Stephen was a co-founder of We Are Hunted - an emerging music chart site, which scanned the web to identify upcoming talent. We Are Hunted was acquired by Twitter in late 2012, and was eventually relaunched as Twitter Music, and finally brought back to life as Wonder.fm. Stephen’s latest project is Mawson Robotics – utilizing the power of robotics and machine learning to change the world.
Startup Grind Brisbane launched on January 28th, hosting Stephen Phillips from Mawson Robotics at QUT’s The Atrium - read on for our highlights from Stephen's story and company building advice, and check out the full video below.
Hunting for the Future
Stephen spoke about his initial experiences in web, meeting early investor Graeme Wood and his foundation projects such as news-aggregator Pluggr. He also told the story of how We Are Hunted came to fruition, the risk averse culture of the board, and how the site went from a side project to finally being acquired by Twitter.
Some highlights of Stephen’s story included:
- Running out of money a week after the team & their families moved to New York
- Initially (and unknowingly) rejecting Twitter’s interest in an acquisition
- Meeting the executives of big music including Sony and MTV
- Being placed into stealth mode after the acquisition - kept hidden above a mechanic’s garage in San Francisco prior to the launch of Twitter Music
Interestingly, it wasn’t all happy times: Twitter Music was shortly shutdown after launch, leaving Stephen to serve out his vesting period in the product & engineering teams. On the day he vested, he left the company and returned to Australia dejected. After a year-long sabbatical, he launched his latest project – Mawson Robotics. Mawson plans to use the power of robotics and machine learning to change the world.
Stephen describes his rationale for this as “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?”. Adding in uniquely Australian elements is also key to keep Australia as a global leader in industries such as tourism and agriculture. Mawson’s current roadmap includes an underwater robot to help stop the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef by the Crown of Thorns starfish.
As Stephen said “We should focus on things that are uniquely Australian – we have reefs in Australia, they don’t have reefs in Silicon Valley”.
Thanks to everyone who attended the inaugural Startup Grind Brisbane. Make sure you check out our next Startup Grind event in Brisbane.