Day One®

A/Prof Fiona Brownfoot and Dr. Emerson Keenan are the co-founders of Kali Healthcare, a company determined to improve fetal monitoring — technology that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s.

Kali Healthcare has developed an electrical sensing wearable patch for fetal monitoring, providing clinicians with real-time information leading to improved patient outcomes.

Fiona and Emerson discuss the power of consumer-centric design (like making the hardware look like a makeup compact), and offer key lessons on how to secure funding and integrate new technology into complex healthcare systems.

02:45 – Fiona and Emerson speak about their backgrounds

03:26 – Origins of Kali Healthcare

06:00 – How Kali Healthcare's electrical sensing wearable patch works

07:27 – How clinicians are making use of the real-time insights

10:00 – What makes Kali Healthcare’s wearable different to existing solutions

13:33 — Breakthroughs they’ve experienced

16:00 – Stepping into the founder role and the "ultimate rollercoaster"

20:02 – Fundraising lessons: why it always takes longer than you think

21:09 – Advice for other healthcare founders

🌐 Kali Healthcare - https://www.kalihealthcare.com/

Assoc. Prof. Fiona Branford - https://www.linkedin.com/in/a-prof-fiona-brownfoot-871036b8

Emerson Keenan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/emersonkeenan

Acknowledgment of Country

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we record and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present. We recognise their continuing connection to land, waters, and culture.

Disclaimer

The New Script is a podcast created for educational and awareness-raising purposes only. The conversations you’ll hear are not intended to be medical advice.

Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for any personal medical concerns or decisions.

Frances LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frances-goh/

Makenzie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/makenziethomas/

The New Script is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors. https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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 Vaso Parisinou we tackle one of the most challenging aspects of early-stage people operations: designing and executing your first compensation cycle. We explore the critical steps from data preparation to employee communication, discussing how to build sustainable frameworks that reward performance while maintaining fairness and transparency. Vaso shares practical strategies for creating merit matrices, handling high performers at the top of salary bands, and incorporating non-monetary rewards like sabbaticals. Keep watching to discover the essential roadmap for getting your startup's first compensation cycle right and setting the foundation for future success.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to FNDN Series and Today's Topic

01:12 The Challenge of First Compensation Cycles: Getting Support

01:47 Key Milestones for Compensation Cycle Planning

01:58 Starting with Clean Data and Proper Scaffolding

05:03 Creating Merit Matrices for Pay-for-Performance Philosophy

05:59 Handling Different Performance Levels and Band Positions

06:45 Breaking Salary Bands: When and Why It Makes Sense

07:44 Avoiding Performance Demotivation Through Rigid Limits

08:00 Balancing Egalitarian Values with Performance Rewards

09:07 Non-Monetary Rewards: Spot Bonuses and Sabbaticals

10:15 Offering Choice: Tailoring Rewards to Individual Preferences

11:21 Post-Cycle Retrospectives and Focus Groups

13:21 Testing Employee Understanding of Compensation Philosophy

14:23 Helping Employees Understand Pay Equity and Positioning

16:26 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Connect with Vaso

Visit: ravio.com 

https://linkedin.com/in/vaso-parisinou-4368b515/?originalSubdomain=uk

Company Mentioned:

Ravio - Compensation benchmarking platform where Vaso works as an expert in startup compensation cycles

Key Concepts Discussed:

More FNDN Episodes:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4GeBIeZOKrFxG1oiiPxmiM 

Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fndn-series/id1794263484 

Before AI was cool, Dominick Ng was already building it. From a tiny country town in regional NSW to a PhD, a Fulbright Scholarship, and nine years at Google, Dom’s journey is the definition of technical brilliance meets humility. Today, he’s the Director of Engineering at Relevance AI, one of Australia’s fastest-growing agentic AI startups, backed by global investors and reshaping how teams build with large language models.

In this episode of In The Blink of AI, Georgie Healy sits down with Dom to talk about the real limits of agentic AI, why Australia needs to embrace experimentation, and how to build world-class engineering teams that can move fast without losing soul.

