Niki Scevak is one of the smartest people I know. He and I worked together at Jupiter Research, over a decade ago. Now he runs Blackbird Ventures, Australia’s largest VC fund with nearly a quarter of a billion dollars under management. When I visited him at his offices in Sydney, we talked about how enterprise software companies have shifted from steak dinner selling to letting their products pitch themselves. It is not that people aren’t important, but as Niki pointed out, the expensive people have been shifted from the start of the process, to the end of it, once users have created a groundswell. In this episode you will also hear us debate the power of founder passion, whether or not big companies can really emulate startups and the unit economics of driverless cars.

This weekend marks the start of the Miami high season, with Art Basel and the attendant influx of well-heeled collectors, bored oligarchs, and international jetset in search of fun, sun and an excuse for a good party. But that’s not the only reason why the world is watching Miami. The city is becoming an emerging hub for high tech companies, especially those with a focus on the Hispanic market. German Montoya, a former McKinsey consultant, and Nabyl Charania, a mathematician who founded software developer Decipher Labs, are at the heart of Florida’s new tech renaissance. Their new venture, Rokk3r Labs, is a collective of engineers, creatives, and strategists who are trying to accelerate the process of launching new companies. Catching up in their offices in South Beach, I spoke with German about emerging market innovation, local solutions with global potential, the challenge of scaling global venture investment, the future of geofencing, and why truly great ideas can come from everywhere, not just Palo Alto.

What is it that makes us happy, motivated, and full of purpose? Dr Adam Fraser has been studying, writing and speaking about human performance for the last 18 years. We caught up in Sydney to chat about his latest research on what he calls, ‘Human 2.0’, the characteristics of people that thrive in complex environments, and those that fail. Many leaders today demand that their people be more innovative, but are at a loss to describe the exact behaviours that define innovation. For Adam, the key is our approach to struggle. What makes people happy, and ultimately more innovative are not more intangible nouns, but rather providing challenges for your teams to overcome, and opportunities to be creative.

Matthew Waldman is a New York based designer, best known for his iconic watch brand, Nooka. Like many of Matthew’s creative projects, Nooka timepieces defy traditional interfaces, whether they be ’telling time’ or other, everyday interactions that we rarely question or challenge. In his studio, situated amid the madness of Manhattan midtown, we chatted about how good design creates pathways of behavior, the necessity of universal language, Hello Kitty and trans-cultural communication, implantables and the bio-programmable future of wearables, and why the ultimate function of a well designed device should be to increase the number of interactions with other people.

Chance are, if you have attended a business event anytime in the last ten years, you will have watched someone play the ‘Did You Know?’ video full of astonishing facts about the digital world. The man behind that video, the most viewed social media clip of all time, and a number of bestselling books such as ‘Socialnomics’ and ‘What Happens in Vegas Stays on YouTube’ is Erik Qualman. And it was in Vegas, strangely enough, that Erik and I caught up to chat about managing reputation in a fully transparent world, the importance of investing in human relationships, the future of automated sharing, and mobile voting, whether a Yelp for human beings is a good idea, and the five habits of great digital leaders.