My guest for Ep133 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & General Partner of Our Innovation Fund, David Shein.

In 1986, David launched Com Tech, just 9 months after moving to Australia from South Africa.

Fast forward 14 years and the company grew to 1,400 staff across Australia and revenues of $700M before eventually being acquired by Dimension Data for $1B.

Since then, David has transitioned into becoming an investor and mentor to a number of startups, many of which have been successfully exited. These include Zipmoney, CalReply, Latam Autos, Pocketbook, Centric Wealth, BlueFire, BizCover, MacromatiX and Holly Connects.

He is currently the Co-founder & General Partner of Our Innovation Fund, a $125M early stage venture capital fund that invests in exciting Australian startups.

We covered a range of topics in this interview including:

• Building and scaling a company culture through trust, respect and storytelling
• Com Tech’s infamous approach of legendary customer service that helped beat out it’s competitors
• What David looks for as an investor
• & much more!

Full interview below!

Show notes:

• Nathan Cher
• No Rules Rules (book) – Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer
• Steve Nola
• Arianna Huffington – “No more brilliant jerks”
• Holly Connects
• Lance Berks
• Bare Cremations
• Clear Dynamics
• Steve Vamos
• a16z Podcast: Designing a Culture of Reinvention with Ben Horowitz & Reed Hastings
• The Hard thing about Hard things (book) – Ben Horowitz
• John Chambers (Cisco)
• VoiceGenie Technologies
• RangeMe
• Nicky Jackson

Special Thanks:

Special thanks to Ross Cochrane, Nathan Cher, Steve Nola and Lance Berks who helped with research for this interview ? .

Next interview:

Join our next live podcast interview with the Co-founder & Co-CEO of Open AI & Huddle, Jason Wilby
Date: 24th November 2020
Time: 8-9am (AEDT)
Registration link: https://tinyurl.com/ep134Open

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Joakim Karud – Dreams

Other channels:

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