Solving vaccination gaps from the skies
Small Steps Vol. 65: Swoop delivers for remote communities ✈️; the future of floating wind power 🌊; and lifesaving tattoos 🛟.
“I’ll not be here, sadly, but Hagrid will.”
— Robbie Coltrane, Actor known for his role as Harry Potter’s Hagrid
Kick start
🎤 Impact Pitch Night is next week on 25th October! There’s a limited number of tickets available so make sure to grab yours now.
🧑💼 We’re also hiring an Investment Manager to join the dream team. Investment experience? Not required. Enthusiasm for startups and impact (aka the Small Steps community)? Essential.
What we’re thinking about
✈️ Swoop Aero delivers. “Is it a bird? A plane? An integrated bi-directional drone logistics company providing seamless access to the skies?” Actually, it’s that last one.. Lucky guess. Check out our Theory of Change for Swoop Aero (now hiring here!), which is making sure vaccines are not a luxury with drones powered by clean energy. They also recently announced they’ll be providing pathology services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Health Service patients in Queensland, cutting 6 hours from the transport time for over 80k samples per year.
🔬 Let’s get clinical. Rockhealth’s healthtech funding review reported the breakout winners of the last quarter have been non-clinical workflow tools, signalling that workforce labour shortages and burn out continues to be a big priority problem to solve. Meanwhile, telemedicine has been knocked back a peg since the heady days of social distancing, hindered by intense competition, increasing costs to market, and greater scrutiny of digital prescriptions.
🔌 State of hydrogen. Alicia Eastman, President and Co-Founder of Intercontinental Energy, shared her reflections about the last 12 months of hydrogen developments on our path to a clean energy system where green hydrogen provides long-term storage and high power output needs. The big factors driving adoption in 2022 have been:
The US Inflation Reduction Act, which included huge pools of funding to decarbonise supply chains, and;
the Ukraine War, which has driven acceleration of hydrogen funding as countries scramble to reduce reliance on volatile and often Russian-controlled gas reserves.
Meanwhile, the biggest momentum sectors are green ammonia (made using hydrogen), which will reduce up to 40% of shipping costs, and green steel production.
🌊 The future is floating. Volatility in the gas markets has also sparked more conversations about offshore wind power, which was reported to be 9x cheaper than gas for the UK this year. Floating wind power, which can be placed in much deeper water than current offshore wind structures, is the next frontier as it can be flexibly placed in the most ideal conditions for generation and costs of power are decreasing fast (listen to the downlow here). The key enablers will be flotation technology, collaboration between equipment suppliers, and lots and LOTS of capital.
New paths
🧠 Applied is on the hunt for a Digital Marketing Manager.
👨🏽💼Perx is searching for Vice-President of Marketing.
👩💼Giant Leap is looking for an Investment Manager.
💻 Coviu is hiring lots of roles, check them out here.
⚕️Seer is also on hiring run here.
🔥 Also, check out our Giant Leap Fund jobs board for over 80+ available positions or fill in our expression of interest form. There’s even more jobs at ethical companies on the global B-Work job board.
Connect with us
🌏 If you’re at Purpose Conference in Sydney today, make sure to say hi to our partners Adam or Rachel (and tell them we know where they were last summer 😱).
🎤 Join the whole Giant Leap team at Impact Pitch Night on the 25th October.
📚 Check out our Investment Manager, Charlie, speaking at the Global Impact Summit in Melbourne on 27th October.
Giant leaps
💄 A huge congrats to Conserving Beauty’s Natassia Nicolao who is the Women of the Future Winner for 2022.
🗞️WORK180’s Gemma Lloyd speaks to Forbes Australia: Jobs for women, fit for all.
🙌 GlamCorner celebrates 10 years in the sustainable fashion movement.
👩 Stacy Flynn, CEO of Evrnu featured in Entrepreneur 100 Women of Influence.
For the road
🏫 Learning to learn. A16Z shared these reflections about the new learning economy, driven by trends like greater digitisation driving down costs, teachers leaving schools in droves, and new public funding in the US providing attractive sales opportunities for K-12 schools.
👩⚕️ Nursebot 2.0. WHO has launched a freely accessible AI health worker, Florence 2.0, who can give advice on mental health, nutrition and smoking quitting habits amongst other things (meet her here). She’s also been fighting COVID-19 misinformation since the outbreak. Good on ya, Florence.
🗺️ Wikipedia for pandemic resilience. DTU researchers have created a freely accessible platform that shows where in the world different types of resistant bacteria are found and in what quantities to help researchers and governments track and react to potential future outbreaks.
👭🏽 Helping hand. Mel Greblo, Founder of Scriibed, raised $170,000 to launch Banksia Academy, a non-profit helping women suffering from domestic violence to achieve financial independence through training, education, employment pathways, and support.
🦾 The energy transition is a metals transition. Renewable energy generators like wind and solar are mineral intensive, with an offshore wind plant requiring 13x more mineral resources than a similarly sized gas-fired plant. That means we need loads more technology for more efficient mining and more companies like Sundrive (recently snagged $21m) swapping out rarer silver for more common copper in solar panels.
👪 Power to the parents. New parents will be entitled to 26 weeks of paid parental leave thanks to government reforms, which will help to boost women’s workforce participation.
🎨 Lifesaving tattoos. These tats change colours to reflect body signals like glucose levels, with potentially life saving consequences. Still a ways to go, but we’ve clearly come a long way since mood rings.
🪷 Staying humble. Hubris Mindset = Success that leads to failure. Humble Mindset = Success that leads to success. Go multiple levels deeper about it on Edrolo founder Duncan Anderson’s blog.
🧙 And thank you Robbie Coltrane, best Groundskeeper Hogwarts ever had.