Fayl Tales

Ride sharing. Do you assume that Uber invented ride sharing? Well you would be wrong (as I was). Sunil Paul and Homobiles were the pioneers. Joining me is Kush Patel, one of the most ruthless founders I know. We get into 👇: ★ Sunil Paul, the man who invented ride sharing in 1997 ★ How Zimride went from a Zimbabwe-inspired carpooling app to becoming Lyft ★ Why Uber started as a luxury black car se...

Simon Crerar is the son of a fifth generation printer in Edinburgh. He got his first job at The Times of London in 1999 when they launched their very first website. Moved to Australia for love. Then became the founding editor of BuzzFeed Australia. He built it into a hundred person newsroom, won a Cannes Golden Lion, broke major political stories, hired Australia’s first Indigenous affairs reporte...

Briella Brown started Your Closet at 17 with an $80,000 personal loan from her father. She was making $35,000 a month, dropped out of university, went on Shark Tank, asked for $80,000 for 20% equity and walked out with $80,000 for 40%.  Then ran the business for eight years, sold it, started a jewellery company during COVID and exited that too. That next thing is Biolae. A perimenopause brand with...

Fayl Safe episode three, PayPal. Specifically, the guy who actually invented online payments and went bankrupt. The startup that began as a Palm Pilot IOU app and accidentally became the biggest payments company in the world. The moment Elon Musk got ousted as CEO while on his honeymoon in Sydney. And why a guy named Eric Jackson ignored his bosses, bet on eBay auction users, and changed everythin...

Patrick Collins is a sixth time founder. He pivoted his last company three times, moved it to San Francisco, and then watched a co-founder burn through $7 million in under a year. He took over as CEO, cut the team from 40 to five, rebuilt it and sold it to the largest private marketing agency in the US. Then spent 13 years in Silicon Valley. Came back. Spent 10 years as a Chief Product Officer at...

Most brands pitch supermarkets with a deck. These two showed up on a camel. Michael McRae was meant to be a lawyer. Instead he ended up selling beer across Tokyo, Singapore and Vietnam with his mate Tom. One morning, Tom was putting on moisturiser, he tried it and said "holy shit". They googled how to make moisturiser. Hired a contract chemist. Kept their day jobs. Set milestones. Hit th...

Byron McCaughey spent 15 years in Europe working in sports sponsorship, Formula One and advertising. Did an MBA at Imperial College London. Built a fintech startup with his co-founder Henry. Raised £80,000 from 50 MBA classmates. Tried to crowdfund half a million pounds. Fell six figures short of the target. Then COVID hit. And they folded. What happened next? Byron became a psychologist. Specific...

Welcome back to fayl safe, the series where I break down startup concepts and history. Episode two. Social media. Specifically why Friendster turned down a $30 million offer from Google, why MySpace sold for $580 million in two years and then got offloaded for $35 million, and how a 19 year old Harvard student ended up winning. There are lessons in here that still apply to every founder building....

im O'Sullivan got expelled from his fancy Melbourne private school at 16 for shoplifting on a ski trip. He never went to university. Instead he spent his early twenties throwing parties in Vietnam, bribing police with $20 USD. He never went to university. He did spend his early twenties throwing parties in Vietnam, bribing police with $20 USD, and making coffees at his family cafe in Essendon...

The Superstat crew applied to Startmate three times. Got rejected twice. Went from zero to $240,000 in recurring revenue in 12 weeks. And then Blackbird led a $3.5 million pre-seed round. And who are these weapon trio? Cordelia King, Sam Hung and Kai Bloomfield. SuperStat uses AI to turn raw match footage into player stats, event timelines and performance patterns automatically. Built for the 99%...

Ryan Woodcock joined Goterra as a software developer in a company using maggots and robots to process food waste inside refurbished shipping containers. By the time he left, he was the engineering manager, could instruct people on heavy machinery, had sorted through tons of food waste by hand, and had watched what the media called Australia's most loved and underfunded startup go into liquida...

First up. What even is a startup? Spoiler: there's no universal definition. And honestly, before researching this episode, I've probs butchered it too Welcome to Fayl Safe, a new series where we break down the startup concepts, jargon and assumed knowledge that nobody ever actually explains. Loveth and Amy Fogarty get into the deets. This one is for anyone who has ever walked into a star...

