Fintech vs. banks, AI jobs surge & top startup raises

0:00 Will Richards: You're listening to a Day One FM show.

0:04 Gemma Clancy: The Startup Retro is recorded on the lands of the Kabi Kabi and Wurundjeri people.

0:10 Will Richards: G'day and welcome to The Startup Retro, a weekly show brought to you by the team behind the Overnight Success newsletter, where we help you level up on the Australian startup ecosystem by giving you an insider view on Aussie startups and venture capital. The Startup Retro is brought to you by Day One, the podcast network for founders, operators, and investors. I'm Will Richards.

0:28 Gemma Clancy: And I'm Jen McLancy. In today's episode, we're going to dive into the biggest headlines of the last week, including a stoush between the fintech industry and the big banks over open banking, and a new report from the Tech Council predicting how many jobs we're going to need in AI. And we'll also look at our top picks of the startups that announced capital raises last week and give you a couple of things that we thought were interesting that we read or watched or listened to this week. Let's jump into the biggest headlines of the last week. This story about the Australian Banking Association claiming that kind of open banking is not really living up to expectations has caused a bit of a stir amongst the fintech industry, which is kind of, I guess, our side of the fence on the startup side. Yeah, I don't know, have you read much about this this week?

1:14 Will Richards: Yeah, it's been, it's come out of this big, big conference they've had, and the, the report was sort of tactically released by the incumbent banks being a little bit defamationary around the idea of open banking. But I think it's really important to— I think before we dive into it, explain maybe some of the definitions around the topic because there's a few acronyms floating around. So, I know you've done a little bit of research on this, but could you sort of define what open banking is? And then we'll get into the Australian context of it as well.

1:39 Gemma Clancy: Yeah. I thought I knew what open banking was and then when I went—

1:43 Will Richards: Me too.

1:43 Gemma Clancy: —to think, how am I going to explain what open banking is? I'm like, oh, I actually really need to do some more research on this.

1:49 Will Richards: It's like a throwaway term. Like people say, oh, well, open banking's around now, so we're going to do this and we're going to do that. But like, I still don't really know what they mean.

1:55 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, so essentially the definition of open banking is that it's a financial services model that allows third-party developers to access financial data in traditional banking systems through APIs, or application programming interfaces, is what API stands for. So essentially the way that banking kind of— and consumer data in banking used to work is that obviously consumers would share their information with the banks, and the banks could kind of share information back with the consumer. But all banks were doing that in probably slightly different ways and in slightly different systems and ways of sharing data. What open banking now allows is for that data to kind of, with the help of APIs, to be shared more freely between the banks and say with third-party applications, so that kind of information around a consumer's transaction history and things like that can all be consolidated in one place. And so it's given rise to, you know, third-party apps that, you know, you can port in with, you know, consumers obviously explicit consent. You can port in all their their different bank accounts and have all their information in one place, which is pretty cool. And open banking is pretty widely adopted now around the world. It looks different in different places. So open banking is kind of a broad term for this portability of data.

3:03 Will Richards: It's like the idea of making data more accessible for third parties. Exactly. But then in Australia, you've got the Consumer Data Right, which is the legislation that's relevant to Australia and Australian startups and Australian banks. So do you want to define that as well and explain it?

3:17 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, exactly. So the Consumer Data Right, or some people kind of shorten it to CDR. I saw this acronym flying around today and I was like, what is CDR? So I had to Google it myself. Is this Consumer Data Right. So it's essentially like interchangeable in Australia with this concept of open banking and the frameworks, the regulation, the legislative kind of structure that sits behind our open banking. So in some markets overseas, they actually don't approach it in a regulatory way. They approach it kind of in a market-driven way. And if you're really nerdy about this, you can go and read up on all the differences of how different countries implement open banking., but in Australia it's something that was introduced by the government. They set out legislation of how they thought it should work, and then they set out a schedule by which, like, the big banks then had to start implementing it. And now all banks in Australia have to put in place certain things in their system so that open banking can work for all Australian banking customers.

