The Kismet Podcast

Sunith de Fonseka is the Integrations Director at Kismet. He arrived in the UK at 21 with two suitcases and a plan to finish an aerospace engineering degree and go home to become a commercial pilot in Sri Lanka. That plan became Cambridge research, then twelve years in the Royal Air Force as an engineer officer, then JP Morgan in London during COVID, then consulting, then Kismet two months ago. He...

Natasha is a Customer Experience Officer at Kismet. Before she got here, she started a petition that got over 2,000 signatures, lobbied both sides of state government, formed the Plenty Valley Clubhouse supporting over 200 families, and was part of a group that successfully pushed for mandatory teacher training in all Victorian government schools from 2016. She did all of this while raising four k...

Caleb does not do movie franchises. He is a lock in for a couple of hours kind of guy. Except when it comes to Breaking Bad, which he is rewatching. All sixty-two episodes... He's aware of the contradiction. Caleb is a member of the Customer Experience team at Kismet. He has three cats and a dog, just got his driver's license after years of putting it off, has recently invested money in ET...

Denise Elgin is the Events Coordinator at Kismet and, as fans of Episode 4 will know, the woman beside the man. She grew up in Elwood with her mum and two sisters, spent her late teens and early twenties in the St Kilda club scene, and had been going to Joey's Nightclub for months before she evennoticed Don working there.   She gave him her number on a matchbook. He proposed three months later...

Michael Connerley grew up in Mississippi, became a financial advisor just before the GFC, heard a colleague mention Australia and bought a ticket to leave two weeks later. He spent seven months in a Darlinghurst hostel, got into software onboarding, went through Xplor from 20 people to 80, and bought a cafe in Brunswick during COVID because the timing felt right. Michael is now the Head of Custome...

Matt Clements is the Chief Revenue Officer at Kismet. He's had Christmas dinner with Mark Woodland every year since leaving Xplor, and when Mark incorporated the business he tattooed the Kismet heart on his ankle. He wasn't working here yet, but he knew he would be back. This week he is. It's his third week on the job and he turned up to the studio in an official KFC bomber jacket. Thi...

Rex Validakis-Betar grew up in a housing commission house in Tweed Heads. He was the first in his family to graduate high school, was told by his careers counsellor not to aim too high, went to UNSW anyway, then Belfast and Galway for a Masters in Human Rights Law, then Oxford for an MBA after getting rejected twice. He hated being a lawyer. He was convinced he was moving to Ireland forever. He ha...

Kellie Puxty went to uni with no plan beyond loving sport. She ended up on placement at Wheelchair Sports NSW, loved it so much she ditched A-grade tennis to drive an hour west to play wheelchair basketball once a week, then spent five years driving a station wagon full of wheelchairs around New South Wales getting kids and adults with disabilities into sport for the first time. From there: Paraly...

Jaylea left school at 17 for a pharmacy job in Castlemaine, quit four years later to travel, came back and worked through banking and COVID relief, stumbled into NDIS with zero knowledge, and signed her Kismet contract on her five-year anniversary in the sector. She is now the Escalations Lead at Kismet, just bought her third property in Bendigo on her own, and has very strong feelings about never...

Lauren Grimes is the co-founder and Experience Manager at Kismet. Mark came up with an idea one day and she said sure, let's go. That is still, she says, essentially how it works. Lauren talks about a decade in mobile development, what it means to build technology that is genuinely inclusive rather than just saying it is, and why she thinks AI is the most exciting thing to happen for women in tech...

Mariesa Ferraro went to London for a six-month working holiday. She stayed for nearly twenty years. In between: a Kensington salon full of Aussies, London Fashion Week, a global beauty education role, an O-1 visa that required six months of paperwork, a 3am green room with Kris Kardashian, a one-bedroom apartment two streets behind Oxford Circus, a Facebook comment that led to meeting her now-husb...

Jess Careless is the Community Engagement and Relationship Manager at Kismet, the person with the bell at the Ready Set Connect events, and a Sarah J Maas fan who got Carina deep into Throne of Glass and has been carefully managing spoilers ever since. She also runs annual vision board nights with her girlfriends, has a colour-coded spreadsheet for basically everything, is learning how to celebrat...

