Founders in Motion with Thea Ngo

AI-native commercial insurance is being built by a man who once ran 80 marathons in 80 days with no coverage at all because every policy excluded anything past two. Sean Stuart is the co-founder of Rosella, an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage working across the US economy. We talk about door-knocking Dallas offices with zero meetings booked, what VCs get wrong about AI-native service busin...

Basketball stats used to require a scout in the gym. Now one phone video gives every player full box scores and highlights, and the team behind it is leaving Melbourne for Austin.  Cordelia King co-founded Superstat after her first company, the Herald Sun called it "Tinder for local sport", kept attracting players who lied about how good they were. We talk about the Australian football m...

Quibi raised $1.75 billion before it had a single show, hired Spielberg and Reese Witherspoon to make TV for your phone, and shut down six months after launch. This is a fun new segment where I take apart a company that died and diagnose what actually killed it. We get into the tech that forced every show to be shot twice, the Super Bowl ad that ran before a single episode existed, and why almost...

Lee Lagdameo crossed over from the other side of the table to build one of the AI companies he used to back — and four months into Shikii Labs, he says most companies aren't AI-ready: their data is a mess, and raising less beats raising more. Lee Lagdameo is the co-founder of Shikii Labs, an AI and product partner for founder-owned and PE-backed companies. We talk about starting an AI consulta...

Arjun Agarwal is the founder and CEO of inaam, a flat-fee alternative to funds that take a percentage of your money. We talk about his family's fortune disappearing in South Africa, the watches that helped them survive, and the teenage crypto fund he wound down before a crash. For: impact investors, fintech founders, and anyone who's been told no more times than they can count. If this epi...

Rowan McNamee builds AI for lawyers that processes thousands of pages of case documents built so it can never make the final call. His first prototype had 300 ways to turn a transcript into a document. Lawyers used exactly one. Rowan McNamee co-founded Mary Technology, a fact-management system built only for litigation and disputes lawyers — not transactional or M&A. We talk about why he drew...

Hayden Smith started Pearler with negative money, medical bills he couldn't pay, surgery coming up. The company he built tells everyday Australians to invest and then leave it alone. He's been running on patience since day one. Hayden Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Pearler Investments, Australia's long-term retail investing platform. We talk about why a brokerage would tell customers to trade...

Josh Foreman built InDebted from his first $12 in revenue to over $1M a week, profitable, 200 people, $350M valuation, then stepped down as CEO to rebuild the whole company from scratch. The AI-native startup he fears most is a leaner version of himself starting today with nothing to protect. Josh is the founder of InDebted, an AI-enabled debt collection platform in 7 countries. We talk about orga...

Eight months of pitching, nothing to show for it, then the first term sheet finally arrives, and his own lawyer tells him not to sign. So he walks away from the only offer he has. Rakhesh Martyn is the founder of Hachiko, a software platform that maximises returns from portfolios of stationary batteries. Before Australia he was a chartered engineer in London who got made redundant after Brexit and...

Lauren spent nearly a decade as a doctor before she joined a chaotic mental-health startup. Then the model broke, her co-founder walked, and she rebuilt the company alone, teaching herself Google Ads off YouTube. That became Good Mind Therapeutics: five ketamine clinics across Australia, break-even, heading for fifty. Lauren Barker is the co-founder of Good Mind Therapeutics, a clinic network for...

Caroline Tran cold-DMed the CEO of Tasmania's largest telco through a Facebook group, no product, no brand, no payments background. He said yes. That became Hello Clever: $15M ARR, 20 countries, 60 banking relationships. Caroline Tran is the co-founder and CEO of Hello Clever, a global payments and embedded loyalty platform. We talk about the pivot that saved the company, the 11pm call that ki...

Will Bodewes wrote a sticky note to himself on day one of building Phonely: "there are no shortcuts for you, Bodewes." That note sat on his desk every day for 2 years. We talk about building a category before it exists, keeping customers through a 30% failure rate, the SMB-to-enterprise pivot, the cycling LinkedIn post that landed a $16M Series A, and what building a company actually cos...

