Day One®

Five founders. Building with atoms and bits. Right at the heart of Australia. From robots that scan the human body to robots watching over satellites in space, one goal unites them: making Australia a better place to start a business.

Season 2 of Oversubscribed opens at BrewDog Everleigh in Sydney with Will Crowe of HEO, Joe Harris of Alloy, John Carroll of Vexev, Cibby Pulikkaseril of Zabidou, and Lachlan Bramble of Antares. Between them they're building satellites, robotic ultrasound machines, factory vision systems, launch infrastructure, and the data platform underneath all of it.

The conversation covers what's actually happening in robotics and space in 2026: why humanoid robots are further off than the headlines suggest, how HEO bought a satellite that was already in orbit instead of building one from scratch, why capital efficiency has become a competitive edge against better-funded US rivals, and how Australia's mineral wealth could make it a manufacturing base for the rest of the world. They also get into hiring, the talent war in US aerospace, and why none of them think being based in Sydney is a disadvantage.

Time Stamps

00:00 Trailer

01:08 Welcome to Season 2 at BrewDog Everleigh, Sydney

02:21 Founder Intros: HEO, Alloy, Vexev, Zabidou & Antares

05:53 Why Humanoid Robots Are Still 5+ Years Away

07:17 Sponsor: Mighty Partners

07:50 HEO's Natural Language Satellite Tasking & "Vibe Tasking" Robots

12:35 Hiring in Deep Tech: Why PhDs Aren't a Requirement Anymore

14:27 Finding & Training Young Talent in Robotics

20:52 US vs Australia: Aerospace Talent, Poaching & the Golden Dome Effect

27:50 Why US Investors Now Believe in Australian Hard Tech

30:54 "Competition Is for Losers": Building What No One Else Has

31:25 Sponsor: Vanta

32:43 How Fundraising for Hard Tech Has Changed in 5 Years

41:05 Zabidoo's Brutal Pre-Seed Deadline & Capital Efficiency

42:25 Lachlan's Antares Raise & Finding the Right Investors

45:00 Micro-Factories & Reindustrialising Regional Australia

50:14 Sponsor: TEN13

51:38 Robots That Don't Look Like Robots: Reindustrialising Australia

54:56 The Future of Health: Automating Diagnosis in Remote Australia

1:02:46 Breaking the SpaceX Monopoly: Satellites, Asteroids & In-Space Manufacturing

1:08:02 How HEO Buys Satellites Already in Orbit

1:10:11 Bringing the Future Together: The Full Supply Chain

1:14:23 The Robotics Boom: 10x More Companies & the Ethics of Robot Safety

1:19:12 Why You Should Work at HEO, Alloy, Vexev, Zabidou & Antares

1:21:58 Closing Thoughts & a Live Deal on the Podcast

Oversubscribed is proudly supported by our sponsor Vanta 🦙 and Mighty Partners 💪

Vanta is the all-in-one solution for startups to become compliant quickly and build a security foundation with ease. Startup customers get $1000 off Vanta at https://www.vanta.com/oversubscribed

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Mighty Partners is Australia's leading venture debt provider for high-growth software companies.

Venture debt gives founders access to growth capital while preserving equity, extending runway and creating greater flexibility between funding rounds. It's designed for ambitious technology businesses that want to keep building without giving away more ownership than necessary.

Trusted by companies including BuildPass, Deckard Technologies and Pearler, Mighty helps founders scale on their own terms.

Learn more about venture debt and how it can support your next stage of growth at https://www.mightypartners.com.au/oversubscribed

The Day One Network

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

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or financial product. Brendan Hill and Steve Baxter are investors in HEO.

About the Host:

Brendan Hill is a Venture Partner at TEN13 and an angel investor in Australia’s fastest-growing startups, including Everlab, Heidi Health, Relevance AI and Instant. If you are interested in finding out more about angel investing, connect with Brendan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsbrendanhill/

Most companies treat compensation as a math problem: get the number right and the rest takes care of itself. Matt McFarlane says that’s backwards, and it’s the reason so many pay conversations go sideways even when the number itself is fair.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN, the compensation consultancy he built after years running People Operations inside fast scaling startups. They get into why counteroffers rarely work, the exact headcount where pay problems start to bite, why equity has stopped doing its job as a retention lever in Australia, and how the AI hiring market has quietly made token costs a bigger line item than payroll.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Cold open: the number is only half the story