Dom explains how AI-assisted coding is changing what engineers can do in a weekend, what makes a great AI hire, and why “if you can’t onboard a person, you can’t onboard an agent.” He also breaks down why Meta’s hiring strategy looks so extreme, what China’s AI talent boom really means, and the cringe misconceptions about AI “making us lazy.”

If you’ve ever wanted to truly understand what’s behind the hype, this conversation will make you smarter (and probably a bit more patient with your next API error).

👨‍💻 Dominick Ng (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominickng/

🏗️ Relevance AI: https://www.relevanceai.com/

🧠 Vibe Sliding (Relevance AI feature): https://chat.relevanceai.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

Mentioned in this episode:

Deel x PX_Post Intro

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From a childhood without electricity to co-founding a listed betting company, Oliver Shanahan’s story is a masterclass in technical grit and commercial pivots. As the Group Head of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure at BetMakers Technology Group, Oliver traces his path from wiring up early ISPs and mining ERPs to building TopBetta from a two-person LAMP stack into an ASX-listed business. 

In this episode of Tech Execs, James MacDonald sits down with Oliver as he unpacks the high-stakes realities of bookmaking, the decision to pivot from B2C to B2B through acquisitions like Dynamic Odds, Global Betting Services, and Sportech, and why they rebuilt a legacy monolith into a cloud-native, multi-tenant platform that now powers 35+ sportsbooks. We also dig into ISO 27001 in practice, due diligence on tech debt, and how to use AI without leaking your IP. A candid, deeply technical blueprint for founders and engineering leaders navigating scale, regulation, and replatforming you won’t want to miss.

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.

The Day One Network

Oversubscribed is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

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, 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.

This is Oversubscribed with Brendan Hill

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 Shirley Baumer, Co-Founder at Dream Team, we explore how to transform people's team by applying product-led principles in practice.

We discuss practical strategies for starting small with MVPs, implementing agile ceremonies for HR teams, and leveraging AI to free up time for strategic impact. Shirley shares actionable frameworks for running kickoff meetings, sync meetings, and retrospectives that help people teams ship faster, build credibility, and create measurable business impact. Keep watching to discover how to move from theory to practice and become a more commercial, effective people leader.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to the FNDN Series

01:56 Starting with Product Thinking: Defining Outcomes Over Solutions

02:40 Running Your First MVP: The Kickoff Meeting Framework

05:58 Formalizing What You're Already Doing: User Interviews in HR

07:32 Fine-Tuning vs. Radical Shifts in People Operations

08:44 Scaling Product Practices: Agile Ceremonies for People Teams

09:26 Three Key Rituals: Kickoff, Sync, and Closing Ceremonies

11:34 Building Credibility Through Sprint Reviews and Visibility

13:49 Normalizing Mistakes: Building Psychological Safety into Your Process

14:58 Taking Pressure Off: Iterative Approaches to Compensation and Performance

17:12 The Power of Owning Your Mistakes as a Leader

18:26 Measuring Success: Qualitative Signals Over Cookie-Cutter KPIs

22:23 Defining Impact-Driven Metrics for Each Initiative

23:10 The Night and Day Difference: Personal Experience with Product-Led HR

25:07 AI's Role in Product-Led People Teams: Automation and Data Insights

28:11 Creating Space for Strategic Work Through Operations and Product Split

29:58 The Future of AI in HR: From Hype to Practical Application

32:29 Conclusion and Wrap-Up

Connect with Shirley:https://www.linkedin.com/in/shirleyjb/ 

Visit: dreamteam.io Newsletter: https://agilehr.substack.com/ 

Company Mentioned:

Dream Team - AI-powered HR platform that automates administrative work and surfaces data-driven insights for people teams

Concepts Discussed:

More FNDN Episodes:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4GeBIeZOKrFxG1oiiPxmiM 

Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fndn-series/id1794263484 

ProductLedHR, PeopleOperations, HRTransformation, AgileHR, ProductThinking, StartupHR, PeopleTech, HRInnovation, CompensationStrategy, PerformanceManagement, HRLeadership, StartupOperations, PeopleStrategy, HRTech, AIinHR, DataDrivenHR, HRProductManagement, PeopleAnalytics, StartupCulture, HRBestPractices

Before he was a VC-backed founder, Harrison Kennedy was walking for Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, and Tiffany & Co., a teenager from the Gold Coast suddenly living a global modeling career. When COVID hit, that world stopped. What began as a mental health podcast with a friend became Really Mental, a media company backed by Amazon, reaching 25 million people and hundreds of millions of collective followers.

