Day One®

In Part Two of my conversation with Dr Steven Lu, Everlab’s co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, we unpack what’s actually worth measuring, which treatments show real promise, what’s still experimental and what the future of preventative healthcare could look like.

And why, when it comes to optimising our health, we should be problem-centric, not solution-centric.

We dive into:

• What keeps Steven up at night as Everlab grows and expands internationally.
• What’s actually worth measuring: From Lp(a), a genetically influenced cardiovascular risk marker, to body composition, and the tests Steven believes deserve more attention.
• GLP-1s, breakthrough drugs or misunderstood medicine? Their potential, the risks of poor dosing and inadequate support, and why protecting muscle and bone health matters.
• The peptide boom: What’s backed by evidence, the safety and quality concerns, and why Steven isn’t ready to inject them himself. Yet.
• Being problem-centric, not solution-centric: Why chasing the latest tests, treatments and biohacks isn’t necessarily the best approach to better health.
• AI and the future of primary care: How Everlab’s Concierge is bringing AI into healthcare while keeping clinicians in the loop.
• The next frontier of preventative medicine: Pharmacogenetics, personalised care and emerging Alzheimer’s blood tests.
• Hype or worth it? Steven’s rapid-fire take on full-body MRIs, continuous glucose monitors, wearables, NAD+ infusions and creatine, plus the health habits he thinks are overhyped and underappreciated.

Chapters

00:00 Preview: what's real in longevity

01:12 What keeps Steven up at night: leading Everlab through uncharted waters

03:00 What's worth measuring: Lp(a) and body composition

05:28 GLP-1s: what works, and what goes wrong without support

12:13 Peptides: the evidence gap and his "would I take it myself?" test

18:28 Be problem-centric, not solution-centric

22:41 Pharmacogenetics, tailored care and the public system's role

24:03 AI in primary care: keeping a clinician in the loop

27:55 The pTau217 Alzheimer's blood test and what Everlab is studying next

31:06 Rapid fire: MRI, CGMs, wearables, NAD+ and creatine

38:59 Lightning round: favourite emoji, overhyped and underhyped

41:40 Family, where to find Everlab, and thanks

Links and resources

What The Health: https://whatthehealth.io/

Everlab: https://www.everlab.com.au/

Dr Steven Lu at Everlab: https://www.everlab.com.au/doctors

Tenmile Ventures: https://www.tenmile.com/

Mentioned in the episode:

• Everlab Concierge product update (the AI health assistant, Eva, that Steven describes): https://www.everlab.com.au/post/introducing-everlab-concierge
• KFF Health Tracking Poll, November 2025 (12% of US adults say they currently take a GLP-1 drug; 18% have ever taken one): https://www.kff.org/health-costs/poll-1-in-8-adults-say-they-are-currently-taking-a-glp-1-drug-for-weight-loss-diabetes-or-another-condition-even-as-half-say-the-drugs-are-difficult-to-afford/
• TGA, concerns about unapproved peptide products (background to the peptide discussion): https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/concerns-regarding-public-health-risks-associated-unapproved-peptide-products
• RACGP newsGP, TGA warning on unapproved peptides (April 2026): https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/tga-issues-warning-against-unapproved-peptides
• MSAC Application 1736 (the proposal to list Lp(a) testing on the MBS; outcome pending): https://www.msac.gov.au/applications/1736
• RACGP submission on MSAC Application 1736 (October 2022; opposes the listing): https://www.racgp.org.au/advocacy/reports-and-submissions/view-all-reports-and-submissions/2022-reports-and-submissions/msac-application-1736-lipoprotein-a-testing-as
• AusDoc, Australian Atherosclerosis Society backs the proposed Lp(a) MBS items: https://ausdoc.com.au/specialist-update/cardiologists-back-expanded-lipoproteina-testing-for-at-risk-patients
• Australian Atherosclerosis Society, patient brochure on elevated lipoprotein(a): https://www.athero.org.au/fh/wp-content/uploads/Lpa-brochure.pdf
• Medical Republic on the pTau217 Alzheimer's blood test (Roche test authorised in Australia; the Health Minister's comments): https://medicalrepublic.com.au/mark-butler-and-the-holy-grail-of-dementia-tests/127796
• Axios on OpenAI's report on ChatGPT health use (January 2026; more than 40 million people ask daily): https://axios.com/2026/01/05/chatgpt-openai-health-insurance-aca
• News 12 New York on the death of a woman after an NAD+ infusion at a Bronx wellness centre (the case Steven refers to in the rapid-fire round): https://bronx.news12.com/prosecutors-unauthorized-nad-iv-infusion-led-to-womans-death

Subscribe for more conversations cutting through the noise in health technology, biotech and healthcare innovation.

