Fayl Tales

Hey Crew! Ben Cull didn't set out to sell his company. He went to market for a $5 million funding round and came back with an acquisition offer from Fiserv at double what he thought the business was worth. Eight years. Two developers who hated selling. 2,500 merchants. One napkin sketch in a Sheffield pub. No hype. Just acquired. We get into what the acquisition process actually looks like fr...

Hey Crew! Imagine you've spent years building a company around live events. You just cracked your first million dollar year, you're training the Eventbrite team in Nashville, you're about to partner with one of the biggest ticketing platforms in the world. Then Friday the 13th of March 2020 hits and every single client calls to cancel and ask for their deposits back. That's whe...

HHey Crew! What do you do when you build a recruitment firm from a cockroach-infested Surry Hills office into a nearly 100-person, $20M-a-year global business, and then look back and say, yeah, I was faking it the whole time? That's Phaedon. He founded Mitchell Lake at 26, exited, and co-founded Innovation Bay, the longest running startup community in Australia. He's been inside more fou...

Hey Crew! Haobo Zhang is 20 years old. He has a full scholarship to study biomedicine at University of Melbourne, 30,000 users on his AI platform, and a very public goal to build a unicorn by 25. He's also on a leave of absence from that scholarship, which is basically just a polite way of saying he dropped out. He's been building since he was 14, and not for the reasons you'd think...

Hey Crew! Millie Marconi has been building for 9 years. In that whole time she's had exactly one real job, and it only lasted a couple of months. She's the kind of founder who doesn't wait for permission, which is exactly why this episode hit different. We get into the LinkedIn post that nearly broke her (and ended up building her next company), how she walked away from $100K in rev...

Hey Crew! Picture this. You win world's best liquor. You're in Qantas first class lounges. You're in over 500 venues across the country. And you got here by betting every dollar you had on a family limoncello recipe. That's Stefan Di Benedetto's story. Stefan is the founder of Solbevi, the world's first limoncello spritz in a can, born from an Italian family tradition...

Hey Crew! Picture this: you walk away from a successful corporate tech career, buy a vineyard in Tasmania with your partner, and dream about the simple life. Then the vineyard goes haywire, you're burning through money, and you can't get anyone to come help. Most people sell up. Fiona Turner built an AI company instead. Fiona is the co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Agronomy — an AI platform...

Hey Crew! Ok so this one hit different. Megan Luttrell has built Aussie Founders Club into a community of thousands of founders, runs Kairos Recruitment, just launched People Stack, won Victorian Ecosystem Hero of the Year, and landed a $200K grant from Launch Vic. But her first year? She was broke. Like properly broke. She got her partner to pay her to clean their own house just to have an extra...

If you've ever read a piece of startup advice and thought "that doesn't feel right"... trust that instinct. This one's for you. This is another solo episode. No guest. Just me unpacking the startup advice that sounds great on a LinkedIn post but actually messes people up when they're in the thick of building. I've interviewed a lot of founders over the past year...

Ok so this one is different. No guest. Just me. I've interviewed so many founders about their failures and mistakes but I realised I've literally never talked about my own. A few friends and guests have called me out on it too so here we are. I also recap the first ever Fayl Tales Live event at Canva in Sydney, which sold out in four days (still a bit shocked about that). I talk about wh...

Ok so this one is a ride.  Alex Melocco studied law AND software engineering (overachiever energy), ditched the safe corporate path, and went full send on building startups.  First attempt? A tutoring marketplace that flopped because nobody actually needed it. Second attempt? A calendar app he built with a whole team for months only to find out people were basically like "yeah it's cool....

Riana Shah was in second year uni with one unit of Python… and somehow ended up co-founding Dugong Technologies -  an AI-powered drowning detection startup designed to flag incidents in real time . And then? When the mission started feeling heavier than the company (and the founders) could carry… she made the call most people avoid: she shut it down . In this episode we get into the messy, real st...

If you’ve ever tried to plan a group trip and watched it fall apart in the group chat… this one’s for you. In this episode, I sit down with Jay Raval , co-founder of Troopa — an AI-powered travel planning platform built around one simple truth: someone always ends up doing all the work. Jay walked away from a stable consulting career to build a startup that’s part AI, part collaboration tool, and...