0:44 - Who Matt McFarlane is, and why James wanted him on

1:30 - Welcome, and the trust problem behind every pay number

3:08 - Pay compression, and getting ahead of the market before you're asked

5:54 - Rebalancing cadence, and when a counteroffer is worth it

9:37 - Bringing in outside help, and titles as currency

11:35 - Building a real pay philosophy, and hiring your first people leader

13:52 - The 50 to 100 headcount inflection point

15:32 - Why the people function is bigger than most founders think

17:31 - Onboarding, ways of work, and staying focused in the age of AI

20:50 - What Zapier gets right about AI adoption

23:29 - The AI engineer bidding wars, and the "jump is too big" excuse

26:29 - Token costs vs headcount costs, and mission over salary

29:20 - Is equity still worth offering

32:50 - The naivety of chasing the next Canva

34:08 - Building a team with a blank cheque

37:52 - Rock stars, superstars, and hiring past 100 people

40:38 - How AI agents are reshaping org structure

42:47 - The Ralph Wiggum loop, and why AI leaderboards backfire

47:13 - Attraction and retention beyond salary

48:50 - The ComBank toilet tracker

49:39 - Advice for individuals chasing a pay rise

53:41 - Why "prove it first" is dying: Gen Z's pushback

56:31 - Staying technical, and why people teams need to get technical too

1:01:27 - Building a personal brand from scratch

1:02:22 - How the podcast happened by accident

1:05:37 - What personal brand does for individual engineers

1:08:17 - The Startup People Summit

1:10:50 - One trend to watch

1:11:50 - James's takeaway, and the gap you need to close

ABOUT THE GUEST

Matt McFarlane is the Founder and Director of FNDN, a compensation consultancy helping startups and scaling tech companies build pay practices that are clear, fair and competitive. He previously led People Operations functions at companies including Oyster, a global employment platform, where he was Senior Director of People Experience. Matt also publishes the FNDN Series newsletter and podcast, co-founded the Startup People Summit, and was named to the 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 for ANZ and LinkedIn’s Top Voices Australia.

LINKS

Matt McFarlane, FNDN · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/ · Site: https://www.fndn.com.au/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau/ · Site: https://ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

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Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsors:

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

Episode Summary

Ilana Elbaz joined Deel when it was five people, one developer and no revenue. It is now 7,200 people across almost every timezone, with more than $1 billion in ARR — and it has never had an office. She built the go-to-market function that got it there, from Singapore, having grown up in France and started companies in Thailand, Switzerland and the US.

Deel went through Y Combinator in 2019 as something else entirely — first a social media product, then a blockchain company — before landing on the payroll, compliance and employment infrastructure it sells today. Much of that product exists because Deel needed it first: the employer-of-record product was built after contractors in Germany and Italy told the company they would not work as contractors.

In this episode of Pick My Brain, Alan Jones asks the question every Australian founder eventually hits: if the local market is small and the experienced talent is thin, when do you start hiring offshore? Ilana's answer is blunter than most — think global from day one, for the team and for the go-to-market, because the alternative is optimising for proximity instead of quality.

They also get into the compliance mistakes that can close a business, why an investor will interrogate your workforce structure at the next round, how Deel runs on written async communication and huddles instead of scheduled one-on-ones, and Ilana's case that the classic weekly one-on-one is obsolete once you have real-time data. Plus the SDRs who went from under $40,000 a year to more than $500,000, and why she would take that job again tomorrow.

Time Stamps

• 00:00 – Five people to 7,200, and zero to over a billion
• 00:58 – Welcome to Pick My Brain
• 01:45 – Meet Ilana Elbaz, head of sales and go-to-market at Deel
• 02:30 – Doctor or entrepreneur, and a first company at 19
• 05:02 – How Deel was founded, and the pivots through Y Combinator
• 07:26 – Is Y Combinator still worth applying for?
• 08:50 – Remote-first from day one, and why proximity is a bad filter
• 10:56 – Eating your own dog food: how the employer-of-record product got built
• 12:29 – Where 7,200 people actually sit
• 14:34 – Why a small market forces Australian founders outward
• 16:41 – Slack from day one: async, written and measured
• 18:07 – Akai by Deel and the daily performance report
• 19:58 – Think global from day one
• 21:08 – The compliance mistakes that can close your business
• 22:59 – Paying people in the currency they actually want
• 25:56 – Onboarding, buddies and enablement
• 26:33 – From under $40k to over $500k: the SDR path
• 27:56 – Bringing a distributed team together, and the Deel World Cup
• 30:24 – Why the classic one-on-one is obsolete
• 32:43 – Fix it now: the cost of postponing hard conversations
• 33:30 – Wrap-up

Resources

- Deel – https://www.deel.com/dayone

- Ilana Elbaz on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanaelbaz

- Ask Alan a Question – https://speakpipe.com/pickmybrain

- More from Alan Jones – https://www.startupfoundercoach.com

Pick My Brain is a Day One show hosted by startup founder coach and investor Alan Jones.

