Inside the Playbooks of Australia’s Million-Dollar Founders

0:00 Brendan Hill: We were kind of like commercial enough that we found something that people were willing to buy. So like in the initial version of Heidi, it was actually—

0:06 Thomas Kelly: Competitors to us, yeah. Property, buying a house is a dumb way. It's also a lame way to get ahead in Australia.

0:13 Liam Millward: People my age think that they want to be someone in strategy. That role just doesn't exist. Like you need to execute and you might have a cool idea, but that's not strategy. Everyone needs to be an executor.

0:24 Charlie Gearside: Hire slow and fire fast.

0:26 Liam Millward: Keep the good ones and get rid of the shit ones.

0:28 Thomas Kelly: The best people I've ever hired have always been me searching for them. And going out to get them.

0:33 Liam Millward: There's nothing more draining than interviewing bad people all day. You walk away at the end of the day feeling like you have achieved not nothing, like below nothing. Had some really cool strategies to get off a Zoom call.

0:43 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, how quickly you can walk off.

0:44 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah. The internet's gone.

0:48 Liam Millward: Fire alarm.

0:50 Charlie Gearside: What's up, founders and investors? Welcome to Oversubscribed. We're creating a new category of podcast, and with any pilot, you need to bring out the big guns. I have with me today Liam, the founder of Instant. They're growing at $1 million revenue a month, working with over 500 brands. I have Dr. Tom, the co-founder of Heidi Health. As reported in the AFR, Australia's fastest growing startup with 15, what was it, 15 million?

1:17 Brendan Hill: Yeah, 15.

1:18 Charlie Gearside: 0 to 15 million of revenue in 15 months. And the Voice, John Farnham has retired, but don't worry, Australia has a new voice. My final guest, the king of content in Australia, Charlie Gearside.

1:31 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, I'm a singer.

1:34 Charlie Gearside: Singer-songwriter. So guys, thanks for coming on the very first episode of Oversubscribe. We're trying to do something a bit different in the Australian startup media space. Natural conversations, just like we're at a pub. Get some good insights, need to inspire the next generation. So here we are. Thanks for coming on.

1:54 Liam Millward: Thanks for having us.

1:55 Thomas Kelly: Thanks Liam for the beautiful office that we're currently in.

1:58 Charlie Gearside: We're coming to you live from Instant HQ in the heart of the capital of startups in Australia, Surry Hills. Do you contest that, Dr. Tom, being from Melbourne?

2:08 Brendan Hill: No, it's the heart for now. The heart for now? Yeah.

2:11 Liam Millward: It's nice here. We just had a lunch at Chin Chin.

2:14 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, exactly.

2:15 Liam Millward: Which is, I feel like a moth.

2:17 Brendan Hill: Our office is here as well now.

2:18 Thomas Kelly: Oh, you guys are in the lunching phase of your startup. Okay.

2:21 Brendan Hill: All right.

2:23 Charlie Gearside: Going fast, but time for lunch. Mate, tell us about the last, 15 months' time. I've been lucky enough to be an investor on the journey since the early days when it was called Oscar.ai. It was funny, I was looking back in preparation for this episode, one of the only startups to hit their metrics in their pre-seed deck, which is crazy. But mate, does this feel real? Tell us in a nutshell about the last 15 months.

2:48 Brendan Hill: Yeah, first off, thanks for having me. Yeah, I think it's been a surreal journey. I think we were really early to AI, arguably a bit too early. So it took a while, like we were just kind of spinning our wheels trying to get doctors to use, like, we didn't even call them LLMs, it was just like AI tools or different things. To be fair, they weren't quite as good and like our ideas were a bit all over the place. But yeah, it's been kind of crazy. I never imagined that doctors would be a category of this AI wave that would be the fastest adopting, but it just seems like they just never wanted to write notes. They hate the administration. I mean, it's intuitive to me 'cause I was one of them, but I just never, I don't know, it's like something like 70, 80% of GPs would've at least like tried an AI scribe at this point. Probably like close to half of them are using one every week. And yeah, if you told me that 2 years ago, I just wouldn't have believed it. But yeah, it's been unreal. I feel humble.

3:45 Liam Millward: I feel like the most incredible thing about Heidi now is the fact that you kind of went through a bit of a shit rollercoaster initially, right?

3:52 Thomas Kelly: Yeah.

3:52 Liam Millward: Most founders would just, I don't know, be done with it.

3:55 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think we were lucky, I guess. We were kind of like commercial enough that we found something that people were willing to buy. So like in the initial version of Heidi, it was actually, I remember— Competitors to us. Yeah, but like very loosely trying to like let an individual practice do like something like what Eucalyptus could do with their patients. Like do some sort of asynchronous, like gather their history, give them a work, workboard of like, you know, here, this patient's like currently working full-time but has these new symptoms, doesn't have time to come to the practice. You know, what should you do? And we'd wrapped all the AI around that. Like we did the history, we scribed the visit, we even gave like a differential diagnosis. Like we actually did more than what we did now. And I think we were lucky in that Blackbird kind of, I guess, saw us make progress and like kept believing in us as founders. We'd kind of like proven enough.

4:46 Charlie Gearside: Mm-hmm.

4:47 Brendan Hill: That when GPT-4 came out and the game on the field changed, actually when we raised our second round, it was in the deck. I was like, look, we've got this interesting Australian business. I don't really know if it's going to work or not, but this is the moment to build things directly for doctors now. And I don't know exactly what it would be, but we're going to launch something directly for doctors. And that was in September '23. And then we kind of internally did the pivot, launched the product version of Heidi in Feb, and it's been kind of crazy since.

5:19 Thomas Kelly: Um, yeah, it's actually been the best thing for Australian healthcare, I reckon, having doctors take on— yeah, start to adopt AI with you guys. Because the feeling before that was that like technology was coming definitely through Eucalyptus and, and other patient-orientated sort of products, but there was, there was some sense of like there's nothing, like the doctors felt kind of resistant to it.

5:43 Liam Millward: Yeah.

5:44 Thomas Kelly: But now that they've got something as well, I feel like everyone's all in on technology.

5:48 Brendan Hill: Yeah, like it was always something in conflict with like the way they wanted to practice or like, you know, I think I've also seen a shift, like there's just more positive sum thinking. Like it's like I've got more time now. Do I see more patients? Do I spend more time with my kids? Do I, I don't know, increase my appointment blocks? Similar in other places in the world where, you know, it's like pretty clear that this combination of a doctor supervising these clinical intelligences will mean they can just do way more. So they can really meaningfully just deliver better care. Patients would just be easier to get good healthcare in places like the NHS and even other non-OECD countries that don't have the doctor to patient ratios to support really high quality primary care. Definitely there's interesting AI-first models that I think will appear.

6:36 Charlie Gearside: Before we get back to the conversation, I want to tell you about the sponsor who made today possible. Vanta. As a startup founder, you're juggling multiple priorities, from the expected, like finding product-market fit, to the unexpected, like customer requests for SOC 2 ISO 27001 certification. But achieving compliance is time-consuming, and time spent on it is time away from needs of the business. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the all-in-one solution for startups to become compliant quickly and build a security foundation with ease. With a combination of automation, an extensive partner network, and a security marketplace, Vanta provides the necessary tools and expertise for startups to achieve compliance seamlessly, no matter how urgent your needs are, and at every phase of growth. Over 10,000 leading companies, just like the ones who have been on the Oversubscribed podcast like Everlab, Relevance AI, Instant, Alloy, and Atlassian trust Vanta to automate their compliance so they can focus on growing their startup. Startup customers get $1,000 off at vanta.com/oversubscribed. Are you able to share any of the numbers? I was reading the latest shareholder updates and obviously some crazy stuff in there. What can you share publicly?

8:07 Brendan Hill: Yeah, so we're nearly doing like 2 million visits a week.

8:10 Thomas Kelly: Is that like consults?

8:12 Brendan Hill: Yeah, so that's just like patient-doctor conversation.

8:15 Charlie Gearside: Wow.

8:15 Brendan Hill: Tidy's being used in it. Yeah, it's insane. We've signed like a few big hospitals in the US, like Beth Israel, which is like a Harvard-affiliated, think like 5,000, 6,000 person, 5,000, 6,000 providers in one account. Yeah, revenue numbers and other things, probably not. But still going well.

8:35 Charlie Gearside: I mean, speaking of investor updates, something I've always wanted to ask you, you're the only founder that sends, no offense Liam, the only founder that sends their investor update at 12:01 AM on the first of the month. I've never heard of that.

8:49 Liam Millward: How do you get all your numbers by then?

8:50 Thomas Kelly: Scheduling's an awesome tool.

8:52 Brendan Hill: Exactly, yeah. Yeah, it varies. Like sometimes I actually, it started because I don't know, it's like something like dogmatic about like forcing myself to just like update. Every month consistently. Yeah, the numbers are always a bit hard. I don't think the finance team loves me, but it's fine.

9:09 Liam Millward: Something around this.

9:10 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah.

9:12 Liam Millward: The investors will like this one.

9:14 Thomas Kelly: Oh, that's awesome. I can imagine you, Liam, sending like, scheduling your Slack messages to like 4:00 AM or something like that.

9:20 Liam Millward: I've done that before. It makes you seem really hustle.

9:23 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah.

9:24 Liam Millward: Something I've started doing recently is sending a Friday email to the team.

9:29 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

9:30 Liam Millward: Since we started hiring people in the US and I guess just not being involved with everything anymore, I don't really like the monthly investor update, although we still do it sometimes. When things are going well, we do it. But I do love the weekly update on a Friday because I feel like at the end of the month, you think back and you're like, "Fuck, we did so many things, but what is actually important?" Whereas I rather just do weekly.

9:55 Thomas Kelly: And that's to team and investors, right?

9:57 Liam Millward: We just send it to the team and some investors, yeah. Like we send it to Blackbird, for example, and they just hear from us every week or hear from me every week. What's top of mind? What are we working on? Sometimes I, like last Friday, I just went through like our product roadmap and everything that we shipped over the past week 'cause we just had a killer week. And the week before that we had a killer week on sales and just kind of shared top of mind there. And then the week before that it was the end of month wrap up. Absolutely smashed some of these targets, fell short a little bit of this one. And then other weeks it'll just be, well, we achieved so much this week, but wow, like I'm feeling a little drained. Like that was huge.

10:34 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

10:34 Liam Millward: I think it just like makes the team, it's like a constant reminder across the team of everything you're working on. And it kind of gives you a voice that everyone looks forward to on a Friday afternoon at 4:00 PM, 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM, whenever I send it. It's only recent, by getting pretty good feedback from people across the team on it.

10:52 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah, I think like any regular reporting or like something, it's more for yourself.

