January 22, 2025 – Challenge of Growth Philippe Bouissou and Mental Health at Work Genevieve Hawkins

School for Startups Radio

Philippe Bouissou – Managing Partner at Blue Dots Partners

Philippe Bouissou, Ph.D. has spent three decades in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur, a CEO, a venture capitalist and a management consultant. He is Managing Partner at Blue Dots Partners LLC, a management consulting firm he co-founded, focused on top-line acceleration. He started his career as the Founder and CEO of G2i, Inc., a Unix software company that was acquired by Matra. Later, Philippe joined Apple as Director of the Worldwide Internet Commerce group, where he founded and managed the online Apple Store and grew its revenue from zero to $350 million. After Apple, Bouissou became a venture capitalist and successfully invested tens of millions and generated double-digit cash-on-cash IRR. Philippe’s latest book, Aligning the Dots: The New Paradigm to Grow Any Business, is an Amazon Best Seller in Business and Amazon #1 New Release in Business. This Growth Playbook reveals the blueprint that will guide any business to align the dots to outperform its target market and fly past its competitors.
Genevieve Hawkins – Author of Mentally at Work: Optimising health and business performance through connection

Genevieve Harkins is a health professional turned transformation executive, Non-Executive Director and business advisor with over 25 years of experience of leadership experience from professional services, to start up, to large corporate organisations.She has developed and executed strategies that have solved highly complicated problems end-to-end, helping transform and deliver sustainable commercial results in two of Australia’s largest businesses, Wesfarmers and Coles and the global companies of WSP and Allianz. She is experienced in and has a deep understanding of how to influence a business across strategy, operations, finance, people and risk, landing material change in supply chain, capital investment programs (digital and property), demergers, strategic risk management, new business and captive insurance. She has a unique combination of commercial and cultural transformation experience, speaking the ‘language’ of multiple departments. With exposure to a range of industries, a clinical health background, and spending a significant amount of her time working in the personal injury arena, she has a deep understanding of mental health in the workplace and expertise in influencing behaviour across and between organisations. Her commitment to helping organisations create the right environment to unlock value at an individual, team and business level, has led her to write ‘Mentally at Work: Optimising health and business performance through connection’ in 2020, and ‘Shrinking Elephants: Untangling workplace conflict to unlock value for all’ in 2024. In a complex world, where collaboration will be needed more than ever to solve strategic problems, Genevieve helps organisations have the conversations they need to have, shrinking the elephant in the room, to improve commercial collaboration and the mental health of teams. Genevieve believes in the value of simplicity, pragmatism, acceptance of clunkiness, finding the right way to talk about the elephants in the room and the importance of sticking to your ‘true north’ to get the right long-term outcome for a business and its people.