

[00:45:34] Craig Blair: In our case, it's regional focus, early stage software businesses. That's all we do. We think we can see. 90 percent of the market, we look at this every quarter, we think we can win most of the deals because of our brand and our track record. And then if Australia keeps producing these incredible companies, then we should be able to keep generating returns.

[00:45:55] Craig Blair: We don't think going to the US or going to Europe is something we can do because [00:46:00] it's so competitive out there and so many other people are doing that thing. So we're unashamedly regionally focused there. Um, but I think in 10 years time, venture's changing too. It's going from a cottage industry to a, Much more sophisticated sector.

[00:46:12] Craig Blair: We've got 45 people in this office sitting in right now. Yeah, that would have been a herd of 10 years ago. In 10 years time, you know, it'll be, it'll be a different kettle of fish. I think the alpha is becoming harder to find in venture, for sure. It's become like any asset class. So we have to compete on brand, track record, and making sure we can see the best founders, invest in the best founders, keep the best founders, and keep backing the best ones in their portfolio, um, in order to generate those returns.

[00:46:43] Craig Emanuel: I might circle back on, if I can, um, university mandate a little. What I mean by that is at the moment Airtree is probably viewed as a private to private business, i. e. um, investing in a private company and trade selling it, or alternatively a private business. It's a public business backing a great company and [00:47:00] taking it public.

[00:47:01] Craig Emanuel: Um, you might have seen a recent use that, um, Yahoo was delisted taken off the public markets back in the private hands and purchased bipolar in, in North America, one of North America's largest private equity funds. Do you see, given current valuations and do you scope any public market companies for, for that reason, do you see, um, a Yahoo, um, in Australian sense where you could, we could deit yourself and go, go from.

[00:47:30] Craig Emanuel: Public to private. 

[00:47:31] Craig Blair: We certainly know the listed companies in Australia. And I guess, I know you have a view on the listed companies in the U S and it's true to say there are a number of listed tech companies, which are probably not being supported as well as they could. And maybe their price is the press.

[00:47:45] Craig Blair: I think that's probably a fair statement. And I think that that's somewhat, it's a commentary on like the sophistication of the ASX. Like, can they actually understand these businesses? So I think it's actually a true statement. We don't, we don't do that. We don't, we don't do this because that's a, that's a different model where you [00:48:00] have to own the whole company.

[00:48:01] Craig Blair: Again, we, we, we take minority stakes in companies. We work with founders. We work about growth. That's more of a turnaround story, ownership story, which is not what we do. Exactly. Um, and look, I get the model and I think I want to see more of that. And there's been some great examples in Australia. So, you know, with some friends that potentially have done a great job there, but, um, it's not, it's not kind of what, it's not our shtick.

[00:48:22] Craig Blair: We think there's enough. Growth companies we can get early on and frankly, we'd probably, we'd discourage people going to the ASX early for those reasons because why would you need to? Wait until you're big enough, wait until you can, you know, a very large company with a clearly defined mandate story that investors can get and you can deliver on your earnings day in, day out, and the you list. 

[00:48:44] Craig Emanuel: Clearly, obviously being a founder of a successful business like Antwerp, growing from a couple of staff yourself and Craig Blair to the staff I see outside this, your boardroom of, call it 50 staff. So, um, know that over the last 10 years, you've worn a number of hats, the HR [00:49:00] hat, the IT hat, the marketing hat, the, um, and that sort of thing.

[00:49:03] Craig Emanuel: But talk us through, I guess, getting the right balance between. Work, life and family. Um, Wouldn't be easy. You'd probably go to bed at night and wake up thinking about, um, a couple of the children in the portfolio company. But talk us through how to get that balance given the career you have. 

[00:49:19] Craig Blair: Yeah, that's an interesting question.

[00:49:21] Craig Blair: I don't know if I've ever been able to say the word balance. But I do, I think it's a really important thing to do if you're serious about a long term career and basically fulfilling life, I think it's really important to try and get that right. It is true that as somebody for yourself, we have to wear different hats in a, in convention.

[00:49:38] Craig Blair: We have to wear the business building founder hat. How do we build the company here? But also the investor hat, like how do we actually make great investors? We're sort of a single person contributor. I've got a job to do to make buying companies and the ability to deliver access and, you know, for our investors.

[00:49:53] Craig Blair: So there's two things we have to do there. Um, how do I get the balance? I think, um, I, I think firstly, I, I, I [00:50:00] surround myself by people who just don't even care what I do. My family keep me well and truly bolted to the floor that I get, you know, me getting ahead of myself. My, um, my, my, my, my, um, a lot of family who have, would put up with no nonsense at all.

[00:50:12] Craig Blair: You know, my friends don't really know what I do or care what I do. So that's, that's, that's give me some sort of, this is, this is a, this is a really important job. It's a great job, but it's not. And then what do I do? I try and stay pretty fit and active. I like to get out and surf, go to the ocean, swim.

[00:50:28] Craig Blair: I'm in the ocean most of the time. Um, I'm happy to be a game of golf or get spotted fishing. Adventure sports is like a thing. I think it's, I believe in that. Just trying to stay very fit and active is kind of part of the performance area. And then I think I, I, I, I, I love reading fiction. I read a lot of fiction.

[00:50:49] Craig Blair: I think, you know, Like most young ambitious guys, I've read all the business books you can imagine, but I feel like fiction is a much more interesting way to understand the world and to develop [00:51:00] in creativity and empathy. So I like, I read a lot of, a lot of, a lot of fiction. I guess finally the arts, I'm interested in broadly the arts as a broad concept, whether it's visual arts, whether it's film, whether it's music, you know, I think that's something that sort of figures on the other side of the brain.

[00:51:15] Craig Blair: It doesn't probably get as used as much. 

[00:51:17] Craig Emanuel: Final parting thoughts, can you tell us something about yourself, a trait of yours personally, which maybe your work colleagues don't know about you, any unusual, tell us, tell us a bit of a secret, anything unusual about yourself? 

[00:51:28] Craig Blair: I think that I have the, the flaws of a founder, at least age four and older, is I value kind of first principles thinking and, and I'm contrarian at heart, like I just, I just always I'm just interested in the alternative path and maybe think about this differently, or there's got to be a better way of doing that.

[00:51:47] Craig Blair: And that comes from the science engineer background, it comes from being a founder, like that's what inspires me. And I think that is very useful sometimes when you're investing for sure, but it can be a problem when you're trying to [00:52:00] scale a business where you just do it the same, just do the order back to your thing, just do finance, don't, don't innovate and add finance, just do that right way.

[00:52:07] Craig Blair: So I think just getting that balance right is something that I, I need to work on that, otherwise it's driving people nuts trying to. Make things even better or think from first principles and then the organization can't scale up. 

[00:52:19] Craig Emanuel: Stepping up to the polls and no one's voting for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:52:23] Craig Emanuel: Thanks so much, Craig. And look, um, finally, a very huge thank you for taking the time to provide us with your very valuable knowledge. Um, welcoming us to your boardroom in Surrey Hills. I'm sure our listeners will agree we've learned a great deal from today. So, again, thank you very much for your amazing insights.

[00:52:40] Craig Blair: Thank you. Thank you, Craig. Thank you. And thank you to EW& L for your support. It's great to have you on on board.

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