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Max Bausher and Brian are the Co-Founders of Twine, a Sydney-based startup bridging product and go-to-market teams by integrating insights across calls, CRM, and roadmaps.
Max, Twine’s COO, brings expertise from leadership roles at CrowdStrike and New Relic, specialising in technical-business alignment.
Brian, Twine’s CEO, has led product and GTM teams at SafetyCulture, Atlassian, Dovetail, and Twitter.
Together, they are redefining how teams collaborate to deliver exceptional customer experiences.This is their first ever in-depth public interview.
Hosted by Vidit Agarwal, Founder of Curiosity Center and The High Flyers Podcast.
It’s now time to explore your curiosity.
Show notes
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***
Our guests this week are Max Bausher and Brian Swift in episode #198—co-founders of Twine, a company turning customer conversations into company-wide action.
Learn about Max and Brian’s successful careers in tech in the US before moving to Australia in 2016. Fun fact: they didn’t meet each other until almost 6 years after moving to Sydney, despite both growing up in the US.
Max, a former sales engineer at New Relic and CrowdStrike, shares his key learnings from his time bridging the gap between go-to-market and product teams. Brian reflects on his highlights and learnings from being a product and Go-to-market leader at Twitter, Atlassian, SafetyCulture, and Dovetail and saw firsthand how companies struggled to capture customer insights at scale.
Our host, Vidit loved learning about how Twine was born from their shared frustration: too many critical insights from sales and customer teams never made it back to product. They saw AI as the missing link, and in 2023, they teamed up to build Twine—and secured venture backing from Airtree.
In this episode, we also dive into:
- Their biggest career lessons, from hyper growth companies to painful failures
- Differences between Aus v US; and how did they manage the difficult transition when they started working in Australia?
- How Twine went from an idea to a venture-backed company with Airtree
- Their opposite personalities and how that makes them stronger leaders
- The power of AI in reshaping work, and why distribution—is their biggest focus right now
- Why they believe in building a small, highly efficient team instead of hiring fast
And so much more—including the one unexpected question about the relationship with his wife that changed how Max thought about starting Twine.
It’s now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy!
Timestamps
About us
The High Flyers Podcast features in-depth interviews with the world’s most relatable role models in business, tech, finance, government and sport in the US, Australia, Singapore, India and New Zealand.
Launched over 6.5+ years ago - our 275+ guests come from various industries around the world including:
Investing and Finance (VC, PE, Pension Funds, Family Offices)
Our guests across venture capital, growth investing, institutional capital, banking, pension funds and family offices include: Keith Rabois (MD, Khosla Ventures), Jason Collins (CEO, BlackRock Asia Pacific), Ryan Beiermeister (Partner, Founders Fund), David Haber (General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz), Kevin Hartz (Managing Partner, A*), Mike Vernal (Partner, Conviction; Ex-Sequoia), David Schneider (Growth Fund Co-Lead Partner, Coatue), Venky Ganesan (Managing Partner, Menlo Ventures), Mark Suster (Managing Partner, Upfront Ventures), Kelland Reilly (Partner, Airtree; Ex General Atlantic, D1), Niki Scevak (Managing Partner, Blackbird), Paul Bassat (Managing Partner, Square Peg), David Neal (CEO, IFM Investors), Sam Sicilia (CIO, Hostplus), Michael Kim (Partner, Cendana Capital), Beezer Clarkson (Partner, Sapphire), Gautam Chari (Head of Capital Commitments, Bank of America), David Shein (Managing Partner, OIF), Vivek Bhatia (CEO, MUFG), Rowan Simpson (Founder, Hoku) and more.
Technology, AI and software (Startups, Big Tech, Publicly Listed)
Our technology, AI and software guests include Jodie Auster (Uber’s Global Head of Travel), Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (CEO, Xero), Rob Giglio (CCO, Canva), Mel Silva (MD, Google), Jean-Michel Lemieux (former CTO, Shopify and Atlassian), Anil Sabharwal (Global VP, Google Chrome, Photos and Drive), Shiv Rao (CEO, Abridge), Jesse Zhang (CEO, Decagon), Dylan Babbs (Co-Founder & CTO, Profound), John Willett (Co-Founder & COO, Rogo), David Eckstein (CFO, Legora), John Haddock (CBO, Harvey), Stevie Case (CRO, Vanta), Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel), Cristina Cordova (COO, Linear), Elena Verna (Head of Growth, Lovable), Jack Zhang (CEO, Airwallex), Tim Doyle (CEO, Eucalyptus), Andrew Fraser (President, Halter), Bowen Pan (creator of Facebook Marketplace) and more.
CEOs, Boards and Major Company Senior Executives
Our guests leading some of the world's largest and most recognisable organisations include Brad Banducci (CEO, Woolworths Group), Aleks Spaseska (CEO, Kmart) Michael Schneider (CEO, Bunnings), Paul Grosmann (CEO, R.M.Williams), Andrew Penn (CEO, Telstra), Vandita Pant (CFO, BHP), Sanjeev Gandhi (CEO, Orica), Craig Tiley (CEO, Tennis USA), Brendan Hargreaves (CFO, Officeworks), Andrew Fraser (Board Chair, Bank of Queensland), Jaddan Cummerford (CEO, Unified Music), Ed McManus (CEO, Deliveroo) and more.
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Our government, diplomatic and public-policy guests include Malcolm Turnbull (Prime Minister of Australia), Amit Singh (Managing Partner, Mandala), Peter Varghese (Secretary of Australia's Foreign Service), Philip Green (Australia’s High Commissioner to India), Brendan Dowling (Deputy Secretary, Australia's Department of Home Affairs), Mukund Narayanamurti (General Manager for South Asia, Austrade) and Ryan Neelam (CEO, Centre for Australia-India Relations, Australian Government).
Professional Athletes
Steve Solomon (400m Olympic Sprinter), Ed Cowan (Former Test Cricketer), Trent Cotchin (3x Premiership Winning Captain, Richmond FC), Lisa Stahelakar (World Cup Winning Captain, Australian Womens Cricket Team).
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