The Founders Fire

You've seen the cars. The offices. The 500 staff. The half a million people watching him online. You haven't seen the four years that made all of it possible and the moment he lost everything. Before the property empire, Emil Juresic was a boy in a war zone, walking five kilometres through sniper fire to carry water back to his family. Four years with no power, no clean water, barely any f...

He owed more than a million dollars and was too ashamed to tell almost anyone. Today he runs a multi-million-dollar business. Tim Duggal built OzMobiles from a second bedroom in St Kilda, buying and selling second-hand phones out the front of his apartment building, into a multi-million-dollar phone trade-in business. But a few years ago he borrowed a million dollars, felt rich, and watched it nea...

She left school three months early, worked nightclubs, trained as an electrician, and once went two years without an oven. Now she co-runs a traffic control business turning over $30 million a year. Sacha Cornford has lived more lives than most founders, and built one of Queensland's fastest-growing businesses through the middle of it.  In this episode she shares about the broke single-mum yea...

He survived cancer in his twenties. Years later he lost his marriage and his business in the same stretch, and it nearly cost him his life. NOTE:This episode discusses mental health and suicide. If anything here lands close to home, support is available in Australia through Lifeline on 13 11 14, and Reach Out at au.reachout.com Scott Horton is one of the best-known names in Brisbane recruitment, c...

He started Di Bella Coffee with $5,000. He sold it for $47 million. This is what that actually cost him. Phil Di Bella built one of Australia's biggest coffee companies, then nearly lost himself doing it. 167kg. Blood pressure of 177. Nightmares for six months. In this first episode of The Founder's Fire he talks about the parts founders never say out loud, and the funeral that made him re...

Niamh Whiley quit her job with $2,000 in the bank, a brand new mortgage and no clients. Under two years later she runs Aligned Allied Health with a team of 12, helping hundreds of people. But the person who treats founders for a living turned out to be the worst at taking her own advice. In this episode she's honest about the burnout, the self-doubt, the friends she lost, and the money mistake...

He signed the deal every startup dreams of: 5,000 jobs a week. Then COVID wiped it out overnight. Rudy Crous arrived in Australia as a teenager with a backpack and not much else. He became an organisational psychologist, spent years studying how people behave under pressure, then co-founded Compono, an HR tech company backed by Shark Tank's Andrew Banks. When his big deal collapsed in 2020 he...

Every founder has two stories, the one on the stage and the one over a whiskey. The Founder's Fire is the second one. We sit down with founders to talk about the things we all go through, but no one talks about. The pressure, the doubt, the times they nearly gave up and how they turned it all around. If you're building something and want to hear what it actually takes, this is for you. Mak...