Investing in the 1%: Backing generational companies with Blackbird’s Samantha Wong

Samantha Wong was employee #1 at Blackbird Ventures, the largest shareholder in design software giant Canva and one of Australia’s most influential venture capital (VC) firms. 

When Sam joined Blackbird in 2015, the Australian VC ecosystem was in its infancy - a cottage industry with just a few hundred participants. The landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade as companies like Atlassian, Afterpay, SafetyCulture, and Canva have captured investor attention and created a thriving breeding ground for innovation.

Venture capital has historically been viewed as an asset class reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but today, many Australians have exposure to it via their superannuation. While a pervasive narrative suggests that Australia lacks innovation, a closer look at the VC landscape proves otherwise.

In this episode of The Rules of Investing, Sam discusses the rapid evolution of the VC landscape in Australia and New Zealand, why backing the right founders is essential to early-stage investing, and the next generation of companies growing at unprecedented rates.

Access the interview via the players or read a summary below

Interview summary produced by a Livewire editor with the assistance of AI

VC investing explained

Early-stage venture funds typically operate on closed-ended, 10-year timelines, with managers working to build a diversified portfolio of 30 to 40 companies within the first three years.

Capital is staged progressively from pre-seed or seed stages over four to five years based on traction. In this high-risk landscape, half of the companies may not survive, but a fund’s ultimate success relies heavily on power-law dynamics where a select few outliers drive the entire fund's returns.

"What you really care about is that your outlier companies that perform, typically there's a quarter of the companies that are responsible for 100% of the returns of the fund and one to two logos that really produce your one times the fund."

Australia’s competitive edge

Despite persistent narratives that Australia lags in innovation, Sam argues that the local ecosystem possesses distinct structural advantages that punch well above their weight globally. She breaks down three underappreciated pillars driving this success:

• The R&D tax rebate: Sam highlights that up until a certain scale limit, local startups receive 45 cents back on the dollar for their research and development spending. In her view, this incredibly generous program serves as the lifeblood of Australian startups, allowing early-stage capital to stretch significantly further than it would in competing global markets.

• High-value talent rbitrage: Sam points out that Australia boasts world-class universities and is the second-largest producer of AI PhDs in the APAC region. She emphasises a major advantage: 70% of these highly skilled graduates choose to stay and work locally, giving companies access to global-tier technical talent at a 30% discount compared to Bay Area salaries.

• A global-first mentality: Because the domestic market is so small, Sam explains that local founders are forced to bypass traditional, localised sales models and design their businesses for a global scale from day dot. Decades of local success stories have established a sophisticated, repeatable playbook for product-led, bottoms-up global growth.

"We have structural reasons why we are one of the best ecosystems in the world for producing unicorn outcomes to dollars invested."

Halter: AI meets farming

While vertical AI applications in software are booming, some of the most profound innovation is happening in traditional industries that previously skipped the cloud and mobile revolutions. New Zealand-born agtech company Halter is a prime example. The company utilises a specialised collar and app powered by physical AI, sound, and vibration to allow dairy farmers to remotely guide and manage livestock. This unlocks virtually unlimited labour efficiency and optimises pasture management, doubling farm profitability and creating an entirely new category of physical automation.

"It just raised a $200 million series led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, so a $2 billion valuation. So that's really great validation for the company. What's super impressive is even at that scale, it's tripling revenue year on year and really doesn't have competition as far as the I can see."

The Canva IPO and the next big thing

The anticipation surrounding a potential Canva public listing is palpable, but Blackbird has already actively engineered liquidity, returning $2.1 billion to investors through secondary market sales.

Beyond the financials, Canva reshaped Blackbird’s strategy, proving the value of doubling down on generational winners through follow-on funds. Looking forward, Sam notes that the next massive wave of growth is emerging in infrastructure companies like Base10, an AI inference platform serving as the AWS of the AI era, which is currently scaling at an unprecedented velocity.

"If we had stopped investing after the seed stage we would've left about $3 billion of gains on the table and it didn't really make sense to us to do that because you're at such an information advantage and relationship advantage."

The most common misconception about VC investing

The prevailing belief among external observers is that successful venture capital investing is purely an exercise in asset selection. However, Sam clarifies that the public market paradigm of simply choosing what to buy does not translate to early-stage venture. In a highly competitive global market where the best founders have their choice of capital, the true bottleneck is securing allocation. Success is less about the mathematical ability to pick a winner and far more about a firm's reputation, founder relationships, and the cultural equity required to win the deal.

"It's not just about selection because access is the hardest thing in the best companies."