For the builders everyone wants to back.
Presented by Vanta & Mighty Partners
Australia's most ambitious founders and investors. In person. Unfiltered.
Five hard-tech founders — HEO, Alloy, Vexev, Zabidou and Antares — open Season 2 live in Sydney: buying satellites already in orbit, capital efficiency as a competitive edge, and making Australia a manufacturing base for the world.
7 episodes
Five hard-tech founders — HEO, Alloy, Vexev, Zabidou and Antares — open Season 2 live in Sydney: buying satellites already in orbit, capital efficiency as a competitive edge, and making Australia a manufacturing base for the world.
HEO co-founder and CTO Dr Hiranya Jayakody (HJ) started out trying to mine asteroids. Instead, he and co-founder Will Crowe built a way to photograph satellites in space using other people's cameras, pointed one at the International Space Station during COVID lockdown, and got a call from US regulators asking what they'd done. Today HEO runs 7 cameras in orbit and sells space intelligence to governments across the US, Europe and Japan. That story opens up the bigger question this episode keeps returning to: do you have to be "damaged" to build something big? Encour founder Jessy Wu makes the case that investors quietly prefer founders who stay triggered and hungry for vindication. Beaten Zone Venture Partners and TEN13 founder Steve Baxter isn't having it, his view is that a lot of what gets called founder intensity is just people being arseholes and dressing it up. HJ, who grew up through war and a tsunami in Sri Lanka, offers a third answer none of them saw coming. Host Brendan Hill takes the Oversubscribed Season 1 finale through defence tech and why Steve calls it "irrationally unloved," the real difference between US and Australian hiring culture, ESG, AUKUS, and the story of how Steve actually landed his Shark Tank gig. Stay to the end for the asteroid still sitting on HEO's roadmap.
Twelve months ago, Everlab had one doctor. Today they have 66. They've built their own patient management system from scratch, landed Bain, BHP and the AFL as corporate clients, and closed one of Australia's biggest seed rounds, $10M USD led by a New York investor who flew to Sydney on Easter Sunday and didn't leave without a term sheet. This week Brendan sits down with Marc Hermann, Australia's leading COO Gillian Findlay, and investor Rohen Sood, all angel investors in Everlab, to get into the real story. How do you hire obsessives, not just smart people? Why did a US fund get it before Australian investors did? And is B2B SaaS actually cooked? Gillian just launched Third Room, a community for the operators who actually scale these companies. Rohen breaks down why the gradient beats the y-intercept every time. And Marc is brutally honest about what it actually looks like inside a fast-growing startup.
How do AI companies scale this fast without breaking? Eight figure revenue in competitive markets. Products that double revenue in a single month. Customers who tattoo your logo on their body. Not growth hacks. Not hype. Real traction, earned the hard way. Brendan Hill sits down with Daniel Slater from Relume, Liam Millward from Instant, and Sally Yu from King River Capital to unpack what actually drives breakout AI companies in 2025. The answer is not building more features. It is obsession with distribution, ruthless focus on speed to value, and teams that move faster than their competitors think is possible. Relume did not start as an AI startup. It started as an agency. Building websites manually, feeling the pain firsthand, and removing the work that should never have existed. Instant did not find product market fit once. It found it three times, killing products, rebuilding teams, and learning the hard way that revenue without stickiness is a mirage. And from Silicon Valley, Sally Yu shares what she sees across the fastest growing AI companies in the world, why community is becoming the real moat, and why founders with unwavering conviction now win disproportionately. They talk candidly about churn, mistakes, hiring A players, monthly execution cycles, and why most AI products fail not because the tech is bad, but because the company moves too slowly. This is a conversation about momentum. About earning distribution. About building products people would fight to keep. If you want to understand how modern AI companies actually scale, and what it takes to stay ahead once you do, this episode is for you.
What does it take to build world class AI companies out of Australia, and why does San Francisco still move 6 to 9 months faster? In this episode, Brendan sits down with three of the most ambitious technical founders in the country: Pasha Rayan (CEO & Co-Founder at A1Base), Anshul J. (Co-Founder at Everlab) and Jacky Koh (Founder at Relevance AI). They break down the rise of agentic AI, how engineering culture in SF accelerates innovation, and why the next generation of founders need to think in $100B outcomes. They dive into everything from 10 to 20 times engineering productivity gains, to building autonomous healthcare, to creating the communication layer for AI coworkers that everyday people will talk to like friends. They also unpack what Australia must do to stay competitive, how to build teams that love hard problems, and why ambition, pace and hands-on founders matter more than ever. It’s a rare inside look at the operators defining the next era of AI infrastructure, agent orchestration and human health. If you want to understand where AI agents are really going, and how Australia can catch up to the frontier, get subscribed.
The future isn’t coming, it’s being built, line by line, chip by chip, in workshops and labs across Australia. From defense-grade autonomy to data infrastructure for robots, this episode of Oversubscribed dives deep into the frontier of hard tech with the founders building it. Host Brendan Hill sits down with Michael Irwin (Breaker), Joe Harris (Alloy), and returning guest Charlie Gearside (Eucalyptus / Build Australia) for a wild conversation about robotics, national ambition, and why Australia needs to start making things again. They talk building AI that lives on the edge, the ethics of defense, hiring A-players for impossible problems, and why the next industrial revolution might start right here. It’s an unfiltered look at the people shaping Australia’s place in the age of autonomy.
Every great startup is an act of alchemy, turning panic into progress, chaos into clarity, and conviction into something that can’t be killed. Welcome to the first episode of Oversubscribed, where Brendan Hill brings together Thomas Kelly (Co-Founder and CEO at Heidi Health), Liam Millward (Co-Founder and CEO at Instant), and Charlie Gearside (Co-Founder at Eucalyptus), to dissect the decisions that separate endurance from extinction. They talk about near-death pivots, hiring A-players, and why distribution so often beats product. No theory. No vanity metrics. Just the real psychology of building under pressure.
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In venture capital, being oversubscribed means everyone wants in, too much demand, not enough room. It’s what happens when a vision, a founder, or a company becomes undeniably magnetic.
That’s the energy behind this show. Oversubscribed is where Australia’s most ambitious founders and investors sit down for unfiltered, in-person conversations about building through chaos, from near-death moments and brutal pivots to the art of hiring killers, raising capital, and scaling conviction.
Think All-In, Flagrant, and Full Send, but for the next generation of Australian startups. No theory. No polished PR. Just raw, honest insight from the people actually doing the work.
Oversubscribed is a Day One® show, the podcast network for founders, investors, and operators.
Brendan Hill is an accomplished entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture partner based in Sydney, Australia. With a passion for startups, technology, and Golden Retrievers, Brendan began his journey in the investment world after his e-commerce startup was acquired in 2016. He has since become a prominent figure in the angel investing community, partnering with ambitious founders tackling significant challenges in sectors such as Fintech, Renewable Energy, Computer Vision, and Space across various regions including Australia, New Zealand, North America, Africa, and LATAM.Brendan is currently a Venture Partner at TEN13, where he syndicates his top global deals. He has also held roles as an investor in numerous companies, including Instant, Heidi Health, Everlab, and SpaceX, among others. His previous experience includes founding and directing the Angel Investors Program at AGSM @ UNSW Business School, where he educated and mentored new angel investors.Brendan holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Wollongong and has studied Technology Entrepreneurship at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His dedication to fostering innovation and entrepreneurship is evident through his involvement as a startup mentor and advisor, as well as his volunteer work with organizations like The Life You Can Save.
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