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Welcome back to the FNDN Series, where we continue our deep dive into startup compensation with industry leaders from across the startup world. In our conversation with Sarika Lamont, Vice President of People & Culture at Vidyard, we explore how to customize and personalize compensation in today's challenging economic environment. We dive into the art of persona mapping for compensation design, discuss how five generations in the workforce have vastly different priorities, and examine practical strategies for creating equitable yet personalized reward packages without breaking the budget. Stay tuned as we uncover how to balance transparency, fairness, and personalization in your compensation strategy during economic downturns.

Chapters:

00:50 Guest Introduction: Sarika Lamont from Vidyard

02:15 The Era of Personalization Meets Economic Reality

03:04 Five Generations in the Workforce: Different Values and Priorities

06:32 Building Employee Personas Like Marketing ICPs

08:07 The Importance of Transparency in Equitable Compensation

09:02 External Context: How Downturns Change Employee Priorities

13:08 From Government Consulting to Tech: Scaling Persona Mapping

14:01 The Interview Process: Validating Personas with Real Data

15:01 Country-Specific Compensation: Australia vs America Priorities

15:29 Why Companies Fear Asking Employees What They Want

16:12 The Christmas Wishlist Approach to Employee Feedback

18:10 Building Culture Through Transparent Communication

19:52 Scaling Back: When You Need to Unbuild What You Built

20:23 Budget Transparency and Honest Conversations

22:03 Resources and Templates for Getting Started with Personas

23:44 Using AI Tools to Build Persona Maps

Connect with Sarika

Visit: vidyard.com

https://linkedin.com/in/sarikalamont 

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2025 was the year AI stopped being hype and started showing up in the real world, in our phones, our homes, our hospitals, and even our holidays. But with the pace of change accelerating, how do you separate the genuine life-changing tools from the noise?

To close out a huge year of In The Blink of AI, Georgie has hand-picked the top ten AI hacks shared by founders, CTOs, designers, researchers, and creative experimenters on the show so far. These are the tools and prompts they actually use every day, to travel smarter, remove mental load, make better decisions, get up to speed fast, and even check their own blind spots.

In this special holiday edition, you’ll learn how to turn an AI into your personal tour guide, save hours of context-setting with one drag-and-drop move, let your kids solve the dinner dilemma, challenge your thinking before you hit publish, and unlock the real power of voice mode for deeper, more personalised results. Whether you’re a total beginner or already living in the multi-agent future, these hacks are your shortcut to a smarter 2026.

Grab your phone, open your favourite LLM, and try these out for yourself.

00:00 — Why AI hacks matter more than ever

01:25 — Hack 1: A tour guide in your ear with voice mode (Dr Thomas Kelly)

03:59 — Hack 2: Poke, the life-organising bot hiding in iMessage (Maddie D Reese)

05:37 — Hack 3: Making personalised music with Suno

07:25 — Hack 4: Drag-and-drop context files to save hours (Isaac Peiris)

09:18 — Hack 5: AI-powered art hunts in Rome

11:46 — Hack 6: No more “What’s for dinner?” with fridge-vision prompts (Katherine Boiciuc)

14:49 — Hack 7: Why everyone is sleeping on voice for prompting (Mike Keating)

18:29 — Hack 8: Using AI to reveal your own blind spots (Sarah Kaur)

22:31 — Hack 9: The party-table prompt that gets personal fast (Kunal Gupta)

25:40 — Hack 10: Stress-testing technical architecture as a non-technical founder (Frank Greeff)

38:22 — What to expect from In The Blink of AI in 2026

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.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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Stripe Startups

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In this episode of Engineering Success, Melinda Sietsma interviews Neil Hunt, Managing Director of McLanahan Group, for a conversation that blends personal resilience, engineering leadership, and an extraordinary company legacy spanning 190 years. Neil shares his unconventional career journey, immigrating to Australia and navigating multiple industry pivots, to ultimately leading one of the world’s oldest family-owned engineering businesses. His story looks at how perseverance, curiosity, and the right mentors can shape a remarkable career.

Neil also dives into McLanahan’s fascinating 1835 origins and its evolution from a Civil War-era foundry to a global leader in mineral processing and Australian manufacturing. He offers candid insights into building the brand locally, the strength of the Hunter region’s engineering ecosystem, and the strategic shifts redefining modern mining. Packed with history, leadership lessons, and industry knowledge, this episode is a must-listen for engineers, leaders, and anyone who loves a great story.