Mentioned in this episode:

Deel x PX_Script 1

Deel x PX_Script 2

Darius Monsef has built a colour-palette website that grew to millions of users, sold two companies, raised over $40 million for a paediatric healthcare startup, and shut it all down. Twice. He's brutally honest about why.

Darius walks through how a joke website for rating colour squares became a design resource used by Adobe, how wearing his own branded t-shirt got him into Y Combinator, and how Creative Market sold to Autodesk just 11 months after launch. But the real story is what happened after the money landed: the quiet depression of an exit that wasn't life-changing enough, the $40 million healthcare business that scaled before it had product-market fit, and the moment on a plane, mid-fundraise, when he realised he might be lying to himself and everyone else.

He's honest about what it cost to walk away from Brave Care, why he now tells Founders to be quitters, and why the businesses that fail teach you more than the ones that limp along for nine years pretending to work.

Stick around for his three life lessons: why your health is the input that decides your output, why quitting well matters as much as starting well, and why Founders should set goals they can't reach and still call it a win.

Find Darius

Darius on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusmonsef/

What he's building now: https://ozbrain.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

Time Stamps

00:00 Cold open + welcome to Life After Launch, introducing Darius Monsef

02:16 Growing up in Hawaii, entrepreneurial parents, and the chip on his shoulder

06:48 Building COLOURlovers, the shirt that got him into Y Combinator, and 11 years to "overnight success"

15:27 Creative Market's fast exit to Autodesk, and why the money wasn't enough

21:29 Sightbox, moving to Hawaii, and the depression after doing "nothing"

29:32 Raising $40M for Brave Care, scaling before product-market fit, and the collapse mid-fundraise

40:53 Shutting down Brave Care, then Genie and Rides, and building Pre

50:03 Life lesson 1: treat your health like an athlete's, not an afterthought

55:16 Life lesson 2: be a quitter

59:55 Life lesson 3: push harder than reasonable, then give yourself grace

1:04:33 Closing thoughts + outro

Sidecars have gone mainstream. Once something mostly associated with larger venture funds, they’re now increasingly common in Australia, with emerging managers using them alongside their first funds and sophisticated LPs increasingly expecting access to them.

But what exactly is a sidecar, and why would you use one instead of simply investing directly?

In this episode of First Track, Cheryl and Maxine break down sidecars from the ground up: how they differ from co-investments, why LPs use them to double down on companies they’re excited about, and how lower fees and carry can make them attractive to larger investors.

They also unpack the less obvious reasons fund managers use sidecars—from getting more capital into high-conviction companies and giving venture-curious investors a way to get reps, to preserving pro rata in follow-on rounds without changing the core strategy of the fund.

The conversation gets into opportunity funds, the history of sidecars, and why a vehicle that was once niche is now a standard part of the venture fund playbook. They also dive into the surprisingly complicated world of Australian SPVs, the four main structures available, and the regulatory challenges facing super funds investing in venture.

Finally, Cheryl and Maxine look at how the venture ecosystem is evolving, why sidecars are becoming part of the progression from syndicate to fund manager, and what the growing expectations of institutional LPs could mean for the next generation of Australian funds.

00:00 – From venture outsider to “everyone is building companies”

01:12 – Why sidecars have suddenly gone mainstream

02:23 – What exactly is a sidecar?

03:14 – Sidecars vs. co-investments

04:12 – The Uber for Cats problem 🐈

05:12 – Why LPs and fund managers use sidecars

05:40 – Doubling down on the companies you love

07:27 – How sidecars can lower fees and carry

08:40 – The paradox of picking winners to average down fees

09:29 – Why sidecars make more sense at growth stage

10:30 – Drafting off someone else’s diligence

11:30 – Follow-on sidecars and pro rata

13:31 – Why competitive rounds make sidecars valuable

14:50 – The admin headache of investing directly

15:05 – Why sidecars can make investing easier

16:02 – The surprising history of opportunity funds

17:25 – When should emerging managers start using sidecars?

