28 founders. The messy middle, on tape.
Unscripted conversations with early-stage founders across Australia, Southeast Asia, and the US. Each episode is one founder, still in the thick of it, answering the questions an early-stage investor would actually ask.
EP 28
Latest
The D1 Athlete Who Built a $100M Voice AI Company | Will Bodewes, Phonely (YC S24)
Will was an ultra endurance cyclist and a college skier whose final race got cancelled. He carried that chip into Phonely — voice AI that answers your phone — going from 30% of calls failing to a customer paying $78,000 a month.
EP 27
Shakeel Lala
Shakeel quit his job, convinced one of Australia's largest VCs to back him with no business idea, ran 800 conversations with financial advisors over 9 months, then vibe-coded a demo the week before Australia's biggest financial advice conference. People tried to buy it on the spot. Marloo has since raised $10M and is live across 6 countries.
EP 26
Nathan Yun
Nathan Yun started a fashion brand with "the least sexy product, socks" after his ankle socks kept slipping on Covid walks. Five years later Paire hits an eight figure run rate, went viral on Shark Tank, and proved that boring products can build iconic brands.
EP 25
Celeste Amadon
Celeste was 21 when she walked into Forerunner Ventures. She raised her pre-seed in 8 days, her seed in 4 days, and fielded 12+ term sheets. Known has set up 1,500 curated dates in beta and hundreds of couples are now in relationships. Her thesis: today's apps are perversely incentivised to keep you single and paying.
EP 24
Nam Nguyen
Nam's co-founder was 19 years old. Law firms told them "come back in 5 years." They applied to YC four times. When they finally got in, their $4M round filled in 48 hours. TruthSystems is now the AI governance layer sitting inside law firms in real time.
EP 23
Finnlay Morcombe
At 25, Finnlay Morcombe built Fluency — a platform that maps how work actually happens in Fortune 500 organizations — raised 6 million from Accel within weeks of landing in the US, and hard pivoted into the product within one week of going to market.
EP 22
Stephen Turban
Stephen Turban started Lumiere because he wanted to quit his Harvard PhD but didn't know how — then his department screen-shared his face and gave him an ultimatum: the PhD or the company, not both.
EP 21
Jevon Le Roux
Jevon Le Roux ran retail brands like Surf Stitch and PE Nation before co-founding Keeyu — and he knew the product mattered when a customer, asked what she'd do without it, said "I just wouldn't come to work tomorrow."
EP 20
Ethan Yong
Ethan Yong built Umami Papi from a tiny apartment and a Microsoft Paint logo into Australia's cult chili oil brand — and got into 150 Coles stores after a chance checkout conversation while buying salmon.
EP 19
Andy Miller
Summer beer, winter launch, unknown brand, mid-pandemic, and non-alcoholic. Kitchen-kettle XPA brewed in longneck bottles. Robbie Williams on the cap table. $50M+ B Corp. Andy Miller on building Heaps Normal into Australia's biggest non-alc beer brand.
EP 18
Alessia and Elia
Alessia and Elia met in co-founder dating hell — Elia doing EF in Paris, Alessia trying the YC co-founder matching platform, connecting from apart (Paris and Sri Lanka) and complaining to each other every day about not finding the right match — until they asked why they weren't just brainstorming together. That became VibeFlow, a YC-backed startup helping non-technical founders build production-ready apps in no code.
EP 17
Joe Zhou
Joe raised money to buy a startup out of administration — "the Theranos of Australia" — then inherited what he calls 1,000 problems overnight. This is what it's like to rebuild a company that already crashed.
EP 16
Satya Tumati
Satya Tumati used to connect his laptop to a self-driving car and push code that moved a two-ton robot in real time. Now he's raised over $4 million to build AI co-workers for fraud and risk teams — and his first customer came from a completely cold message.
EP 15
Hamish McKay
Hamish McKay co-founded Order Editing, a Shopify app that gives online shoppers a "Grace period" to change their order after checkout — and hit a million in AR in the first year by building in public and refusing venture capital.
EP 14
Jason Ma
Jason Ma turned down offers to return to Google DeepMind, Nvidia and Meta to start Dyna Robotics — and just raised $120 million to build robots that fold napkins non-stop for 24 hours instead of chasing the humanoid dream.
EP 13
Sam Richardson
Sam moved cities six times and kept rebuilding his social life from scratch, so he built Butter — the app to hang out with new friends, now at 10,000 users and gearing up to launch across Australia.
EP 12
Phung, Daniel and Hanson
Phung, Daniel and Hanson spent two years building SipHRD — an Asian-flavoured alcohol brand — while juggling full-time jobs, four different launch dates, and 15 trial recipes. Their first product, a lychee vodka seltzer, sold out in 48 hours.
EP 11
Vivek and John
Vivek and John got into YC with an idea the partners disliked, then landed their first paying customer with no real product — John manually skim-reading documents at "absolute blitz breakneck speed" while telling the customer the AI worked great. They sold before they built.
EP 10
Hung Bui
Hung Bui's AIducation hit 40,000 users and entered 23,000 schools — but only after his first product flopped in the field and he had five months to rebuild it from scratch.
EP 9
Floriye Elmazi
Floriye sold her car to start a hair care brand she didn't set out to build — and ended up shipping Sisterwould to Lindsay Lohan, Dua Lipa and Nicole Kidman, with Braille on every bottle.
EP 8
Brian Pham
Brian Pham built Litecard, a "wallet led marketing platform" that turns Apple and Google Wallet into a media channel for brands and retailers — and expanded it from Australia across Asia and into Europe. This is how he picked markets, killed technical friction, and learned to study the data faster.
EP 7
Robert Huynh
Robert Huynh got Nook, his blue collar job marketplace in Vietnam, to 50,000 users and a $20 million valuation — then had to walk away. This is the story of how it started and how it fell apart.
EP 6
Ben Wood
A designer turned founder, Ben Wood takes tents and backpacks that are past their use-by date and turns them into brand new products — keeping high-performance textiles that are nigh on impossible to recycle out of the landfill.
EP 5
Nhi Nguyen
Nhi grew up in Vietnam, studied finance in Australia, and was shocked that one country builds your wealth automatically while the other leaves you guessing — so she built MaiMoney to bring institutional-quality investing to everyday Vietnamese investors.
EP 4
Kiki and Elan
Kiki and Elan quit their corporate jobs to start Sourmilk, a probiotic yogurt company — and grew to ten K followers and a cult following by building the brand in public. Their bet: people still care about protein, but now they're caring a lot more about gut health.
EP 3
Nate Spiteri
Nate Spiteri raised 800 K for Shopfront in December — the month every investor told him a round could never close. To get there, he reached out to almost 1000 investors and treated fundraising like a sales pipeline.
EP 2
Selina Li
Selina Li built the MVP of gymii.ai in two months with no prior full stack experience, then chose to bootstrap rather than chase VCs while building a nutrition-tracking app that's social on purpose.
EP 1
Abby Huang
Abby Huang built Dime into a marketing platform that connects brands and Gen Z consumers through student ambassadors — after first building a bad product nobody wanted and learning that you can't out market a bad product.