Founders in Motion with Thea Ngo

Hayden Smith started Pearler with negative money, medical bills he couldn't pay, surgery coming up. The company he built tells everyday Australians to invest and then leave it alone. He's been running on patience since day one. Hayden Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Pearler Investments, Australia's long-term retail investing platform. We talk about why a brokerage would tell customers to trade...

Josh Foreman built InDebted from his first $12 in revenue to over $1M a week, profitable, 200 people, $350M valuation, then stepped down as CEO to rebuild the whole company from scratch. The AI-native startup he fears most is a leaner version of himself starting today with nothing to protect. Josh is the founder of InDebted, an AI-enabled debt collection platform in 7 countries. We talk about orga...

Eight months of pitching, nothing to show for it, then the first term sheet finally arrives, and his own lawyer tells him not to sign. So he walks away from the only offer he has. Rakhesh Martyn is the founder of Hachiko, a software platform that maximises returns from portfolios of stationary batteries. Before Australia he was a chartered engineer in London who got made redundant after Brexit and...

Lauren spent nearly a decade as a doctor before she joined a chaotic mental-health startup. Then the model broke, her co-founder walked, and she rebuilt the company alone, teaching herself Google Ads off YouTube. That became Good Mind Therapeutics: five ketamine clinics across Australia, break-even, heading for fifty. Lauren Barker is the co-founder of Good Mind Therapeutics, a clinic network for...

Caroline Tran cold-DMed the CEO of Tasmania's largest telco through a Facebook group, no product, no brand, no payments background. He said yes. That became Hello Clever: $15M ARR, 20 countries, 60 banking relationships. Caroline Tran is the co-founder and CEO of Hello Clever, a global payments and embedded loyalty platform. We talk about the pivot that saved the company, the 11pm call that ki...

Will Bodewes wrote a sticky note to himself on day one of building Phonely: "there are no shortcuts for you, Bodewes." That note sat on his desk every day for 2 years. We talk about building a category before it exists, keeping customers through a 30% failure rate, the SMB-to-enterprise pivot, the cycling LinkedIn post that landed a $16M Series A, and what building a company actually cos...

Shak quit his job, convinced a VC to back him with no business idea, and spent nine months running 800 conversations with financial advisors before building Marloo - the AI doing the actual work inside financial advice firms, now raised $10M and live across seven markets. For: founders still searching for the right idea, operators thinking about AI and vertical SaaS, anyone who's ever over-eng...

Nathan Yun built Paire into an eight-figure brand by doing almost everything the DTC playbook said not to: engineering fabric from scratch, opening a physical store, and turning Shark Tank into a sales channel rather than a funding pitch. This is the story of building an iconic brand from the least sexy product in fashion. We talk about manufacturing from the yarn up, pricing strategy, the Shark T...

Celeste Amadon left Stanford, cancelled her job offers, and raised her seed round in four days before Known had a single paying user. Her thesis: dating apps aren't broken by accident. They're engineered to keep you swiping, paying, and single. We talk about the loneliness epidemic and why it's already your problem too, how Known uses voice inference to understand personality beyond wh...

Nam got told to come back in 5 years by major law firms. A year later he was YC-backed, had raised $4M in 48 hours, and was serving some of the biggest law firms in the world. But the harder story is what it took to get there, January in Poland, rejections piling up, a parental deadline looming, and 20 something selling AI governance to people with decades of experience. We talk about how to sell...

I walked into a top consulting firm interview fully prepared and lost the room in 15 seconds. Six months later, same resume, same experience, I got the offer. The only thing that changed was how I showed up. We talk about reading the room in real time, how to research your interviewer like a journalist, and what to do in the 24 hours after the interview. For: early career job seekers, career pivot...

Same resume. Same background. First time: didn't make it past screening. Six months later: six-figure consulting job in New York. The difference was five invisible mistakes. CHAPTERS 0:00 - Intro 1:15 - Mistake 1: Your Story Doesn't Add Up 2:40 - Mistake 2: You're Too Late 3:35 - Mistake 3: Wrong People, Wrong Questions 5:27 - Mistake 4: Bad Relationship Management 7:35 - Mistake 5: Yo...

