It's a slightly different Startup 360 this week with no special guest, so cohosts Simon and Majella take the time to kick around the big news of the last few weeks, from Canva buying two more startups, to WiseTech slashing 2000 coding jobs in favour of AI, UpGuard's $105 million raise and SafetyCulture founder Luke Anear returning as CEO ahead of an AI rebuild of the workplace safety platform.

Simon and Majella also cover Growth Summit in Melbourne, where Aconex cofounder Leigh Jasper offered advice on staying the course in business, and VCs explained what "you're too early" means.

The pair also crack open a can of Australian Coffee Culture's Australian-grown coffee. Cofounder Shreya Gupta was a guest on the show in November, and Majella had an update on Dome - founders Sophie Greiner and Bella Filacuridi were guests in August - with the podcasting community engagement startup launching with its first podcast, all about tackling the juggle between work and raising a family.

They also discuss Uber after Simon made a post about surge pricing on LinkedIn that's had more than 60,000 impressions in just 48 hours. What's your take - just the free market working or a price gouge that's outside the acceptable boundaries of business?

This show is a SmartCo. Media production, produced and edited by Matt Jackson.

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It’s all about artificial intelligence this week with In the Blink of AI host Georgie Healy joining the show  to talk about what many see as the 4th industrial revolution.

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This week Startup 360 discusses leadership - and how to do it without being a jerk, with Karlie Cremin, CEO of Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia.

Karlie wrote a book about it - Don’t Lead like a Jerk - and Simon and Majella talk to her about the ups and downs of being the boss, confessing the jerk bit can happen to anyone - what you do next is what matters.
Karlie reminds us that first and foremost, we're not machines, we're humans and that means there are good days and bad ones. It's a fascinating dive into what it means to lead and hang around to the end, when she reveals the simple trick that transformed one CEO's life, both at work and home.

The news Simon and Majella discuss this week includes digital twins platform Neara raising $90 million to become Australia's newest unicorn, Startmate's plan to back social enterprise startups to create generational businesses that make the community better, and Deel's $21 million global Seed-stage startup comp, The Pitch.

Startup 360 is all about staying human and finding out what makes people tick.

This show is a SmartCo Media production, produced and edited by Matt Jackson.

This episode is supported by Deel. Hire, manage and pay – anyone, anywhere.This episode is supported by Deel. Hire, manage and pay - anyone, anywhere.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and read StartupDaily.net for all the ANZ tech news for free!

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Startup 360 looks south this week, for a conversation with fintech investor Brian Collins about his new role as CEO of Enterprize Tasmania.
Brian, deputy chair of Fintech Australia, and cofounder of fintech VC Triple Bubble with Dom Pym and Judy Anderson-Firth, spent more than a decade in Silicon Valley before calling Melbourne home in recent years.
Brian shares the stories of some remarkable Tassie startups, as well as the joys of life on the Apple Isle - from a caring community’s support and collaboration to the food, wine and fun of a MONA visit.
He also shares his tips to founders as a long-time mentor to hundreds of startups.
While Simon and Majella plot how soon they can head to Hobart to record Startup 360 on location there, they also talk about the big news of the week. First up it’s the release of the annual State of Australian Startup Funding report, which reveals a 24% increase in investment to $5.1 billion in 2025, although the total number of deals fell as later-stage rounds became the focus alongside AI, which received the most funding at $1 billion.
Elon Musk was also in the new for the right and wrong reasons, from the merger of SpaceX and xAI, to making plans to visit convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious island, with the release of emails and 3 million files about Epstein contradicting Musk’s previous spinning of the narrative around his involvement with the billionaire, who died in jail in 2019.
Startup 360 is all about staying human and finding out what makes people tick.
This show is a SmartCo Media production, produced and edited by Matt Jackson. This episode is supported by Deel. Hire, manage and pay - anyone, anywhere.
Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and read StartupDaily.net for all the ANZ tech news for free!

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Welcome back to Startup 360 for 2026.

·       The sudden collapse of parcel delivery platform Sendle

·       The end of SXSW Sydney

·       Airwallex calling in lawyers to ask media to take down critical stories

Maddi started her career in management consulting at BCG, working with

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When Jim Cooper, CEO of Blue-X, a California-based innovation services company for startups, moved to the US three decades ago, he had some trepidations.

Now he loves it, but the former Sydneysider is back "home" for Christmas and in his shorts, to share his experiences on the final Startup 360 episode for 2025.

Jim, who coaches an AFL team in Orange County, not far from Disneyland, has some strong thoughts on the Australian mindset and how to hustle.
"We've only got really one metric and that is at the end of the fourth quarter, we've got more points on the board than our opposition," he said.