10:57 Liam Millward: I do it, yeah, exactly. There's a founder in the US that I forget their name, but when they IPO'd, he gave a book to every employee of all of his Friday updates from like the last 6 years. And it was like a story of the company being built. That's what I actually do it for. In my mind, that's like—

11:17 Thomas Kelly: For posterity, yeah.

11:17 Charlie Gearside: Yeah. It'd make a good ebook as well, man.

11:20 Brendan Hill: Yeah, when we did the big pivot, we wrote, I still write them, it's called the canon, Heidi's canon. So 'cause when people join, they don't know all the history and all the mistakes and lessons and things we've tried. I mean, it was a bit too long. I think people would probably be bored, but again, it was mostly for me. It would've been like, I don't know, couple thousand words of all of the different, you probably don't remember that it was like, look, It was kind of like a, look, I'm sorry, but we're just going all in on this AI directly to clinicians moment. Still try to do them. I think it's useful. Just like, I don't know, writing culture is a good culture in my opinion.

11:57 Charlie Gearside: 100%. You're talking about the pivots as well. So Liam, you started as a one-click checkout sort of conversion optimization. You've pivoted into a full retention suite for e-com and merchants. Tom, as you mentioned, you started as a full clinical suite of AI tools for clinicians. Like, what gave you guys conviction to go, as you said, all in on a new product? You pivoted super fast.

12:21 Liam Millward: Yeah, the pivot was really hard for us initially, but looking back, it should have been so much easier.

12:27 Brendan Hill: We—

12:28 Liam Millward: and you say that about everything, I guess— but we built Checkout, Instant Checkout. Um, you know, I was— we were lucky enough to have Blackbird invest in us pretty early. They gave us We raised $2.5 mil, but we had some massive competitors over in the US. You know, Fast had raised almost $200 million, I think. We had Bolt, and then we, just the biggest thing, we had Shopify encroaching on the land of, well, we don't want anyone to disrupt payments. That's how we make our money. We knew that we either needed to, for Checkout to work and go all in on enterprise business who is not on Shopify, or we need to use this as a wedge into just getting a footprint in market. Whilst we figure out what our next product would be. And with Instant Checkout, or one-click checkout, we built the ability to remember a shopper every single time they came back to your website to give them a one-click checkout experience. And we needed to build the ability to remember that shopper indefinitely. And so we built that, we grew the product to, we probably focused the first 6 months after raising on just product. Just building, messing around, trying to get our first customers, et cetera.

13:32 Charlie Gearside: Mm-hmm.

13:32 Liam Millward: And then I remember going to lunch with Nicky Shevak, and this is pretty well documented story, and he's like, "Man, you really need to get some revenue." And we spent like the next 6 months of that year then growing from zero to a mil of revenue with the checkout product. But we got to November, December of that year, and we're like, "Well, moving into next year, we are going to fail as a company if we don't figure out a product that has high velocity growth or the potential of high velocity growth." And so we thought, well, we've built this ability to remember a shopper every time they come back to your website. Why don't we use that ability to empower a marketer to be able to remember their shoppers coming back to their website and trigger things like email campaigns, SMS, et cetera? And so we launched that product in January and The Oodie was our first customer on that. And we ended last year at $8 million in revenue with that product. So pretty good growth in the year. Whereas if we were still on Checkout today, like our competitors are dead. Shop Pay is clearly the leader, if not Apple Pay. And almost all of our customers have left us from Checkout to go to Shopify. And then now we're really focused on Instant AI, which is like our, I guess our third bet. Because we're still a plugin to Klaviyo today. We still plug into their platform. Whereas we need our own product that we're passionate about, I guess, and have the ability to actually build features for rather than just build features for another product. But when we, the pivot from Checkout to Audiences was really hard because at one point we had like 2 sales teams. One sales team was focused on Checkout, one sales team was focused on Audiences because Checkout sold to non-Shopify brands, whereas Audiences only worked with Shopify brands. Then we had like 2 different marketing teams, 2 different, like everything was split split in half. And then one day I went, we went to an all hand, or Brendan and I, my, our COO on like Thursday or Friday, we caught up and we're like, man, this is just hectic. And we had an all hands on the Monday morning. And I just shared with the team, like I think it was like 20 or 30 slides of all of these customers raving about audiences, like how good the results were, how excited they are by it. And I said, we're just, whether this is the right bet or not, we're gonna go all in on it. And we did. We just shifted the entire sales team, everyone, to be focused on audiences, and it paid off significantly.

15:55 Charlie Gearside: Wow, hard conviction. And Dr. Tom, I know you mentioned it in the canon, but what did it feel like, like going all in on a new area?

16:03 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think our version of the story was it's some combination of like me building a software business for the first time, not knowing what's important, mixed with changing AI landscape. So Because when we first started the company, in my head it was a technology problem. So basically it's like we're trying to build some sort of like, I remember we wrote on the board like multimodal medical intelligence that like knows everything about medicine. We always had the same vision that like the idea that a doctor learns everything in medical school, has a bunch of experiences, and then that's the way we practice feels like not the way that I'm going to be seen when I'm in my 50s and 60s. It was very obvious to me there'd be something that could supplement a doctor's reasoning to make them better at what they do. Now, never actually replace because software can't feel a pulse and can't elicit the history and can't just see how sick someone is. I did vascular surgery. It's the most examination-oriented thing. There's a cold leg, a warm leg, cold leg's in trouble. It's like software can't do that.

17:09 Thomas Kelly: But—

17:10 Brendan Hill: But it can definitely make sure that I'm not missing any obvious symptoms, or like the emergency doctor who hasn't noticed that the temperature is different and the patient has a sore foot and it gets worse when you put it up in the air. That's maybe not a symptom that they've seen very often, but for a vascular person, it's very off— obvious that that foot doesn't have blood going to it. And so like the clinical part of the story, that technology problem in 2021, it wasn't obvious that —like it was, it felt like something we had to build. So that's what we did. So we had like machine learning team, we had a medical knowledge team, we like mapped all of medicine, we had like scrapers. And there's a blog article called The Bitter Truth, which is basically like in machine learning, if you have lots of data and a clear objective and like a, um, basically like a reinforcement learning function, it will always beat any hand-coded, human-coded, like fabergé egg approach in machine learning. And so that's basically what happened to us. So in end of, we kind of knew with GPT-3, but I was kind of kidding myself like, oh no, you'll need like some sort of referenceability, some sort of like medical knowledge graph. Like there's no way that like just a next token predictor could ever do medicine like we can. And then end of 2022, GPT-3.5 is already like pretty much scorching our knowledge graph at history taking.

18:33 Liam Millward: Yeah.

18:33 Brendan Hill: The problem we had was that the graph was like a linear thing and medicine's not linear. And the models were just so much better at figuring out like how to ask the right question than we were. And so then, so basically the whole calculus of the business changed in 2023, '24, which was, okay, well basically everything we've built is effectively worthless because all of the underlying ML is now like free for everyone. Actually, it was worse than worthless. We had all this debt. Everything we'd built was reliant on the way that it worked. We now had customers using this thing, but they weren't loving, loving it, and they weren't paying us that much for it. And it was just this, like, it was just, I think it was the singular moment for me was when we actually saw, when we saw a lot of competitors launching the thing we had wanted to launch, which was just like general AI partner for every doctor. Yeah. I was feeling this deep envy, like, man, I wish I had started the company now because that was exactly what I wanted to do. And then at some point I just thought, well, why aren't I doing it? Why don't I just do it? I think it's my company, I can do what I want. I had all this external pressure about what the investors had expected and I had in the investor updates people asking about the accuracy of the knowledge graph and how's it going and everyone in the company was just thought that it was a technology problem, but it just wasn't anymore. So most of the pivot was just getting the confidence to do what I knew we should do, basically. Like actually, yeah.

20:05 Thomas Kelly: What was that moment like when you walk in and tell the team, burn the boats?

20:10 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think it was some combination of relief for me, 'cause I knew it was the right thing, mixed with just like the trauma of like having to, 'cause it was hard. Like we had to reduce the size of the team. We'd grown like a success function 'cause we had all these practices we'd sold to. We'd sold to about like 500 GP practices. So we'd hired a lot of CS people, but I knew this was like a zero to one thing. So we had to go back to like 15 people, like the minimum number.

20:39 Thomas Kelly: So it was like hard rather than—

20:41 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think—

20:41 Thomas Kelly: It was a lot to unpick.

20:42 Brendan Hill: It was like the emotional bit of like all these people I'd told, like they'd spent 2 years with us, building this thing, they put their careers on pause. Now their equity's worth a lot now, so they're probably not that angry at me anymore. But at the time it just felt horrendous to be like, fuck, I just feel so bad, but I just know I have to do this and just—

21:01 Liam Millward: Let's go all in.

21:02 Brendan Hill: So it felt bad. And it was also hard because amongst the co-founders, we all generally agreed in the direction, but the part we didn't agree on was going all in on one thing. But I just knew, all these other competitors were getting so much traction that they were going to get, have so much funding and like so much momentum that the only way we could win was if we had both some sort of go-to-market innovation. So like the way that we approach the market and product and execute like incredibly well on everything, just like to like nail like acquisition, top of funnel, like figure out how to activate them, sell to them really well. Like everything had to be, we had, we did a year late. Yeah. On a category that was very obvious. Anyway, so long story short, it was extremely painful, but then it actually simplified things a lot. It was just, and this is the thing I've learned, I think, sorry, a lot of me rambling, but the software company thing is just like build a product, someone should want to pay for it and just get more of those people. It's not complicated. It's like they should just love it. It shouldn't be that hard to sell if you're trying to go to end users. And as a founder, I'm more of an end user founder. Like I'm a product, person. And what we ended up building was very B2B, top-down, complicated, which is a different skill set. And I had never been a hospital administrator or I never owned a practice, so it was hard for me to know what their incentives were. But as a thing for a doctor, I knew intuitively what they would love. Yeah. So anyway, long story, but that's basically— it was just doing the right thing, building my own self-confidence, just taking ownership ultimately for the direction and just pulling the trigger basically.

22:35 Charlie Gearside: Another overnight success. That's exciting.

22:37 Brendan Hill: Yeah.

22:38 Charlie Gearside: As you know guys, Vanta are the biggest supporter of the Australian startup ecosystem and we have cooked up a unique event slate to finish 2025. Founder vs. Investor Padel, which is the world's fastest growing sport for the fastest growing startups in November in Sydney. And we have 361 Angel Club in Sydney in November, where you can meet 100 investors and 100 founders all on one night. Then to end the year, we have the 10:13 Runway Conference in Brisbane on the 27th of November, featuring 500 founders and investors. Simply go to oversubscribedpodcast.com/events to find out how you can apply to these events and meet the best founders and investors in Australia. I know Charlie Gearsight, every startup has many near-life or near-death experience, I should say. Can you tell us about any at Uke over the years?