4:08 Will Richards: Which then gets us into the report that was recently released by the Australian Banking Association, which is really the sort of the big banks in Australia, and we all know who they are.

4:16 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

4:16 Will Richards: And they were basically saying that It hasn't quite worked because they're basically annoyed that they're having to pay for the build-out of open banking here in Australia or the consumer data, right? They're the ones that are footing the bill, but they're not necessarily seeing any reward for their effort while they've got all these, let's say, entrepreneurs and startups who are taking advantage of their development work.

4:38 Gemma Clancy: Yeah. So, I sent to the government, said, all the banks have to do this. It rolled out. It's kind of been rolled out properly since July. I think it's 2020. So it's been out and about for, you know, 4 years or so now. But the— in this report from the Australian Banking Association that came out this week, they claim that the banks have invested over like $1.5 billion into kind of implementing the Consumer Data Right. And that's kind of probably, you know, all the people power that goes into changing their tech systems and managing this from a compliance perspective. But they're saying that only 0.3% of people with bank accounts in Australia are actually using this kind of new open banking system. So that's about— this is just on— just shy of 200,000 banking customers. So they think that it's kind of not living up to its expectations. There were these kind of principles around it has to be focused on the customer, has to promote competition in banking and encourage innovation and be efficient and fair. These are kind of the principles that they said open banking should be set up with, and they don't think it's living up to those expectations. So that's the report that they put out. And then I think as a day or couple of days later, this other report comes out from the peak body of the fintech industry, Fintech Australia, and they've teamed up with a company called BASIC. I think that's how you pronounce it, B-A-S-I-Q, who are Australia's leading open banking platform. So have obviously a vested interest in open banking working in Australia. And they've released this report that says that this 0.3% couldn't essentially possibly be correct because their platform alone has enabled over 900,000 open banking connections. And I guess generally it seems like the fintech industry is saying, look, it's been around for 4 years. This whole concept has actually only been fully rolled out for even less time than that because that's just from when the big banks started rolling it out. And, you know, we kind of need some more time for this, you know, huge innovation to come off the back of this new, um, system.

6:40 Will Richards: Yeah, definitely one to watch. I think the Australian fintech sector is in some regards world-leading. So it's, you know, these things do take time and it's definitely interesting to sort of see these incumbents complaining and then the startups like clapping back. So yeah, one to watch.

6:54 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

6:55 Will Richards: The next headline, the Tech Council has just released a report that the Australian economy is likely to have 200,000 AI jobs by 2030. And the big takeaway from this is they're not saying necessarily that an AI is going to replace your job, but they're sort of saying you need to be able to have let's say, AI competency to survive in the future of work. We'll see where that actually— if that's true or not. But it's, um, it was a report released by, in combination with Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Workday. And interestingly, in 2014— Gem, how many, how many AI jobs do you reckon there were in Australia?

7:30 Gemma Clancy: Sure, not many. I'd say like a handful, like in the hundreds.

7:34 Will Richards: In the hundreds, uh, pretty good. There was 800. The workforce for AI-relevant jobs was 800 in 2014, and, and that's now grown to 33,000 in 2023.

7:42 Gemma Clancy: Gee, that's a Huge jump.

7:44 Will Richards: Yeah, massive jump. And then they're forecasting a 500% increase until 2030s for 200,000.

7:51 Gemma Clancy: Wow.

7:51 Will Richards: But I thought getting stuck into the report, it was quite interesting to look at what they were really focusing on. And let's say for young people who could be listening, how to think about the future of work for their career. And interestingly, if you're leaving university and you're sort of entering the workforce, the expectation is no matter what type of work you're doing, you're going to be working with some sort of like, you need to have some sort of AI competency in your job.

8:16 Gemma Clancy: Yeah. It's not just for the coders and developers. Like, it's not just like people building out these AI models who need to know about AI. It's like everybody, right?

