big bets and bad calls

big bets & bad calls with Navi Medical Technologies

An aerospace engineer walks into a NICU and doesn't leave the same person. On this episode of big bets & bad calls, Clint and Andrew sit down with Alex Newton, co-founder and CEO of Navi Medical Technologies, whose company has spent seven years building a device to solve a problem most people never knew existed: confirming catheter placement in critically ill newborns without repeat X-rays and dangerous delays. Alex brought the actual device into the studio. We talk about the bet of leaving a stable aerospace career for a pre-revenue medtech startup, what it takes to raise hardware funding in Australia, and how Navi landed an FDA Breakthrough Device designation along the way.

big bets & bad calls with mixOmics Pro

50,000 researchers. 400,000 downloads. Used in COVID vaccine validation, Great Barrier Reef science, cancer treatment development, and CRISPR research. And it nearly collapsed because there was no money to maintain it. Mixomics co-founders Kim-Anh Lê Cao and Mike Rennie sit down with Clint and Andrew to talk about building a global scientific standard on no budget, the big bet of going from academic project to real company, and why their biggest bad call was letting other people's doubt become their own.

big bets & bad calls with Brightspace

Rob de Burgh Day has been an electrician, a talent agent, a venue owner, and the guy running a call centre out of Cambodia. So yeah — the Brightspace story didn't start in a boardroom. In this episode, Rob walks us through a winding founder journey that pivoted hard when COVID wiped out a million dollars of equipment sitting in boxes. Out of that chaos came a genuinely interesting idea: a live digital twin for buildings — tracking people, air quality, temperature and energy use in real time, so that the whole place runs smarter. Today Brightspace is installing at the International Convention Centre in Sydney, working with major asset owners across Singapore and Malaysia, and chasing Changi Airport as the crown jewel. We get into the real stuff: what it actually costs to build hardware (and why you probably shouldn't), the hidden nightmare of integrating into buildings that have been patched together for 80 years, raising money when the tank is empty, and why consistent investment agreements will save you thousands in legal fees — eventually. Rob's also one of the more privacy-conscious founders we've had on — he's literally built hardware limitations into his product so it can't identify individuals. In a world where 40% of his clients would happily go further, that's a genuine values call. Good stories, hard lessons, and one very memorable charity bike ride that landed his first client.

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.