The Quote Library

Don't be a B-grade version of me, be an A-grade version of you.

Nothing educates the mind quite like a complete lighting of one’s capital on fire.

You can build the best product in the world, but if you don't have a go-to-market strategy, you can't be a unicorn because no one's going to buy your product.

All the billionaires in the world and all the poorest people all have the same 168 hours every week.

If we end up vibe coding and slop coding, then we end up vibe assurance and slop assurance, and it just expands out by scale.

I think 2026 is the year of the agent. People sort of declared 2025 that, and I'm not seeing a ton of agents in production.

The biggest problem has never been in finding bugs. We are really good at finding bugs. It is choosing what things to fix.

I had to become used to this shortening cycle of how long your knowledge is effectively valid.

People don't invest in decks. Software games publishers don't license games from decks. They trust people, so they should be focused on you.

Interviewers are not necessarily looking for the right answers each and every time. They want to know, is this a good person for my team?

The accountability can't rest with the machine, it has to rest with an individual.

If you're an architect that's just doing assurance, you're absolutely replaceable with where AI is heading.

It's no good if you break yourself in order to try and make a business that doesn't work.

If you can learn how to interact with those systems, your life will change in a good way.

The main defensive moat that still exists now is distribution. In many verticals, the winner will be the company that's most successful at distribution.

For most early-stage investors, you fully expect 50% of the companies you invest in to go to zero.

Don't try to cost-optimise before you have product-market fit; you can always solve cost and pricing later.

What's more important is actually solving real problems for real people and businesses. That's what people should focus on.

I thought we were building a tech product, but I'm gradually learning, this is mostly about sales and marketing.

If it doesn't work for the way you work, or there's much more upkeep in it, you're not going to maintain it.

Themes kill returns, because once the thing's a theme, people don't exercise the same level of judgment. Most themes only yield one or two great companies.

Removing stress is always gonna be more of a selling point than slightly lower cost or slightly quicker result.

The ability to control how you work the software around your process, instead of changing your process to fit software, can unlock creativity and value.

Sometimes you've just gotta listen to your gut and follow the intuition and then the data will follow.

If you can control who gets the coffee from A to B, but you are not the person who gets it from A to B, you win in the industry.

You could come up with the best product on this planet, but if the market's not ready, you're never gonna achieve product market fit.

You have to back yourself, but you have to have people that are willing to back you.

It's really hard if you've only got one way of seeing the world.

Many women are forced through mental load to choose between their career and their family.

AI behaves a lot like a teenager. It is very smart, very clever, but it thinks it knows everything when it actually doesn't.

You wouldn't play a guitar without tuning it, so why would you use an AI model without tuning it too?

It's not the AI's fault that it is able to do all of these incredible things. It's the people that are using the AI in the wrong kind of way.

Every customer we have is our investor, because that's how we built the business. If we disappoint our customers, we should be out of business.

I got to a place of curiosity from a place of burnout, fatigue, and dissatisfaction after working like a dog and continually striving.

We're not like a B2B AI SaaS play. We kind of exist in a funny space.

There's a lot of ways to go wrong if you don't understand the ramifications of the power law.

Anybody that tells you they are an expert on this topic is probably lying, because this stuff didn't exist a year ago.

ChatGPT doesn't have confirmation bias, but actually ChatGPT can be a bit of an echo effect and it wants to please, and it will never actually reject you.

AI is the equivalent of the internet or Wi-Fi being invented. It's going to change every single thing we do in our lives.

Years aren't equal. Some people have a lot of years where nothing very much happens and nobody really grows very much.

Don't lock yourself into a specific provider. Model improvements are coming out on a monthly or bi-weekly basis, and the state of the art is changing rapidly.

Unless you can take that dollar and turn it into 10, don't raise.

Reputational risks can honestly be more devastating than business risk. So it made me more intentional about what risks to take.

Investors are always looking for reasons to quickly say no, because they always see more pitches than they can possibly invest in.

I won't be your biggest check, but I will be your biggest champion.

Don't start a startup unless it is something that you're ready to work on for 10 years.

It's the role of the government to talk about issues that might be important not today, but five years from now, 10 years from now as a country.

It is certainly easier to teach a programmer physics than teach a physicist programming.

If this is the right time and the right place to solve this problem, then you won't be the only person working on solving it.

Your job is not to deploy money, it's to deliver returns. Deploying the money is not the job.

I've kind of done my time as a mercenary and I'm excited to do my time as a missionary.

Most of the business problems don't need an AI agent to solve. There's much simpler solutions than having to tinker an agent.