"So I treat every single startup as if it's three-quarter time with five goals, two, down, and we need to do something in the next 20 minutes to turn this game around so that we can win it.

He also believes tall poppy syndrome is a thing in Australia and tells cohosts Simon Thomsen and Majella Campbell it's holding us back, alongside the "report economy" endless reports, and no action.

"We gaze inward, we see what we're missing and then we do very little about it except write a report. We don't address the problem head on. We like to be safe and we like to say a lot of safe things in Australia," he said.

"We like to be very comfortable and polite. We don't like to tell the hard things that people don't like to hear. We can't confront that in Australia and I think that's a real fault of ours, being on the outside looking in and kind of seeing that now, you know, it makes me, it makes me cringe. It kind of makes me a little bit angry as well."

And don't get him started on aphorisms like "punch above our weight".
Episode 41 of Startup 360 is an extended Summer edition, diving into what Jim Cooper's learnt about startup life - he first launched accelerators in the US in 2010, and has worked and advised around the world on innovation and company building.

It's also the last episode for 2025. Have a wonderful Summer and happy new year! The show will be back at the end of January, just as everyone packs up the beach umbrellas and heads back to work.

Startup 360 is more founder fund than founder mode. It’s all about finding out what makes people tick and staying human.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and don’t forget to read ⁠StartupDaily.net⁠ for all the ANZ tech news for free!

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Back in 2016, around the time LaunchVic was kicking off in Melbourne, Dave McManus left the city for Silicon Valley, determined to become a startup founder.

Now he's back in Melbourne and the founder of Lightning Ventures has plenty of stories to tell and advice to share on episode 40 of Startup 360.

Explaining Lighting, his no-code innovation studio, which helps early-stage startups rapidly build, test and launch software without needing a technical founder or large amounts of capital, Dave describes it as "the IKEA model of software development".

"The way people build software is they go out, they find the tree, they chop the tree down, they hack the tree in half and they hand whittle all the pieces for the chair," he said.

"Whereas the new model is out of the box, bang, click, click, bang - the pieces assemble a chair and it looks pretty much the same, does the exact same thing, hosted on AWS, with the exact same infrastructure that your custom-coded dev's doing without headaches, for like, a 10th of the price."

Lightning has worked with more than 60 startups, combining lean product strategy with no-code tools.

Cohosts Simon Thomsen and Majella Campbell were keen to know more about Dave's experience in San Francisco.

"I think the Bay Area is very open and accepting of people, especially if you're having a go, it's amazing," he said.

"I think they've got an advantage in San Francisco - seven miles by seven miles - so it's such a small area and you've got so many successful people. The personal life and the business life kind of intertwine. You could be at a house party having a chat with someone - and this actually happened to me in the kitchen at a house party - saying, 'Oh, what are you doing?' They're like,'Oh, I work in tech'. I'm like, 'Oh cool'.

"Anyway, turns out that guy was the cofounder of Weebly that sold to Square for like $300 million. He was like the most modest, humble guy. So yeah, you get the opportunity to meet incredible people."

On the penultimate show for 2025, Majella and Simon also talk about the leaked details of Blackbird's investor day, "AI slop" as word of the year, and the ban for life on GetSwift's cofounders to prevent them being company directors in Canada.

Startup 360 is more founder fund than founder mode. It’s all about finding out what makes people tick and staying human.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and don’t forget to read StartupDaily.net for all the ANZ tech news for free!

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Alex Miller was having rapid success with his subscription management platform Hudled when he spotted a nugget of insight in that startup and launched a second, Rechargly.

Like a Marvel movie spinoff, he's now enjoying even more success, as Alex explains on episode 39 of Startup 360.

Cohosts Simon Thomsen and Majella Campbell asked Alex about the lessons and mistakes along the way and how startup No. 2 came about.

"What we discovered [in Hudled] is that accounting firms were managing hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of their clients. And in the Hudled dashboard, which was supposed to help them track all of this, they were hiding it," Alex recounts.

"And we just couldn't work out why because it was coming off their credit card, it was their spend, but they didn't consider it as their own."

So so they launched, Rechargly, so accountancy firms can bill clients quickly and correctly for software disbursements - a pain point that, surprisingly, many neglect or get wrong.

Rechargly now delivers the bulk of the revenue and Majella and Simon wanted to know how to spot an opportunity and go all-in.

"It's always tricky, isn't it? Because things were working with Hudled and to take a step back in order to go forward faster is always a really hard decision," Alex explained.

"And when our team sat down and we were evaluating what was in front of us with what we knew versus what we discovered about what could be, it was, it was really challenging at the time."

