In The Blink of AI with Georgie Healy

Anna Zhou and Vivian Shen, the co-founders of Toastie, join Georgie Healy for one of the warmest and most personal conversations the show has had. Two software engineers at Google by day, they have quietly built one of the most thoughtful health tracking apps in the world by night, all without spending a single dollar on marketing.

Toastie was born from a problem they were both living. Anna was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and handed a few photocopied sheets to figure out the rest of her life from. Viv has been managing PCOS for years, experimenting with medications and diets on her own. They realised the tools available simply were not built for people like them, so they built one themselves. Today Toastie helps users track symptoms, food, body signals, lab reports and scans, surfacing the patterns and irregularities that would otherwise go unnoticed.

In this episode they unpack why almost one in two Australians live with a chronic illness but no one talks about it, why slapping AI on everything is the wrong instinct and how they decide which features actually need it, and the cold LinkedIn email that landed them their first global partnership before they even had a product. They also share why ChatGPT and Gemini are not enough when the stakes are this high, what their users actually write to them in the feedback form, and the story of the user who quietly security audited their app and was so impressed they wrote in to tell them.

Plus the early hackathon they won by faking the backend in real time, why they call themselves boomers when it comes to social media, the worst startup advice they have ever received, and a special offer just for In The Blink of AI listeners.

🎁 Use promo code ITBOA2026 to get a 90 day free trial of Toastie

🍞 Find your Toastie personality: https://toastie.au/quiz

00:00 Intro

02:20 AI Hacks and Life at Google Sydney

07:00 How They Met and Their Hackathon Wins

10:51 What is Toastie and Why It Matters

13:50 The Personal Stories Behind the Product

16:23 How They Use AI (And Where They Don't)

17:37 The Cold Email That Landed a Global Partnership

20:00 Why General AI Models Aren't Enough

23:25 Building, Prioritising and the Competition

25:13 Why They Refuse to Call Themselves an AI Company

27:57 Trust, Security and User Feedback

30:00 Going Viral With Zero Marketing Spend

33:33 Handling AI Hate Online

35:43 Rapid Fire and What's Next

38:45 Special Offer for Listeners

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

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

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"Code is getting cheaper. Which means taste is getting more expensive."

That one idea from Andrew Hogan reframes everything people think they know about competing in AI right now. Andrew, Head of Insights at Figma, joins Georgie to make the case that features are no longer a moat, and that the companies quietly investing in how their product feels are the ones building something that's actually hard to copy.

In this episode they get into why 56% of non-designers are already doing design work, why the job title "designer" isn't going anywhere, and why anyone who's still treating design as a finish-line coat of paint is going to get lapped. They also unpack what agent management platforms actually need to get right, why design matters even more when kids are the users, and what GeoCities taught us about creative ownership that most product teams have completely forgotten.

Plus: the prompting-together technique that turns prototyping into a team sport, why "no tech at all" is unnecessarily painful for parents, Andrew's verdict on Australian coffee, and why the golden era of the side project might be the most important shift nobody's naming loudly enough.

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.

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"Shit at the speed of light is still shit."

That one line from Pip captures the entire philosophy behind Springboards, the AI company he co-founded with Amy and Kieran that is quietly pushing back against what the rest of the industry is doing. The three of them join Georgie Healy for one of the most thought-provoking conversations the show has had about what AI is quietly doing to creativity, and what it takes to build a model that breaks the mould.

Pip and Amy never planned to start an AI company. Both worked in advertising and got laid off within three weeks of each other, which led them to accidentally build the first version of Springboards themselves to solve a problem they kept running into: existing AI tools were not helping them do creative work better, they were making everyone's creative work look the same. Kieran joined as their technical co-founder and together they have now released Flint, a divergence model designed to break the AI hive mind.

In this episode they unpack why 69 out of 70 language models will tell you that time is a river, why mainstream AI has converged into one gray mush of sameness, and why the scariest part of this might be that most people will not even notice. They also get into how they built Flint to score 7.5 on novelty bench when the frontier models score ones and twos, why the smallest possible model was always the goal, and why they deliberately avoid making the tool feel too polished.

Plus why humans are evolutionarily lazy and what that means for our brains in the AI era, the unexpected analogy about sourdough and alcohol that changes how you think about creativity, and the honest reflection from all three founders on being the self-loathing AI company in a space full of hype.

