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Yas Grigaliunas built the circular economy in Australia before the term existed — a charity garage sale that grew into a $4 million capital raise. Then the company she founded barred her from her own office for nine months. This is what she learned about power, trust, and building back.
Read the articleImage from the interview on Perspective X with Pauline Fetaui.
12 articles
Alexey Mitko designed the equity plan that returned roughly $300 million to Eucalyptus employees — reportedly the largest ESOP payout in Australian history. Before any of that money existed, his job was looking two hundred people in the eye and showing them the version of the spreadsheet where the company was worth nothing.
Read the articleQuibi raised $1.75 billion before a single episode existed, hired Spielberg and Reese Witherspoon, and bought a Super Bowl ad before launch. Six months later it was dead. Thea Ngo's autopsy lands on one structural flaw: you couldn't even take a screenshot.
Read the articleCordelia King's first company matched footy players with clubs — until she realised players were lying about how good they were, because there was no data to check. The fix required teaching a computer to watch an entire game of sport, and it only worked once they gave up on football completely.
Read the articleEden Shirley had bootstrapped AutoGuru into Australia's biggest car-servicing marketplace. Then, the week international borders shut in March 2020, a signed investment term sheet evaporated. What actually saved the company wasn't the marketplace at all.
Read the articleOn a panel about whether founders need to be "damaged" to build something big, Hiranya Jayakody didn't take the bait. He just mentioned, almost offhand, that he grew up through a civil war and the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka — and that surviving it didn't leave him feeling owed anything, just recalibrated about what actually counts as hard.
Read the articleIn February 2023, Australia became the first country where authorised psychiatrists could legally prescribe MDMA and psilocybin. Dr Michael Winlo, Chief Scientific Officer at Emyria, describes what an actual eight-hour dosing session looks like — and what still stands between this and mainstream medicine.
Read the articleTaryn Williams started a modelling agency at 21 with $30,000 and no roadmap, and has built six companies since. The part she's only recently started saying out loud: the personal cost of building them, and the realisation that enough never actually feels like enough.
Read the articleKirstin Hunter co-founded Australia's first fossil-fuel-free super fund, then went on to run two Techstars accelerator cohorts in Australia. Now she runs Birchal, betting that ordinary people funding ordinary founders gives everyone a chance to choose which ideas work.
Read the articleChris Fresle had no technical background. At twenty, one news segment convinced him to spend years and a six-country patent building an app that uses facial recognition to make sharing someone's intimate photo without consent almost impossible.
Read the articleDr Catriona Wallace went from NSW police officer to founding one of the world's first enterprise AI companies, took it public on the ASX as one of the only woman CEO/chair pairs in the exchange's history, then watched Amazon and Google give away her product for free. The same afternoon she finally closed the sale, she drove to her first ayahuasca ceremony.
Read the articleDarius Monsef has sold two companies and raised more than $40 million for a paediatric healthcare startup that treated 50,000 sick kids — then watched it collapse under U.S. insurance billing codes. His theory of why founders fail isn't the market. It's that nobody lies to a founder as effectively as the founder does.
Read the articleYas Grigaliunas built the circular economy in Australia before the term existed — a charity garage sale that grew into a $4 million capital raise. Then the company she founded barred her from her own office for nine months. This is what she learned about power, trust, and building back.
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