Shak quit his job, convinced a VC to back him with no business idea, and spent nine months running 800 conversations with financial advisors before building Marloo - the AI doing the actual work inside financial advice firms, now raised $10M and live across seven markets. For: founders still searching for the right idea, operators thinking about AI and vertical SaaS, anyone who's ever over-eng...

Nathan Yun built Paire into an eight-figure brand by doing almost everything the DTC playbook said not to: engineering fabric from scratch, opening a physical store, and turning Shark Tank into a sales channel rather than a funding pitch. This is the story of building an iconic brand from the least sexy product in fashion. We talk about manufacturing from the yarn up, pricing strategy, the Shark T...

Celeste Amadon left Stanford, cancelled her job offers, and raised her seed round in four days before Known had a single paying user. Her thesis: dating apps aren't broken by accident. They're engineered to keep you swiping, paying, and single. We talk about the loneliness epidemic and why it's already your problem too, how Known uses voice inference to understand personality beyond wh...

Nam got told to come back in 5 years by major law firms. A year later he was YC-backed, had raised $4M in 48 hours, and was serving some of the biggest law firms in the world. But the harder story is what it took to get there, January in Poland, rejections piling up, a parental deadline looming, and 20 something selling AI governance to people with decades of experience. We talk about how to sell...

I walked into a top consulting firm interview fully prepared and lost the room in 15 seconds. Six months later, same resume, same experience, I got the offer. The only thing that changed was how I showed up. We talk about reading the room in real time, how to research your interviewer like a journalist, and what to do in the 24 hours after the interview. For: early career job seekers, career pivot...

Same resume. Same background. First time: didn't make it past screening. Six months later: six-figure consulting job in New York. The difference was five invisible mistakes. CHAPTERS 0:00 - Intro 1:15 - Mistake 1: Your Story Doesn't Add Up 2:40 - Mistake 2: You're Too Late 3:35 - Mistake 3: Wrong People, Wrong Questions 5:27 - Mistake 4: Bad Relationship Management 7:35 - Mistake 5: Yo...

Finnlay raised $6M from Accel VC weeks after landing in the US, no deck, no data room, just two pages. But the bigger story is what Fluency is actually building: a platform that maps how work gets done inside enterprises, heading toward AI models that can predict your business before it happens. We talk about US fundraising, product-market fit vs. the pivot that came before it, and whether AI will...

If you've been sending applications and hearing nothing back, you're not unqualified, you're just invisible. In this episode, why the job application is a dying channel and what to do instead: from crafting outreach that actually gets responses, to having conversations that make hiring managers remember you, to building a personal brand that makes opportunities come to you. Three concr...

Stephen Turban was two semesters into his Harvard PhD when he got called into a Zoom room and confronted with his own face on the Lumiere website. The ultimatum was simple: PhD or startup. He chose the company. Four years later, Lumiere is 100 people strong and doing eight figures. We talk about using a startup as an exit strategy from academia, the hidden cost of scattered focus, content tactics...

If I covered your name on your resume, could it belong to 5,000 other people? If yes, you're playing a losing game. In this episode: → Why you're not getting callbacks: You're indistinguishable, not unqualified → What signaling actually is: Proving you're already doing the job (just not for them yet) → The Signal Equation: Specific + Relevant + Public (miss one = invisible) → The 4...

Jevon dropped out of high school to become a pro surfer, then built Nike's Hurley brand in South Africa, ran PE Nation and Surf Stitch, and now he's building Keeyu, an AI platform that stops ecom complaints before customers even notice problems. This episode covers his pivot from selling a "vitamin" to a "painkiller," why distribution beats product-first, and the custom...

Mass applying, tweaking resumes, and waiting for callbacks doesn’t work anymore and it’s not because you’re bad at job hunting. In this episode, we break down what actually changed in the job market and the 4-step framework that works in 2026: positioning, proof, distribution, and conversion. Anything I can be helpful with, leave a comment! This is Episode 1 of The 2026 Job Playbook, a mini series...

How do you turn a lockdown side project into a cult food brand? In this episode of Founders in Motion , Ethan Yong, founder of Umami Papi , shares the real story behind building one of Australia’s most talked-about chilli oils. We dive into the origin of the name “Flavor Daddy,” early product experiments, breaking into retail, and what it actually takes to stand out in a crowded food and CPG marke...