What the Health is brought to you in partnership with Tenmile Ventures.

What the Health is part of Day One Network: https://dayone.fm/

#HealthTech #Longevity #PreventativeHealth #AIinHealthcare

Georgie Healy talks to Mirko Gropp, General Manager of Digital, Data and Technology at The Living Company, live from Dreamforce day three. The Living Company owns, develops and operates student housing, build-to-rent apartments and senior living across Australia, with around 2,000 people and about $17 billion in assets by Mirko's count.

Mirko's take on the week: Salesforce going headless means the UI, long the moat for software companies, is no longer the point, and Claude arriving inside Salesforce lets his team ask plain-language questions of their cases. He says agentic coding lets him build in 3 months what used to take a year, with 2 people who never touch the code.

They get into how a company rolls AI out when a small group of super users does most of the heavy lifting, and the HR question nobody has answered yet: how do you reward someone who is 10x more productive? Mirko explains why students hate email and voice, how The Living Company will build its first agent for senior living, and why most customer chat doesn't need a top-tier model.

If you have a custom tool you assumed was too hard to build, this one is the push. Mirko's advice is to describe the outcome you want, let the tool walk you there, and be a critical, proactive builder.

Captions

00:00 Cold open

01:30 Welcome back: the final Dreamforce interview

01:39 Headline: AI agents don't need screens

03:29 Headline: Headless 360 and the 5% AI value gap

05:27 Headline: How AI ends email and password fatigue

08:59 Mirko joins live from Dreamforce

10:22 The Living Company and the headless shift

11:49 Building in 3 months with 2 people who never touch code

12:51 Onboarding 10,000 students with 80% old school automation

13:53 What chatbot questions reveal, plus Cowork inside Salesforce

15:14 Rolling AI out to staff and the super users

16:56 The HR question: employees who are 10x more productive

17:20 Students trying to jailbreak the agent

18:13 Senior living: building the first agent

19:44 Designing for Gen Z and seniors

23:11 Tone of voice and rebuilding the bot with Salesforce

24:18 Shipping 5x to 10x faster than 10 years ago

25:47 Rapid fire: will AI disrupt property?

27:52 Predicting who's leaving and filling rooms early

28:40 You don't need Fable for everything

30:04 Where The Living Company goes next

32:16 Mirko's advice for builders

34:28 Outro: Attention is All I Need

Mentioned in this episode:

Deel x BAI_Script 02 - Sep 2026

Deel x BAI_Script 01 - Sep 2026

Nathan Clark runs three clients on three different AI stacks. One has standardised on Claude, the next on ChatGPT, and he doesn't have the luxury of picking just one. So he built a system that lets him move between models and agent apps without starting over each time.

Nathan Clark, founder of ReadyGTM, helps companies sharpen and scale their go-to-market motion, with a growing focus on AI implementation. On screen, he opens the file system underneath his work and hands a live piece of client work from one tool to another, showing exactly where the handoff still gets messy.

The system is a folder structure on an always-on Mac Studio, reachable from his laptop, iPad and phone through Tailscale. The folders follow how Nathan runs his business: plan, market, sell, deliver, operate. Each client gets an AGENTS.md file, and a job that runs at 10pm each night sweeps his messages and files to keep those client files current, but it's only allowed to touch low-risk files. A centralised skills library is symlinked into every tool he uses, so the same skills are available whichever agent he's in.

For the demo, Nathan works from a synthetic client, Acme Inc. He opens a sales diagnostic built in Codex, his daily driver, and explains why he delivers client reports as web pages rather than slide decks: clients are paying for clarity, and the evidence behind every number sits one click away. When he doesn't like parts of the design, he hands the same folder to Claude Code in the terminal and dictates the brief: strip the eyebrows and page numbers, add a dark-mode toggle. While that runs, he shows GrokBot answering client questions from the same underlying files. The change lands, dark mode works, and he goes back to Codex to push it live.