23:36 Thomas Kelly: Well, I think we haven't like, the pivots that you guys talk about are like pretty momentous pivots. We got kicked off Stripe early, which was nervy 'cause we were a couple, maybe a little bit before both of you guys 'cause you were like 2020 vintage, maybe 20, Yeah, and healthcare in Australia didn't have a, like, there was no accepted payment terminal, particularly for prescription medication. So that was nervy. But I think the closest thing to an all-in moment was like the decision around like, do you go generalised healthcare?

24:09 Brendan Hill: Mm-hmm.

24:10 Thomas Kelly: And do you do treat lots of conditions for lots of people knowing that you can't deliver, you might not be able to deliver the best experience. So like essentially how a GP is, right, is like they're like the entry point, this like horizontal entry point. But then just deciding to focus on metabolic health and weight management once GLP-1s came on the scene was like a bit of a vibe shift within the company. And so that was like, that's closest to like a bet the company moment on that. Yeah, and that was like my co-founder Benny, who's the driver behind that who saw it coming. It was just like thankful we were in the right place at the right time.

24:52 Liam Millward: You've got kind of different challenges though to us. Like we are almost building one product in many ways, whereas at Youq there's so many different, like at one point and still is, there's so many different brands to invest in, different people focused on it, different this, different that.

25:08 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it always feels like the part I can't understand is like it seems it's like the time is running out on some arbitrage. I know that's not how it is, but that's how it seems. Like it's like even GLP-1, like eventually if evidence keeps coming out, might just be available from every GP. And it's like, there always has to be like the next thing. Like what's the next innovation? What's the next like trick? You know?

25:27 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, well I suppose the roadmap, like it has to lead to the vision which we had at the very start, which is like your, what's your health account? What's your healthcare account? Online healthcare account. And, and to that end, it sort of has to end up at generalized health, right?

25:44 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's like, it's like the model is really appealing for as a patient. It's like what you said earlier, but like trying to figure out the right, um, way to bring that kind of like high experience but to any presenting health problem is really hard, um, having done it and failed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

26:01 Charlie Gearside: We're talking about distribution. For a minute. So in healthcare, it's super interesting. So Luke's original vision, you've got Heidi's original vision. Obviously you're doing 2 million consults a week now, thousands of GPs on the platform. I can't give away too much, but you've got this awesome distribution. What's the future of Heidi going to look like? Are you just going to crush all these new vertical players coming up in the healthcare space?

26:31 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think it's not too much of a secret. We've shared most of what we want to do. So yeah, my sense is that where we are now in the AI product world is it's, yeah, it's pretty overwhelmingly clear that the LLMs are extremely capable at doing clinical reasoning and retrieval. So again, in a more supportive context. So generating documentation, potentially helping answer queries with referencing and evidence. There's a massive product called Open Evidence that's storming the US at the moment doing pretty much exactly that. So you can type in any natural language query and get all the latest papers and sort of a, I don't know, consuming the world's knowledge, medical knowledge in a single query. So yeah, I think basically it's like how do we give clinicians sort of like a, ironman suit of different AI tools that they can supervise, steer, and control. You know, maybe in the visit, that's so if they want surfacing evidence about like the guidelines that are appropriate or the care pathways that exist, or maybe in cases where they're not thinking of an important condition like a critical safety issue, like surface that if they want. Doing outbound calls and like extensions of the clinicians. We're starting to roll that out at the moment. So doing like initial scheduling. So, you know, taking histories from patients, or maybe if I'm, let's say, operating and my phone's on do not disturb, Heidi can be your specialist voicemail and like answer on behalf of you, gather like what is this request, what do you want from me? Is it a referral? Is it a blood test I need to check up on? Have I done something wrong? Is it just, you know, my rent's overdue? Like whatever. So yeah, I think just like how giving clinicians an extension of themselves beyond just the notes, but doing lots of other things, uh, integrating more with medical records as well. So reading more of the historical context, um, and I'd say like probably where it ends up in the next 5 years is definitely Heidi will be— become closer and closer to like a medical device that— and I think for patients, like as a patient, it's not quite there yet, but I reckon by end of the decade you won't want to see a doctor not using one of these tools. Um, like it will feel weird and old-fashioned that the doctor's like trying to figure out everything that's going on. That's definitely not popular and there will be doctors who don't want to use that and that's fine, but it's clear to me that's where it's going.

28:55 Thomas Kelly: Will just like most medical devices, will the TGA have to approve you?

29:00 Brendan Hill: I think so, yeah. And I think it does make sense. It depends on the use case, like maybe for the initial like retrieval stuff, we'll provide references and like make sure it's really transparent. But in the end, I think it kind of depends. It, it depends on, again, back not trying not to be in love with like the solution rather than the problem, like classic kind of startup trope. If doctors really like the Evidence products and like the non-regulated version of it, then we'll lean into it. Like we're not afraid of it. That was what we wanted to do initially. Like we're deeply a medical tech company. Like we are best placed to build like the med device version of this. Yeah.

29:41 Thomas Kelly: Do you guys do hardware?

29:43 Brendan Hill: Not yet.

29:44 Charlie Gearside: Okay.

29:45 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah.

29:46 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, 'cause every time I go to a GP and the doctor's using Haidi, they have this like beautiful like—

29:50 Brendan Hill: Little mic kind of thing.

29:51 Thomas Kelly: Well, they have a mic and they have this like espresso display, sort of like vertical display.

29:56 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

29:56 Thomas Kelly: And it looks, and I thought that maybe it was like you guys actually like rolling that out.

30:00 Brendan Hill: Yeah, actually, so there's this GP who runs this group called Tech for Docs and his name's Gihan and he was the one that started that. It's actually like streamers, the video games, like shortcut things. And they, it's crazy. They do these macros to like, oh, you're getting a vaccination. They hit it. And then like the computer goes like, does like 20 things and opens up the vaccination screen. So like imagine if Heidi could just do that. Like you don't need to have a streamer deck and like set it all up.

30:25 Thomas Kelly: Man, you could fit out the whole GP office. It would be so sick.

30:29 Brendan Hill: Like literally an Iron Man suit. Yeah.

30:31 Thomas Kelly: It'd be amazing.

30:33 Charlie Gearside: Good. And mate, Instant AI, speaking of AI, you've just launched Instant AI, rapid uptake. Can you tell us a bit more about that and what does it do, man? What does Instant AI do?

30:43 Liam Millward: Yeah, so Instant AI is, I guess, our version now, kind of what I touched on before of giving every e-commerce brand their first AI-powered marketing manager. There's a lot that e-commerce brands spend time on that generates them a lot of revenue, I guess, but is very repetitive, has, you know, very clear strategies of what works, what doesn't, is very repeatable. Should I do a coupon code on this email? No coupon code on this one. And it's important things for the brand to get right. However, a marketing manager should be spending, or a founder of an e-commerce brand should be spending their time on things that actually need human involvement, like community, even performance marketing. Mm-hmm. The design of their website. Like there's so many other things that a human should be spending their time on than doing some of these repetitive things. And so Instant AI is like our first version of this AI-powered marketing manager. And we're just starting with email. And I think we'll continue to expand that out over time. And the reason why we built Instant AI in the first place was we had audiences that plugged into Klaviyo and majority of the time, a really small brand or a medium-sized brand would underperform in email revenue because they didn't have their flows set up properly, or they didn't have the right campaign set up, or the right coupon codes, or the right graphics, or the right copy. And so we originally built it as a way to drive increased performance with audiences. And then we thought, well, why don't we just launch it as a standalone product? I really think that we built audiences, you know, to 8 mil in rev last year, It, audiences is quickly becoming the biggest feature of Instant AI. And Instant AI gives us the ability to go from owning like 3 to 5% of a merchant's business in terms of how much revenue we're making for them. Instant AI gets us up to like between 20 and 30% of their business. And when you own 20 or 30% or you're responsible for 20 or 30% of a merchant's business, you clearly become a lot stickier of a product. And ultimately that's what we want. We actually wanna build a product that is meaningful to a brand in a significant way. Arguably, and we actually just spoke about this over lunch, like we were a very revenue-obsessed company. And in many ways we weren't product-obsessed at all. And so we grew really fast. We were able to get in front of customers. And I think distribution— Mm-hmm. Is honestly the answer to accelerated growth. Like if you can figure out how to get your product in front of the right people to buy it quicker than everyone else, you win. And there's a lot of shit products out there that have just won at distribution. And they win because they are, they're absolute just guns at distribution and not necessarily product. And it's not to say we're bad at product, but we weren't as good as we could be. And we had 4 engineers, I think, with $8 million revenue 4 or 5 engineers. And at the start of this year, we had to take a step back. We're like, customers, like, we're just not sticky enough. Customers aren't advocates for our product. They see incredible results, but they don't love us. And we thought, well, product is the only way to solve that problem. And so we tripled our product and engineering team in January. And we've just been focused on being way more product obsessed as a company now. And like, we've never had more word of mouth. We've never had customers emailing the team, telling them how excited they are about the product. We've never had customers referring other customers. We've never had, like until now. And it's because we are so product obsessed as a company today. And we match that with distribution. Like I think you've gotta be product obsessed on one hand and distribution obsessed on the other. And you've gotta do both. And because of that, like we had 160 brands adopt InstantAI since we launched it 7 weeks ago, and it's already at $1 million in ARR.

34:36 Charlie Gearside: Oh wow.

34:38 Liam Millward: So good product and distribution I think has been the answer for us on accelerated growth. Yeah, and then InstantAI, like there's been no brand, like Heidi growing very quickly in the healthcare space, obviously Harvey in the legal tech space, like there's so many AI companies that are seeing just wild growth. There's been no company in the e-commerce space that has seen that wild growth yet, and we want to be the first.

35:05 Charlie Gearside: Until now, watch this space. And I've got to say, you guys are very well media trained. I'm not sure if they do the Blackbird, some great responses here. But speaking of content, we have the king of content in Australia, Charlie Gearside. Thank you very much for coming in today.

35:20 Liam Millward: That's like the third intro.

35:21 Brendan Hill: Yeah. All YouTube videos. Yeah, exactly.

35:25 Charlie Gearside: What about those numbers though? That first video got like 55,000 views.

35:30 Thomas Kelly: Yeah. Now it's second album syndrome since, right? Can't even get a second album out.

35:35 Charlie Gearside: But mate, talk to us about the power of content and LinkedIn is a thing now. I know you guys know as founders, most founders think it's a bit cringe to put the content up there. We were talking about before.

35:47 Liam Millward: It works.

35:47 Charlie Gearside: It does work. Tell us about content working, Charlie. What's working at the moment?

