with Thea Ngo
Honest, tactical conversations with early-stage founders — the real decisions, trade-offs and mechanics behind building a company.
APAC-leaning founder stories, hosted by Thea Ngo, on YouTube, Spotify and Apple.
Honest, tactical conversations with early-stage founders. Every episode goes after three things.
The calls founders actually agonise over — not the tidy after-the-fact version.
What it cost, what got dropped, and why. The parts most shows skip.
How it was really built — the moving parts under the story.
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Every policy he read had the same clause: more than two marathons back-to-back counts as an "extreme event." He and three friends were about to run 80 in 80 days, and none of them had run one. They went anyway, with nothing covering them.
20 episodes
Every policy he read had the same clause: more than two marathons back-to-back counts as an "extreme event." He and three friends were about to run 80 in 80 days, and none of them had run one. They went anyway, with nothing covering them.
Cordelia King co-founded Superstat after her first company kept attracting players who lied about how good they were. One phone video now gives every basketballer full box scores — and the team is leaving Melbourne for Austin.
Quibi raised US$1.75 billion before it had a single show and shut down six months after launch. Thea takes apart what actually killed it — the tech that forced every show to be shot twice, and why almost no one converted from free trial.
Lee Lagdameo crossed from VC to founder to build Shikii Labs — and says most companies aren't AI-ready: their data is a mess, and raising less beats raising more.
inaam founder Arjun Agarwal joins Thea Ngo to talk about building the ASIC-regulated impact-investing app inaam, cold-emailing a CEO to land his first banking job, and how he quadrupled a teenage crypto fund before giving every dollar back.
Mary Technology co-founder Rowan McNamee joins Thea Ngo on why his legal AI reads thousands of case documents but never makes the final call — and the failed first prototype that offered lawyers 300 options when they only wanted one.
Hayden Smith started Pearler, a wealth management platform for everyday Australians.
Josh Foreman built InDebted from $12 in first revenue to over $1M a week profitable, 200 people, $350M valuation then voluntarily stepped down as CEO to rebuild the company from scratch.
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.
Lauren spent nearly a decade as a doctor before she joined an early-stage mental-health startup. When the model stopped working, she rebuilt the company herself, teaching herself Google Ads off YouTube. That became Good Mind Therapeutics: five ketamine clinics across Australia, break-even, heading for fifty.
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.
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.
What happens when a VC backs you before you have an idea and then you have to find one?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do you turn a lockdown side project into a cult food brand?
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Thea Ngo is an investment manager at Archangel Ventures, an Australian pre-seed fund that writes first cheques into early-stage startups, where she sources and evaluates new investments. She came to venture capital after working with early-stage startups in the US and Southeast Asia, including venture-building and operating roles at Do Ventures, Kidas and Phynergetix, and after strategy consulting at PwC's Strategy& in New York. She holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Ngo created and hosts Founders in Motion on Day One, a podcast of honest, tactical conversations with early-stage APAC founders about the real decisions, trade-offs and mechanics of building a company.
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