AI is lowering the barrier to software development faster than anyone expected, and GitHub’s APAC VP Sharryn Napier has a front row seat. In this conversation, she shares how she built a personal to-do list app in under an hour with GitHub Copilot and Spark, despite not writing code herself. Georgie and Sharryn explore why millions of new developers are joining the platform, how 80 percent of new signups use Copilot within their first week, and what the explosion of no-code experimentation means for both beginners and seasoned engineers.

They also unpack the chaos and opportunity of the multi-agent era, where GitHub’s new Agent HQ aims to keep developers productive, secure, and in control. From open source culture and the next wave of technical talent to enterprise adoption, risk, and the future of software creation, this episode offers an inside look at how AI is transforming who builds software and how it gets made.

Do you have a follow-up question about a topic discussed in today’s episode, or want a quick summary to reshare on LinkedIn? Just ask Top Road AI:

https://toproad.chat/in-the-blink-of-ai-with-sharryn-napier

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.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.

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Description:

Welcome back to the FNDN Series, join us as we continue our deep dive into startup compensation with industry leaders from across the startup world. In our conversation with Sarika Lamont, VP of People and Culture at Vidyard, we explore how AI is transforming the people function beyond just tools and automation. Sarika shares her unique journey from leading people operations to spearheading AI adoption across her entire organization, revealing practical strategies for reducing administrative burden while enhancing employee experience. We dive deep into the mindset shifts required for successful AI implementation, the importance of critical thinking when leveraging AI tools, and how to start small with automation to create meaningful impact. Keep watching to discover how AI can revolutionize your people's operations and learn actionable steps to begin your own AI transformation journey.

Sarika Lamont is a seasoned People leader with 20+ years in talent strategy, DEI, and organizational transformation. As VP of People and Culture at Vidyard, she leads AI and automation efforts while fostering inclusive, high-performance cultures that enable teams to thrive and deliver meaningful impact through clarity, focus, and execution.

Chapters:

Connect with Sarika

linkedin.com/in/sarikalamont

Visit: vidyard.com 

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Companies/Tools Mentioned:

People Mentioned:

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Pave is a compensation intelligence platform that gives you real-time compensation data from more than 8,300 companies, allowing you to make calls with confidence, not guesswork.

Access Information & Resources from Pave:

2026 Budgeting & Trends Report: Get your free copy of the full report discussed in the episode, which includes trends on planned merit budgets, "job hugging," and pay transparency.

Report Landing Page (Email)

Learn More About Pave: Visit the Pave homepage to explore how you can benchmark pay, price jobs, manage pay ranges, and run your merit cycle all in one place.

Pave Homepage

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Artificial intelligence is reshaping everything from work to healthcare to the way we interact online, but it’s also exposing deep gender gaps that we can’t afford to ignore. At the eSafety Summit in Canberra, Georgie sits down with award-winning researcher and gender equality expert Dr Elise Stephenson for a live conversation on the uncomfortable truth behind AI’s gender problem.

Only 22% of the global AI workforce is women.

Only 2% of Australian startup funding goes to female founders.

And when generating images of British women, some AI models label them as models or prostitutes 30% of the time.

In this episode of In The Blink of AI, Georgie and Elise dig into how bias creeps into AI systems, who’s responsible, and what needs to change, from data collection to funding incentives to the way we teach young people about online safety. They also explore the surprising ways women are using AI, why representation matters at every layer of the stack, and what a truly gender-responsive AI future could look like.

This is one of the most important episodes we’ve made, equal parts confronting and constructive, and a must-listen for anyone who cares about building tech that works for everyone.

00:00 — Intro

02:31 — What AI actually is (and what it definitely is not)

04:00 — How AI is showing up in daily life: usage trends among women and men

06:40 — Physical AI, robotics, and Grace Brown’s loneliness-fighting invention

08:44 — The hidden gender power imbalances behind AI development

09:29 — A history lesson: how women were pushed out of computing

11:19 — Privacy, consent, and the fear of being recorded by your own doctor

12:35 — Deepfakes, blackmail, and why women are disproportionately targeted

14:45 — The “ghost workforce”: who actually labels the data AI learns from

15:26 — How unrepresentative datasets become harmful outcomes

16:35 — When Google Photos labeled a Black man as a gorilla

18:04 — The case for optimism: can AI reduce bias if we design it right?