Now, Harrison’s building ReFresh, an emotional intelligence platform that helps companies detect how their people are feeling. Using AI models that analyse tone, text, and behavioural signals across tools like Slack and Google Workspace, ReFresh helps organisations measure mental wellbeing, burnout risk, and compliance, all while keeping employees anonymous.

In this episode of In The Blink of AI, Georgie Healy and Harrison talk about the evolution from creator to founder, how AI can be used to understand humans rather than replace them, and what it really means to build a values-driven company. Harrison shares lessons on patience, communication, and curiosity, and why in a world that’s more “connected” than ever, loneliness is still one of tech’s biggest unsolved problems.

🙋‍♂️ Harrison Kennedy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrison-kennedy-81b7171a1/

💡 ReFresh: https://www.refr-esh.com/

🎧 Really Mental (Podcast): https://pods.to/reallymental

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.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:

Deel x PX_Post Intro

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In this episode of Tech Execs, James MacDonald heads to Melbourne to sit down with Matt Vitale, former co-founder of Australia’s largest equity crowdfunding platform and now Executive Director at New Dialogue. Matt traces his winding path from nightlife promoter and sugarcane juice tinkerer to financial services lawyer, then startup pioneer, where he helped more than 300 companies raise over $250M. He shares the breakout Sheba Rideshare campaign, why storytelling and community trump slick code, and how a $300K LaunchVic grant sparked a hardware-focused angel network that became their most successful to date.

Tune in to hear Matt break down how enterprises can safely adopt AI by deploying open-source large language models inside their own secure environments—model-agnostic, auditable, and up in days, not months. He makes the case for bottom-up experimentation, rapid pilots, and why compliance-by-design will be the real moat as regulation catches up. Alongside the professional achievements, Matt also shares the daily practices (think meditation, breath work, and long works) that helped him reset following burnout. A must listen for those working in the rapidly evolving AI space.

In this episode of The New Script, Makenzie Thomas and Frances Goh sit down with Ash Ramachandran, founder and CEO of Sapyen, an at-home male fertility testing company that’s helping men take charge of their reproductive health.

Ash shares how his background in research, venture capital, and global health led him to build Sapyen, and what he’s learned about the hidden factors affecting male fertility. He explains how sperm health reflects overall wellbeing, why lifestyle and early testing matter, and what needs to change in how we talk about fertility and family planning.

The conversation also explores the realities of building a medtech startup from Australia, the challenges of fundraising in healthcare, and the importance of supporting founders’ mental health along the way.

02:27 – From asteroid mining and venture capital to founding Sapyen

03:32 – The idea behind Sapyen and rethinking male fertility testing

05:20 – How fertility clinics are changing and where gaps remain

05:54 – Breaking the stigma around male fertility

08:39 – What sperm quality tells us about health and fertility

10:37 – Why including men improves outcomes for couples

12:36 – The emerging research on sperm health and pregnancy

14:17 – How the Sapyen test works and what users can expect

15:41 – Building a global health company from Australia

17:11 – From investor to founder: lessons in healthcare fundraising

22:30 – Learning from early challenges and “favorite failures”

26:54 – Managing wellbeing and founder mental health

29:39 – Why men’s health matters for the future of fertility

31:34 – What’s next for Sapyen

35:00 – If Ash could rewrite the script on men’s health

🌐 Sapyen – http://www.sapyen.co/

👨‍🔬 Ash Ramachandran (LinkedIn) – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwinramachandran1/

Acknowledgment of Country

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we record and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present. We recognise their continuing connection to land, waters, and culture.

Disclaimer

The New Script is a podcast created for educational and awareness-raising purposes only. The conversations you’ll hear are not intended to be medical advice.

Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for any personal medical concerns or decisions.

Frances LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frances-goh/

Makenzie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/makenziethomas/

The New Script is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors. https://dayone.fm/newsletter