Finnlay raised $6M from Accel VC weeks after landing in the US, no deck, no data room, just two pages. But the bigger story is what Fluency is actually building: a platform that maps how work gets done inside enterprises, heading toward AI models that can predict your business before it happens. We talk about US fundraising, product-market fit vs. the pivot that came before it, and whether AI will...

If you've been sending applications and hearing nothing back, you're not unqualified, you're just invisible. In this episode, why the job application is a dying channel and what to do instead: from crafting outreach that actually gets responses, to having conversations that make hiring managers remember you, to building a personal brand that makes opportunities come to you. Three concr...

Stephen Turban was two semesters into his Harvard PhD when he got called into a Zoom room and confronted with his own face on the Lumiere website. The ultimatum was simple: PhD or startup. He chose the company. Four years later, Lumiere is 100 people strong and doing eight figures. We talk about using a startup as an exit strategy from academia, the hidden cost of scattered focus, content tactics...

If I covered your name on your resume, could it belong to 5,000 other people? If yes, you're playing a losing game. In this episode: → Why you're not getting callbacks: You're indistinguishable, not unqualified → What signaling actually is: Proving you're already doing the job (just not for them yet) → The Signal Equation: Specific + Relevant + Public (miss one = invisible) → The 4...

Jevon dropped out of high school to become a pro surfer, then built Nike's Hurley brand in South Africa, ran PE Nation and Surf Stitch, and now he's building Keeyu, an AI platform that stops ecom complaints before customers even notice problems. This episode covers his pivot from selling a "vitamin" to a "painkiller," why distribution beats product-first, and the custom...

Mass applying, tweaking resumes, and waiting for callbacks doesn’t work anymore and it’s not because you’re bad at job hunting. In this episode, we break down what actually changed in the job market and the 4-step framework that works in 2026: positioning, proof, distribution, and conversion. Anything I can be helpful with, leave a comment! This is Episode 1 of The 2026 Job Playbook, a mini series...

How do you turn a lockdown side project into a cult food brand? In this episode of Founders in Motion , Ethan Yong, founder of Umami Papi , shares the real story behind building one of Australia’s most talked-about chilli oils. We dive into the origin of the name “Flavor Daddy,” early product experiments, breaking into retail, and what it actually takes to stand out in a crowded food and CPG marke...

Andy Miller didn’t just start a beer company, he helped spark a cultural shift. In this episode, he shares how Heaps Normal grew from a lockdown experiment into a $50M non-alcoholic beer brand loved across Australia. We unpack building a product for the “sober curious,” turning pandemic challenges into momentum, landing the first 200 customers, designing a category-defining brand, scaling a premiu...

Most AI dev tools can write code but they fall apart in production. In this episode, the founders of VibeFlow (YC S25) explain why they bet their entire company on fixing that exact problem. We break down the real bottleneck in AI development (maintainability), how they built a platform that’s ready for real-world use, and how they gained 6,000 users in their first three weeks. Perfect for enginee...

StrongRoom AI was once hailed as a healthtech rising star then came the collapse. Joe Zhou stepped in to buy the company out of administration and rebuild from chaos. We dive into the lawsuits, leadership shifts, and the hard lessons behind bringing a broken startup back to life. A must-listen for healthtech founders, investors, and anyone curious about startup resilience. If this episode helped y...

What if AI could take over the most painful parts of fraud detection? In this episode, Satya Tumati , co-founder and CTO of Socratix AI , shares how he went from tuning cars with code to building AI coworkers that automate fraud analysis for banks and fintechs. We unpack the early MVP that landed his first customers, how they got into Y Combinator with nothing, and why confidence isn’t required to...

Hamish McKay built a Shopify app for MrBeast and turned it into one of Shopify’s fastest-growing startups. In this episode, he shares the scrappy early days, his 3 pillars to hit $1M ARR FAST, and building in public on LinkedIn. Perfect for founders, personal brand builders and just anyone obsessed with e-commerce growth and startup building. If this episode helped you, leave a review on Apple Pod...

Jason Ma turned down offers from Google and Meta to build Dyna Robotics, a $600M startup making AI robots that actually work. We cover the 800-napkin breakthrough, taking robots from lab demos to laundromats, and what it means to power the physical economy.  Perfect for founders, operators, and anyone curious about applied AI beyond the hype If this episode helped you, leave a review on Apple Podc...