As well as a great convo with a serial founder who kicked off with a paddleboard importing business with a mate, this week's show discusses the latest from Blackbird-funded New Zealand startup Kiki, now starting out again in London after being shut down in New York, having paid $224,000 in a settlement - 3x the total revenue generated there - with the city over Kiki's illegal operations there.

Also getting Simon riled up are 350 researcher jobs being cut at the national science agency, CSIRO, in the face of flatlined federal funding.

Startup 360 is more founder fund than founder mode. It’s all about finding out what makes people tick and staying human.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and don’t forget to read ⁠StartupDaily.net⁠ for all the ANZ tech news for free!

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This week's Startup 360 kicks off with cohost Simon Thomsen recounting the two days spent in the NSW Supreme Court this week as senior council for the liquidators of failed medtech StrongRoom AI probed cofounder and former CEO Max Mito, and director Divesh Sangvhi, about the potential insolvency of the business.

Sangvhi sold his company, Medical Benefits Australia (MBA), to StrongRoom when it had no cash, having already rented the company's IP to the startup, which is was also, frequently unable to pay for on time.

Simon recounts how Mito told the court that they company's approach to board minutes was "informal", and when one director raised concerns that the acquisition had gone through, Mito explained that "We had a bit of an issue with board members not always remembering details."

What also emerged was that both MBA and StrongRoom were behind on the tax obligations, and the ATO was chasing both companies for money, as well as issuing Sangvhi with Director Penalty Notices for non-compliance.

The details emerging from the public examination into the company's failure left both Startup 360 hosts a little gobsmacked, especially when it came to company governance, and the liquidators appear to be taking a close look at the actions of both men and their compliance with the Corporations Act.

On a happier note, the also shared some excellent advice from the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, now 95, in his final shareholder letter as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

His excellent advice includes: "Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them."

Their guest this week is Shreya Gupta, cofounder of Australian Coffee Culture, which is championing Australian-grown coffee - it accounts for just 1% of the 6 billion cups of coffee we drink annually - in a new range of ready-to-drink pick-me-ups.

Shreya takes about moving from corporate life to startup founder and why Australian coffee beans deserve a special place in our cups.

Startup 360 is more founder fund than founder mode. It’s all about finding out what makes people tick and staying human.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and don’t forget to read ⁠StartupDaily.net⁠ for all the ANZ tech news for free!

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Startup 360 cohost Simon Thomsen is flying solo this week, taking a deep dive into philanthropy with Antonia Ruffell, CEO of StartGiving, and the Australian MD of global tech charity initiative Pledge 1%.

Technology is transforming the art of giving - with companies such as Atlassian, Canva and now Airtree cofounder Daniel Petre, founder of StartGiving, leading the way.

StartGiving is not-for-profit, funded by Petre, who was inspired by his time working with Bill Gates, to change the culture of giving in the local startup sector.

As Antonia explains: if you just look at the top 50 biggest philanthropists in Australia, a few years ago, 1% of that giving came from the tech sector, and now it's 21%. And just looking at the commitments that have been publicly made by those, particularly those sort of wealthier end of the tech founders, we think there's the potential for $20-30 billion dollars of untapped potential giving to come through the pipeline in the next few years."

The research commissioned by StartGiving also found at people working in the tech sector were more than twice as likely than others to already be giving to charity, with $19 billion in commitments already made.

English-born Antonia has had her own remarkable career in philanthropy and social impact over the past two decades, starting out of the Prince’s Trust - now the King's Trust after its founder, King Charles, took the throne.

After moving to Australia, her roles have included CEO of Australian Philanthropic Services, and nowadays, she's a director of UNICEF Australia and chairs The Giving Academy Advisory Committee at the Centre for Social Impact, among several other hats.

Last month she joined Pledge 1%, now chaired by Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar, who was instrumental in establishing it a decade earlier, to lead its first team outside of the US.

More than 1,800 companies across Australia are part of a global community of 19,000-plus Pledge 1% members in 130 countries. They include the unicorns Atlassian, Canva, Airwallex, Culture Amp, and Employment Hero. Their commitment is to give 1% of equity, profit, product, or employee time to projects and causes that help others.

Simon and Antonia spend time discussing leadership, kindness, and how to support others to make the world a better place in an inspiring 40 minute conversation.

To learn more, check out StartGiving and Pledge 1%.
Startup 360 is more founder fund than founder mode. It’s all about finding out what makes people tick and staying human.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and don’t forget to read StartupDaily.net for all the ANZ tech news for free!

Startup360 is a SmartCo Media production.

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