Good luck trying to get a bot to figure out how to do due diligence effectively in a way that lawyers would be happy and confident using.

Imagine if you built a car and every time you took it out of the garage, something had changed just overnight. That's biology right now.

Why do we use tech in every other aspect of our lives, but yet, when we go into a fitting room, we still do it the same way that we did in 1920?

The ability to ingest a whole bunch of really well-known information and then regurgitate it is something AI can do way better than any student.

AI isn't going to replace lawyers. Lawyers that adopt AI will replace lawyers that don't adopt AI.

Film and TV is one of the hardest industries to break into, because it's highly nepotistic and connection orientated.

The best projects in large companies are high impact, low visibility projects. That's actually the type of project that has the highest chance of success.

If you haven't done great, well-thought-out customer research and can demonstrate that you will continue to do that, you cannot have my LPs' money.

Money is the ultimate commodity. They can get money from anywhere. Why should they take yours?

If you focus on learning as play and you're not worried about your job, you're going to have a way better time.

You can't fake something actually being good. As soon as you play a song to anybody else, they're going to know straight away.

If you're the smartest person in the room, find a new room. When hiring, I want passion.

You've got so many opportunities to quit, and you always have to do the harder thing.

At the very earliest stage, there is no such thing as a good deal. There are just great companies.

A huge amount of the world's universities today shouldn't really exist anymore, because they've got no competitive advantage.

Generative AI is easier than you think but more powerful than you can imagine.

Once you stop trying to avoid the negative and try to take the positive, the delta between the absolute negative and the positive can be absolutely huge.

If you're using AI to create great outcomes for your customers, you're an AI company.

You have to have that surface area with luck by having deployable capital so that you can deploy when you meet really interesting companies.

In China, people say there's no rare disease because there's so many people.

The mentality that I've taken as a VC investor is to be a learner as opposed to a knower.

The goal is learn as fast as possible, not make no mistakes.

Fighting against the inevitability actually is just going to slow your business down. If you don't transition, you're going to be left behind.

AI can be assistive, it can augment, or it can become fully autonomous, and we're still at the infancy of the whole AI era.

We're not asking for compromise as much. We're asking for something that's better.

Sometimes your constraints are what leads to innovation. And I think that seems to have happened in this case.

We see that the ownership rates are decreasing and it's essentially the first generation where we'll have fewer people own a property than their parents.

It's really hard to compete with free. As a business model, very tough to compete with free.

The green premium is quickly becoming a green profit.

If you don't want to learn how to use these tools and you want to be deeply inefficient, we'll come in and we'll outcompete.

It's not just building in public. It's building as loudly as possible.

We're appealing to people's sense of fairness to repay the loan rather than their sense of fear.

You don't do it for quick wins. There are no quick impact wins, and if you're doing it for a financial win, you're probably not doing it for the right reason.

Betting on ceilings of scaling is one of the worst bets that you could have ever made in the history of technology.

Technology always moves faster than society. Regulations tend to come a bit slower than technology, but people will decide with their wallet.

We need this combination of impatience for action, but patience for results.

It's a dollar conversation, that's what it always comes down to. You can dress it up however you want, it always comes down to the buck.

If you can't imagine doing anything else that would make you really happy, just do it. No matter how hard it is, it'll be worth it.

Technically we could wait a decade and then start building at that point, and everything will be so much more amazing.

If businesses don't adapt now, your competitors are going to be leveraging AI and you are going to fall behind.

AI is really, machine learning models are really statistics on steroids.

You have to be comfortable for being uncomfortable. We shouldn't have the victim mentality, because your energy gonna affect your luck.

You can have the most powerful model in the world and it will still deliver no value to a business if it can't access the business's genuine workflows and data.

The real solution isn't for one side to be right and the other to be wrong. The real solution is unification through empathy.

I like to think about my time at work as running sprints. I just need to make sure I don't end up running this endless marathon.

If you can join a company in the very early stages, you have the opportunity to try your hand at lots of different things and learn a lot.

The challenge of building a thing, of creating something from nothing, is really cool.

Every retailer and every distributor in almost every industry in every country is using these types of incentives to drive revenue, drive margin.

It's easy to get a 652 multiple return if you only invest once, because you're always going to get the best return from your first investment.

Focus on building a product that people actually want to pay for, which is unusual these days. You build a product so you can sell it.

The best founders also ignore 90 percent of advice that they get from people within the ecosystem.

The tech is neutral. It doesn't do anything. It's what the humans are doing around it.

Startups don't know how to sell to corporates and corporates actually don't know how to engage with startups.