The back half covers how Nathan picks tools. Codex does around 80% of his paid work because it follows precise instructions literally. Claude handles visual work and reads intent from looser prompts. Solo runs multi-agent builds for hours while he's elsewhere, and Amp's cloud-based Orbs keep environment and context intact without anything running on his desktop. Then the rough edges: memory drift in his file system, and agents that have pushed changes live when told not to. Nathan wants proper per-agent permissions rather than instructions an agent may or may not follow.

It closes with a quick-fire round and Nathan's advice for anyone starting out: be more ambitious about what you ask AI to do, and when it names something you don't know, ask what it is and ask it to walk you through doing it. As he puts it, it's prompts all the way down.

Nathan Clark is the founder of ReadyGTM, where he helps companies sharpen and scale their go-to-market motion and put AI to work in ways that move the numbers. He also works with Works.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

01:03 Meet Nathan Clark

01:48 What "AI nomad" actually means

02:52 Why most operators should go deep on one tool

05:34 What needs to live outside the apps

06:00 Inside the Nathan Brain: a durable file system in plain text

09:13 The 10pm sweep, AGENTS.md and a centralised skills library

15:50 The demo: Acme Inc. and the Codex diagnostic

18:21 Why reports are web pages, not slide decks

21:17 Handing off to Claude Code for a dark-mode fix

22:42 GrokBot for client management on the move

26:04 Dark mode lands, and pushing live

29:14 Ranking the tools: Codex, Claude, Solo, Amp

37:10 Where it breaks: drift and permissions

38:52 Quick-fire round

43:30 Where Nathan gets his alpha

44:52 Advice for beginners: prompts all the way down

46:07 Where to find Nathan

Resources

Nathan Clark: https://readygtm.com

Nathan on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathancjclark

Nathan on X: ​​https://x.com/nathanclark_

Solo: https://soloterm.com

Amp: https://ampcode.com

Tailscale: https://tailscale.com

OpenCode Go: https://opencode.ai

Lorikeet (Steve Hind): https://www.lorikeetcx.ai

About the host

Zachary King is the founder of Works, where he installs AI into how Australian companies operate. He has worked at the commercial pointy end of AI for almost twenty years and runs his own company largely from the command line.

About the show

Operator AI is the show where real operators open their screens and show exactly how they run the real parts of their business with AI. The real stack, not the hype.

If you want AI installed into how your business actually operates, learn more at https://workshq.com.au/ or book a time with Zachary King at https://savvycal.com/Zachary-King/zac-at-works-30.

Operator AI is part of Day One Network, the podcast and media network from W2D1 Media: https://dayone.fm/.

Everlab has raised around A$80 million, including a recent A$65 million Series A, reached 20,000 patients and processed more than 21 million biomarker results. Now, after becoming one of Australia’s fastest-growing preventative health companies, it’s taking the model global. (Everlab)

I first spoke to the Everlab team back in 2023. I loved what they were building then, but at the time there were plenty of skeptics about whether this kind of deeply personalised, data-heavy model of preventative healthcare could ever really work at scale.

Three years later, they’re proving that it can.

Longevity has become one of the most hyped corners of healthcare. There’s no shortage of supplements, biohacks, expensive tests and big promises about living longer. But while much of the industry is still selling the idea of longevity, Everlab is turning it into actual healthcare: doctors, diagnostics, longitudinal data, clinical follow-up and preventative care, delivered at increasingly serious scale.

And the company is on a rocket-ship trajectory. Its A$65 million Series A was oversubscribed, it now works with more than 180 clinicians and 1,850 healthcare locations, and it is beginning its push into global markets. (Everlab)

In Part One of this two-part conversation, I sit down with Dr Steven Lu, Everlab’s co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, to unpack how they actually built it, and what it takes to turn the promise of longevity into real-world medicine.

