Day One®

Kirstin Hunter has co-founded a super fund, run a startup accelerator, and now leads Australia's biggest crowdfunding platform. None of it was the plan. She grew up in Tweed Heads folding junk mail for two cents a letterbox, trained to be a doctor, then pivoted through law and consulting before a friend told her the pro bono work she loved was just "the trinkets" propping up a job that made corpor...

Building a Company of AI Super Workers with Tracy St. Dic, Chief People & Talent Officer at Zapier Description: 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 Tracy St. Dic, Head of Talent at Zapier, we explore how one of the world's most AI-forward companie...

Dan Westgarth has spent 7 years helping build Deel from a contractor invoicing tool into one of the most valuable HR and payroll platforms in the world, and he did it after cutting his teeth as an early operator at Revolut. As COO, he sits across nearly every function the AI conversation touches: finance, sales, engineering, and the sheer operational load of running a company at global scale. In t...

The junior engineer used to be the safe first hire. Cloë Stanbridge says AI just made that job disappear, and that's only the start of what's rewriting tech hiring right now. In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Cloë Stanbridge, Talent Lead at Airtree, one of Australia's most active venture capital firms. Cloë spends her days helping early-stage founders make thei...

If you've ever felt like you're not a "real" Founder because you're not chasing unicorn status, this episode is your permission slip to build differently. Jodie Imam has done almost everything you can do in the Australian startup ecosystem. She co-founded Occasional Butler and went head to head with Airtasker (who eventually acquired her), opened depo8, one of Melbourne's first coworking spaces, a...

Episode Summary Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way, and the founder of IMVU and the Long-Term Stock Exchange. His new book, Incorruptible, examines why companies drift from their mission once investors and boards take over, and what founders and early investors can do to prevent it. In this episode, Cheryl and Maxine unpack what Eric calls "financial gravity," the forc...

Lucas Cantor has an unusual claim on the AI conversation. In 2019, Huawei asked him to finish Schubert's Unfinished Symphony using artificial intelligence, and he did it. He's an Emmy-winning composer who has worked on every Olympics since 2002, produced a cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde, and now invests in music technology. His new book is Unfinished: The Role of the Artist...

$320 billion flows through Australia's commercial construction industry every year — and far too much of it still moves on spreadsheets and re-keyed purchase orders. Mitchell Baker spent 12 years inside that machine as a contract administrator — on John Holland's $250M shopping-centre rebuild, and on Facebook's £150M London HQ with Kier — watching well-paid people burn their days copying data that...

Most organisations are asking which AI model they should use. Patrick McQuaid thinks that is the wrong conversation. Patrick is Group Head of Data, Analytics & AI at NGM Group. He joins James MacDonald to explain how leaders can build practical AI capability without getting trapped by hype, vendor lock-in or an endless cycle of new tools. They discuss how NGM approaches AI inside a regulated b...

If you've ever talked yourself out of reaching out to someone because they're "too successful to reply", this episode will change how you send your next message. Dom Pym co-founded Up, one of Australia's fastest growing digital banks, and has personally invested $85 million into the Australian startup ecosystem. But he started with nothing. Dom tells Megan and Geo about growing up in a family that...

Novartis has agreed to acquire Myricx Bio for up to US$1.5 billion, approximately A$2.2 billion, in a major outcome for a UK biotech company with deep Australian venture backing. In the inaugural What the Health Wrap, host Emily Casey is joined by Dr Jackie Rabec, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at ThinkMD.ai, and Dr Prashanth Rajan, Associate at Brandon Capital, to work through what the fort...

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 Adam Weber, Executive Coach to CEOs, Chief People Officers, and other C-suite leaders, we unpack what it truly takes to thrive at the executive level. From the five signals of great executives to navigating dysfunct...

Robin O'Connell spends his days inside LinkedIn's marketing and advertising team in Australia, working with founders and brands on content strategy - which makes him a rare voice on where AI genuinely helps marketers, and where it still falls flat. In this episode, Robin makes the case that the smartest move for any marketer right now is trying to replace parts of your own job with AI, just to fin...

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Every great team she has ever seen shares one trait: they are comfortable with discomfort. Claudia Barriga-Larriviere has spent nearly 20 years building people and culture inside startups and global enterprises — and she thinks most of the AI conversation is quietly dodging the hard, human questions. In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Claudia Barriga-Larriviere...

Episode Summary Ilana Elbaz was employee number five and the first go-to-market hire at Deel, helping scale the company from its early pivots through blockchain and payments to a business she helped grow from zero to hundreds of millions in ARR in just a few years. She's now an active angel investor and runs Deel's global pitch competition, which received tens of thousands of applications this yea...

Freddie McKenzie is the co-founder and CEO of Manifest, an AI platform that helps creative and marketing agencies capture the real value of their work without timesheets. Before Manifest, he built and exited VIVID Creative, an Auckland-based production agency behind campaigns for Jetstar and other major brands, and in this conversation with Georgie Healy he traces that journey and where he thinks...

Mark Samlal grew up as one of the only Indian families in a small Perth township, went on to co-found a payroll company from a secondhand desk in Singapore with his wife Samantha, and eventually listed it on the ASX as PayGroup. In 2022 Deel acquired the business in an all-cash deal worth $120M at a 143% premium to market. In this conversation Mark talks about the racism he faced growing up, the "...

Australia is about to build guided missiles for the first time — and Kongsberg is doing it at Williamtown, in the Hunter. John Fry, Managing Director of Kongsberg Defence Australia, joins James MacDonald for the first episode of Engineering in the Hunter to explain what's being built, why a 210-year-old Norwegian company chose Newcastle over 40 other sites, and what it means for the region: roughl...

The business wants AI, and it wants it yesterday. But once the proof of concept works and the partner goes home, someone inside the company has to keep the thing running. Nathan Hill, Head of Telco at AWS and a 20-year veteran of the telco industry, joins James to talk about what actually happens when enterprises push AI into production — and why the scarcest asset in the room is still deep domain...

Welcome back to the FNDN Series, where we continue our deep dive into startup people and pay practices with industry leaders from across the startup world. --- Join Startup People Summit, a one-day virtual conference designed for startup People leaders who want practical insight, honest conversations and proven approaches to scaling their People function — get your ticket here: www.startuppeoplesu...

Welcome to the first ever episode of AI Icons, a new thing I'm launching on the show. Here's the idea: the people reshaping tech have stories more entertaining than anything Hollywood is putting out, so in under 30 minutes I'm going to tell you the whole story, the good, the bad, and the ugly, but only the facts. No spin. And at the end, I'll give you my two cents on what actually made them an ico...

Dilip Jacob is the solo founder and CEO of Pitchberry, an AI platform that helps people in high-stakes professions practice the conversations their careers depend on. The idea came from a very personal place: diagnosed with high anxiety, Dilip froze during an investment pitch and went looking for a way to get better. What began as a tool for founders found an unexpected first market in dentistry,...

The business wants AI, and it wants it now. Meanwhile security budgets are flatlining, breaches are becoming a line item, and agents can wander places no one scoped them for. Kevin Akermanis, Solutions Architect at Okta and a 15-year Salesforce veteran, joins James to talk about what actually breaks when you bolt AI onto an enterprise, and why experience is quietly becoming the scarcest asset in t...

Side Stage Ventures and Dealroom have just released the 2026 edition of their landmark report on Australian venture. Grab your copy of the Australia Venture & Startup Report 2026 here: https://www.sidestage.vc/outliers-report-2026 Australia has created more unicorns per dollar of VC invested than anywhere else in the world — and Ben Grabiner has the data to prove it. In this replay, Cheryl and...