8:24 Will Richards: It's literally everybody. They definitely do say that the highest demand forecast for skill sets that they've got moving forward is definitely engineering and it's product designers. And it's also, of course, cybersecurity. So, they're the 3 big areas for the jobs market in AI moving forward in Australia that the Tech Council suggests.. But if you're a young person entering the workforce in the next, you know, few years, definitely try and upskill yourself on AI.

8:49 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, it's probably also a good opportunity for anyone who's a bit older and thinking, oh, I want to transition into a role in tech. I think upskilling in this space would kind of give you a bit of a fast track in.

8:59 Will Richards: Exactly. And another big trend we'll definitely see off the back of this forecast really is people teaching about AI. So, the education sector is definitely going to have to shift whether it is the incumbents or new startups or whoever. There's definitely going to be a shift in the AI upskilling. And I know my dad loves a shout out on this podcast, but he's recently enrolled in a CSIRO-led AI introduction course. So—

9:23 Gemma Clancy: Wow, how cool.

9:24 Will Richards: I'll let the audience know how that goes. But I just told him to get stuck onto ChatGPT and have a play around.

9:29 Gemma Clancy: Amazing. How good. That'll make your Christmas dinner conversations even more interesting, like the Toners that we talked about last week. You watch out, Toners. The Richards are coming. They're going to be the next AI powerhouse family.

9:41 Will Richards: I think I'll just be fielding very basic questions for the next 6-12 months, but we'll see.

9:46 Gemma Clancy: Don't underestimate him. He'll probably know more about AI than you soon.

9:51 Will Richards: If he does this course, definitely.

9:52 Gemma Clancy: Definitely. Amazing. So, yeah, last week we also talked about this Future Made in Australia legislation. Speaking of the future, the legislation was introduced into Parliament this week. So, essentially it meant that we, you know, well, we were, I guess we were hoping we're going to get a little bit more data around kind of how it's going to work. It is not necessarily game-changing, like on a practical level for people in startups, but I think it's good for people to understand in general, the way that it's structured and the way that the government's thinking about making these, um, like investment decisions under the, under the Future Made in Australia policy. So I just thought I'd give people a bit of an overview of what it looks like. There's 3 pillars because everyone loves— you can never have 2, you always have to have 3 pillars at least for something like this. One of the pillars was already announced prior to the legislation being introduced into Parliament, and that is around what was being called a National Interest Framework. So it's a guide around how the government identifies the primary, um, or priority industries that the policy will support, and they fall into two streams. So the one stream is the net zero transformation stream, and that probably doesn't come as a surprise to people because the government's been talking a lot about how Future Made in Australia will support our net zero transition. So that's one stream of the two, and then the other one is called the economic resilience and security stream, which has kind of a bit of a defensey vibe about it, national interest vibe about it. But it is a pretty broad bucket, so I think a lot of things will fall into bucket two if they don't fit the net zero stream. So that's the National Interest Framework. That's pillar 1 of Future Made in Australia. And then pillar 2, which was one of the biggest things that was announced or introduced as part of this legislation this week, was the community benefits pillar. So these are kind of the 5 principles that the government's going to be looking at these different investments kind of meeting. They have to meet the standard of being a benefit to the community. So that's around promoting safe and secure jobs. It has to develop a more skilled and inclusive workforce. Mm-hmm. The companies have to engage collaboratively with and achieve positive outcomes for local communities, which includes First Nations communities, which is really great to see. And then it also has to strengthen our domestic industrial capabilities. And they also want to make sure that the companies are demonstrating transparency and compliance, which is not a surprise because it's government.

12:11 Will Richards: Mm-hmm.

12:11 Gemma Clancy: So that's the second pillar. And then the third one is around these powers that Jim Chalmers, our Treasurer, has to direct Treasury to undertake sector assessments investments that then have to be tabled in Parliament. So this may be an oversimplification, but to me that is essentially Treasury doing DD on these investments, and then that DD has to be tabled in Parliament. And any VC hearing this, like, I just want to say, like, I don't know how they would feel— how you would feel about your DD being put up in front of like a whole like heap of people, not just Parliament, but like the entire country, and be like, this is what we think. Like, that's pretty— that's a pretty high bar, pretty high standards. So that's kind of the third pillar that adds, you know, robustness to this Future Made in Australia Fund.