00:00 — Intro

02:22 — Introducing Flint and the convergence problem in AI models

04:50 — Why Springboards is uniquely positioned to solve creative AI

07:30 — What entropy actually means in language models

09:44 — Real examples: random cars, pizza toppings, and where to holiday

12:36 — Why this matters for the advertising industry (and everyone else)

15:29 — Inside Flint: how to fine-tune a model for divergence

18:38 — Doubling the score on Novelty Bench (and what that even means)

23:35 — Try Flint yourself: who it's for and how to access it

26:10 — Cognitive atrophy, taste, and keeping humans in the creative loop

35:04 — Choosing a tech provider as an early-stage AI startup

38:20 — What actually matters for founders in the sasspocalypse era

41:12 — Rapid fire: copyright, cover shoots, Eumundi markets, and self-loathing AI

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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Josh Clemm, VP of Engineering at Dropbox, joins Georgie Healy to cut through the noise and get to what is actually happening with AI agents right now. Josh has scaled engineering teams at LinkedIn and Uber Eats, founded his own AI venture, and is now building Dash, Dropbox's context layer designed to make agents dramatically more reliable. This is someone who has been on the coalface of this technology longer than most.

In this episode Josh introduces two ideas that will change how you think about AI at work. Context rot, the reason your large language models quietly get dumber the more information you give them. And work slop, the plausible sounding but completely hollow output that gets generated when AI tools are used without intention. He also delivers the most reassuring reality check of the year for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the idea that everyone already has a fully functioning team of AI agents working for them.

They also get into how the index approach behind Dash solves what real time fetching cannot, why the next AI breakthrough might actually come from old fashioned software engineering principles, and the two engineers Josh considers the greatest builders of their generation and why neither of them was asked to build what they built.

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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Frank Greeff, the founder behind a $180M exit and the viral Founders Table series, is back, this time building Kinso, an AI messaging aggregation tool set to change how businesses communicate. Instead of retiring after one of Australia’s biggest tech acquisitions, Frank is diving back into the grind, sharing why momentum and purpose keep him building.

In this episode, Frank reveals the AI hacks that surprised even his engineers, why scrappy MVPs may not survive in today’s fast-moving AI wave, and how personal branding gives founders a hidden moat. Georgie and Frank also dig into what it takes to self-fund after top VCs said no, attracting A+ engineering talent in a competitive market, and why “taste” will define which AI products win.

Plus, Frank unpacks Meta’s $100M AI hires, the rise of deepfakes and how he protects his family, and answers listener questions on planning exits, building AI startups, and navigating AGI, UBI, and the future of work, all while playing a spicy rapid-fire round.

Time Stamps

03:20 – What is Kinso and why aggregate business messaging

06:15 – Why Frank couldn’t retire after a $180M exit

10:45 – Hack of the Week: how non-technical founders can challenge engineers with AI

14:30 – Why Frank thinks MVPs can’t be scrappy anymore

18:00 – Building a founding team: attracting top AI engineering talent

23:30 – Meta’s $100M AI hires and how Kinso competes

26:40 – Why VCs rejected Kinso and why Frank’s self-funding

30:50 – Taste as a moat: what makes great AI products stand out

33:00 – How building an AI startup differs from RealBase

36:00 – Planning for exits: documentation and timing

40:30 – Deepfakes and Frank’s “secret password” strategy

43:20 – Rapid Fire: AGI, UBI, future of work, and more

Resources Mentioned

🌐 Kinso – https://www.kinso.ai/

🔗 Frank Greeff on LinkedIn – / frankgreeff

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.

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Jason Maynard, CTO of Zendesk, joins Georgie Healy for a conversation that cuts through the AI automation hype and gets to what is actually happening on the front lines of customer service.

Jason shares the framework every business needs right now for deciding where automation genuinely helps customers and where it quietly destroys trust. He introduces the dolphin problem, the counterintuitive reason why the brands that listen hardest to complaints end up winning the most. And he explains why, despite everything you are hearing about AI replacing jobs, customer service job postings in the United States went up 10% in 2025.

They also get into digital snap and how to design your way out of it, why your AI agent is really just an extension of your brand identity, a brand new role emerging inside service organisations that looks a lot like what happened to marketing in the early 2000s, and three rapid fire scenarios that reveal exactly when you need a human and when you do not.

This is one of the most grounded and practical conversations we have had on the show about what AI in customer service actually looks like when it is done well.

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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Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Chief Operating Officer at Vercel, joins Georgie in Sydney to discuss what the shift to agentic AI actually means for developers, founders, and enterprise teams in 2026. Jeanne shares why the primitives required to build reliable agents at scale have only just arrived, and what that means for companies still stitching together fragmented infrastructure.

They explore Vercel's product suite, the real-world application of vibe coding for non-technical builders, and why Next.js has become the default framework that AI models reach for unprompted. Jeanne also breaks down the go-to-market and engineering alignment model Vercel has built internally, and the design partnership approach, refined at Stripe, that turns customer relationships into a product roadmap.

The conversation covers what founders should prioritise right now, why small and fast beats big and planned in the current AI landscape, and how to get genuine signal from customers before you try to sell them anything.