We dive into:

• The Everlab journey, from an ambitious idea investors were skeptical of to raising around A$80 million and expanding globally
• Why longevity has exploded, and the gap between the hype surrounding the category and what good preventative medicine actually looks like
• What the Everlab patient journey actually looks like, and how its model differs from the healthcare most of us experience today
• How you take enormous amounts of fragmented health information and turn it into something clinically useful rather than simply giving a pile of test results

Chapters

00:00 Preview: why prevention so often comes too late

01:04 The longevity boom: what's signal and what's expensive theatre

06:22 What "longevity" should mean: healthspan, not hype

10:24 Why prevention still loses to reactive care

17:48 Everlab's model: one plan built from your records

24:26 How AI and clinicians work together on patient data

28:40 The founding team, the mission and the early cases

34:05 Making prevention stick when you feel fine

38:21 Lessons from closing a whole-body MRI business

42:36 Whole-body scans: a great scan, not a magical one

44:39 Patients as customers: trust, Covid and consumer agency

49:46 Where Everlab and preventative care go next

Links and resources

What The Health: https://whatthehealth.io/

Everlab: https://www.everlab.com.au/

Dr Steven Lu at Everlab: https://www.everlab.com.au/doctors

Tenmile Ventures: https://www.tenmile.com/

Mentioned in the episode:

• Everlab's Series A announcement (the funding Emily cites): https://www.everlab.com.au/press/everlab-raises-au-65m-series-a-to-make-world-class-preventative-healthcare-something-everyone-can-access
• Neko Health's US$700m raise (Emily's reference to a recent whole-body scan raise): https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/full-body-scan-startup-neko-health-scores-700m-break-us-market
• Australians live longer than previous decades but spend more years in poorer health (MJA InSight+): https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2026/27/australians-live-longer-than-previous-decades-but-spend-more-years-in-poorer-health
• National Drug Strategy Household Survey 2022 to 2023 (AIHW; daily smoking is at a record low, while risky drinking is unchanged since 2019): https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/illicit-use-of-drugs/national-drug-strategy-household-survey-2022-2023/contents/summary
• Early-onset bowel cancer research, University of Melbourne: https://about.unimelb.edu.au/news-resources/awards-and-achievements/research-grants-funding/university-of-melbourne-researchers-funded-to-investigate-early-onset-cancer
• Search for the causes of rising early-onset bowel cancer, Adelaide University: https://adelaide.edu.au/about/news/2026/search-for-causes-of-rapid-rise-in-bowel-cancer-in-young-people/
• Warranty period of coronary CT angiography (European Heart Journal Cardiovascular Imaging, 2023; background to the "warranty" idea Steven describes): https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/178099808?lang=en_GB
• MoreGoodDays (the digital fibromyalgia program Steven mentions): https://moregooddays.com/

Subscribe for more conversations cutting through the noise in health technology, biotech and healthcare innovation.

What the Health is brought to you in partnership with Tenmile Ventures.

What the Health is part of Day One Network: https://dayone.fm/

#HealthTech #Longevity #PreventativeHealth

Jess co-founded Neighbourlytics in 2017, taking the placemaking work she'd done as CEO of CoDesign Studio and turning it into a data product that measures what people actually do in a neighbourhood. It grew to cover more than twenty thousand neighbourhoods across twelve countries, raised about five million dollars across five rounds, and was acquired by REA Group in late 2025.

She walks through the quarter the business was growing four hundred per cent a year and still only had fifty logins against $600,000 of revenue, why she sat her team down on a Friday lunchtime and told them she might have to give them four weeks notice, and the phishing scam that drained the bank account while she was at a wedding in the UK.

She finishes with three life lessons: why it's always harder than you think and you can't believe your own bullshit, why the hard work of people and culture matters more than the four per cent of running a business that is raising investment, and why her identity was never the business - it was having a team.

Find Jess

Jess on LinkedIn

Neighbourlytics

Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship

Books mentioned

Crossing the Chasm

The Mom Test

Join the Aussie Founders Club

The Slack community, the newsletter and everything else live here

Want to partner with Life After Launch?

Explore sponsorship and partnership opportunities

Life After Launch is an Aussie Founders Club podcast.