12:56 Will Richards: Yeah, but sector assessments, though, that's not looking at individual investments.

13:00 Gemma Clancy: No, no.

13:01 Will Richards: That's probably like, oh, should we put money in? Should we tip money into Quantum or should we tip money into one specific company in Quantum?

13:07 Gemma Clancy: Yes, exactly.

13:08 Will Richards: I wonder if that's the differentiation they're making.

13:11 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, probably, probably. But I think it's, you know, it's Treasury having to make some pretty big assessment. I think that would be quite interesting. You know, like it's probably interesting actually for our entire industry, startups and VCs to be looking at those kind of sector assessments, being like, well, what does Treasury think about this entire sector? Um, and it'll be interesting to see, I guess, how accurate they are.

13:28 Will Richards: I'm all for more scrutiny on, uh, taxpayer money being spent on high-risk assets. So that's good, I think.

13:34 Gemma Clancy: Totally, totally. So yeah, that's Future Made in Australia. 3 pillars, nothing too game-changing, but interesting. Awesome.

13:40 Will Richards: So, Gem, let's get stuck into the raises for the week. And we saw some pretty diverse companies raising capital this week, which is always awesome to see. So there was a bit of a mix between a consumer app, you know, that it's a bit of a social networking app, all the way through to e-commerce analysis software, through to NDIS platforms, and a lot of stuff in AI.

14:04 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, really making us stretch our brains for the week.

14:08 Will Richards: Did you have a particular favorite this week?

14:10 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, my pick of the week this week is CareSquare. They raised $300,000 in seed investment, and I'm a little bit closer than the average person to this raise because CareSquare is actually a client of mine at the moment at Stellar Startup. Ups. So we've been doing some work to kind of set them on the right direction with their marketing strategy. But CareSquare is a pretty cool platform. They've essentially mainly focused on the NDIS plan management market at the moment and helping uplift their systems and processes with AI. And if you're not familiar with what plan managers do, so in the NDIS system, so you've got obviously your recipients of the funding, your people with disability, living with disability, and then you've got all the services that they're trying to access. I mean, they go to the physio, for example, and when they go to the physio, they need to obviously pay for appointment and their NDIS funding might cover part of that.

14:58 Will Richards: The plan manager sort of work out the best use of the budget, right?

15:01 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

15:02 Will Richards: Yeah.

15:03 Gemma Clancy: Exactly. You have to have the plan manager in the middle to manage all the admin of kind of the invoices that go back and forth, you know, track that spending. And the plan managers are paid by the government. So for every additional person you have managed by that plan manager, they get paid actually like a set amount to manage that person's plan. So what CareSquare does essentially is that they help improve, like, I guess, the automation of a lot of these systems. They've kind of— invoicing is a big focus of the platform right now, and it just speeds up the process of that processing so much more than what it was before, which essentially means that the plan managers can kind of get through the bulk of this admin work a lot more.

15:41 Will Richards: Yeah, the article here has actually gone quite into detail around the performance of the business. So this is, this is not insider stellar knowledge. This is actually the AFR doing some good reporting, which is good.

15:51 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, it's a Yeah, so the AFR covered that they're looking at a revenue, I think, of around $500,000 annual recurring revenue at the moment. So, you know, they're clearly servicing a big need at the moment.

16:03 Will Richards: Yeah, yeah. They've announced the valuation in this raise as well. Um, so obviously $300,000 for 10%, so you get a valuation of $3 million, and the startup is doing— they're suggesting $500K annualized revenue already, and I suppose from maybe an investor, but definitely a founder perspective on the earlier stages of things around, you know, what are the expectations for a startup to raise money at the moment?