19:10 – Why fund managers run sidecars

21:00 – Sidecars, carry and staying disciplined

22:00 – Why sophisticated LPs increasingly expect sidecars

23:10 – SPVs aren’t actually a legal structure

24:10 – The four main Australian SPV structures

25:23 – Why Australia is different from the US

26:00 – The evolution from angel to syndicate to fund

27:08 – The super fund fee problem

28:17 – Should venture be treated differently?

29:11 – The regulatory challenge for Australian venture

30:24 – What happens as Australian funds mature?

31:23 – Why building a fund is still building a company

32:01 – Sidecars 101: did we cover it all?

32:49 – Send us your sidecar questions

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.

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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:

Deel x PX_Script 2

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 PX_Script 1

A survey of more than 1,800 clinicians across 25 countries found 83% had already adopted AI before their workplace had any governance in place. Healthcare, it turns out, is not just adopting AI. It is being redesigned around it.

In the second What the Health Wrap, host Emily Casey is joined by Dr Simon Kos, Global Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, and Dr Janice Tan, GP and General Manager of Clinical Innovation at Bupa, to work through what the fortnight's biggest healthcare stories actually mean.

Simon uses Heidi's Pressure Points report to bust some long-held myths. Clinicians are not Luddites; get product-market fit right and they will adopt ahead of their own organisations. Product-led growth is not impossible in healthcare. And the idea that everything must run through a single electronic medical record screen does not survive contact with the reality of shadow AI. Janice agrees, arguing that GPs are among the most innovative professionals there are, and that what matters is not clicks or screens but the value exchange.

The conversation turns to where this leaves general practice. Both guests expect voice to become the default way information is entered within two years, freeing clinicians for deeper, more present consultations rather than merely shorter ones. Janice makes the point that scribes save time not to compress the visit but to enrich it. Simon argues that scribes should be commoditised, because they are the entry point to something bigger: infusing evidence and decision support into the flow of care.

They also examine what happens when patients bring their own AI into the room. OpenAI's launch of Health in ChatGPT, and the broader move by frontier labs into consumer health, could be the single biggest driver of health equity, filling the gap for people who previously had no care at all. But Simon draws a firm line between consumer-grade and clinical-grade health, pointing to the liability caps some providers attach to their advice and the accountability the medical profession is held to. The regulatory framework for quality and safety is not yet in place, but it is coming fast.

Janice explains Bupa's own metamorphosis from health insurer to health organisation, investing heavily in primary and preventive care across medical, dental, optical and psychology clinics, and rolling out AI scribes to its clinicians under strong governance. Simon zooms out to a health system whose old boundaries between payer, provider, acute, primary and consumer care are blurring, driven by digital capability, policy reform and a wave of consolidation.

The panel closes on the future of care. They discuss how to equip the next generation of doctors without letting AI become a crutch that erodes clinical judgement, what digital health's US$7.4 billion funding rebound says about capital concentrating into a handful of mega rounds, and why the companies winning big are the ones co-designing with clinicians from day one. Then they imagine the patient journey in 2035, from wellness chairs in autonomous vehicles to consultations that feel, as Janice puts it, more human.

Dr Simon Kos is Global Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, the AI clinical documentation company. A physician who practised critical care medicine before moving into digital health, he was previously Global Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft and CEO of Next Practice, and is a long-standing figure in Australian digital health.

Dr Janice Tan is a GP and the General Manager of Clinical Innovation at Bupa, where she leads the rollout and piloting of AI solutions across the group's health services. She also advises the RACGP and works to uplift the digital health capability of the GP profession.

00:00 Introducing the What the Health Wrap

00:07 Guest updates: Heidi's global expansion and life in general practice

03:03 The fortnight's five biggest headlines

05:11 Heidi's Pressure Points report: adopting AI ahead of governance

06:16 Busting the myths about clinicians and technology

10:11 Where general practice is heading: voice by default and deeper consults

13:00 Patients are bringing their own AI to the consult

14:21 Health in ChatGPT and big tech's move into consumer health

18:33 Consumer-grade versus clinical-grade care and the regulation gap

23:41 Bupa's shift from health insurer to health company

30:29 Training the next generation without de-skilling

33:43 Digital health's US$7.4 billion funding landscape

35:31 Finding the wedge: co-designing with clinicians

38:46 The 2035 patient journey

42:46 Rapid fire: emojis, surprises and companies to watch

• Heidi
• Heidi's Pressure Points 2026 report
• Bupa Australia
• Bupa's Connected Care strategy
• Bupa to acquire Partnered Health Group
• Health in ChatGPT
• Rock Health H1 2026 funding and market overview
• Australia's ban on genetic discrimination in life insurance
• Claude for Healthcare

Emily Casey is the founder of What the Health and host of the What the Health Wrap, making major developments in health technology and innovation easier to understand.