Aussie Founders Club is a community for Founders, operators and investors navigating the Australian startup ecosystem. What started as an events-first, in-person community has grown into a network of thousands, connecting people building startups with the people who've done it before. Join the conversation and the community

Connect with Megan Luttrell on LinkedIn

Connect with Geo George on LinkedIn

Kairos Recruitment is a recruitment company supporting startups and scale-ups across Australia, helping Founders find the right people to grow their teams. Led by Megan Luttrell.

Mayfly Ventures is an Australian AI venture studio building industry-focused AI and software ventures. We work with industry leaders to validate, build and scale AI ventures, starting with the strategy and commercial foundations most teams skip.

Description

Couldn't make it to Dreamforce? Salesforce is bringing the latest from the event to Sydney on 20 October and Melbourne on 27 October with Agentforce World Tour Essentials. Find out more: https://www.salesforce.com/au/events/

Recorded at Dreamforce 2026, Georgie sits down with Joe Inzerillo, President, Enterprise and AI Technology at Salesforce. Joe oversees Slack and leads Salesforce's Customer Zero program, where the company puts its own AI to work on itself before customers do. Before Salesforce he was CTO of Disney Streaming, where he led the launch of Disney+, and Chief Product and Technology Officer at SiriusXM.

Joe breaks down Claudeforce, the Salesforce and Anthropic partnership, and why he thinks the SaaSpocalypse story never held up. He explains what headless means for a platform built around screens, and why he says the UI was necessary but not the point

Then he gets into Customer Zero: small squads that pair a business owner with a couple of technologists to build with coding agents, sometimes shipping within the day. Joe shares the numbers Salesforce is seeing, including a legal team agent he says now routes tickets more accurately than the lawyers who used to do it by hand. Plus the story of when a Salesforce agent recommended a competitor!

In the rapid fire, Georgie asks what Joe thinks is nonsense here on the ground, and what he predicts for Dreamforce 2027.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open: Do you still need to log into Salesforce?

01:08 Georgie's AI assistant and the four hours a week it saves

02:08 OpenAI launches Dots

03:08 GPT 6.1 Astra pulled after safety testing

04:00 Georgie's McLaren take: no brakes, no release

05:32 Meet Joe Inzerillo

07:38 Dreamforce 2026: Super Bowl meets Coachella

09:26 Claudeforce and the SaaSpocalypse myth

12:14 What "headless" Salesforce actually means

14:02 Slackbot and putting agents and people in one place

15:45 Why Slackbot already knows how your company works

17:14 Slackbot as the impartial teammate in the room

19:19 Customer Zero: how enterprises actually adopt agents

23:47 Can a big enterprise move like a startup?

26:47 Winning hearts and minds with 67 small teams

28:12 The human side: what should agents do, and what stays human?

29:09 When agents go off the rails: the competitor story

31:17 Rapid fire: will Salesforce still have a login screen?

32:03 What's nonsense: "my company can't"

33:16 The flyer story: one prompt that changed her mind on AI

34:21 One prediction for Dreamforce 2027

35:33 Wrap up and Georgie's Substack

Mentioned in this episode:

Deel x BAI_Script 01 - Sep 2026

Deel x BAI_Script 02 - Sep 2026

Chad Stephens and three mates couldn't get a rental in Brighton. After filling out the same two-page paper application for property after property, Chad and his best mate Chris Koch went looking for an online version. There wasn't one, so they built it. That became 1Form, which ended up used across most of the Australian rental industry and was bought by REA Group in 2014. Everyone they pitched told them it was just a form.

Chad walks through funding it with maxed-out credit cards, a bank loan for a car they never bought and the sale of the cars they already had, then moving back home. He explains how they won over one of Melbourne's most respected property managers by building everything she asked for, how lunch in an empty fine dining restaurant led to $250,000 from the people behind Carsales, and the $5 save button that finally made the business money. Then comes the sale. REA had once told them it would build the idea itself, and eight years later it bought the company, cutting the agreed price from $17 million to $15 million a week before signing.

He also covers Fillr, which burned $300,000 a month, pivoted to mobile checkout for buy now, pay later apps, and sold to Rakuten after COVID derailed a Series B in March 2020, with his wife running the legals while he walked the pram. He finishes with his next venture, Formlytics, and three life lessons: why friends and family loving your idea is a warning sign, why a blocked road is just a stop sign, and why knowing your weaknesses tells you who to partner with.