35:51 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, I suppose what I've learned, it kind of shocked me, and it's weird because I've spent my whole career doing advertising and focusing on distribution, but it kind of shocked me just doing the first like YouTube video for shits and gigs is the view hours you get out of like just the scale of people consuming online still blows my mind. So That's been the incentive to keep going really is like—

36:17 Liam Millward: How do you get people to know about the video?

36:19 Thomas Kelly: Well, you sort of try and kickstart each video with a bit of a blast on various channels. Started doing TikToks, which I actually hate the idea of TikTok as a platform. So, you know, it's pretty, you know—

36:34 Brendan Hill: Do you know there's some like magic in like trying to like compress like what matters into 20 seconds?

36:39 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, but I still think it's like super lossy even if you like are the most succinct person of all time.

36:45 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I agree, I agree.

36:46 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, so I'm liking YouTube 'cause there's like room for nuance.

36:49 Brendan Hill: Yeah.

36:50 Thomas Kelly: Which are kind of those people doing YouTube are more my people. But the thing that's encouraged me most about YouTube is that they're so transparent with the algo. I mean, obviously it's still black box, but it's like at least you can, try things and you can actually see impressions, views, click-throughs.

37:12 Brendan Hill: Yeah, like the retention and like moments that you fall off and like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

37:16 Thomas Kelly: And you sort of like, yeah, that feeling of getting better each episode has been like, I don't know, it's just like a feeling I haven't had for many years.

37:25 Liam Millward: Why are you doing it?

37:28 Thomas Kelly: It's funny, I get asked this question a lot and most people are like, oh, that guy's gonna sell courses. Like, I'm waiting for it. I fucking hate courses. So yeah, I won't do— I will never do courses. But yeah, someone asked this today and I replied because I don't want to see— I guess the essence of my channel is about Australia's in a bad shape economically. How can we stop pouring our money into unproductive assets like property? And so I said to this person, I don't want my kids to grow up in a country that's essentially Argentina for the last like 90 years.

38:00 Liam Millward: Yeah, yeah.

38:01 Thomas Kelly: Um, love Argentinian people. But like, holy shit.

38:05 Brendan Hill: You can see that.

38:06 Thomas Kelly: They've been through the wringer.

38:07 Brendan Hill: Yeah.

38:08 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, and I think Australia is like essentially heading that way. And unless we have more innovation, more companies, more prosperity, like it's basically the lucky country. Like we only get so many chances.

38:23 Brendan Hill: Yeah, the thing I really liked was like trying to create positive associations with like creating things and building businesses. Like that was actually one of the things that held me back so much as a doctor 'cause you just, you never think about it. You know, you're in it for service. Of course you wanna get paid well and it's a great career and all these things. But yeah, like it's not quite tall poppy syndrome. It's more just like Australians in general, I just think don't always have the default positive impression of someone trying to start a business. It's like you're trying to cheat people or something.

38:50 Thomas Kelly: Yeah.

38:50 Brendan Hill: And it's like, it's not really the point. Like I'm making something you like and if you wanna buy it, buy it. If you don't, don't. But that's like how economies work. Like if we were, you know, gathering around a fire and there were 5 of us and I made something everyone wanted, they would trade, and that's how economies build, you know?

39:04 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, I think it's a cousin of like tall poppies basically.

39:07 Brendan Hill: Yeah, um, yeah, I don't know why it's like this like bad association with business in general, especially if you get really successful. Like, we're finding it now, it's like the average GP or specialist is like, oh, Heidi's too big now, they don't care about us.

39:20 Liam Millward: It's like, no, it's the opposite. Yeah, I feel like that middle part of building a company is that's the way you get the most hate. Like when you first start as a company and you raise your round and everyone's like, oh yeah, good on you, that's amazing, you raised your round, that's awesome. And then when you're really big like Canva, everyone loves Canva and et cetera. But that middle part everyone hates.

39:42 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's like 'cause the velocity on product has overcome. So you can't have, what we find is like there's obviously a lot of competitors we have. And right now, like we have more product depth, but it's easy enough to say like, oh, these guys do it and I get to talk to the founder and they've actually rocked up and like visited my practice. And like I honestly couldn't care more about each individual doctor. Like I was them, like I literally know what it's like. It's like, you know, soul crushing when Heidi doesn't do well in those settings. Like it hurts just as much, if not more. But I think, I'm hoping, this is what I'm praying is that like at some point you overcome that with like, if you execute well on multiple products, then there's like so much joy they're getting out of everything and others can't catch up, which is what I tell myself at night. But yeah, it's definitely— Yeah. It's so painful. Like it just feels so bad. 'Cause I used to, it's like I used to be an intercom. I'd be like default replying to everything. I would reply to every email. I was just like everywhere. But at some point you're just like, holy, I just can't do this. I'm gonna drown. You know? Yeah.

40:40 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, totally. And I think if you can push through that, great. The bad thing, Like the way that goes bad is like what Australian politicians do is basically it's like instead of like focusing on the big picture and like helping people at scale, it's like the photo op with like, it's like every day is a photo op. Yeah.

40:59 Brendan Hill: It's like. Yeah, it's like the bad examples are always just louder than all the good.

41:04 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, exactly. The era of anecdotes we're in, you know, like where one thing matters more than the big picture.

41:09 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's like I did this and then this happened and it's like, It's like, yeah, we did 2 million sessions last week and you're one, there's so many nines of reliability, I'm so sorry. It's just, yeah.

41:20 Thomas Kelly: What you could do is just sign off every customer.

41:24 Charlie Gearside: Dr. Tom.

41:24 Thomas Kelly: Dr. Tom customer support email from the Philippines.

41:27 Brendan Hill: Yeah, personal signature. Yeah, no, it's tough. But it's a good problem to have. It's nice to have lots of customers, better than having none. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

41:39 Charlie Gearside: So mate, what's the roadmap for the Gearside movement that you're creating here?

41:44 Thomas Kelly: Oh, it's pretty week to week to be honest. I would say paycheck to paycheck, but there's no money coming in.

41:50 Charlie Gearside: There's YouTube ads, man, come on.

41:52 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, it's, I don't know, it's like a creative outlet, getting plenty of like random people sort of email me their business ideas and like, you know, getting good enough feedback that I'm like, I'm just buoyed by the opportunity. I think I'll start another company at some point in the future, but I think if we can get in a movement of Australian builders that wanna share knowledge and sort of, you know, it's kind of getting to a point where the writing, our backs are against the wall as a country. And like, I think everyone's willing to get their hands dirty and become, I don't know, a little bit more nation-building orientated. Mm. If we can pull off a movement like that and maybe have some fun Brendan Hill organized parties along the way, then I'll be happy.

42:42 Charlie Gearside: We'll definitely be doing an event very soon. Stay tuned. I've been angel investing since 2017, made over 80 investments, many of them through 1013. So 1013 is Australia's largest network of angel investors And each month we send out a curated list of 1 or 2 deals that you can choose to join in on the journey. These are companies like Everlab and Instant that you've seen on the Oversubscribed podcast and other companies like Go1, Mr. Yum, and Autograb. If you're interested in finding out more about the world of angel investing, I'm happy to jump on a call, share some war stories, and tell you about the exciting companies that we're currently looking at. Simply go to 1013.vc/oversubscribed and you can book a call with me for next week and we can talk about all things startup and angel investing. All right, speaking about, we've touched on competition a couple of times here. So you two are building in a very competitive space. You as well, Charlie, at Eucalyptus. Mate, tell me about competition. I know you use some very colourful language in investor updates about competition. Not sure if I can share that, but I mean, you guys are aggressive, you're growing fast, competition comes to you as well. Any anecdotes you can share or how do you guys think about?

44:08 Brendan Hill: Don't you reckon it's like the best thing ever? I don't know if it's just me, but I think that's another signal you're in the wrong direction if you don't have any competitors.

44:18 Charlie Gearside: True.

44:18 Brendan Hill: Like for me, it's not just about winning to, you know, like, I don't know, become like top of the hill and destroy everyone. It's just like a signal that people like this thing. And then like, if you have, it's like the Liam Neeson, like if you have a particular set of skills and like you think you can execute better, then you can win. Which like, it is like, it's like playing a board game, but everyone's agreeing on what the game is, which is like the, thing you're building. Whereas for the longest time, again, this is pre-pivot, we just had no one building the thing, which should have been a red flag, I think. It's like if this was a good opportunity, so many people would have already tried this, or they probably tried and just kind of failed. Yeah, I don't know what you guys think, but yeah, it definitely doesn't keep me up at night. It's just like, just be better.

45:04 Thomas Kelly: It's like the sweet spot, right? Because you can be fully like teal-pilled on like Monopoly.

45:09 Liam Millward: Yeah.

45:09 Thomas Kelly: Or you can be like, hey, if there's competition in the market, it's sort of the market's de-risked, but then the risk is on execution.

45:18 Liam Millward: Yeah, you just gotta be the best.

45:20 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, which like being the alpha of the market is kind of like, I mean, you're obviously, you guys both obviously confident that you can pull that off, but I can understand why people get sort of like.

45:31 Brendan Hill: Yeah.

45:32 Thomas Kelly: I suppose it's for me, the answer is probably a little bit of both, right?

45:35 Brendan Hill: Yeah, do you agree? Like I think maybe initial phases, like the kind of people maybe like who wanna start a company, I remember just getting like overcooking thinking about competition.

45:47 Liam Millward: Yeah, I was always thinking about it, always mentioning it. And it can easily become a habit. Like it's the first thing you do every day, you log on to socials, LinkedIn, and everyone's posting, you know, this founder-led content on LinkedIn. So you immediately think, looking at that is, you know, you can get ahead and it just never works out. And then you become so obsessed with what the competitor's doing versus actually just trying to get ahead of them. And then I feel like companies obsess so much on the surface, us included initially, focus so much on the surface level of how we beat the competitor from a product perspective. But how do we just, I always say to the team now, like how do we just strangle our competitor's voice in market? So our customers just never know that this competitor exists in the first place. If we win at getting in front of the brand or the e-commerce brand first, they won't even know this competitor exists. If they have a better product, not that they do, but if they did, or they're better at executing, or they're better at whatever it is, even in your case, like they got more money, like whatever.

46:50 Thomas Kelly: It's the distribution.

46:52 Liam Millward: If you just strangle your competitor's voice in market, and you are the clear winner and everyone is hearing about you everywhere, you just immediately seem bigger than you are and you win.

47:02 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that 'cause it's like, is it fair to say that distribution's a Heidi, like a Heidi advantage as well?

