Fayl Tales

Moritz Lechner started his first company at 14 with 100 euros of pocket money. At 15, he pitched on Austria's version of Shark Tank and raised €170,000. At 21, he sold the company he built to 50 people and millions in revenue. He is now 22 and already planning the next one. What could possibly go wrong along the way? A lot, actually. The subscription box business that never quite took off. A...

Hey Crew! Kilian Kaminski was running Amazon's entire refurbished program in Europe. He could see the opportunity. He could see Amazon had no intention of building it. So naturally, he quit and decided to do it himself. What could go wrong... refurbed is now the largest refurbished marketplace by markets across Europe. 24 countries. 10 million products sold. Over €150 million raised.  But get...

Hey Crew!  Oliver Holle founded his first company as a PhD student at Columbia in the late 1990s. Raised money. Opened four offices. Hired 20 people. And nearly went personally bankrupt for two and a half years with three small kids, no salary, and personal debt of €1.5 million. He eventually sold to VeriSign, moved to Silicon Valley, came back to Vienna, and built SpeedInvest. Europe's large...

★ Do you have a random question or need advice? Pop it into the chat or send them to me!! I get to meet and interview some amazing founders and investors globally, so I'll have it included in an upcoming episode :) ★ Hey Crew! It's just me today. No guest. Just a proper deep dive into one of the biggest shifts in consumer business happening right now. Direct to consumer had its moment. G...

Hey Crew!  Daniel Lord-Doyle started in telemarketing. Taught himself to code on YouTube. Built a laser hair removal e-commerce company during COVID by accident among many other things. And then co-founded Mary Technology, an AI legal tech startup that just opened offices in New York and San Francisco. Half engineer, half salesperson. He thinks that combination is the whole game. And he has a lot...

Hey crew,  Dickie Currer-Ganguli grew up on the poverty line in Yorkshire with a single mum, joined the army at 20, became a criminal defense and asylum lawyer at 23, moved to Australia at 26, and then found himself picking fruits and milking cows at 27 thinking, what the hell has happened here? Now he's running Hype Man Media and APAC Innovation Hub, and recently spent 16 days on a train acr...

Hey Crew! Trang Nova stepped on a snail during a morning run and it triggered a quarter life crisis that changed everything. The career. The relationship. The country. Even her name. She went from unhappy physio to checking her bank account at a petrol station and finding 80 cents. From a 10 year relationship to a one way ticket to Bali. From not speaking English as a kid to coaching people how to...

Hey Crew! It's just me today. No guest, no founder story, just a proper behind the scenes of what building Fayl Tales actually looks like. We just hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. And I have made a lot of mistakes getting there. I'm spilling all of it. The guest incidents I haven't talked about publicly. The stuff that kept me up at night. And the honest truth about what it actual...

Hey Crew!  Sam Garven spent 10 years watching HR get left behind while every other team got the shiny new tools. So she built Hello Canopy to fix it. Got into Techstars pre-MVP. Pivoted live on stage at SXSW. Had hundreds of users and angel investors ready to back her next raise. Two weeks ago she chose to close it all down. Not because she ran out of money. Not because she lost her team. Because...

Hey Crew!  Loughlan Dalton de Burgh named his cafe Pyramid Scheme. On purpose. Got a cease and desist from his landlord, went viral with 400,000 views, and had people driving two hours for his falafel. Then his business partner overdosed in the kitchen, $30,000 went missing from the books, and he shut it all down. He missed 12 consecutive mortgage payments. Used a foreclosure notice to unlock his...

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...