Build It. They'll Come.

Serial startup innovator & Redbubble co-founder Martin Hosking believes that aside from those enduring values learned from his mum, his University of Melbourne History degree, of all things, plus his career stint as an Australian diplomat, navigating the tricky politics of the Middle East, were perfect foundations for his eventual entrepreneurial journey.  Throw in returning to uni to com...

Martin Hosking co-founded art & design website Redbubble to put visual artists’ creative output directly in touch with consumers. But for its first 3 years Redbubble went virtually nowhere, with no traction and few sales. But little by little, with the support & belief of the artists themselves, and a few funders, Redbubble began to make headway. While initial scale up was so difficu...

Law academic, linguist and theologian Dr Michael Spence AC has been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney for a dozen years, & in that time he’s modernised and simplified the venerated sandstone institution, by essentially bringing together what he saw as a bunch of warring Faculty factions, to unite to make the university more community-facing, rather than inward-looking. Along th...

Melbourne-born corporate lawyer Adam Schwab was 24 years old when he and a schoolmate began their entrepreneurial journey. While Adam was still living at home with his parents, the two friends started out sub-letting apartments to backpackers, as a side gig.  Bit by bit, through much trial and error – including waging war on bed bugs! – the pair made enough money to dream bigger....

Co-founder of AirTree Ventures has been an Australian role model & trailblazer in the digital technology space for over 3 decades. But after early business career success working for Bill Gates at Microsoft, a seismic personal event made Daniel Petre decide there was more that he needed to do to become, in his view, a better person and a good dad to his daughters. So he set out on a slightly l...

Co-founder of AirTree Ventures, Daniel Petre is a serial entrepreneur - not only did he build successful digital startups inside bigger companies for bosses like Bill Gates and Kerry and James Packer, but in the past 7 years he’s built up over $600million in Venture Capital funds to invest in many promising Aussie startups, creating one of Australia’s largest VC companies in AirTree Ve...

While Bronte Capital’s self-styled eccentric co-founder John Hempton has made a reputation chasing corporate frauds; he also loves, delves deeply into and invests in, strong, quality companies around the world. Another surprising thing about him? Hempton can also admit when he’s pursuing the wrong strategy, and the 10-year bull market since the GFC, has proved a bit of thorn in his sid...

Global fund manager John Hempton, co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at Sydney-based Bronte Capital is a maverick investor who prides himself on being eccentric and loves to track down corporate frauds and short sell their shares. He creates critics, particularly amongst managements, because he’s a short-seller. In Part 1 of this interview, Hempton explains why he short sells, or bets a...

Canva co-founder Cameron Adams reveals how the Canva teams pulled out all stops in the past 12 months to fuel massive growth, leaping from serving individuals’ design needs, to servicing much larger corporates’ needs, and how that’s paying off. While much of Canva’s product is still free, Canva Pro team has launched a new tool giving paying customers access to some 60 milli...

Cameron Adams began mucking around with computer games as a kid, in the back room of his dad’s suburban Melbourne computer shop. After uni he parlayed that computer literacy, fuelled by a passion for graphic design, into a job at Google. But his entrepreneurial spirit serendipitously led him to meet 2 young people with a dream - Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht wanted to transform their sma...

Graham Skroo Turner was bitten hard by the travel bug. Twice. Creating and building not 1 but 2 business empires specialising in travel. There’s the massive, now publicly listed Flight Centre, which operates in 24 countries, and writes billions of dollars in travel sales each year. But then there is another empire he built, from scratch, with the help of a few mates back in the early 1970’s, at ju...

Flight Centre co-founder Graham Skroo Turner witnessed bookings & sales in the giant global travel company’s leisure division plunge 97%, within just 1 week in March, as nations, Governments & states closed borders; ordered citizens & businesses into lockdown; and planes essentially stopped flying. How Skroo Turner & his leadership team went straight into survival mode to shore up...