16:28 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

16:29 Will Richards: Obviously the bar has definitely shifted in the last year or two and it's definitely become harder to raise capital. But this is a, I think, a really interesting indication of maybe where the bar currently is. So it's a $300K investment for 10% of the business. So the valuation is $3 million and the company's potentially already profitable and generating $500K of revenue. So I think it's, it's an interesting, I think, look into where the market is right now.

16:52 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, yeah. I think it's just a different mindset for like from a founder perspective coming in being like, I'm going to build a business where yes, I want money to kind of accelerate faster and grow, but I don't necessarily need the money, which I think is not necessarily a bad way to think about things in the current market. So yeah, that was my pick of the week. Will, what was yours?

17:11 Will Richards: Yeah, it was actually very difficult to pick my pick of the week this week because I think a little bit like you, I know some of the founders that raised money this week, but I decided to go with Redactive AI, and they landed a monster $11.5 million seed round for permissioned dev tools.

17:26 Gemma Clancy: Gee, that's— yeah, that's big for a seed round, right?

17:28 Will Richards: Yeah, yeah. What are permissioned dev tools, I hear you say?

17:32 Gemma Clancy: Um, well, yes, what are permissioned dev tools, Will?

17:37 Will Richards: Yeah, so I, I think there's obviously a huge trend for enterprises wanting to use AI to obviously improve everything. And the issue with that is a lot of these platforms basically aren't secure. So, well, it's a bit of a misnomer, but once you put data into the pool of OpenAI or Gemini, you sort of don't know, is that data secure? Are they using it? Who knows? And basically what Redactive is doing is helping set up inside big enterprises basically the ability for people who work internally to use AI, but make sure that the data is permissioned so it stays in that silo and stays into the box that's appropriate to that person. So for example, I think a really neat example of it basically is, you know, someone who works in, let's say, customer service can't ask a question about the finances of the business, or maybe can't go into the HR's box of information and ask questions about people's salaries. So it's basically permissioning around what people have access to.

18:36 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Makes sense. Yeah, I never even thought about the problem that deeply before.

18:40 Will Richards: The team is a very strong dev team. They've all sort of come out of Atlassian as product managers. They're all ex-founders as well. The round was led by Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures, but also had contribution from their ex-employer Atlassian Ventures, which I think is a really nice sign that the employer's given them the thumbs up and the best of luck.

19:01 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

19:02 Will Richards: As they left that business. But also Zapier, which I think is really interesting for a strategic point of view. Yeah. Redactive already have a fair bit of traction in the market considering they've only basically just come out. They've already landed a couple big enterprises here in Australia, including some unnamed big banks. But basically one to watch. I think they're expanding the team here in Melbourne, but they're also building a headquarters in San Francisco too. So exciting.

19:28 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, amazing. So there are a few other interesting raises this week, Will. Resy.me raised $1.5 million seed round. For their recipe sharing app. They recently moved to the US, which is really cool to see that they're kind of, they still raise some money from Australian investors, but it's really great to see they've moved over there and they're raising money and they're, you know, obviously kind of on the right trajectory.

19:48 Will Richards: Yeah, and they've got some massive angels in this round as well. So, the former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's come in.

19:55 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, I saw that. How cool.

19:57 Will Richards: The CEO of Ancestry and a few other really interesting people jumping on that one.

20:02 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, amazing.

20:03 Will Richards: We also saw Millie Bean, which is a Sydney-based deep tech company that's building the new super fast 5G. They reckon it's 26 times faster than normal 5G, and it's the technology that kind of sits on the big mobile towers. But that got some funding from Breakthrough Victoria and Main Sequence.

20:19 Gemma Clancy: Very good.

20:20 Will Richards: You may wonder why Breakthrough put in the money, but they're building a design team here in Victoria, so that checks out. And then the other interesting one was Profit Peak, which secured some capital from Black Sheep Capital. And these are two husband and wife team, ex-e-commerce leaders, and they're building a platform that basically helps you, I suppose, connect all the data you've got in an e-commerce business, whether it's marketing spend or cost of landing your goods in the country and delivery and all those sorts of things and acquiring customers and all that, social media spend, everything, and giving you a really simple dashboard that shows you whether these decisions are profitable or not profitable.