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

What the Health is part of Day One Network, the podcast and media network from W2D1 Media.

Benjamin Plummer has one of the stranger CVs in Australian tech: nine years inside Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, building an AI lab alongside IBM Watson's inventor, scaling a startup he says went from $10M to $160M in revenue in eighteen months as CEO, and now running Dragonfly Intelligence, a firm that buys ordinary services businesses and rebuilds them as AI-native companies from the ground up.

This conversation starts with the week ChatGPT tried to cheat its way out of its own safety harness, and what that says about accountability as models get more capable. From there, Ben and Georgie get into why coding has gotten fast while everything around it, deciding what to build, checking it got built right, has become the real bottleneck, why software has spent a decade getting bloated and what an Apple-style, purpose-built alternative could look like, and why locking your business to one model provider is a losing bet.

Ben also makes the case for Australia's shot at this moment: not frontier models, but data centers, the application layer, and physical AI, backed by what he estimates is a two trillion dollar services economy that's largely untouched.

It closes with Ben's read on who wins and loses as AI reshapes work, and a blunt warning for the services companies still sitting on the sidelines.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open

0:51 Welcome to the show

2:16 Sponsor: Deel (pre-roll)

2:36 Hack of the week: the "rambling session"

5:13 Georgie's hack: the NFC nail chip

6:12 When ChatGPT tried to break its own harness

13:14 AI makes coding fast, everything else the bottleneck

15:39 Sponsor: Deel (mid-roll)

18:19 Nine years inside Bridgewater

21:37 Building Elemental Cognition with Watson's inventor

24:26 Scaling Invisible from $10M to $160M

26:06 Why Dragonfly Intelligence

27:59 Spotting "zombie companies" in the AI gold rush

32:10 Why software moats are dying

35:01 Open source, closed source, and not marrying a model

44:26 "Easier to do hard things": Dragonfly's ambition

47:12 The real debate on AI data centers in Australia

52:15 Three bets for Australia beyond frontier models

55:05 Rapid fire: what keeps Ben up, who wins and loses from AI

1:01:30 Outro

Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsors:

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

Galah Cyber offers Application Security Assessment.

Get a clear, ten-minute snapshot of your AppSec maturity across the five core principles. Fast, practical insights you can act on straight away at https://www.galahcyber.com.au/assess

Episode Summary

Alternative investments can give investors exposure beyond shares and bonds, but most clean-energy projects still come with high minimums, expensive structuring and long, relationship-driven sales cycles. Ishan Dan founded RegenX to help developers make those projects investment-ready and give wholesale investors access at a more practical scale.

In this episode of Pick My Brain, Alan Jones helps Ishan confront the hardest part of the model: RegenX is a two-sided marketplace, and neither side moves quickly. Project developers need capital, while wealth managers and family offices need trust, evidence and a reason to pay attention.

They unpack how to stop treating both sides as equal growth problems, why one-to-many relationship building can outperform another round of cold outreach, and how a founder becomes the credible industry expert the market needs. Ishan also shares RegenX's fee model, early project pipeline and the regulatory constraints behind raising capital for clean-energy assets.

Time Stamps

00:00 – Why RegenX is changing access to alternative investments

01:25 – Welcome to Pick My Brain

02:14 – Ishan's question for Alan

02:54 – From aspiring stockbroker to startup founder

04:40 – What counts as an alternative investment?

05:33 – Making clean-energy projects investment-ready

11:36 – RegenX's first projects and $60 million pipeline

13:13 – The hardest part of raising capital

17:43 – Why two-sided marketplaces are so difficult

24:25 – Trust, relationships and wealth managers

29:06 – Becoming the industry expert

29:43 – Making one side someone else's growth problem

31:34 – Wrap-up

Resources

- RegenX – https://www.regenx.io/

- Ishan Dan on LinkedIn – https://au.linkedin.com/in/ishandan

- Ask Alan a Question – https://speakpipe.com/pickmybrain

- More from Alan Jones – https://www.startupfoundercoach.com

Pick My Brain is a Day One show hosted by startup founder coach and investor Alan Jones.