Find Chad

Chad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadstephens1/

Fillr: https://www.fillr.com/

Join the Aussie Founders Club

The Slack community, the newsletter and everything else live here: https://www.aussiefoundersclub.com

Want to partner with Life After Launch?

Explore sponsorship and partnership opportunities at https://lifeafterlaunchpod.com/partner-with-us

Life After Launch is an Aussie Founders Club podcast.

Aussie Founders Club is a community for Founders, operators and investors navigating the Australian startup ecosystem. What started as an events-first, in-person community has grown into a network of thousands, connecting people building startups with the people who've done it before. Join the conversation and the community at https://aussiefoundersclub.com/

Connect with Megan Luttrell on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganluttrell/

Connect with Geo George on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/contactgeo/

Kairos Recruitment is a recruitment company supporting startups and scale-ups across Australia, helping Founders find the right people to grow their teams. Led by Megan Luttrell. Learn more at https://www.kairosrecruitment.com.au/

Mayfly Ventures is an Australian AI venture studio building industry-focused AI and software ventures. We work with industry leaders to validate, build and scale AI ventures, starting with the strategy and commercial foundations most teams skip. Learn more about Mayfly's approach at https://www.mayflyventures.com/

Time Stamps

00:00 Cold open: "You can't make money from a form"

00:43 Welcome to Life After Launch, introducing Chad Stephens

02:24 Growing up in Bayside, tennis dreams and the milk bar plan

04:30 The black sheep of six kids, and running a cafe in Brighton

06:21 VenueHQ, the first idea that didn't work

07:06 Four blokes, one Brighton rental and the application that became 1Form

11:18 Maxed-out credit cards, a car loan with no car, and moving back home

14:19 Winning over property managers with no marketing budget

20:41 Lunch in an empty restaurant and pitching the people behind Carsales

26:12 The GFC, and the $5 button that finally made money

32:03 Hiring, growing and the squiggly signature

36:13 A team of five, 50% margins and testing the US

43:17 Selling 1Form to REA Group: $17 million, then $15 million

47:55 Fillr: burning $300,000 a month and pivoting to mobile checkout

51:57 COVID, the Series B and selling to Rakuten

55:05 Angel investing and building Formlytics

56:30 Life lesson 1: if friends and family love your idea, pivot

58:45 Life lesson 2: a blocked road is just a stop sign

1:00:44 Life lesson 3: know your strengths, and who to partner with

1:03:06 Closing thoughts + outro

Blackbird partner Tom has spent the last decade obsessing over one thing: why Australia talks about innovation from a place of doubt, while the US talks about it from a place of opportunity.

From buying BHP as a kid through his parents, to operating at Canopy before it was acquired, to spending most of the 2010s investing out of Colorado and now back in Australia at Blackbird, Tom has seen both sides of the talent arbitrage.

In this episode of First Cheque, Tom joins Maxine and Cheryl to share why 8 percent of all AI experts in Asia-Pac are based in Australia, why we have more AI PhDs than any other country in the world and why no one is celebrating it, and what it really means that 88 percent of our PhD students are immigrated talent. They also dive deep into why commercialization is still broken, how Foundry and Baker Street are trying to fix the bridge from lab to seed, and why product-led growth is not dead — it just changed.

Tom also reflects on the boomerang effect, the R and D tax credit as Australia's secret weapon, and why the next decade of Australian companies will be built with a base in Australia and a base on the West Coast.

00:00:00 - Intro: Doubt versus opportunity

00:01:12 - Hey, I'm Cheryl. I'm Maxine. This is First Cheque

00:03:45 - What was the first thing you ever invested in? BHP and the Canva vs BHP math

00:05:51 - Invest early and hold: learning compounding from his parents

00:06:52 - Invest America: what happens when every kid gets $1,000 to compound until 18

00:08:14 - Robinhood, retail, and the new CEO playbook

00:11:02 - Why aren't we more excited about Australia? The AFR talent piece

00:12:29 - 8 percent of Asia-Pac AI experts are in Australia and we have 6 of the top 100 AI universities

00:13:59 - The output story: 6 foundational models trained in Australia, Leonardo at number 5 globally

00:16:52 - Why Australia builds global-first: Heidi and Leonardo are 90 percent offshore revenue