Unless you intentionally block out parts of your life to live your life, you will fill it with work.

It's an opportunity for everyone else to jump in. The business model of car sharing is definitely not over.

If you don't have the end user bought into the whole process, it will never work. You will have great ideas, but ideas alone mean nothing.

I love the challenge of how are you going to make the biggest possible impact for the smallest possible cost?

I have a seven year old daughter. She keeps me busy. She has a bigger social calendar than I do.

Founder market fit is like catnip to investors.

The downside is hardware is hard. The upside is because it's hard, you get kind of a moat for free.

There are so many gaps in the market, and almost all of it can be or will be solved by technology.

Operators can really be the unsung heroes of a startup ecosystem. Founders need amazing operators to make their startups work.

I want money to accelerate faster and grow, but I don't necessarily need the money, which is not a bad way to think in the current market.

For bootstrappers, you need some sort of network or skill or something that helps you stand out, so customers are willing to take a chance on you.

Savings doesn't just have to be this kind of stern lecture of financial discipline. It can actually be a really engaging experience.

The contracts are there so that you don't need to use them.

Bootstrapping is just test and learn and iterate off the testing, and don't spend a lot of money building this huge tech without knowing if it works.

The real wisdom comes from people who are only a couple of months ahead of you, not from the people who are streets ahead of you.

People don't want to be accountable for the biggest financial decision or nest egg in their life. They need that intermediary.

As soon as you're competing, you're losing. You should just aim to be in non-competitive situations.

The unfortunate reality is that most people can't afford to buy a house by themselves.

A lot of people view their bank account as free. Obviously it's not, but that's the perception.

It revolutionized everything, and 86 percent of all payments in Brazil now go through PIX.

You can't just profit from the ecosystem, you have to take responsibility for building it too, and building it in a certain way.

I'm going to be the person that helps founders connect with capital and helps investors deploy capital, but I'm not going to be the one that deploys it.

An angel is somebody who's taking a bet on you, out in the wilderness of social proof. They're the call before the board member call.

The founders that survive this are the ones that we are so excited to back as investors.

Bravery is being fearful of something, but doing it anyway. It's not about not being fearful.

Most people spend too much time on diligence on what if I lose my money, whereas I focus a lot more on what if this works.

If you have wealth, you have a responsibility to be solving some of the biggest problems in the world with that wealth.

I really want to invest, and then I am going to spend the next couple of weeks trying to talk myself out of it.

It's all about trying to have a larger share of voice than you have share of wallet.

The difference between really high quality investing at a very early stage and betting is, are there risk factors that you can control versus not?

I don't want plan A to work. I don't want to be working on plan B. I want this planet.

Back in the eighties, the problem was there was too much money and not enough good founders.

It's the people who have this real authentic connection with a problem that tend to make the best startups.

It's never been a better time to start a startup or invest in a startup in Australia, and every day gets to be more true.

Mining booms, commodity booms come and go, but human ingenuity is perennial.

If you're a company that's not actually improving the world in the future, you won't survive.

The best startups need no help, and the best startups will succeed anyway, and so you're inserting this artificial handicap onto the decision.

A trap founders find themselves in is they are just trying to be something that they're not, and that's not gonna get you anywhere.

This is not a training ground. You don't come to startup to learn a new set of skills, you come to learn quickly so you can build something amazing.

When you're getting started, you're going to make all sorts of mistakes. It's much better to make mistakes when the check size is small.

If we don't create, we are going to be doomed to consume other people's products.

Fail fast, but don't think of it as failure. It's learning, and you can be happy that you're wrong.

Entrepreneurship cannot fail if it's funded by an entity that needs to get re-elected.

The average Australian marriage is now shorter than the average relationship between a startup and their investors.

You can only learn once you start. It's like you can't steer a parked car — start moving and that's the way you'll learn.

Action gets traction, and traction is everything. Traction trumps everything.

Leaders are learners. And sometimes that's a book, other times it's a podcast.

You guys need to stop fighting over pieces of the pie and be in the business of building pie factories.

Mining booms, commodity booms, come and go, but human ingenuity is perennial.

The strategizing and mapping out the planning is so much fun. The doing is what separates the wheat from the chaff.

It's a complete myth that government has no involvement in helping create markets. It absolutely does.

There's so many problems in the world that there's no end of need for solutions. So let's get going and innovate.

Too many great companies are invisible to the people that can help them, because the founders are failing to communicate why that's valuable.

We're not just a consumer market. We're a creator market. And that is on top of my mind all the time.