Zoe Cluff was 23 when she walked into a job interview for a director role. The centre had cockroaches in the garage and bricks holding up the desk. She thought: we can do better than this. 15 years later she left with a NSW Children's Week Advocacy Award, a finalist spot for the International Rudenberg Prize for Inclusion alongside Michael Phelps, Selena Gomez and Andrea Bocelli, and parent gr...

Content note: this episode discusses suicide and mental health. Please look after yourself while listening. If you or someone you know needs support, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 - they're available 24/7. https://www.lifeline.org.au/  Tahlya Sleep goes by a lot of names. Tahlya, Tals, T, Sleepy. She is the Community Engagement and Relationship Manager at Kismet, a former residential care o...

Mat Ellis is the CTO and co-founder of Kismet. Mark called him with an idea. Mat said yes. That is still, he says, essentially how their relationship works. In this episode, Mat talks about his dream job at Lockheed Martin, riding motorbikes through Vietnam, a year in Shanghai where his favourite meal was Japanese, and how a niche coding language called Elixir ended up connecting him to Xplor. He...

Lachlan Smale is the Strategy and Investments Manager at Kismet. He is also, according to his colleagues, a mythical creature.  Lachie has been quietly one of the most interesting people in the building since he arrived, and this episode finally gets him in the room.  He talks about almost (my take, not his) making it as a professional soccer player, investment banking in London and the app idea t...

Sam Armstrong is the co-founder and Chief Ecosystems Officer at Kismet.  He met Mark for the first time helping carry a very large tree up a lift in South Melbourne. He was the first person hired at Xplor. He was an electrician for 10 years before that, a personal trainer before that, and a removalist in London who moved Madonna, Jude Law and Ozzy Osbourne before that. This episode is warm, funny...

Adam Dicker has been at Kismet for three years - one of the OG's. He's the principal engineer and has the least internet presence of anyone who has sat in this studio. And he would like to keep it that way thank you very much. This episode is a delight. Adam is honest, funny and completely himself. He talks about being a first-time parent and an early stage startup employee simultaneously,...

Meet Dylan Verrier: Kismet's acquisitions specialist, serial community builder, and the person who sat outside his Bondi apartment with a handmade sign that said 'Here to Listen' the day after one of Australia's most devastating events. Dylan talks about the card game he built called Beyond theWeather, the overnight kayak race and the sand marathon he ran for Mensline, how an ex ta...

Meet Anna Latussek: software engineer at Kismet, freshly minted Australian citizen, and the person who accidentally ended up catering for orcs and hobbits on a mountain in New Zealand at 5:00 AM.   Anna left Germany at 19 and hasn't really stopped moving since. She talks about building a life in a country that is not your own, the years it takes to find home, and the moments that finally made...

Seventeen episodes in, it's finally time for the CEO tosit down.   Mark Woodland is the CEO and founder of Kismet, and thisconversation goes places most founder interviews don't. He talks about losing his brother Ben and about losing hisson five years ago during COVID and going to work the next day. About the three problems he needs to solve before he's done: healthcare, education and...

The tables have turned. This week, our host Carina Waye takes the guest chair, and Kismet CEO Mark Woodland takes the mic.   It turns out Carina has quite the story. Musical theatre degree, rejection from WAAPA at 18, Channel 10, New York, Jim Henson's carriage house, catering for billionaires in the Hamptons, and then coming home during COVID to start fresh in tech with zero experience and a...

Meet Simone Weston, Chief Performance Officer at Kismet,obsessed with the Navy SEALs, powered by a 5am ritual, and one of the most extraordinary people to sit down in the studio yet. Mon's episode covers a lot of ground. Her lived experiencewith domestic violence and the healing journey that followed. The power spectrum she created to diagnose where we all sit at any given moment. What we are...

In this episode of The Kismet Podcast, Carina sits down with Shanti Dhanaraj, who looks after Compliance and Systems at Kismet, for one of the most joyful, wide-ranging conversations the pod has had yet. Shanti is a theatre kid turned data nerd turned book obsessive turned flower person, and somehow all of it makes complete sense. They talk about growing up painfully shy and how drama class change...

In this episode of The Kismet Podcast, Carina sits down with Nat Kramersh, Kismet's Chief Operating Officer and our first exec in the room. Nat's path to COO wasn't exactly direct. After five years at a high-performing consulting firm, she made the deliberate decision to step back, take time off, and figure out exactly what she wanted next, on her own terms.  No job lined up. Just a vi...