00:18:20 - The cost of not celebrating: US pre-seed up 70 percent, Australia going backwards

00:20:33 - Capital constrained but the most capital efficient market in the world

00:21:31 - Sourcing from universities: the good and the bad

00:23:20 - Why we are last on the OECD for commercialization: Google Maps, Wi-Fi, and Bluey

00:25:10 - What is working: UNSW 10x, Melbourne NextGen, and defence tech accelerators

00:27:28 - Baker Street and the rise of alumni syndicates

00:28:40 - Foundry: building the bridge from lab to seed round

00:30:18 - What this means for your average angel investor

00:30:42 - Grading Australian talent: from C minus to B minus

00:31:16 - Two types of AI talent: engineering versus research PhDs

00:32:54 - The boomerang effect: Jesse Clark and why top researchers will come back

00:33:41 - The Australia plus US operating model and the 14-hour flight

00:35:13 - Talent arbitrage and the 43 cent R and D secret weapon

00:36:45 - Do you take a talent haircut outside the Bay Area? No.

00:39:18 - Is product-led growth out of vogue? 2019 to 2021 and why Australia got so good at it

00:41:14 - What PLG actually is: methodology, not freemium

00:44:15 - AI agents in the sales funnel and why go-to-market feels stale

00:46:15 - Back to the Stone Ages: brand, community, podcasts, and in-person events

00:49:47 - Building in public, hype cycles, and Manus AI

00:51:20 - Why enterprise is coming earlier: 2023 consumer AI, 2024 prosumer AI, 2025 enterprise AI

00:53:18 - Single-player versus multiplayer mode: why AI changes the buyer

00:57:48 - Palantir, CrowdStrike, and when enterprise motion makes sense

00:59:20 - What does a capital-starved ecosystem mean for enterprise go-to-market

01:00:38 - Biggest big cojones moment: 3 boys under 6 with a founder CEO wife

Deel: Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

___

Pear Tree: Pear Tree helps Australian and New Zealand founders build high-performing offshore teams without the agency middleman.

As local hiring becomes more expensive and harder to fill, many operators are turning to offshore talent across engineering, development, marketing, accounting and operations at a fraction of local salary costs.

The offshore horror stories you hear usually aren’t a talent problem. They’re the result of outsourcing agencies that overcharge clients while underpaying staff. Pear Tree takes a different approach through a direct, transparent model where your team is paid fairly, fully compliant, and focused entirely on your business.

As part of the Day One community, you’ll receive a free team audit to identify where offshore talent could move the needle in your business, plus 20% off your first hire. Learn more at http://dayone.fm/peartree

To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new First Cheque episodes and upcoming shows.

Mentioned in this episode:

Pear Tree

If you're a founder or operator trying to scale, here's the reality — Australian hiring is getting harder, salaries are at record highs, and the talent you need is increasingly out of reach. The best operators are quietly building offshore teams of engineers, marketers, accountants and analysts at a fraction of the cost.

Deel x FC_Script 01 - Sep 2026

Deel x FC_Script 02 - Sep 2026

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar built Atlassian into one of Australia's most successful tech companies, and one of the rare local startups to become a global software giant. Then the partnership behind it came apart.

Journalists John Stensholt and Perry Williams join Georgie to unpack their new book on the two co-founders: how they scaled a hundred-billion-dollar company side by side, and what happens to a business when the people at the top stop seeing eye to eye.

They cover how co-CEO leadership worked inside Atlassian, how the founders' split affected the company's culture, and what it took to keep the business moving through it.

Then the big question: where does Atlassian stand now? They get into the share price, the pressure on software companies to prove themselves in the AI era, and whether Atlassian can make the leap. Plus, John and Perry step into Mike and Scott's shoes to argue who was the better entrepreneur.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open

00:47 This week's AI headline: an OpenAI agent inside Medicare

02:55 Meet John Stensholt and Perry Williams, authors of Tech Bros

05:05 The farewell dinner Mike Cannon-Brookes skipped

09:51 Why Mike and Scott wouldn't talk to the authors

11:28 Point Piper: the $71M house next to the $100M house

16:17 Private school vs public school: did class play a part?