The best impediment to a great life is a good life, and us as a country have been quite comfortable where we are.

There is an imbalance if the tech that is being built isn't being built by those that it wishes to serve.

Surround yourself by other smart people. People that have been there before, that have got skills that can fill in some of those skills gaps you might not have.

If you're not ashamed of the first version, you're waiting too long to launch things.

It's really the things that you choose not to do that will make or break the success of your product.

You can actually build really big companies really quickly, but you have to set out to build something really big.

As the CEO and founder, not only are you very unlikely to succeed in each startup that you do, but you have maximum insecurity.

A good but imperfect answer to the right question is so much more valuable than a perfect answer to the wrong question.

Pick your investors wisely, pick your investors, not your valuation.

The longer I can avoid talking to customers, the more I can live without having to deal with the fact that my baby is incredibly ugly.

Not everyone's cut out to be the founder, but they could definitely play an instrumental role in another company or be a change maker within a large organization.

There are too many deep tech founders that optimize for grants rather than investors.

You wouldn't achieve anything without competition, but you need to be able to work out where you collaborate and where you compete.

Founders have two problems. One is a product problem, and the other one is a distribution problem. And both those problems can be solved by customer conversations.

Men will accept jobs where they have two of the ten qualifications and women need to have at least eight or nine.

Government never creates ecosystems. Government jumps on the back of the flywheel as it starts to really turn.

A relentless passion for identifying your customer and identifying their needs and serving those needs. That's the only way, basically.

People coming together with shared passions, people exploring new ideas together, that's where the real magic happens and that's the real reason why you should do a startup.

It's a really lonely place to be at that early stage and you need as many believers around you as possible.

Your income has to exceed your outgoings, or your upkeep becomes your downfall.

Talk to your customers, talk to your customers, and don't stop talking to your customers, ever.

If we don't disrupt, we will get mowed over by other economies who are innovating, and we will simply become purchasers of other technology.

As soon as someone says someone's a safe pair of hands, you're almost guaranteed that that person is not going to be a safe pair of hands.

You have to have a big vision, but you've got to break that down and solve small steps of it at a time.

Be impatient with execution and patient with results.

A lot of the solutions would have probably lasted if people just kept at it a bit longer.

Always hire people smarter and better than you, and learn how to cultivate them rather than necessarily manage them.

No public transport mode makes profit. Why would bike sharing be compared with car usage?

Be brave enough to believe you deserve and can have a beautiful environment that is perfectly imperfect for you.

A lot of times when employees come into a business, they're waiting to be told what to do. We try and hire people that will tell us what to do.

Everything we do and everything we are is a choice. You can make that choice, you can not make that choice, and you can change that choice.

The biggest mistake that startups make is they put all their energy into designing, they care about the product so much, but they forget about who they're selling it to.

I'm not just doing this to survive and make money, I am doing it to have relationships with people who are doing really interesting things.

Like any business, if you're not listening to your customers, then you don't have a business.

Often the issue isn't their marketing, it's their brand and image. You can't just cookie-cutter an approach from business to business.

It's somebody who just won't stop doing what they're doing, even though a billion people are going to tell them it's a bad idea.

Differentiation is important in venture funds, just as important as it is in startups.

For the first time in human history, you can address every customer in the world, service every customer in the world, from a laptop in Sydney as a 16 year old.

The only regret I have is that I didn't back myself earlier. Maybe that's because I'm a woman.

Don't let the end goal get in the way of progress. They talk about fail fast, and I don't like the word fail. So learn fast.

The biggest risk that I've felt so far is that we don't make the most of the opportunity in front of us.

You might fail, but you'll learn and then new doors will open that you never imagined.

You can be the biggest, juiciest, plumpest peach, and there'll still be some guy that doesn't like peaches.

Take on board advice, but feel free to ignore it. No one else knows your business and your situation like you do.

Maybe instead of taking a job, I should be making a job.

You really shouldn't be worried about someone stealing your idea, because if it's that easy, then it's not really a very good idea anyway.

The Australian market is small and it's just an initial stepping stone to achieving greater success, greater relevance for your business.

Anyone can position themselves to be an entrepreneur, but the key is the awareness that you're not likely to be doing this alone.

It's like telling a painter not to paint. They just have to. People who are entrepreneurial have to do the same thing.

Quick shifts and changes are not welcome a lot of the time within corporates, and you are not necessarily better than them.

We punched above our weight in coming up with ideas, but the issue was getting those ideas to be realized. Commercialization was a real issue.

We should be using the magic of startups to make things that are magical, not just make money.

If you get a bad market and a great team and infinite money, you'll lose money every time.