21:32 — Who’s responsible for gender-safe AI: companies, funders, or users?

23:30 — The Inclusive Innovation Playbook: how to build fairer AI ecosystems

25:40 — Why regulating AI is so hard (and why countries disagree wildly)

27:23 — Dual-use tech, human oversight, and what companies like Unilever get right

29:03 — AI we should be excited about: healthcare, diagnostics, and robotics

31:39 — When an AI coworker goes rogue: who’s accountable?

32:56 — What a gender-responsive AI future actually looks like

34:08 — Top recommendations: feminist tech diplomacy and moving beyond critique

36:28 — Where to find Georgie and Elise

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.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.

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Is AI in the Physical World the next $100 Trillion Opportunity?

In this episode of Oversubscribed, we go deep into the "Hard Tech" revolution. From defence-grade autonomy to data infrastructure for robots, we dive deep into the frontier of hard tech with the founders building it.

Brendan Hill sits down with Michael Irwin (Co-Founder at Breaker), Joe Harris (Founder at Alloy), and returning guest Charlie Gearside (Co-Founder at Eucalyptus / Build Australia) for a wild conversation about robotics, physical AI, national ambition, and why Australia needs to start making things again.

They talk building AI that lives on the edge, the ethics of defence, 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.

00:00 – Intro: Founders, frontier tech, and Australia’s new wave of builders

02:00 – Breaker’s origin story: building robots that act on human intent

05:00 – From drones to defense: autonomy, privacy, and life on the edge

08:20 – The hardest problems left to solve (and why easy ones are gone)

10:40 – Sponsor: Vanta – building trust and compliance for startups

12:00 – Alloy’s story: from Eucalyptus to building the data brain for robots

16:00 – Why Joe left a rocket ship to start from zero

19:30 – Building for the age of robotics: data, telemetry, and the next frontier

23:00 – Finding A-players: how ambitious missions attract ambitious people

25:00 – Culture, conviction, and what passion really looks like inside startups

27:00 – The defense dilemma: ethics, values, and the post-Ukraine mindset

30:00 – Going global: why Australia’s best founders build beyond its borders

34:00 – Build Australia: a new movement for ambition and national pride

38:00 – Manufacturing, energy, and why we stopped making things

43:00 – How robotics could solve Australia’s affordability crisis

46:00 – The humanoid debate: specialized vs. general intelligence

50:00 – Life in 2035: what robots at home might really look like

52:00 – Data, autonomy, and the next AI arms race

56:00 – How Breaker and Alloy could power each other’s missions

59:00 – Skynet, manipulation, and the ethics of AI power

1:03:00 – Competition, collaboration, and the Cambrian explosion of robotics

1:06:00 – Founder stories: from CB radios to humanoids in hack houses

1:09:00 – Building the next industrial revolution from Australia

1:10:00 – Final pitches: why you should join Breaker, Alloy, and Build Australia

1:11:00 – Outro: Vanta, Ten13, and building what comes next

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Max Kausman is the founder and solo GP of Advance VC, Australia's first dedicated fund-of-funds with a focus on secondaries.

In this conversation, they discuss why secondaries won't "save" all of venture (only the top performers), how discounts actually work (spoiler: the average is 30-35% but it's wildly bespoke) and why vintage diversification matters as much as portfolio diversification.

02:47 – Max's first investment: lessons as a 14-year-old basketball coach

07:08 – Defining secondaries and Advance VC's unique LP fund focus

09:44 – Why vintage diversification matters as much as company diversification

13:57 – How secondary transactions actually work: the three-way deal between buyer, seller, and fund

19:24 – What Max learned looking under the hood of Australian VCs firms across different funds and vintages

24:09 – Why Max decided on a secondary Fund of Funds (FoF) model

34:16 - Pricing secondaries

42:20 – What discounts actually look like in practice

47:40 – Will secondaries save venture? The truth about liquidity and why it's concentrated in top performers

50:16 – Building Advance VC and the founder journey of becoming a fund manager

Max Kausman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxkausman

Advance VC - https://www.advancevc.com/

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Justin Tauber has spent nearly a decade inside one of the world’s biggest tech companies, first in strategic innovation, now leading Salesforce’s global work on ethical and human use of AI. With a background in cognitive science and design thinking, he’s become one of Australia’s most insightful voices on how technology and ethics can (and must) evolve together.