19:33 How two journalists split and wrote one book

22:02 Atlassian's share price rollercoaster

23:57 Can Atlassian navigate AI and become a 2.0?

27:42 Australia's next billionaires: data centres

30:01 Debate: Scott vs Mike, who's the better entrepreneur?

32:50 Charismatic Mike, "robotic" Scott, and the famous punch

34:11 Signed book + predictions giveaway

34:34 "The most toxic place I've worked": Atlassian's culture

37:18 The Silicon Valley mediator who couldn't fix it

40:38 Will they reunite? SunCable, Anthropic and Skip Capital

42:29 Have Mike and Scott read the book?

44:35 Who should read Tech Bros

47:14 Outro

Mentioned in this episode:

Deel x BAI_Script 01 - Sep 2026

Deel x BAI_Script 02 - Sep 2026

Román Olivera runs his company on files and folders. No database, no CRM platform — a fractal system he calls Flatfish, built from plain text and a set of rules an agent reads before it does anything else. On this episode of Operator AI, he opens it up and shows exactly how it works.

Román Olivera, from Orban Labs, walks Zachary King through the system live. Every folder that matters is a "node," and every node carries the same four things: rules for how to behave there, a current-state file for what's true now, an append-only log for what happened, and a registry so an agent can find its way around without being briefed from scratch. Román built it after losing track of one too many half-finished projects scattered across folders he couldn't remember the naming convention for.

The demo is the receipt. By voice, from his phone, Román creates a CRM entry for a contact met at the local pub, in Codex running on a remote machine. Codex then builds an HTML presentation in Román's own design system. Then Claude Code, a different tool running a different model, picks up the same context in a fresh harness. It uploads the deck to AWS S3, shortens the link, and drafts two follow-up emails: one to Zac in English, one to the new contact in Spanish. Nobody told it to switch languages. It read the contact's file, which noted where he was from, and made the call itself.

That portability is deliberate. Román turns platform memory off on his agents, on purpose, because an agent with its own memory tends to skip reading the rules and shortcut toward an answer. He'd rather own the context outright than rent it from whichever platform is trending: he uses APIs over MCPs so he can control the process, and keeps his skills in a plain folder rather than a config file, so nothing locks him into one tool.

The conversation lands on an analogy Román coins mid-episode, on the record, timestamped live by Zac: AI is bringing back the Mad Men era of knowledge work, where the job is to direct rather than to do. The advertising executive never touched the filing cabinet — he told someone where a letter should go and trusted it would be there when he asked for it. Román argues that's the discipline AI now demands: be specific about what you want and where things belong, and the system holds up the rest.

Román also draws a line most operators haven't hit yet. Files and folders work brilliantly for a business of one, or close to it. Once client work moves into enterprise environments, the same logic has to move into databases — a challenge he's already started tackling with clients on platforms like Azure.

Before Orban Labs, Román spent more than a decade in the energy sector across field engineering, project delivery, and operational leadership — work that shaped his insistence that speed only matters once a system is reliable enough to trust with real work.

Resources

Román Olivera — https://linkedin.com/in/romanolivera

Orban Labs — https://orbanlabs.com

Codex — https://chatgpt.com/codex

Claude Code — https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

Cursor — https://cursor.com

VS Code — https://code.visualstudio.com

AWS S3 — https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Cloudflare — https://www.cloudflare.com

OpenRouter — https://openrouter.ai

Kimi — https://www.kimi.com

GPT-5.6 — https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/

How I AI with Claire Vo — https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai

Works — https://workshq.com.au/

Book time with Zachary King — https://savvycal.com/Zachary-King/zac-at-works-30

Day One Network — https://dayone.fm/

About the host: Zachary King is the founder of Works, where he installs AI into how Australian companies operate. He has worked at the commercial pointy end of AI for almost twenty years and runs his own company largely from the command line.

About the show: Operator AI is the show where real operators open their screens and show exactly how they run the real parts of their business with AI. The real stack, not the hype.

If you want AI installed into how your business actually operates, learn more at https://workshq.com.au/ or book a time with Zachary King at https://savvycal.com/Zachary-King/zac-at-works-30.

Operator AI is part of Day One Network, the podcast and media network from W2D1 Media: https://dayone.fm/.