Ep175 – Ed Hooper (Co-founder & CEO – GXE) on frameworks, exits and investing

March 14, 2024
rohitbhargava
Uncategorized

My guest for Ep175 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Ed Hooper, the Co-founder & CEO of GXE.

Ed was previously the Co-founder & CEO of Omny Studio, which was an audio management platform used by media companies and podcasters to grow their audience, reduce production costs and monetize their platform. Omny was later acquired by Triton Digital.

Ed then went on to launch Cardinia Ventures, a Venture Capital fund that invests in hardware and software startups from pre-seed to Series A stage and counts companies such as Chornosphere, Edrolo and SpiceAi in its porfolio.

He is now the Co-founder & CEO of GXE, which is an all-in-one platform for Investment Funds, Family Offices and Syndicates.

It’s also the platform we use to manage my syndicate, Playbook Ventures.

In this episode, Ed shares the key lessons as an investor and founder including:

Building & selling Omny Studio (acquired by Triton Digital)
The frameworks Ed uses to make product feature decisions and assess trade offs
How Ed approaches building professional relationships
His approach to investing into startups
& much more!

Ps stick around till the end of the interview for an announcement!

Timestamps

4:08 – Ed’s background
5:16 – SOAK (Ed’s first company)
8:57 – Learnings from Silicon Valley, advice to early stage founders
12:22 – Time at ANZ, Rome2Rio, Groupon
15:06 – Omny Studio origin story
19:02 – Launching SoundGecko
21:54 – How to think about product feature trade offs
25:27 – Things to consider when raising using SAFE notes
29:47 – Frameworks for solving business problems
32:09 – Raising from corporate VCs
35:03 – Omny Studio acquisition
39:07 – Building relationships and networks
42:27 – Strategically building relationships with investors
46:17 – How Cardinia Ventures started and what they invest in
50:05 – How to structure a fundraising round
53:27 – GXE journey
58:37 – How to prioritise product feature requests
1:00:48 – Playbook Ventures rolling fund

Our partners

A big thank you to Andrew Armstrong for his help with research for this interview!

Also a big thank you to our partners for the show:

Scendar

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business.. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Get started with a Sydney-based Vanta team member today, or watch a 3-minute demo to learn more, at vanta.com/playbook.