Time Stamps

0:00 Intro

03:07 The Role of Engineers in AI Development

06:01 Transitioning from Tech Giants to Startups

08:56 Vercel's Impact on Development in Australia

12:10 Understanding Vercel's v0 and Next.js

14:53 The Future of AI and Development Tools

18:10 Bridging the Gap Between Technical and Sales Teams

21:10 Feedback Loops and Customer Insights

24:03 The Emergence of Go-to-Market Engineers

27:02 Empathy in Sales and Engineering

29:50 Advice for Navigating AI Overwhelm

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’s Head of Startups, Hayley Hopwood, joins Georgie to unpack what the next era of commerce actually looks like and why founders need to rethink payments now, not later.

They start with something unexpected: vibe coding a household chore app in 20 minutes. But the conversation quickly moves into much bigger territory. From OpenAI’s arrival in Australia to agentic commerce and Stablecoins, Hayley explains how AI is reshaping the final mile of every transaction and why payments are no longer just infrastructure, they are strategy.

They dive into frictionless checkout, tokenisation, and the psychology of “one click” buying. Hayley shares why Australia will not build the next foundational LLM but can absolutely dominate in niche AI verticals like health, insurance, agriculture and education. She also unpacks why founders must build for global from day one, even if they are only selling locally, and how ignoring tax, currency and billing models early can quietly kill your scale later.

Plus: is B2B SaaS actually dead, what jobs will change first in the AI era, why mediocrity will not survive, and what founders should do in 2026 to stay ahead of the curve.

This is a masterclass in building durable infrastructure in a world moving at AI speed.

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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Every time you ask an AI to write a song, generate a script, or mimic a creative style, there's a good chance it learned how to do that by consuming someone's life's work, without asking, without paying, and without them ever knowing.

In October 2025, the Albanese Government became the first in the world to rule out a text and data mining exception to copyright law, a landmark win for creators that is now being actively challenged by the tech industry. It's the backdrop to everything Holly and Georgie discuss here.

Holly Rankin, the artist behind Jack River and founder of cultural strategy company Sentiment Agency, has testified before Australian Parliament and become one of the most articulate voices in the fight to ensure the AI economy doesn't get built on the back of stolen human culture. In this episode she and Georgie get into the staggering labour that goes into making a single song, why the "it's too complicated to license" argument from Big Tech is a convenient myth, and what the Anthropic book piracy settlement really signals about where this is all heading. But underneath the policy detail is a bigger question: if we let machines consume and replicate everything that makes us human, what exactly are we left with?

Jack River - https://www.jackrivermusic.com/

Holly Rankin Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-rankin-3535912b3/

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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Tracey Spicer is one of Australia’s most respected journalists and the author of Man-Made: How the Bias of the Past Is Being Built into the Future. In this episode, Georgie sits down with Tracey for a sharp, funny, and occasionally jaw-dropping conversation about what happens when we treat AI like neutral math instead of what it really is: opinion written in code.

They unpack why algorithmic bias is getting worse in the generative AI era, how recommendation engines can quietly radicalise people (from Andrew Tate pipelines to hyper-performative “tradwife” culture), and why “move fast” without guardrails is a dangerous blueprint. The discussion also goes into the weird and unsettling frontier of humanoid home robots, privacy risks in always-on devices, and what Tracey learned researching sex robots, including the disturbing ways consent is engineered out of the product.

Plus: why Tracey’s favourite AI tool is Claude, what she thinks about Grok and the chaos machine of X, why we are not getting a four day work week anytime soon, and her case for “regulatory sandpits” to test AI safely before it hits the rest of the world.

01:10 – Tracey’s TEDx “The lady stripped bare” moment and why it still matters

04:45 – Beauty standards, AI filters, and why expectations on young women have intensified

08:20 – Man-Made and the epiphany that sparked Tracey’s AI obsession

11:10 – The AI arms race, speed, and why we are in the “seatbelt era” of tech

14:30 – Digital natives vs critical thinking: the hallucination blind spot

16:45 – Tracey’s AI stack: why Claude is her daily driver

19:05 – Humanoid home robots: convenience vs surveillance

21:55 – Strength vs security: what actually scares Tracey about robots

24:35 – Sex robots and the consent problem manufacturers do not talk about

28:10 – Algorithms as “opinions in code” and how radicalisation happens

33:10 – Removing bias: conversations, perspective checks, and inclusive design

35:00 – Grok, MechaHitler, and what happens when platforms mirror their owners

36:45 – Deepfake porn, consent, and why regulation is finally catching up

38:10 – No, AI will not magically deliver a four day work week

41:10 – Future jobs: law, AI assistants, and why juniors still need fundamentals

44:15 – Indigenous knowledge, language revitalisation, and the full-circle AI story

46:50 – Rapid fire: brain chips, Waymo, smart glasses, and AI “snog marry avoid”

49:55 – What we should do now: regulatory sandpits and real guardrails

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:

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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