You can't keep digging bigger and deeper holes in the ground. That's not a way to innovate.

Whatever layer you put between you and the customer is going to be the hurdle that you fall over.

We have people that feel like they can own community when you can only serve it.

It's very, very hard to execute an idea. There's lots of ideas, but executing on them is the crucial thing.

It's definitely not a sprint. How do you work on your resilience and increase your skills to endure the ups and downs of the journey?

Silicon Valley is the dividend of a trillion dollars of U.S. Department of Defense spending.

We are a cautious country. We have cautious founders. We have cautious VCs. It does mean that we move very slowly.

I don't see competition as local. I see our competition as global.

Our success will never make an individual rich, and that's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of social enterprise.

Being a good person and speaking to others really does increase your surface area for luck.

Raise money that comes with knowledge attached to it, and comes with experience attached to it.

A big idea and a killer plan is not enough to guarantee you a unicorn business. It takes excellent execution.

If you're one year ahead of the competition in Silicon Valley, mate, you're a genius. If you're two years ahead of the market, the market might be trying to tell you something.

As a founder, you have to be a little bit delusional to be successful. An overly reasonable rational person would probably never found a startup.

You don't need to leave to make it work. You need to stay and back your own people to get it done and prove that we deserve to be on a world stage.

I think that accelerators are generally terrible businesses and generally not a good idea. I think Startmate is an exception.

The challenge continues to be seeing that there's a single model of development in a startup ecosystem. It's got to look like Silicon Valley.

People confuse listening with waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can speak.

One in every 16 Australians works for a tech company and already we're injecting more than $167 billion into our economy.

The investors, the service providers, the co-working spaces, the incubators, the start-up studios, it's all bullshit, in comparison to the start-up founder themselves.

Figure out what success looks like to you, because there's no universal definition of success. It means something very different to each of us.

You are always pitching, no matter what you're doing, even if you're not a founder, you are always pitching.

You have to have this undying bordering on irrational belief that of course you can, because then it turns out that you actually can.

Talent is widely distributed, but opportunity is not. So the talent gap is a significant challenge for a lot of startups.

Think bigger, act braver. Don't hold yourself back. Yourself is your number one worst enemy, to be honest.

When you focus on trying to master something and be really good at it, then you have much greater chances of success.

If what you're developing doesn't have a customer at the end of it, then maybe you need to reevaluate.

Customers solve most of the problems with startups. If you get customers, you get revenue, you get proof points, you get momentum, you get more customers.

We've only got 4% of women who get venture capital funding and you don't get that by mistake, that's by design.

Be extremely adaptable and flexible and customer obsessed from day one, because your customer is your truth.

We can't continue to look to dig our future out of the ground. We have to dig it out of our heads.

My motto in life is you have permission to be awesome and complete freedom to fail.

If you are at home, by yourself, your knowledge is limited to what you know, your luck is limited to who you can run into.

It's got to be something a customer needs, not something they want. It's got to be a need to have not a nice to have.

Just the act of starting is the most powerful thing, and being serious about it.

Could we dare to aim to be one of the most productive startup ecosystems on the planet? And I think we could.

First focus on your people, including yourself, then your product, and then your profit, in that order.

People who solve problems are different to the people who run a business that solves the problem.

We don't pick winners, we let winners pick themselves.

You have to be a certain type of crazy to give up the security of jobs, have big dreams, and give up the safety net.

If you don't believe yourself, don't go in and talk to anybody, because they're never going to believe you.

Cash flow is the number one priority. Cash is king. If you don't have cash flow, you're out of business.

Why does everything have to be defined in terms of negativity and scarcity? Why can't we define it in terms of abundance?

Investors choose founders, not so much for their idea, not so much for the exit. They invest in the founders, and they feel it.

It's a very long and hard journey, and if you don't love doing it, you're probably not going to have the resilience to keep pushing through.

There are very few startups you can do just in the Australian market that can achieve global scale.

We can certainly leverage the tools that digital technologies bring, but at the same time, we still need to build things, and building things is important.

Australia is an awesome pilot market for these kinds of build local, but then go and build it again overseas type models.

Don't think that until you raise capital you can make a business. In actual fact, turn it inside out.

I don't think you can start a business without a very, very strong digital presence.

You can't force this stuff. Founders are going to do what founders do.

How can you be customer-obsessed if you don't have a realistic representation of your customer around the exec table?

If you get stuck in one particular venture, you can move onto something else and then circle back, and often the answer will come to you.

Go into this loving what you're doing, but also be ready to change direction.