21:00 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, I was really surprised when I saw this one 'cause like I've recently actually just started working with an e-commerce company and one of the most challenging thing, I mean, it's a challenging thing for every business when they do their marketing, just like figure out how much should we spend in order to acquire these customers. But in e-commerce, it's super fast-paced. You have to keep your eye on it, like, you know, 'cause you've got kind of customers coming in and money going out constantly. But yeah, I was really surprised that clearly there's obviously not in the founder's opinion, a platform out there already serving this need. 'Cause if they've come from an e-commerce background, obviously they've kind of know what's out there. And yeah, so like I was really surprised that there's not something already doing this. So I think it's definitely one to watch.

21:38 Will Richards: Definitely your client should check them out. So they're in closed private beta right now, but the tool sort of already works with Shopify and the other big e-commerce brands as well. So yeah, definitely wanna check out if you are building an e-commerce. The Startup Retro is supported by Themify. So I'm super excited to be joined by Simon Lee, the co-founder of Teamified. Simon, I'd love to get your thoughts on the rise of fractional roles for startups in Australia. It's a trend that I'm seeing really start to kick off lately. How do you sort of see that in the market at the moment and what does Teamified do to help?

22:13 Will Richards: Yeah, I don't know about you, but everywhere I'm seeing fractional everywhere now. If you actually look at the biggest cost on people's balance sheet is their labor costs, right? And 90% of businesses, it's their labor costs is the biggest cost. And so So building remote teams is a great way to reduce the cost, but fractional services is also, you know, if you're a small business, do I need to hire a full-time CFO? Do I need a full-time CMO? We'll hit $18 mil revenue this year, and I've still got a fractional CFO and a fractional CMO, and they do an amazing job. When you're trying to start a business, trying to find who should I partner with, and having someone that at least a vetted CMO or a vetted CTO is just gonna make it that much simpler.

22:51 Will Richards: To learn more about how Teamified can help scale up your business, head to teamified.com.au.

22:57 Gemma Clancy: So each week we are going to leave you in the same way that we finish up our newsletter each week, which is a section called Knowledge as a Service, or we shorten it to KaaS. It's just essentially us picking out our carve-outs of the week. It's something maybe we watched or we listened to or we read that we thought was really interesting and was somewhat startup relevant, might be interesting to founders, investors, anyone startup curious. So, um, Will, what was your KaaS this week?

23:24 Will Richards: Mine is potentially super boring, but also I think really valuable. It is an article that takes 8 minutes to read and it's called What You Should Know About SAFEs, and they are SAFE notes. It's a, yeah, simple agreement for future equity. Extremely popular now, born out of Y Combinator, but becoming super common now, especially in the angel and the seed stage here in Australia. I see it a lot in my role at the Regional Angel Network. But there's often, you sort of definitely get questions from both founders and investors around how they work. So this is an article that's, that's really easy to read, well written, that sort of goes through the pros and cons of SAFE notes and how they compare to priced rounds, but also convertible notes.

