Mike's Notes
I agree with this. I spent 10 years working on solving a set of very hard problems, trying everything along the way. The solution wasn't obvious at the beginning; I discovered it through grit, a lot of luck, and surprise.
Resources
- https://youtu.be/Q1rWcenDFS8?si=RSuP47UN6Plc01Cy
- https://www.youtube.com/@WildHeartsPodcast
- https://mitti.com/meet-the-team
References
- Reference
Repository
- Home > Ajabbi Research > Library > Subscriptions > Blackbird
- Home > Handbook >
Last Updated
31/08/2026
Rarely is your first idea your best idea, with Mitti's Luke Anear
Kate is the Head of Impact & Operating Principal at Blackbird in Australia.
...
Luke Anear began his working life as a private investigator, sitting in cars and filming people who had been injured at work.
He says it was the coolest job he ever had. It was also where the problem found him. He was watching people whose lives had been altered by something preventable, paid by the system that let it happen. Once he understood he was part of the problem, he had to become part of the solution.
That was 2004, in a garage on the northern outskirts of Townsville. No software industry, no co-founder, about 30 computer science graduates a year coming out of James Cook University and maybe two of them staying in the field. Twenty-one years later, Mitti has passed a billion dollars in revenue since it began, and Luke is still running product.
Rarely is your first idea your best idea
It took a long time to look like this. Luke is unusually honest about the years of things that didn't work. He built a training platform in 2007, which he describes as a bad version of PowerPoint. There was a document management system in 2010. For a while, there were telemarketers ringing businesses to ask whether they wanted safety paperwork. The checklist app that made the company's name didn't arrive until 2012, eight years in.
His point isn't that the failures were noble; rather, it's that the insights we all recognise today could only emerge after experiencing those failures. "The simplicity comes from the complexity of unravelling all the different variables until you can distil it down," he explains. You can't skip that process.
"I was cooked”
Two years ago Luke stepped down as CEO. He rang the chair, Robin Denholm, and told her he was done. She was direct with him, and told him he needed to understand he could not come back. He accepted it. Then she rang and asked him to come back anyway.
Upon returning, he realised it wasn't the job that broke him. The way he had built the job broke him. "You have a million things coming to you if you allow your job to be set up that way, which is what I'd done." So he came back to a different shape entirely. He isn't in the weekly exec meeting. He runs product and strategy, and gets pulled in when he's needed.
More experts, not fewer
AI now writes 90% of Mitti's code, and a research and design process that used to run three months resolves into a prototype in 24 hours. The obvious conclusion is that you need fewer people. Luke has drawn the opposite one.
When you can build almost anything in a day, the scarce thing is knowing what to build. So they're hiring subject matter experts into product: a former construction manager, the COO of a quick service restaurant chain. In a two-hour session with one of them, the team makes fifty product decisions. The old research process made ten in three weeks.
He's honest about the cost too. Shipping faster means a team fails at five things where it used to fail at one, and that takes something out of people.
In this episode, Kate Glazebrook talks with Luke about the store manager who replaced a 700-question checklist with a single question, why the insurance industry hasn't changed since 1666, the month he spent sleeping in his car on a Darwin beach at twenty, and plenty more.
YouTube interview
26/08/2026 1:06:12
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