big bets and bad calls

big bets & bad calls with Trove

Sheree Andersen didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. She grew up on a Tasmanian farm, spent two decades in corporate HR, and stumbled into startups when she fell in love with building something from nothing. In this episode, Sheree — Co-Founder of Trove, the platform supercharging how brands manage corporate gifting at scale — walks us through the bets that defined her journey: leaving a working business behind to build something entirely new, sending co-founder Johnny to Singapore without a single local contact, and deliberately targeting Asia's gifting culture before anyone told them to. She also gets honest about the bad calls: building before validating, hiring before the business was ready, and chasing big partnership opportunities that quietly went nowhere. We get into AI, team culture, the female founder funding gap, and why saying no is sometimes the most powerful thing you can do. Warm, candid, and full of hard-won wisdom.

big bets & bad calls with Eolas Dx

Two electrochemists. One $1.50 hack. A diagnostic platform that could go anywhere. Prof. Conor Hogan published a breakthrough mobile diagnostics idea in 2011 without patenting it. Someone called him an idiot. He never forgot it. Years later, he did it right — secured the patent, landed a multinational licensing deal, spent five years developing a smartphone-based wine sulphite test. Then the company walked away. The IP came back to La Trobe. What felt like a gut punch turned out to be a free shot on goal. That's when Dr. Saimon Silva showed up — a Brazilian electrochemist with the manufacturing instincts Conor didn't know he was missing. Together they founded Eolas DX, built on a simple insight: the audio codec in every smartphone can do the same work as a $20,000 lab instrument, for $1.50. Wine testing first. Heavy metals, roadside drug tests, and disease biomarkers next. The mission: accurate diagnostics, everywhere, for anyone.

big bets & bad calls with MyFast Medical

What if the problem with healthcare isn't the doctors — it's the whole system they're trapped in? This week, Clint and Andrew sit down with Dr Farhad Goodarzy and Sadaf Tamizkar, co-founders of a healthcare startup that's quietly rewriting the rules on how Australians access primary care. And they're doing it in a way that's as practical as it is ambitious. It started with a simple observation: international students were showing up sick — not because they didn't have insurance, but because they didn't understand how to use it. From that seed grew something much bigger: a model that brings GPs into workplaces, surfaces silent cardiovascular risks before they become crises, and builds the kind of connected wellness network that GPs actually want to be part of. Oh — and they're about to flip the name. By the time you're listening to this, the rebrand is done. But the vision? That hasn't changed one bit. In this episode: * The pivot from international students to manufacturing workplaces — and why 6–10% of workers were walking around with serious undiagnosed heart conditions * Why selling software to GP clinics doesn't work — and why owning the clinics does * The "Project X" vision: AI-powered wellness insights, a network of GP practices, and telehealth — all talking to each other * Australia's looming GP shortage (11,000+ by 2031) and how smarter data could stretch every 15-minute consult further Bad Calls will have to wait — these two are moving too fast to make many yet. We'll have them back.

big bets & bad calls with Mark My Words

James Smith had 150 students, five English classes, and a standing Sunday appointment with a pile of marking that never got smaller. So at 25, with barely two paying customers — both friends of friends — he quit his job and bet everything on fixing a problem he knew better than anyone. That was two and a half years ago. Today, Mark My Words is an AI-powered writing assessment platform in schools across Australia and New Zealand, with 200 new schools onboarded in the first five weeks of this year alone — and conversations underway in the US and UK. In this episode, James walks us through the quit-your-job moment, the $80 wake-up call that shaped his entire tech architecture, and the scrappy $9.99 pricing hack that cracked open the school market from the bottom up.

big bets & bad calls with Cell Bauhaus

Megan Coomer and Michael Stumpf are the co-founders of Cell Bauhaus — a startup building software that simulates biology on a computer before anyone sets foot in a lab. Think 10x faster, 10x cheaper biotech innovation. We dig into how a published research paper caught the attention of the Gates Foundation, what it's like to wake up to $3.1M in your bank account, and why they believe they're sitting on a $79B market with no real incumbent. Two brilliant scientists, one civilisation-scale bet.