Carolyn Creswell started her entrepreneurial journey young… she was just 18 years old, working part-time as a student mixing up small batches of muesli for a mum & dad operation. When that business was about to fold, with her job threatened, she and a pal bought it for just $1,000 each. But it was no overnight success. After several years of hard grind -- perfecting muesli recipes, sourcing qu...

Four Pillars Gin entrepreneur & marketing whizz Stuart Gregor and his co-founders LOVE making craft gin, pouring heart and soul, plus the best local & exotic botanicals into their boutique Aussie brand. In just over 6 years, Four Pillars has won prestigious international awards, become a local G&T favourite, and was selling an impressive 600,000 bottles of gin a year. That is, until CO...

Young, 3rd-Year Resident, who is yet to graduate in her Specialty training, Dr Daniela Petraglia talks candidly about the almost crushing challenges faced by frontline doctors & nurses caring for the avalanche of ill Covid-19 patients which threatened to collapse the entire hospital system of Emilia-Romagna, one the hardest hit regions of Northern Italy. The heart-breaking decisions forced on...

Professor David Isaacs, senior Sydney pediatric specialist in respiratory virus infections and immunisations, at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, bluntly assesses WHY Australia has managed this pandemic pretty well so far compared to many world-leading nations and HOW only minor, firmly-controlled COVID-19 infection breakouts might occur once lockdown lightens. Plus he calmly explains the evid...

Melbourne-based medical device entrepreneur Jefferson Harcourt talks of the heroic collaboration going on right now between normal business competitors, to build from scratch and then deliver 2,000 invasive breathing Ventilators: new, much-needed “weapons” in the frontline fight against COVID-19, which will contribute to the Federal Government’s National Medical Stockpile. But what’s amazing about...

With less than 2 years as a practicing doctor, Internal Medicine Physician Dr Anna O’Kelly talks candidly about the heart-breaking challenges faced by frontline doctors & nurses in ICU caring for Covid-19 patients, who need to be invasively ventilated, to hopefully breathe again. Working in one of Boston’s busiest hospitals in the USA - now the global epicentre of this highly infectious, dange...

3D-printing entrepreneur Paul Docherty speaks about HOW his small advanced medical manufacturing facility is currently trialling their new 3D-printed swabs for much-needed Covid-19 tests, in conjunction with the Doherty Institute and University of Melbourne, to test the swab’s efficacy, and await TGA approval. 3DMEDiTech is also 3D-printing parts for the crucial breathing ventilators, all part of...

Making it onto Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 List for 2019 shows just how rapidly Kristy Chong’s baby, Modibodi reusable leak-proof underwear, is growing: from a humble start-up 7 yrs ago to a global star. But what really drives this young entrepreneur is giving customers what they want & need: a solution to personal hygiene leaks and spills, and a solution to the billions of fem hygiene tampo...

New mum Kristy Chong wanted to solve an everyday, often embarrassing, problem for women, & men, without the massive amounts of disposable personal hygiene products eventually being dumped in landfill. With passion & perseverance she created revolutionary underwear that promises to soak up leaks, periods and perspiration, building Modibodi into an empire growing recently by up to 400% a yea...

Highly experienced virus & infectious diseases specialist Professor Dominic Dwyer who’s working on the frontline at Westmead Hospital, talks plainly about where we are at with COVID-19, & what are the crucial weapons in the fight to diagnose, treat and stop the spread of this virus & disease, that ALL of us in the community MUST engage in, & what he is worried about. Prof Dwyer als...

How entrepreneurial Tony & Josephine Sukkar’s hands-on approach to everything -- from interviewing every cadet to negotiating massive building contracts – built their empire. But it also boosted their ability to agitate for gender equality and changen not only on building sites but in one of our oldest sports, Rugby Union! Hear how Josephine was instrumental in pushing rugby to establish the W...

Fleeing civil war in Lebanon as a teen, while protecting his younger siblings, made Tony Sukkar AM resilient and ready for any crisis, later forging a construction empire out of his former employer’s corporate collapse. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Entrepreneurial Fund Manager Geoff Wilson AO, founder & CIO of Wilson Asset Management, on Being a Maverick, Outspoken Shareholder See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.