What actually kills startups? Sometimes it’s not product… it’s timing . In this episode, I’m joined by Alan Jones: angel investor, startup mentor, ex-founder, and co-manager at M8 Ventures (backing early-stage tech across Australia & New Zealand). Alan’s also the host of Pick My Brain , where founders pitch live and get the kind of feedback that’s equal parts practical and slightly brutal . We...

What if donating didn’t require a big monthly commitment… or an awkward “do you want to round up?” moment at the checkout? In this episode I’m joined by Tim Millbank, founder of Change for Change, a fintech-for-good platform designed to turn everyday spending into micro-donations for vetted charities. Think round-up apps, but instead of investing spare change for private wealth… it goes straight t...

Nick Hazell raised $180M building V2 Food , Australia’s market leader in plant-based protein, before exiting and turning his focus to an even bigger climate problem. Now the founder of Algenie , Nick is betting that algae biomanufacturing could one day compete with crude oil and become a scalable solution for food, fuel, and materials. In this episode, we cover: Raising $180M and scaling V2 Food n...

Some founders build products. Others build the future. In this episode of Fayl Tales , I sit down with Roxanne Bardini-Medio , CEO and co-founder of Geoneon , a climate tech company using geo-intelligence and data science to help governments and communities prepare for natural disasters like bushfires, floods, and deforestation. Roxanne shares her journey from earth sciences and disaster risk rese...

Welcome to the first ever solo episode of Fayl Tales. After interviewing founders across Vienna, Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania, Loveth has noticed the same themes appearing again and again, regardless of industry, experience or geography. In this episode, she unpacks the truths founders whisper privately, the lessons they wish they’d learned earlier, and why failure is rarely catastrophic but alw...

From booking bands to backing founders in Tasmania. Amy Fogarty has lived multiple lives. And somehow they all make sense. In this episode, Amy shares how she went from booking talent for live gigs, coordinating hundreds of performers and managing the chaos of the creative economy, to becoming a leader in the startup world. She explains why those early chapters, with all their pressure and unpredi...

What do you do when your first hire steals from you, your business partner stops working, and your media company burns nearly half a million dollars? For Steve Grace , founder of The Nudge Group and private members’ club The Pillars , the answer has always been the same: you keep going, even when the chaos feels personal. In this episode, Steve opens up about: The shocking betrayal he uncovered th...

Australian founder Taryn Williams built Wink Models at 21, then launched marketplace startup theright.fit, raised venture capital from Airtree, expanded into Asia and exited to international acquirers – all while surviving hyper-growth, chaos, and burnout. In this episode of Fayl Tales , we dive into how she rebuilt a broken modelling industry, the real economics of the creator and influencer spac...

What happens when you realise you’re building the wrong kind of success? In this episode of Fayl Tales, Georgie Healy ~ engineer, founder, ex-VC, AI podcaster and leader of one of Australia’s biggest accelerator programs ~ unpacks the real story behind her pivots. We dive into: Leaving chemical engineering and consulting to chase more meaningful work Building a playground discovery app as a new mu...

What happens when two consultants walk away from stable 6-figure careers… with no idea what they’ll build next? Meet Daniel Jo and Justin Jang , the co-founders of Attentv, who went from whiteboards and frameworks to late-night pub installations, broken TV systems, and a crash-course in hospitality, hardware, AI and co-founder conflict. In this episode, they share: why they quit without a plan the...

Strategist Adam Murray on the real startup killers: resentment, complacency, and fuzzy reality . We dig into scale-up breaking points, the danger of too much cash , “ warm data ” for better decisions, and a co-founder alignment ritual that prevents blow-ups. Plus a turnaround story, and how impermanence  reshaped his approach to work and life.  Follow us on all platforms! Instagram ~ @fayltales Ti...

Before running startup pitch nights and ecosystem tours, Desmond John was showing backpackers around Melbourne’s bars and laneways. When COVID hit, it all collapsed, but that collapse became the blueprint for something new. In this episode, he shares how curiosity, connection, and failure led him to create Vibe Guide Ventures and help founders go further together. Follow us on all platforms! Insta...