24:06 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, that's great. I think a lot of, especially first-time founders, if you ask them what a SAFE note was, they probably couldn't really explain it super well before you've actually gone into the weeds of it. So I think it's a great resource and it's probably something good actually for even operators working in early-stage startups to have a read of because 'cause if you're working in early-stage startup, they might have raised on a SAFE note. It's good to understand how the SAFE note interacts also with maybe even your equity in the company, how kind of it works from a future dilution perspective, stuff like that. So yeah, worth having a read. It's a good educational one to read. My cast, on the other hand, educational, definitely. A little bit more fun, also definitely, I think. Sorry, Will. Usually your cast is quite interesting, but I'm trying to one-up you this week. Go for it. With a fun little website all about robots. So, the website is called robotsguide.com, and I spent a lot of time looking at this because I'm actually working with a robotics company, and I just stumbled across it in my research and then proceeded to spend maybe a little bit too much time clicking around on it. What's really cool about it is that, well, from my perspective, it just completely opened up my mind when it comes to robotics. Like, when I think of robots, I have kind of, or like previously, I've just kind of had one idea of what a robot looks like. I'm not I'm not going to describe it to you because it will probably just make me sound really dumb, but I had kind of one rough idea of what a robot kind of looks like. But the more I get into learning about robotics, the more I've realized that like robotics is just kind of so wide-ranging, and this website really captures that. So you can look at their entire directory of robots, and they've got I think 262 robots on here of all different types, and you can filter by category. So there's aerospace robots and disaster response and drones and exoskeletons, entertainment robots, military and security ones, humanoid humanoid and everything you can possibly like think of, as well as, you know, you can filter by feature. So, are they AI enabled?

26:01 Will Richards: You want to hear my favourite robot ranking category they've got on the site?

26:05 Gemma Clancy: Okay, go on.

26:05 Will Richards: They've also got a ranking for creepiest robots in the uncanny valley side of things. But oh my God, some of these robots are just not what you want to have anywhere near your house or children.

26:16 Gemma Clancy: Yeah. You know what my favourite one is? Albert Hubo. Which is a humanoid robot that combines a mechanical body with a robot replica of Albert Einstein's head. I'm not really sure what the point of it is, I'd have to look at it a little bit closer, but it is very funny to look at. Um, so yeah, that's my cast for the week. Educational from the perspective of if you've never thought about the wide variety of robots that exist in the world, you should definitely check it out. But also, just a warning in advance, you might find yourself going down a rabbit hole, um, looking at some very, very weird and wonderful robots.

26:48 Will Richards: Awesome. Can't wait to spend a bit of time on it this weekend. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Startup Retro. We would love to hear what you thought of the show, so feel free to reach out to us directly on LinkedIn, or even better, follow us on your favorite podcast player and leave us a review so more people can find us. Jen, did you have a favorite review from this week?

27:09 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, so I received some messages privately, which was really lovely, some great unsolicited feedback, and I encourage that to keep coming because we want to keep making the podcast better. But my highlight of the week in terms of reviews and shoutouts on socials was from Jared Lawrence, and he's been a supporter of Overnight Success for a long time, and he posted on LinkedIn just saying, you know, congrats on the podcast, and he said he's already been addicted to the Overnight Success newsletter, and now he's really excited to be able to digest our content in audio format. So thanks for that, Jared. Really appreciate it.

27:40 Will Richards: Yeah, and we're gonna start a new tradition of rewarding the best shout out of the week with a little prize pack with some Overnight Success merch. So Jared will be in touch and we'll send some stuff over.

27:50 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, I'd love to see people getting really creative in the reviews. You know, I wanna see some competition happening in there with this one, 'cause our merch is highly sought after.

28:00 Will Richards: 'Cause it's so rare.

28:02 Gemma Clancy: It's so rare. It's so rare. So my storage space will thank you.

28:08 Will Richards: Exactly. So if you enjoyed this podcast, you'll probably also enjoy our weekly newsletter, Overnight Success, which goes into even more detail in the headlines and the raises, and a fair bit more. So you can subscribe to that newsletter at overnightsuccess.vc.

28:21 Gemma Clancy: Amazing.

28:22 Will Richards: Catch you next week.

28:23 Gemma Clancy: Catch you next week.

28:31 Will Richards: Listen to the Unfunded Podcast, brought to you by the Day One Network and hosted by me, tech writer Joan Westenberg. We're sharing the no-holds-barred untold stories from entrepreneurs who have decided to build a business on their terms. I'll be interviewing successful founders and operators on the grit and ingenuity it takes to build and scale independent startups without the support of traditional venture capital funding. Subscribe to the Unfunded Podcast now, wherever you get your podcasts.