47:08 Brendan Hill: Yeah, for sure. It was because we came late. So because we were a year late, we'd missed on a year of selling. And so then when I thought about, I mean, there's combination of things like we saw the way people use the product— the initial magic was our conversation, you click stop and you just see what you would have written appear. That was like the holy crap, I need to share this with everyone thing. But actually, if you kind of looked at just the next level down, pretty much everyone who then became a real durable user customised Heidi quite a lot. So it was just like a very natural product gate. Anyone who's going to use it a lot is going to pay. And then— But the thing that everyone will freak out about, we should make that free. Actually, someone who joined the team helped me kind of see that, I think initially, because I was so worried. It was costing us at the start of 2024 around a dollar a visit. So imagine, so we didn't have that much money in the bank and it's like, okay, I'm just going for it. It was very hard to convince the other founders because it's basically just accelerating towards the wall. But it kind of worked. It might not have, but now reflecting back, pretty much all of our sales pipeline, every large enterprise price deal. Like, everything that works is because of that.

48:20 Liam Millward: Whereas if you copied what the competitors did, you wouldn't have been free, you wouldn't have— Yeah, we would have just been like—

48:26 Brendan Hill: Been in a bit of strife. Like, it's a bit hard to— I think it would have been fine, but it just wouldn't have worked as well. And so I'm always wondering, like, what's that same moment, like, for the next product, like, the next thing? Like, what's the equivalent? Like, how close can I go to the bone of, like, making me uncomfortable to get distribution? It's the same thing.

48:47 Liam Millward: Yeah. Yeah.

48:48 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, it's cool. Maybe it's like, 'cause we definitely had a distribution focus and that's still core part of Eucalyptus's DNA. It's like Australia, I don't know, maybe, you know what I mean? Obviously like Cameron and Atlassian are very much like product orgs, but like maybe there's like a distribution, a generation of companies that like, you know, make shit. And maybe Michael Beveridge is like the through line.

49:10 Brendan Hill: Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Between all of us, yeah. Yeah, actually, I have to say, because we've been hiring a lot around the world, I do think Aussies, back to this positive sum view of the economy and building things, I do think the Australian kind of growth product-led talent is amazing. It's actually better than most. We've met people who were the first growth hire at X or Y famous brand. And it's like they get a cheat code because in the SF Valley area, it's like if you've got a great product, it just kind of catches fire and everyone shares it.

49:41 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, B2B just spreads, right?

49:42 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's like getting your first 1 to 10 million is kind of written in the stars if you build something amazing. Whereas here, you're just on the island, so it's just, there's only so many companies that are willing to use it. So that's why you have to be a sales god like you are, or you have to have some product-led thing like us. So I don't know, maybe we can build more companies like that, more product-led companies.

50:02 Liam Millward: Maybe on your point before around we've got shit politicians, but maybe also, We've also got a problem with talent. What's the thoughts on talent in Australia versus say the US? Like we find, we just find it so different. Like product talent here in Australia can be pretty incredible, but honestly we found more luck with marketing talent in the US for B2B. It just seems like we don't have a reliable pool of talent here in Australia that is easy to come across compared to, the US, or maybe I'm wrong.

50:38 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think, yeah, obviously where I'm a bit biased now, 'cause we're, you know, like people wanna now work at Heidee, which is great, but it is hard to find people who haven't been like ruined by consulting or professional services or something. I don't know how to describe it. It's like they're brilliant, intelligent people, but they've kind of been taught a way to operate and think, which is like very hierarchical about like, politicking and safety nets. And like, and it's just really hard when there's a high amount of uncertainty in an area and you just need to be able to trust someone to go figure it out. And there's like no tricks you can pull politically in the org. Like, the results will speak for themselves. It's really hard to find those people. We've just hired grads and taught them ourselves.

51:20 Liam Millward: Yeah, we shape a lot of people, to be honest.

51:22 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, totally. I think that, yeah, the talent thing I've always found really hard to just like blanket compare countries. Yeah, because I'm like, the best people there, they're the best people in any country in the world. It's just a question of like how good you are to— how, how are you able to find them? Like, the, the best people I've ever hired have always been me searching for them and going out to get them. Yeah. And on that basis, like, the talent pool doesn't need to be massive because I'm like spearfishing, right? As opposed to like dragging this net through like Seek and some god-awful—

51:56 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never. Yeah, yeah.

51:57 Thomas Kelly: People like, oh wow, we got a "10 applicants and they're all shit." And it's like, yeah, no, like anyone applying for this job isn't gonna by definition really make the bar, right? You'd have to be quite lucky, so.

52:09 Liam Millward: Do you find that it becomes easier as you get bigger? Like I find in our case now that people know about Instant, particularly here in Australia, it becomes easier and easier to track down really awesome people because they're willing to get back to you on LinkedIn. It becomes so much easier to poach. They don't feel like they're gonna, you know, going out of business tomorrow. And I feel like a lot of really good people at say our stage now are not actually really good at going from like the 0 to 1, but they are really good at going from like 1 to 100.

52:45 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

52:45 Liam Millward: And the people that are 0 to 1 are kind of the people that in a lot of cases just need to suck it up. Like this is what we're doing, we just need to execute, have a cool idea, let's just do it. There's no OKRs, there's no, Yeah, there's no hierarchical—

53:00 Brendan Hill: There's no structure, yeah, yeah.

53:01 Liam Millward: And you wanna still remove a lot of that as you grow, but there is an element where really good people operate in a startup where there's a clear path to success and now they just need to run at it.

53:13 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, and you'll find that like as you scale through like several hundred people, you attract different people for those different stages and you get good things with them and you get bad things with them, right? Because like those stable people, don't like chaos and they prefer certainty, but they can also be more conscientious in a way and better specialized, more specialized.

53:35 Brendan Hill: Yeah, way more experienced. Yeah, I agree.

53:38 Liam Millward: We went through a phase on the kind of staying like a startup and executing like a startup. Interested to know if you guys did similar. We made the mistake of everyone needs a chief of staff. We got the chief of staff, shit chief of staff, got the second chief of staff, chief of staff, shit chief of staff. Then we—

53:56 Brendan Hill: How many chiefs of staff are there? Too many chiefs.

53:58 Thomas Kelly: Too many chiefs.

54:01 Liam Millward: Too many chiefs. But like we didn't want to, well, I didn't wanna distract teams with different things that we wanted to work on that weren't ready yet to distract. Or I just wanted to work with one person to solve a big issue. We have two now. They just work directly with me in special projects.

54:24 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

54:25 Liam Millward: And like we had a really big issue around churn and it was across product, customer success. You know, there was so many teams involved and I just didn't, obviously it's a big issue. You need to be across it, you need to work on it. But I just wanted to be able to kind of just brain dump and like work with one person. I felt like that was a huge unlock to solve that issue. And like one of our biggest things now is the marketing team is so focused on like we have really started getting US growth going. A lot of our marketing talent is in the US growing by like, like we sign about $1 million a month over there. It's all inbound. So distracting that marketing team on our new AI bet right now to figure out top of funnel for AI is a little bit risky. Yeah. Whereas now working with Felix in special projects to go like, all right, let's just build some top of funnel hype for AI and see if we can figure out the messaging, figure out top of funnel before we go and distract that team. But I don't need someone to create me a board deck. I don't know, like I feel, and that's allowed the company to stay in startup mode for so much longer.

55:32 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

55:32 Liam Millward: Where we can just have these random cool bets and run at it.

55:37 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I don't know, how did it work at UQ? Did you have like a group that could wield founder authority or was it just the founders?

55:42 Thomas Kelly: Well, we had 4, so it was like, that was easy. And you guys got 3 or 4? 3 of us, yeah. Yeah, we've been through chiefs of staff though, like similar to you. Yeah, I think they sort of become useful as a sort of board deck, exec operations kind of role later on. But the special projects, I do like that. It's kind of like, who are your best people? Who are the ones that can go 0 to 1 on particular problems or like problem solve?

56:10 Brendan Hill: Yeah.

56:11 Thomas Kelly: And as long as that, they're almost the people that don't really have a spot on the org chart.

56:16 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, it's like they're not a 10 out of 10 on any one role, but they're kind of like 8-ish on everything.

56:21 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

56:22 Thomas Kelly: Yeah. Yeah, and they're animals and just get shit done. And I think if you have a, like, as long as you have enough of those left in the chamber, like of those people, like, Yeah, 'cause I remember you guys used to hire them as strategy leads, was it?

56:34 Brendan Hill: For like new initiatives or something.

56:36 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, we had—

56:36 Brendan Hill: I remember, yeah.

56:37 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, that sort of like straddled product and ops.

56:40 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We found it, I found it like so useful. But again, I think it's like once something's working and yeah, it's a bit tricky like exactly how to set it up. But yeah, like there's Christie, Sam, Shaz in that group. It is tricky to nail the execution 'cause I think I don't ever want people to feel like they can't talk to me or it's like some weird abstraction layer to get to me. But actually what it ends up being is just stuff that I just don't have the follow-through to execute properly. A good example is where, because we have so many regions, pricing is becoming very complicated. And so if we want to launch a new feature and slightly change pricing, there's like, 100 people that need to now know what the new pricing is and how's it going to work and what's all the different levers and discounting and all this stuff. And so it's something I can steer, but I just can't have 100 conversations. But also whoever's doing that, I need to be able to trust very deeply that they're going to make the right decisions. So yeah, it's been very, very helpful. But I would say it's at the point that the machine is working well enough. It's mostly pulling together parts of the organisation I've found. Where it's most valuable. Not so much like building new product that is still founder, at least for us.

58:00 Liam Millward: Yeah, founder-led product for sure. But where it really worked for us to move the needle was we stood up like an inside sales team recently. We had 500 accounts on audiences and we want to get those 500 accounts to also adopt Instant AI. And if we didn't have, Fenna in special projects, it would have been, oh, okay, fuck, we've gotta hire, someone's gotta lead the inside sales team, all right, where are these salespeople coming from? Or do we go and educate the customer success team to how to sell this product? All right, now we've gotta coach like 20 salespeople, 20 CSMs on how to sell the product versus just 2 salespeople. And so I don't think we would have had 140 brands adopt the product as quickly as we did if we just threw it into a team. And now it's like pulling back to the team because, well, we've got kind of adoption pretty quickly. There's not as many customers to sell to. But like those 3 people, Fana and the 2 salespeople in inside sales, just get adoption so quickly. Like made $1 million in 6 weeks versus $1 million in probably 10.

59:07 Brendan Hill: That's crazy. Yeah, I think it's like, the reason I was a bit hesitant initially is I got such bad advice, I think, from investors on this one. They were just like, oh yeah, chief of staff, like literally day one. We just do. Like day one, they're like, yeah, hire like at least like one per founder or something. It's like, that's my job. Like I'm doing that job at the start. There's only like 10 people. What's complicated? Whereas yeah, once it gets big enough that you can get leverage on your time, like there's more projects than you can manage, then it's very valuable.

