Blackbird's investment ups and downs, key sales lessons for founders and AI slop

Back in 2016, around the time LaunchVic was kicking off in Melbourne, Dave McManus left the city for Silicon Valley, determined to become a startup founder. Now he's back in Melbourne and the founder of Lightning Ventures has plenty of stories to tell and advice to share on episode 40 of Startup 360. Explaining Lighting, his no-code innovation studio, which helps early-stage startups rapidly build, test and launch software without needing a technical founder or large amounts of capital, Dave describes it as "the IKEA model of software development". "The way people build software is they go out, they find the tree, they chop the tree down, they hack the tree in half and they hand whittle all the pieces for the chair," he said. "Whereas the new model is out of the box, bang, click, click, bang - the pieces assemble a chair and it looks pretty much the same, does the exact same thing, hosted on AWS, with the exact same infrastructure that your custom-coded dev's doing without headaches, for like, a 10th of the price." Lightning has worked with more than 60 startups, combining lean product strategy with no-code tools. Cohosts Simon Thomsen and Majella Campbell were keen to know more about Dave's experience in San Francisco. "I think the Bay Area is very open and accepting of people, especially if you're having a go, it's amazing," he said. "I think they've got an advantage in San Francisco - seven miles by seven miles - so it's such a small area and you've got so many successful people. The personal life and the business life kind of intertwine. You could be at a house party having a chat with someone - and this actually happened to me in the kitchen at a house party - saying, 'Oh, what are you doing?' They're like,'Oh, I work in tech'. I'm like, 'Oh cool'. "Anyway, turns out that guy was the cofounder of Weebly that sold to Square for like $300 million. He was like the most modest, humble guy. So yeah, you get the opportunity to meet incredible people." On the penultimate show for 2025, Majella and Simon also talk about the leaked details of Blackbird's investor day, "AI slop" as word of the year, and the ban for life on GetSwift's cofounders to prevent them being company directors in Canada. Startup 360 is more founder fund than founder mode. It’s all about finding out what makes people tick and staying human. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and don’t forget to read StartupDaily.net for all the ANZ tech news for free!