HHey Crew! What do you do when you build a recruitment firm from a cockroach-infested Surry Hills office into a nearly 100-person, $20M-a-year global business, and then look back and say, yeah, I was faking it the whole time?

That's Phaedon. He founded Mitchell Lake at 26, exited, and co-founded Innovation Bay, the longest running startup community in Australia. He's been inside more founder journeys than most of us will ever meet.

In this one he gets into a US founder who raised $360M from tier one VCs and still shut it down, Sequoia's "PowerPoint of death" during the GFC, an investor whose whole philosophy is "I drown puppies," and the mentor who told him mid-spiral: you're stuffed, stop everything.

We cover:

• How Mitchell Lake scaled to $20M across three countries and what he'd do differently
• The $360M raise that still ended in a shutdown
• Why Australian founders hold on too long and what it's costing them
• Why US VCs specifically back founders who already failed once
• Keeping a co-founder relationship alive when everything is on fire
• Building from Hobart and what other states are getting right

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Follow Phaedon at Innovation Bay: innovationbay.com

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