59:37 Thomas Kelly: I wanna bring, you know how chief of staff is like the hot job title? I wanna bring back squires from like the medieval era.

59:42 Brendan Hill: Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. Yeah, your right hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hand of the founder.

59:50 Charlie Gearside: But speaking of talent, you guys have super strong teams, both growing fast, but you hire slow and fire fast. How do you, I guess, attract the right people in the first place so you don't have to get rid of them? And I mean, how quick do you get rid of people if they're not a good fit for the mission?

60:09 Brendan Hill: You're more militant than me on this one. You start. I'll soften the blow.

60:13 Liam Millward: I got a bit of controversy 'cause on, Mason's podcast with, oh no, maybe it was Sachin and Adam's show. I said, "Keep the good ones and get rid of the shit ones." And I honestly feel like that's true. And we, you know, we have a very clear mission that we're going after. You can watch about it, you can read about it. There's very clear goals. And I feel like we have a very clear path to success. We just need to execute. And so many people come in thinking that, particularly I find young people, like people my age, think that they wanna be someone in strategy. And there's just, that role just doesn't exist. Like you need to execute. And you might have a cool idea, but that's not strategy. Everyone needs to be an executor. And, but we try and set people up for success. You know, they have a, what we call an onboarding Bible where it's got like everything about their team, their goals for their first 7 days. No like 14 or 30-day stuff, just what are you doing in the first week? And we try and make every, now that we're at, I really love this part of the stage that we're at where everyone gets inserted into a team now. Where, you know, when you're first getting started, I feel like people, you know, you might hire your first person in marketing, but they're just working with you as a founder and they're not really a part of a team. They're part of a wider team, sure, but then, they're just working by themselves. Whereas now everyone slots into a team that is working towards a goal. And so people are so much more fulfilled and competitive when they're working in a team. But I would say like for a salesperson, like you've got less than a month to prove yourself. In your first week, you should be booking your first outbound meeting. By week 2, you should be closing a deal. You know, customer success, you should have your book of business by the end of your first week. By the second week, you're jumping on customer calls. And we just get rid of the shit ones.

62:13 Brendan Hill: Hmm. Yeah, I think, I don't know.

62:18 Liam Millward: But I was sloughing the blow. But the good ones that are on the team are so well rewarded. Like we, you know, they have so much trust, so much autonomy, and they're achieving the best work of their career. And I don't, like, that is a cliché thing to say, like everyone says that, but I genuinely think that's the case. Yeah, I agree.

62:39 Thomas Kelly: The best people want to work, good people want to work with other good people, right?

62:43 Liam Millward: And they're so excited to turn up every day and do what they're doing because they're trusted to do it. And Instant is the fastest place they've ever worked, but they love it because of that.

62:56 Thomas Kelly: And nothing improves morale faster than getting rid of someone who's not good.

63:01 Brendan Hill: Yeah, exactly. Like for me, it's like more more like a soul than system kind of thing. It's not like explicit, like, I don't know, if you don't rate someone at this at their probation, they're gone. It's not like that. I think at least for us, we're nearly 200 and we've grown a lot. And I still think it's like chemistry in teams more than it is metrics driven. Because unlike Instant, our sales is a little more tricky. So for example, you can have really positive signals on pipeline, or you could be making amazing traction with different hospitals and health systems, but that might not show up in revenue for 12 months. It's like a tricky kind of future bet that we have. So you definitely can drive metrics, but at least for us, I think you just know. I don't know. Instinctually, if you think someone is not executing well, then I think you have to actually, where I've changed is I used to be the person that just thought like, they just move on, hire someone else. Like they can't get out of it. I've actually changed my perspective. Like I really think Heidi or like any startup is unique. There's like a pace and like it is different to what they've experienced before. So you like have to accept that you should, like as much as I just fucking hate PIPs, like if it's gotten to the point where I have to write down a plan and like manage you out, like fucking hell.

64:23 Thomas Kelly: It's too far gone.

64:24 Brendan Hill: Yeah, exactly. But before that, actually, it's like—

64:27 Liam Millward: But a lot of people hate the asshole who has the best metrics.

64:33 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

64:33 Liam Millward: And I feel like a lot of the time they're the people that you gotta get rid of most, that are actually the hardest because they might be the best salesperson. The talented assholes.

64:43 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's like the poison. Poison, yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, but I think like we, so generally it's like a conversation. I think it's like a culture you set that like, The default is everyone is losing their job every year. You should be like, why are you still the best person in the seat? Especially because we've been growing so much. It's a real question. If I hire your role again, would I hire you again? Which is the classic Netflix thing. And they have institutional knowledge, so it should be like a hell yes. The manager should want to fight me to keep the person in the seat because they've been with them for 6 months and they know so much about the company. Literally so much is happening that every month you're with Heidi, you should be exponentially more valuable. So if there's hesitation there, then there's clearly something wrong. That doesn't mean you just exit the person. I think you still like, is there a good reason? Is there feedback I can give? Is there better onboarding? Is there like an ex— Because the costs are higher and the time, it's very significant. So actually it's changed early on, really early. I think the more just ruthless like you just like that 10 people, they have to be amazing. They have to be extremely high trust, like SAS team, like default in this, share the same mental model. You just like, you don't need to think about them. But I think it changes when the teams are bigger. It's like you have to actually be a bit softer, a bit more like try to mold the right team. However, if they're not consistently not performing, then just like, like—

66:10 Liam Millward: The fish always rots from the head. If the leader of the team is bad, the whole team's—

66:14 Brendan Hill: Agree, yeah. That's another hard thing to do.

66:15 Liam Millward: Going to be somewhat bad.

66:16 Brendan Hill: When you bring on new managers, that's like the hardest thing 'cause you're like trying to give them autonomy, but then you also want to intervene and it's like, I don't know.

66:23 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, and you find out they're protecting their team who's underperforming and then those guys hire more people and then yeah, it can get ugly really fast.

66:32 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah. And it's like, it's not big enough that any of the functions don't matter. So like they're like all key organs kind of. It's like if this person like, you know, if I don't know, like our part of our platform is failing or like the models team isn't working, like the whole product is cooked. But that's like a 4-person team now with a leader and it's like, so, you know, don't worry models team if you're watching, it's fine. But it's just, yeah, it's really tough thing to let go of, I guess. I don't know, I guess you just have to be a micromanager, just is what it is.

67:04 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, founder mode.

67:04 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like all over everything.

67:08 Charlie Gearside: But you guys have grown super fast to 200, and did you poach the head of talent from Blackbird, your investor?

67:16 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, uh, Nell. Yeah, she's the best. Um, yeah, I think we— she actually joined pretty early on, like pre-pivot, when we were doing that like initial little growth phase of like bringing on all, all these people to help with the practices we'd sold to. Um, yeah, poaching is the best way, I think.

67:32 Liam Millward: Do you feel like, um, since getting talent people on the team to hire new people, the talent bar has gone up 'cause I actually do. I feel like we—

67:41 Brendan Hill: Way up.

67:41 Liam Millward: We spend like so much more time interviewing really awesome people. I would say I spend, me and Brandon, our COO, spend so much time, or initially, maybe not so much now, coaching the talent team on like the talent we look for. And now we just get it almost on a platter, like really awesome people. To spend your time interviewing. 'Cause there's nothing more, I feel like there's nothing more draining than interviewing bad people all day. You walk away at the end of the day feeling like you have achieved not nothing, like below nothing.

68:16 Brendan Hill: Yeah, exactly, just frustrated.

68:18 Liam Millward: I don't know, I've had some really cool strategies to get off a Zoom call.

68:21 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, how quickly have you walked off?

68:22 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah. The internet's caught fire alarm. Yeah, no, it's been unreal. Like, I don't know, I guess like reflecting on it, I guess if I was doing a job and I had someone from like what seemed like a cool company reach out to me and say like, hey, I've chosen you and you seem amazing. I don't know, I just didn't think of it in that way. 'Cause I always thought of TA as like recruiters and like maybe it's like a bit transactional and whatever.

68:49 Liam Millward: But they also do things that you just don't have time to do. Like some of our best software engineers have all worked together before.

68:56 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

68:56 Liam Millward: And a great TA just starts to go, who else do you know? And then they join, oh, who else do you know? And next minute you've got, you've kind of, you've brought the whole software engineering team over.

69:05 Brendan Hill: That's when the exiting starts, because it's like, wow, like if they can keep bringing these people to the table, it's like, oh, you know, so it's unreal. Like I do think it's a symptom of success though. I imagine like if things aren't going as well.

69:15 Liam Millward: Because you need to set the initial like 15, 20 people that you—

69:19 Brendan Hill: And like in Nell's case, like she's amazing at external employer brand and going to events and hiring things and building up the perception of the company, which is really important because people are betting their livelihoods on you, their careers. So it is a hard thing. But yeah, such a crazy— so much alpha in getting great talent people. It's been— I honestly think—

69:42 Liam Millward: It's something that's not spoken about enough.

69:44 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think all of our future success the next few years is basically just from the group we've managed to recruit in the last year. It's obviously messy and hard, but they're just amazing. Can't believe they've joined.

69:54 Liam Millward: Does Charlie agree?

69:56 Brendan Hill: Yeah, do you agree? I don't know.

69:59 Thomas Kelly: We've had some, like, I think we've gone through talent, like, similar to chief of staffs, to be honest. Because we've had so many different domains, I wouldn't say it's been easy for people to understand, okay, we need a Japanese, ops person and then we also need an engineer and whatever. But generally I think the process improvements are there 'cause once you hit that point, are you guys doing any, are you still doing founder sign-offs for hires?

70:31 Liam Millward: Mm-hmm, everyone.

70:31 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, so once you cross out of that, you are much more at the sort of—

70:36 Brendan Hill: Yeah, true.

70:37 Thomas Kelly: Like yeah, at the quality, you're as good as your systems, right? The people running them. So I'll be interested to check back in with you guys.

70:46 Brendan Hill: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it in the next episode.

70:48 Charlie Gearside: Would you know the 200 people at Heidi and the 60 people at Insta by name?

70:53 Liam Millward: Yeah, oh, yeah, definitely.

70:55 Brendan Hill: Yeah, we've just crossed like that dumb bar number. Like almost everyone but a couple people, like I definitely wouldn't have met everyone and definitely wouldn't have had like a one-on-one with everyone in the team. It's okay, just, hey, what do you do? It's not a big deal.

71:12 Charlie Gearside: Yeah, I mean, speaking a lot of people, like you've both successfully entered the US market and Charlie, I know you did a few international go-to-markets at Uke as well. What are some tips around what to do for first-time founders? Usually in my experience, it takes a founder maybe 3 or 4 times to do a successful US go-to-market, but I think you guys maybe one try each and then you've sort of hit some success.

