big bets and bad calls

An aerospace engineer walks into a NICU and doesn't leave the same person. On this episode of big bets & bad calls, Clint and Andrew sit down with Alex Newton, co-founder and CEO of Navi Medical Technologies, whose company has spent seven years building a device to solve a problem most people never knew existed: confirming catheter placement in critically ill newborns without repeat X-rays...

50,000 researchers. 400,000 downloads. Used in COVID vaccine validation, Great Barrier Reef science, cancer treatment development, and CRISPR research. And it nearly collapsed because there was no money to maintain it. Mixomics co-founders Kim-Anh Lê Cao and Mike Rennie sit down with Clint and Andrew to talk about building a global scientific standard on no budget, the big bet of going from academ...

Rob de Burgh Day has been an electrician, a talent agent, a venue owner, and the guy running a call centre out of Cambodia. So yeah — the Brightspace story didn't start in a boardroom. In this episode, Rob walks us through a winding founder journey that pivoted hard when COVID wiped out a million dollars of equipment sitting in boxes. Out of that chaos came a genuinely interesting idea: a live...

Sheree Andersen didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. She grew up on a Tasmanian farm, spent two decades in corporate HR, and stumbled into startups when she fell in love with building something from nothing. In this episode, Sheree — Co-Founder of Trove, the platform supercharging how brands manage corporate gifting at scale — walks us through the bets that defined her journey: leaving a work...

Two electrochemists. One $1.50 hack. A diagnostic platform that could go anywhere. Prof. Conor Hogan published a breakthrough mobile diagnostics idea in 2011 without patenting it. Someone called him an idiot. He never forgot it. Years later, he did it right — secured the patent, landed a multinational licensing deal, spent five years developing a smartphone-based wine sulphite test. Then the compa...

What if the problem with healthcare isn't the doctors — it's the whole system they're trapped in? This week, Clint and Andrew sit down with Dr Farhad Goodarzy and Sadaf Tamizkar, co-founders of a healthcare startup that's quietly rewriting the rules on how Australians access primary care. And they're doing it in a way that's as practical as it is ambitious. It started with a simple observation: in...

James Smith had 150 students, five English classes, and a standing Sunday appointment with a pile of marking that never got smaller. So at 25, with barely two paying customers — both friends of friends — he quit his job and bet everything on fixing a problem he knew better than anyone. That was two and a half years ago. Today, Mark My Words is an AI-powered writing assessment platform in schools a...

Megan Coomer and Michael Stumpf are the co-founders of Cell Bauhaus — a startup building software that simulates biology on a computer before anyone sets foot in a lab. Think 10x faster, 10x cheaper biotech innovation. We dig into how a published research paper caught the attention of the Gates Foundation, what it's like to wake up to $3.1M in your bank account, and why they believe they'r...

We sat down with Samar Mcheileh and Roo Harris, two of the three co-founders of Scale Investors to talk about being Australia’s First Women-Led VC Fund backing Women-Led Startups. Founded in 2013 as a gender-lens syndicate, Scale Investors launched its debut venture capital fund in 2025.The fund is backed by the Forrests’ Minderoo Foundation, the family of the late, iconic, female entrepreneur, Ca...

What if you could inhale your vaccine instead of bracing for a needle? We sat down with Dr. Anushi Rajapaksa, founder of Misti, who's on a mission to change the way biological medicines — including vaccines — get into your body. No needle. No clinic. Just a smart inhaler that uses sound waves, from the comfort of your own home

Most psychologists who work with entrepreneurs have studied the experience. Byron has lived it. Before becoming a psychologist, Byron was a venture-backed founder, navigating the pressure, the uncertainty, and the internal chaos that comes with building something from scratch. That experience is what eventually led him to specialise in exactly this space. Byron founded Sublime Studio as a psycholo...

Most people think "mental load" means remembering to buy milk and book the dentist. Sociologist Leah Ruppanner Ruppaner says that's just the tip of the iceberg — and she's written the book to prove it. In Drained, Leah maps out eight distinct types of mental load that people carry, from emotional support and relationship upkeep, to dream-building for others, to the invisible work...

We sit down with QuarterZip co-founder Andrew Pankevicius, as he takes us on his journey from multiple startups, exits, and pivots, and what the future holds for onboarding at enterprise scale

Today’s guest is Dr Nicole Jenkins co-founder of FeBI Technologies, a deep-tech startup developing quantum sensing technology designed to prevent missed and misdiagnosed iron disorders. It’s a fascinating mix of cutting-edge science and real-world healthcare impact.