Feels strange not being in the studio but when you get the chance to interview Kamran Elahian, you say yes! So excuse the background noise! Soo, Kamran has co-founded 10 companies across five decades. Four unicorns. Six successful exits. Over $8 billion in peak market cap. He has also been fired from his own company. Twice. The first time was on April Fool's Day. He showed up to work the next...

Akshat Agarwal dropped out of a civil engineering degree, spent four years at Antler watching hundreds of founders try to build companies, helped launch Antler's Middle East fund across Saudi and Dubai, and then walked away from VC entirely. His conclusion after all of it? The reason Australia's best founders keep leaving for San Francisco isn't money or talent. It's the enviro...

Nina Wöss has spent 13 years in VC. She started at SpeedInvest as an intern, became a VC all-rounder, and then left to co-found Female Founders Global and then decided to build a fund on top of that. What could go wrong? They started fundraising in early 2022. Russia invaded Ukraine. Crypto winter hit. Stock markets tanked. Everyone told them, do you really want to do this now?  They did it anyway...

Moritz Lechner started his first company at 14 with 100 euros of pocket money. At 15, he pitched on Austria's version of Shark Tank and raised €170,000. At 21, he sold the company he built to 50 people and millions in revenue. He is now 22 and already planning the next one. What could possibly go wrong along the way? A lot, actually. The subscription box business that never quite took off. A...

Hey Crew! Kilian Kaminski was running Amazon's entire refurbished program in Europe. He could see the opportunity. He could see Amazon had no intention of building it. So naturally, he quit and decided to do it himself. What could go wrong... refurbed is now the largest refurbished marketplace by markets across Europe. 24 countries. 10 million products sold. Over €150 million raised.  But get...

Hey Crew!  Oliver Holle founded his first company as a PhD student at Columbia in the late 1990s. Raised money. Opened four offices. Hired 20 people. And nearly went personally bankrupt for two and a half years with three small kids, no salary, and personal debt of €1.5 million. He eventually sold to VeriSign, moved to Silicon Valley, came back to Vienna, and built SpeedInvest. Europe's large...

★ Do you have a random question or need advice? Pop it into the chat or send them to me!! I get to meet and interview some amazing founders and investors globally, so I'll have it included in an upcoming episode :) ★ Hey Crew! It's just me today. No guest. Just a proper deep dive into one of the biggest shifts in consumer business happening right now. Direct to consumer had its moment. G...

Hey Crew!  Daniel Lord-Doyle started in telemarketing. Taught himself to code on YouTube. Built a laser hair removal e-commerce company during COVID by accident among many other things. And then co-founded Mary Technology, an AI legal tech startup that just opened offices in New York and San Francisco. Half engineer, half salesperson. He thinks that combination is the whole game. And he has a lot...

Hey crew,  Dickie Currer-Ganguli grew up on the poverty line in Yorkshire with a single mum, joined the army at 20, became a criminal defense and asylum lawyer at 23, moved to Australia at 26, and then found himself picking fruits and milking cows at 27 thinking, what the hell has happened here? Now he's running Hype Man Media and APAC Innovation Hub, and recently spent 16 days on a train acr...

Hey Crew! Trang Nova stepped on a snail during a morning run and it triggered a quarter life crisis that changed everything. The career. The relationship. The country. Even her name. She went from unhappy physio to checking her bank account at a petrol station and finding 80 cents. From a 10 year relationship to a one way ticket to Bali. From not speaking English as a kid to coaching people how to...

Hey Crew! It's just me today. No guest, no founder story, just a proper behind the scenes of what building Fayl Tales actually looks like. We just hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. And I have made a lot of mistakes getting there. I'm spilling all of it. The guest incidents I haven't talked about publicly. The stuff that kept me up at night. And the honest truth about what it actual...

Hey Crew!  Sam Garven spent 10 years watching HR get left behind while every other team got the shiny new tools. So she built Hello Canopy to fix it. Got into Techstars pre-MVP. Pivoted live on stage at SXSW. Had hundreds of users and angel investors ready to back her next raise. Two weeks ago she chose to close it all down. Not because she ran out of money. Not because she lost her team. Because...

Hey Crew!  Loughlan Dalton de Burgh named his cafe Pyramid Scheme. On purpose. Got a cease and desist from his landlord, went viral with 400,000 views, and had people driving two hours for his falafel. Then his business partner overdosed in the kitchen, $30,000 went missing from the books, and he shut it all down. He missed 12 consecutive mortgage payments. Used a foreclosure notice to unlock his...