71:38 Brendan Hill: I think, I don't know, we had like different failures in different ways, but it worked like pretty quickly. I'm not sure, I'm interested to hear how you did it. For us, it was basically that initial, you know, small team, a couple of the strategy leads kind of like do everything, like Jesse and Ryan.

71:59 Liam Millward: They were it, I reckon.

72:00 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, exactly. They just, we managed to convince them to move, and then both William and I spent time over there. I think the key thing was we spent heaps of time selling in the market and meeting customers and building up good intuition. Also because I'd tried the old version of Heidi, sort of pseudo-selling in the early years in the US, I'd gone to some conferences and I had a sense for it. Yeah, I think we were lucky 'cause the category existed, so it wasn't that complicated. I would imagine if it's like a brand new thing that you're trying to sell and like people don't even know what it is and whatever, that would be a totally different ballgame. But yeah, we just kind of jumped on an existing wave that was happening and then kind of carved out our own slice, I guess, yeah.

72:46 Liam Millward: Yeah, we probably failed for the first 6 months, I would say. We thought that, let's just replicate what we're doing here in Australia, and it will definitely work in the US. And what was working here in Australia, we thought was outbound sales. And if you look at a dashboard, outbound sales is almost 100% of our growth here in Australia. However, we forgot about everything that actually made outbound sales work, which was being at every event, working with, you know, having the best case studies with the biggest brands, working with influencers, having well-known investors backing us, basically everything under the surface that actually makes outbound sales work. Brand, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so when we went to the US, we thought, and I feel like this is the biggest mistake, we thought, all right, let's hire 2 salespeople in New York, so wherever e-com brand is, and they're just gonna sell. And it just got more and more and more depressing as each month went on because we're doing exactly the same thing here in Australia. Arguably there's way more brands, why isn't it working? And we eventually took a step back and now we kind of run two different businesses in both markets. Like Australia, we are still very, basically all outbound sales, whereas in the US we're completely inbound, almost 100% inbound. And both markets grow basically at the same rate now. Which is pretty incredible that both markets have two different go-to-markets. Although in the US, I still believe that what we've done so well out here in Australia compared to, well, compared to the US is exactly what we were speaking about before. Like we have strangled our competitors' voice in market here. Like we, every e-commerce brand in Australia knows about Instant, whether they have work, whether they work with us today or not, they've heard about us. And it's because we're at every event, we're on every podcast, we're on every this, we're on every that, where like we do everything. And so a brand can't not see us. And that's harder thing to achieve in the US just considering the size of the market. But I think investing in awareness and just every e-commerce brand knowing about Instant, it will be a huge unlock that we're really focused on now amongst everything else. But we started to, we did find, I feel like initially you just need to find one channel kind of like when we went from, from zero to a mil with checkout, you know, we just did outbound sales and just brute forced our way there. And I feel like every new market is like a new startup in so many ways. And we just had to brute force our way to $1 million of ARR in the US. And then now we're starting to figure out, okay, what's scalable? How do we grow faster? What people do we need in place? What leaders? We need to grow the team, et cetera. But initially it's just brute force, I feel.

75:35 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

75:36 Brendan Hill: Agree. Yeah, how did you guys do the initial market launching phase? Was it very metrics-driven or like, here's this, you're getting this much capital for the next 6 months, good luck out there? Is that how it's—

75:49 Thomas Kelly: No, it's always, we don't really, never did budgets or that kind of thing. It was more just like, get it out there and see if the unit economics are working really quickly. And thankfully in the UK, some of our best people like Beck, who runs the UK, she's like set up a, like a eucalyptus strain of the eucalyptus culture that's almost like more potent in some ways.

76:11 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah.

76:11 Thomas Kelly: And a lot of people do like stints over there and remark about how special the UK, the London office is.

76:18 Brendan Hill: Yeah.

76:18 Thomas Kelly: And that's sort of become the EU sort of, yeah, the hub.

76:23 Brendan Hill: Yeah.

76:24 Thomas Kelly: So in many ways it's a little bit different to this sort of like Yeah, it's the hub approach to like the spoke, the mini spoke approach, which I'm sure you guys will have to tackle being like software has to be like everywhere, right?

76:39 Liam Millward: It's funny though, like it feels like we've all had like one really killer person in the market though. Like we had Quinton who leads our marketing over there who just unlocked like significant growth. You probably Jesse or something.

76:51 Brendan Hill: Yeah, like Jesse, actually all the first hires, like everyone that moved or gone.

76:56 Liam Millward: And yours as well, right?

76:57 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's like, 'cause it's like you're filtering for the kind of person that's gonna back themselves to just go move to a brand new country and also still succeed. Just like, I don't know. It's not guaranteed, it can not work, but it's—

77:09 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, people that say yes to that, they're like inherently psychos.

77:14 Liam Millward: I feel like a lot of startups try and chase the new market too early though, because they get bad advice from investors. Where if you're starting in Australia and there's a market for you in Australia, I think something we did so well was not getting distracted by the US before we had the bandwidth to do it. Even though we were getting so much pressure, because I feel like if we focused on the US earlier than we did, we wouldn't have grown so quickly in Australia. We wouldn't have been able to raise our next funding round 'cause our growth would've just been bad in both markets. Then we would have run out of money, then like we'd just be shit everywhere rather than cracking Australia, using that revenue to now fund our expansion into the US and we have the bandwidth to now focus on that expansion. Like I feel like that was something we did pretty well. Do you agree with that?

78:05 Brendan Hill: Yeah. I think for us it was more like, and I'm still grappling with it 'cause I think the models are only just got good enough in non-English speaking markets for us, like really this year. Heaps of engineering later, we can finally pretty much do any in to any out, even mixed languages, which is pretty cool. So the question is, it's like, okay, basically every country is a potential market. So what do you do? Do you launch ads everywhere? Do you set up these hub and spoke teams where you have EU based out of Germany or—

78:39 Liam Millward: Like the Deal kind of model?

78:41 Brendan Hill: Yeah, do you do a Revolut kind of thing where it's kind of crazy be capital allocation leaderboards with all these different country leads vying for resources, some sort of weird Hunger Games kind of thing.

78:51 Thomas Kelly: Yeah.

78:53 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I don't really know. I think for us, because healthcare's really complicated, a lot of different systems, integrations, bureaucracy, compliance, governance, et cetera, it's a bit more product philosophy. What do you think is the durable thing? Is it that Heidi can be so much better on product and the orchestration of all this stuff? Heidi's calling your patients, answering your phone, searching evidence for you, drafting documentation, and it's just such a good experience that you can patch over the fact that it's not German by nature and wasn't built in the market and isn't perfect on localization. And can you overcome that? Yeah. Or is it better to just double down and actually get super deep in the markets that we're succeeding in? So integrate with every medical record, do every nth little thing, set up with referral systems and the prostate cancer registry and all this random stuff. And I actually don't know what the answer is. My intuition is that the LLM, like the AI apps are so impactful that the last 10% doesn't really matter. And actually being better on the 80 or 90 is enough, but we'll see. So the way we're going to do it is more of this hub and spoke model. We'll have basically teams who, and probably country leads once they break out. So we're being super disciplined about what were the metrics, what was it like when we had 10 active users in Australia? And what did we do at that point in time? And let's replicate that time in Heidi and not over-invest until it's proven itself. And it's kind of working. It's a bit early. I'll be able to tell you in a year whether or not it worked. We're probably at 100 active users in 5 European countries and about 50 to 100 in 3 Asian countries now.

80:49 Liam Millward: The hardest part I feel is treating each new market like its own startup.

80:52 Charlie Gearside: Yeah, and it's like—

80:53 Liam Millward: You get this mindset that you're just bigger than you are.

80:55 Brendan Hill: It's so hard because the people joining now see all the other teams and they see how everyone else is running their marketing and they've got some crazy auto-SDR thing and it's like, dude, you need to speak to every customer. You need to visit them all. You need to turn them into ambassadors. None of this shit matters. You are not in auto mode. But it's very hard because then actually, maybe that's just me being an idealist and they do need a different model to your point. Maybe they need to do inbound, outbound sales where we never did that. Anyway, it's tricky. I don't know. Basically the hardest thing is finding the people that you trust to just figure it out for themselves, which I think we have great people in the seats, but we'll see how we go. Yeah.

81:38 Charlie Gearside: Changing tracks for a minute here. So Charlie, Tom, you are obviously great founders. You're making a few angel investments now as well. Liam, I know you're onboarding to 10:13 at the moment. I've also got to get that sophisticated investor certificate up to date. But you're talking about finding psychos who are my favourite type of founders as well. Like as an investor with your investor hat on, what do you look for in a new sort of, you're trying to find an unreasonable founder, what are the first things that you guys look for?

82:10 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, it's either like people you work with. So thankfully like Eucalyptus is like old enough now that like I know Joe Harris for example has just gone out and raised for his company and he's like easily, you know, top 3 people I've ever worked with. Um, and so it's a no-brainer. And then the other is just like people that you meet and you're just like, wow, this person is an actual like psycho. Um, and yeah, I mean like we've all got chips on our shoulders, right? So like I, I definitely had early on, and I think it's easy to easy to spot those people that are like damaged enough to like—

82:50 Brendan Hill: What are you trying to prove to the world? Like, who hurt you?

82:54 Thomas Kelly: Exactly. So I think the times that I've sort of overthought it, essentially in a seed, the way I think about investing is— and by no means a great investor— think about it in a dumb way is that like you basically write the money off, bet on the person,, and like you can nod your head and look at the pitch deck and go, oh, that's a great idea and whatever. But if unless it's your domain or like you don't really know anything and you're betting on the— betting solely on the person, so how can you de-risk that basically?

83:23 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I, I think it's like totally about the person. Um, I don't know, I, I haven't done much, like I've done a couple. I think because Heidi's become more successful, I like— like it's not about the money, I think it's For me, it's an interesting creative outlet of being able to try to think about a different business.

83:43 Thomas Kelly: Re-live the early days.

83:46 Liam Millward: Yeah, exactly.

83:47 Thomas Kelly: Oh, that's sick. Yeah.

83:49 Brendan Hill: There's 6 of you. Oh, wow. No, I think, yeah, probably it's, I guess, thinking about different business and trying to help them navigate similar problems that we had. Try not to be an annoying investor. And just be realistic and not care too much about the money. But yeah, definitely there's one of my favourite VCs who I won't name because they invested in a competitor, so fuck off. But is that they invest in damaged people.

84:21 Thomas Kelly: Oh, wow.