Mentioned in this episode:

Deel x PX_Script 2

Deel x PX_Script 1

Most technical interviews still ask a candidate to write a function on a whiteboard. Adam Witanowski says that question is already obsolete, and what should replace it says everything about how AI is changing who gets hired.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Adam Witanowski, AI Architect at nib, where he has spent the past several years building the insurer's AI engineering practice from the ground up. They get into why most enterprise AI projects underperform (nobody is measuring the right things), what "back pressure" means for AI-generated code, why Australian salaries can't compete with the US for senior AI talent, and why the technical interview needs a full rebuild.

It's a hands-on, practitioner's take on what's actually happening inside enterprise AI teams, not the conference-keynote version. They cover the real dollar gap between hiring an AI engineer in Australia versus the US, why "the whiteboard should come back" as an interview tool, how Adam built his own AI agent to interview for jobs on his behalf, and the testing harness his team uses to check whether AI-generated work is actually any good.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Cold open: the line that explains why most AI investments don't work

0:44 - Who Adam Witanowski is, and why James wanted him on

2:06 - Welcome, and building an AI SDLC from scratch inside a regulated insurer

5:12 - What "back pressure" actually means, and why solo AI coding doesn't scale

10:52 - Startups vs enterprises: re-engineer whole processes, not thin slices

13:24 - Why most companies can't even measure the problem they're trying to solve

17:10 - Software eats the world, and why that makes engineers apex predators

19:44 - Build in-house or buy: the blind spots consulting companies won't tell you

23:57 - Forward deployed engineers, and the rise of the hybrid product-engineer

26:38 - Tangent: his 13-year-old builds an AI auto-aimbot

30:43 - Build, upskill or outsource: the renters, owners and caretakers test

34:18 - What AI talent actually wants beyond a bigger title

38:30 - The real dollar gap: $220K in Australia versus $500K in the US

46:37 - What to actually pay your first AI hire

49:01 - "What you don't measure, you can't change"

51:01 - Redesigning the interview: show me your harness

56:45 - Why the whiteboard should come back

58:38 - Building a harness to test his harness

1:03:46 - He built his own AI agent to interview for him

1:07:28 - Why motivation and taste still beat any technical test

1:12:19 - Apex predator, Jedi, stallion, unicorn: Adam's closing line

1:13:00 - James's takeaway: it's a measurement problem, not a technology problem

ABOUT THE GUEST

Adam Witanowski is an AI Architect at nib in Sydney, where he has built Prometheus, an integrated suite of agentic AI tools now running in production across the business. He works at the intersection of senior engineering and AI leadership, and has spoken publicly on enterprise AI engineering discipline, including harness design, testing and evals, and AI governance.

LINKS

Adam Witanowski, NIB · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/witanowski/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau/ · Site: https://ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

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Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Kirstin Hunter has co-founded a super fund, run a startup accelerator, and now leads Australia's biggest crowdfunding platform. None of it was the plan.

She grew up in Tweed Heads folding junk mail for two cents a letterbox, trained to be a doctor, then pivoted through law and consulting before a friend told her the pro bono work she loved was just "the trinkets" propping up a job that made corporations richer. That conversation pushed her into Future Super, where a pitch her co-founders called "absurd" turned into one of Australia's first fossil-fuel-free super funds.

She's honest about what came next too: the moment she and her co-founders stopped wanting the same thing, and why leaving felt like leaving a marriage. From there she takes you through Techstars Australia, the funding data project that exposed how badly VCs back women and diverse Founders, and how she landed the CEO seat at Birchal, almost by accident.

Stick around for the one Revolut stat that makes the case for democratised funding better than any pitch deck could.

Find Kirstin

Kirstin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirstinhunter/

Birchal: https://www.birchal.com/

Future Super: https://www.futuresuper.com.au/

Join the Aussie Founders Club

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

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00:00 Cold open + welcome to Life After Launch

01:14 Introducing Kirstin Hunter

02:16 From junk mail in Tweed Heads to running a $20M student union at 23

09:16 Consulting, "the trinkets," and the leap to Future Super

15:48 Becoming a co-founder and building Australia's fossil-fuel-free super fund

20:39 The co-founder breakdown, and why she walked away

24:54 Techstars, the funding gap for diverse founders, and Funding the Balance

42:27 Landing at Birchal, and the case for crowdfunding

48:06 Closing thoughts + outro