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Episode Summary “It’s not a fit.” “You’re too early.” “Let’s have one more meeting.” “We’re still building conviction.” If you’ve ever walked out of an investor meeting wondering what the hell any of that actually meant, this episode is for you. In this episode of First Cheque, Cheryl and Maxine decode the language of venture capital — from fundraising and negotiations to what happens once an inve...

For the first time in 80 episodes, host Georgie Healy flips the format and answers your questions. Recorded to mark 50,000 Spotify plays, this Ask Me Anything covers the questions listeners have been sending in since the early days of the show: the imposter syndrome years when even friends and family weren't listening, the two lines she still repeats to herself every week, and how she prepares gue...

Luke Marshall, CEO at GradEngage runs growth marketing from a single Claude Code instance — hosted on a cloud VM so he can reach it from any device, tied to a running knowledge archive, and extended into everything from lead generation to his own workout tracker. GradEngage helps companies keep graduate hires warm and prepared in the months between accepting an offer and actually starting the job....

Nick Maxwell got cut by the same football club four years running. Cut at 14. Cut at 15. Cut at 16. Cut at 17, three minutes into a trial, with a snapped vertebra. He made the squad on his fifth attempt and still went undrafted. Four days before Christmas, a phone call changed everything. Nick walks through the voicemail that told him he'd been picked up by Collingwood, the 200-plus games that fol...

Description: Welcome back to the FNDN Series, where we dive into startup compensation with industry leaders from across the startup world. In this episode, Matt McFarlane speaks with Colby Nesbitt about the “10X employee” and whether hiring exceptional people is really the key to building high-performance companies. They explore power laws, performance, compensation, AI, skills-based pay, and how...

Lazar Jovanovic didn't go to engineering school. He found a beta tool called GPT Engineer, set himself a challenge to build a new app every week, and filmed the whole thing. Two years later he's Lovable's in-house vibe coder, building load bearing internal tools that engineers tell him used to take a team of twenty. In this episode of In the Blink of AI, Georgie Healy hands him her own website and...

Jack Rudenko hasn't written a line of code himself in nine months. In that time, his team has shipped six or seven products used by millions of people, and he says that gap, between who writes the code and who's actually building, is the whole story of engineering right now. In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Jack Rudenko, Chief AI Officer at 10x Labs, where he...

Shane Chanel bet his entire life savings, $20,000, on a four-wheel drive racing app when he was 14. It wasn't his last high-conviction bet. He went on to leave a stockbroking career to build Yondr Money, a digital bank that never became a bank, survived a hostile takeover attempt from his own investor, and is now building Kobble, the infrastructure that lets almost any business launch a financial...

Episode Summary Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures has built one of the most ambitious solo GP models in venture capital: around 450 investments over the last decade, with a 14-person team supporting a single investment decision-maker. In this episode of First Cheque, Charles joins Maxine and Cheryl to unpack what it really takes to build and scale a solo GP fund, why he believes partnership dyn...

For a decade, Elon Musk was the face of the modern entrepreneur: a self-made billionaire who bet his fortune on impossible ideas and somehow made them work. SpaceX made reusable rockets a reality. Tesla helped turn electric cars into a global phenomenon. He became one of the most admired and influential figures in technology. So what happened? In this episode of In the Blink of AI, Georgie Healy t...

When his co-founder announced she was going on maternity leave, Airguides co-founder Paul Rowsthorn realised he was about to lose the operational knowledge holding his tourism business together. So he set out to replace it — not with a hire, but with an AI agent. Paul Rowsthorn, co-founder of Airguides and co-founder of AI installation company HubMind, joins Zachary King to show how that agent, Am...

One in three people will experience a mental health disorder in their lifetime, PTSD went more than 20 years without a new approved treatment, and spending keeps rising while outcomes keep getting worse. Against that backdrop, Australia has become the first country in the world where psychiatrists can prescribe MDMA and psilocybin. In this episode, host Emily Casey sits down with Dr Michael Winlo,...

Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsors: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit h...

Eight guests into Building Tech Teams, one theme has shown up in every single episode: money. A principal software engineer who now manages a team of agents asks what he should be paid, and nobody in the room has a clean answer. AI has changed what one person can produce, and salaries have come off the rails behind it. In this best-of episode, James MacDonald pulls together the sharpest thinking o...

Welcome back to the FNDN Series, where we continue our deep dive into startup people and reward practices, with industry leaders from across the startup world. In our conversation with Hallie Condon, VP of People at Chili Piper, we unpack what it actually looks like to build AI deep into a people function. We dive into how her small team decides what to automate and what to keep human, the "compan...

Paloma Newton is the founder of Elita, a longevity platform for dogs that combines biological testing, clinical history, and the changes owners notice day to day into one picture of how a dog is ageing. She built it backwards by most startup standards, a stem cell bank before a product, years of science before a single marketing push, all under one rule: don't promise more than the platform can ba...

Five founders. Building with atoms and bits. Right at the heart of Australia. From robots that scan the human body to robots watching over satellites in space, one goal unites them: making Australia a better place to start a business. Season 2 of Oversubscribed opens at BrewDog Everleigh in Sydney with Will Crowe of HEO, Joe Harris of Alloy, John Carroll of Vexev, Cibby Pulikkaseril of Zabidou, an...

Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsors: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit h...

Most companies treat compensation as a math problem: get the number right and the rest takes care of itself. Matt McFarlane says that’s backwards, and it’s the reason so many pay conversations go sideways even when the number itself is fair. In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN, the compensation consultancy he built after years runn...

Darius Monsef has built a colour-palette website that grew to millions of users, sold two companies, raised over $40 million for a paediatric healthcare startup, and shut it all down. Twice. He's brutally honest about why. Darius walks through how a joke website for rating colour squares became a design resource used by Adobe, how wearing his own branded t-shirt got him into Y Combinator, and how...

Episode Summary Sidecars have gone mainstream. Once something mostly associated with larger venture funds, they’re now increasingly common in Australia, with emerging managers using them alongside their first funds and sophisticated LPs increasingly expecting access to them. But what exactly is a sidecar, and why would you use one instead of simply investing directly? In this episode of First Trac...

A survey of more than 1,800 clinicians across 25 countries found 83% had already adopted AI before their workplace had any governance in place. Healthcare, it turns out, is not just adopting AI. It is being redesigned around it. In the second What the Health Wrap, host Emily Casey is joined by Dr Simon Kos, Global Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, and Dr Janice Tan, GP and General Manager of Clinica...

Benjamin Plummer has one of the stranger CVs in Australian tech: nine years inside Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, building an AI lab alongside IBM Watson's inventor, scaling a startup he says went from $10M to $160M in revenue in eighteen months as CEO, and now running Dragonfly Intelligence, a firm that buys ordinary services businesses and rebuilds them as AI-native comp...

Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsors: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit h...

Most technical interviews still ask a candidate to write a function on a whiteboard. Adam Witanowski says that question is already obsolete, and what should replace it says everything about how AI is changing who gets hired. In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Adam Witanowski, AI Architect at nib, where he has spent the past several years building the insurer's A...