84:21 Brendan Hill: It's in the charter and it's basically, I actually think it's not about them being damaged, but there has to be some reason. You're trying to do this kind of like outside size thing. Like, are you in it for the money? Like, what is, like, what's driving, I think, is the thing that I care most about. And then obviously just trying to see like some spike or like some ex— like there just has to be like some— this is even when we hire. Like, I don't mind if someone has like crazy weaknesses, but actually just like trying to find some polarized strength is something that, like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of one that I can talk about. I don't know, I've only done two, but they haven't announced yet. Um. For example, I spoke to someone who came from another startup and he, we were a customer of theirs and he was talking to me. He just like understood like how to market his business so well. But I actually don't think he knows anything about software at all. But he's got another co-founder and it's like, yep, good enough for me, I'm in. You know, it's like you're just so much better at this than I could ever be. And that strength hopefully is like the thing that makes you win.

85:22 Charlie Gearside: Yeah. I mean, it's been interesting 'cause Like I know Blackbird use U2 for a lot of DD and meeting with founders and stuff like that. And it's funny because like Liam, you think every founder's shit, which is interesting except—

85:35 Liam Millward: I don't think that, but yeah.

85:36 Charlie Gearside: No, but except for Dr. Tom, you always speak very highly of Dr. Tom. So it's great to have you both here today. True story, true story. But mate, do you think you'll start making a few bets or you spent all the money on your $200 haircut here?

85:54 Liam Millward: It was the rain outside. Is that a product? I just did a hairspray, combed it back. It's looking good, man. It was looking a little long, so.

86:05 Charlie Gearside: Series B haircut.

86:07 Liam Millward: In the works. I personally find it a bit distracting for me. I don't really catch up with too many founders consistently. Like sure, still catch up with plenty, but I, yeah, it's just not something I've really ventured into. Yeah, not for, I don't know, got no comments on it.

86:29 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, focus.

86:30 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just as well, revenue. No, I know, yeah, I kind of agree. It's like, it's a good expressive outlet for like an hour a month or something.

86:38 Thomas Kelly: Yeah.

86:39 Brendan Hill: It's like, okay, cool.

86:39 Thomas Kelly: I mean, we're sitting with the angel king.

86:42 Liam Millward: The king.

86:42 Charlie Gearside: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

86:42 Thomas Kelly: Himself, what's your, What's your tips? How do you pick?

86:45 Charlie Gearside: Well, I like the damaged founders, or they have to be unreasonable. And I think backing you guys in the very early rounds, you're definitely too unreasonable.

86:55 Liam Millward: What do you think is unreasonable though? Every investor says unreasonable, non-linear.

87:02 Brendan Hill: They see it like they squint and they see like a curve.

87:05 Liam Millward: Yeah, they're non-linear.

87:07 Charlie Gearside: I think unreasonable, like Dr. Tom's Worst case, you could have had a very fulfilling and comfortable career and challenging being a doctor.

87:16 Liam Millward: Yeah.

87:17 Charlie Gearside: You're already working 18-hour days. You were already doing another edtech in the medtech space, which was going well. So you could sort of see there was that platform there. You had a massive vision, kind of like a Melanie Perkins sort of big vision. But yeah, bumpy road, which has been exciting. It makes it all the most exciting. I remember Was it 28th of January you turned on revenue last year?

87:41 Liam Millward: Yeah.

87:41 Charlie Gearside: And like midnight, as we know, every first of every month, like I was staying up for the initial crazy ramp and seeing the numbers like—

87:50 Brendan Hill: Yeah, sharing on WhatsApp.

87:52 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

87:52 Brendan Hill: 20K, 100K, million. It's like, whoa.

87:55 Charlie Gearside: I remember Rain Ong was like roasting you in the WhatsApp about like, where's revenue? Why aren't we taking off? And now— You never responded, which was interesting. Yeah, the history speaks for itself, which is good. And I mean, Liam was an easy one as well. I have a thesis about 17-year-old founders, as Charlie knows.

88:18 Brendan Hill: It's hard to find them. Yeah.

88:20 Thomas Kelly: We need to shout out Liam for—

88:21 Charlie Gearside: He needs to be called Liam as well. But yeah, I mean, for you, like, I met you when you were 16, cold emailed, I think about 100 investors probably. Like I knew a lot about your competitors at the time in the one-click checkout space and just the way you were able to articulate your vision as well. And I think that's one of the things that Michael Tolo really liked about you at Blackbird when you went through Startmate. And you're the kind of guy that you can never win an argument against. I think you always have the answer, which must be tough for your girlfriend as well.

88:58 Liam Millward: Maybe. But I think that's pretty true. I would say the communication part is like the best thing that I find in founders. If they can't articulate their own business or construct a conversation or, it's just so hard to lead a team if you can't communicate. And it's so hard to get people motivated at the weekly all hands on Thursday if you don't know how to present something in front of people. It's so hard. Like I feel like so much of it comes down to communication and sharing your vision with investors is like the first test of that.

89:32 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's really hard. I don't know, it feels like a bit like roulette.

89:36 Liam Millward: Like it's just like you can outsource so many things in a company, but people always wanna hear from the founder or the CEO.

89:42 Brendan Hill: Agree, yeah. If they're not compelling, you can't imagine working for them I think is another way. Again, it doesn't solve the problem, but like, it's like, "Yeah, you seem pretty cool.

89:50 Liam Millward: I could go to war with you." And like somewhat energetic, like you need to be somewhat energetic. As a person. Yeah, I don't know.

89:58 Charlie Gearside: Oh, I love it. Charlie Gieside, can you take us out on an optimistic note about Australia?

90:03 Thomas Kelly: An optimistic note about Australia, wow.

90:06 Charlie Gearside: And maybe startups, how can startups contribute to your vision of Australia?

90:11 Thomas Kelly: Well, I think the thing that gives me hope is obviously Canva's, this chat about Canva listing next year. That's going to make a lot of people wealthy in the Australian ecosystem.

90:25 Brendan Hill: Yeah, a lot more angel investors.

90:27 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, a lot more angel investors. And so yeah, what's— what are we going to create from like an ecosystem point of view? How can we get people to take note that like property, buying a house, is a dumb way? It's also a lame way to get ahead in Australia. How can we either work at companies, get equity, found companies, build enterprise value, and like essentially make Australia cash in. Yeah, make us much more than digging holes and shipping rocks. Yeah.

91:01 Brendan Hill: I'm here for it.

91:03 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, well, I mean, you guys will just make more stuff. Yeah, you guys are leading the charge, really. So it's awesome. I don't know, but I think there's plenty of reasons to the next 10 years could be an amazing decade.

91:18 Liam Millward: One last controversial thing. What's the thoughts on the new rules around work-life balance that politicians—

91:27 Thomas Kelly: Victorian government?

91:28 Liam Millward: No, it's the federal government. You can't—

91:31 Thomas Kelly: A right to unplug.

91:32 Liam Millward: What's the thoughts on that?

91:34 Thomas Kelly: Disconnect, is that the one?

91:35 Liam Millward: Yeah, yeah.

91:35 Brendan Hill: A right to work from home, I think, is the Victorian one.

91:37 Thomas Kelly: That's the Victorian one, yeah. So obviously— No, Victorian founder here. So Jacinta Allen, if you're watching, you're definitely not because of social media ban. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like in Australia more regulation is the answer and it's never going to be a good thing for nascent technology.

91:59 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I agree. Just feels like just less rules is generally helpful. Like, don't get me wrong, you know, there can be amazing remote cultures, there can be amazing in-person cultures, but I just like—

92:10 Liam Millward: But it's so much fucking better in person, I think.

92:13 Brendan Hill: Yeah, yeah, I think so. Depends if you're looking for like specific roles. I feel like you can be like somehow more hardcore remote sometimes. But I agree, I agree, for sales, nothing like it.

92:22 Liam Millward: Especially for young talent where they just need to—

92:25 Thomas Kelly: Oh yeah, to learn.

92:26 Charlie Gearside: Yeah.

92:26 Liam Millward: To learn and I don't know, I feel like people are just way more depressed when they're at home. All the time. Like a work from day, work from home day sometimes is actually really awesome for focus. But being able to come into the office and share lunch and share an idea and get the whiteboard up, like I just, at a startup, so many startups think they're Microsoft and like that's a big company. And so much of the advice around not working or working from home all the time comes from big companies. Whereas like the best startups are built with people together.

92:56 Brendan Hill: Especially 'cause you're trying to create some sort of like alchemy new thing in the world and it's so hard as it is and doing it remotely is just, yeah, it's pretty tough.

93:04 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, totally inefficient. Yeah. So you guys have 996 at Jack Ma?

93:12 Brendan Hill: Yeah, it's popular now. Yeah, our CTO is just like, you just got to ship, doesn't matter. No, it's not that bad. Outcome-oriented.

93:21 Charlie Gearside: Well guys, thank you so much for joining for the first episode of Oversubscribed. Liam, Dr. Tom, Charlie, Any parting advice and why should people come and work for these three great Australian companies? Hard missions but good quests.

93:37 Liam Millward: Yeah, we're really excited building the first AI-powered marketing manager for e-commerce brands, hiring here in Australia and New York, a lot ahead and continue, keen to just continue growing really, really fast.

93:50 Brendan Hill: Yeah, I think everyone gets sick, you know, it's, you know what it's like to see a doctor. I think this is the first time in human history that we'll have systems that can do do, you know, sort of what doctors do almost as well. And so, you know, it's AI app, hypey software company, fun place to work, but you also get to do something really meaningful, and doctors' feedback is the best thing ever. So yeah, come join us.

94:13 Thomas Kelly: Cool. And then Eucalyptus is about the, I guess, the actual patient side of that. So it's like, how do we stop chronic disease, which is upstream of all the other things that ruin people's lives? So how can we live longer, healthier lives? And building technology to solve that. So screw these guys and come to Euclides.

94:34 Charlie Gearside: How do we subscribe to the YouTube channel? And you've got a great newsletter as well, I've seen.

94:40 Thomas Kelly: Yeah, just search Gearside and enter the world from there.

94:47 Charlie Gearside: Excellent, excellent. And one more thing I almost forgot before we go. If you look at our countdown timer over here, we have our Cliff from Canva countdown timer till he's on the pod. So we sent him a first email 7 days ago. Cliff, I know you're watching. We're gonna come into Canva. We're gonna film an episode. It's gonna be fantastic. It's gonna be big. So thank you, Cliff. Thank you.

95:10 Liam Millward: Thank you.

95:10 Charlie Gearside: Thank you everyone for joining. Go to oversubscribepodcast.com to check out all the show notes. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. We have the application links for Instant and Heidi Health, two of the best and fastest growing companies in Australia. And until next time, I've been Brendan Hill, Venture Partner at 1013. See you next time on Oversubscribed.