In this episode of In The Blink of AI, Georgie Healy sits down with Justin to unpack what “agentic AI” really means beyond the hype, and how enterprises can adopt it responsibly. Justin shares how scenario planning helps teams prepare for unpredictable futures, why prediction matters less than rehearsal, and how ethical constraints often spark the most original innovations.

They also dig into the growing problem of “shadow AI” inside companies, the trade-offs between startups and enterprises, and why Australia’s best AI opportunity might not be moving fastest, but safest.

If you’ve ever wondered what trust, transparency, and technology look like when they collide, this episode is your blueprint.

00:00 - Intro

05:20 - The rise of multimodal thinking

08:05 - Scenario planning and future rehearsal in AI

09:01 - Inside Salesforce: what an ethical AI team actually does

11:47 - Strategy vs policy: why most “AI strategies” aren’t strategic

13:00 - Safe hammers, safe chainsaws, and the real meaning of safety

15:45 - Trust = character + competence

17:15 - Prediction is less important than rehearsal

19:39 - Why ethics often drives innovation (bendy straws, accessibility, and more)

24:50 - Training ethical thinking like a muscle

26:01 - Shadow AI: the hidden risk inside every company

28:39 - Where bias really comes from, and how to design around it

32:12 - When to use generative vs deterministic AI

36:01 - The privacy paradox: consent, choice, and control

39:00 - Agentic AI explained through drum machines and creativity

46:13 - Startups vs enterprises: who’s taking bigger risks with AI

52:48 - Australia’s AI opportunity: becoming the world’s “safety lab”

🙋🏻‍♂️ Justin Tauber: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tauber/

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.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

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Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.

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When Maddie Reese discovered AI tools in June, she’d never written a line of code. Six months later, she’d won multiple hackathons, built viral projects like Startup Obituary and Pet Hero Comics, and quit her job to go full-time as a vibe coder.

In this episode of In The Blink of AI, Georgie Healy sits down with Maddie to unpack what “vibe coding” actually is, and why joy might be the best productivity hack of all. From debugging API keys with ChatGPT to using Lovable, Cursor, and Replit to build entire web apps in hours, Maddie shares her exact workflow, her biggest “LLM gaslight” moment, and how she’s turning play into a career.

Expect practical tips for no-coders, hilarious guinea-pig side quests, and a refreshingly real take on the future of AI creativity.

00:00 – Welcome to In The Blink of AI with Georgie Healy

03:50 – AI Hack of the Week: Poke bot + Suno music app

08:37 – Maddie’s first project: cloning Google Drive in 4 hours

14:03 – Startup Obituary: a memorial for your failed startup 💀

15:35 – Debugging 101: what to do when API keys break everything

19:15 – Roast My App: Guinea Pig of the Day 🐹

22:24 – Using ChatGPT + Cursor + Lovable together

27:06 – Snog / Marry / Avoid: Lovable, Replit & Cursor

28:36 – Quitting her family business to go full-time in AI

30:46 – Getting through frustration (and proving ChatGPT wrong)

33:45 – Why you should hit “Publish” even if it’s not perfect

37:24 – How to recover when a prompt breaks your build

38:44 – Which tool to use: Lovable vs Cursor vs GitHub

39:33 – Is vibe coding dying or hotter than ever?

41:45 – What happens if vibe coding actually does die?

42:46 – Hot Takes 🔥 Non-engineers are the future of tech

49:10 – What’s next for Maddie Reese

🙋‍♀️ Maddie Reese: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maddiedreese

🪩 Maddie’s Projects: https://maddiedreese.com/

🐦 Twitter / X: https://x.com/maddiedreese

💻 YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@maddiedreese

✨ Lovable: https://www.lovable.dev

💬 Cursor: https://cursor.sh

💡 Replit: https://replit.com

🎵 Suno Music AI: https://www.suno.ai

📱 Poke by Interaction: https://poke.com/

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.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter