The stories behind the interviews.
Long-form features drawn from full episode transcripts across the Day One Network.
He Personally Walked 200 Employees Through a Spreadsheet Where the First Number Was Zero
Alexei Mitko designed the equity plan that returned roughly $300 million to Eucalyptus employees — reportedly the largest ESOP payout in Australian history. Before any of that money existed, his job was looking two hundred people in the eye and showing them the version of the spreadsheet where the company was worth nothing.
Read the article →His Dad Lost His Business in COVID Lockdowns. Now He Shows Clients Their Finished Garden on an iPad Before He's Touched a Shovel.
Robin O'Connell leads strategy for LinkedIn's content team in ANZ. His sharpest case for what AI is actually good for isn't a marketing campaign — it's his own father, rebuilding a livelihood from scratch.
Read the article →He Went Viral as "the TikTok Founder Guy." A Stranger Recognised Him at a Bar and He Deleted the Account That Night.
Freddie McKenzie built an AI company that replaces agency timesheets — and refuses to let AI anywhere near the one tool he says actually built his business: his own inbox.
Read the article →They Raised $1.75 Billion to Rent Attention. It Had No Way to Grow Itself.
Quibi raised $1.75 billion before a single episode existed, hired Spielberg and Reese Witherspoon, and bought a Super Bowl ad before launch. Six months later it was dead. Thea Ngo's autopsy lands on one structural flaw: you couldn't even take a screenshot.
Read the article →He Hit Every Goal on His List and Felt Nothing. That's When He Started Writing About AI's Next Class System.
Kunal Gupta built one of the first apps ever approved on the iPhone, then burned out chasing goals that stopped meaning anything once he'd hit them. His book imagines a near future where the ruling class isn't defined by money or schooling, but by who actually knows how to use AI.
Read the article →Why a $3 Million AI Royal Commission Is Solving the Wrong Problem
Paloma Newton built her pet-longevity startup backwards — a stem cell bank before a single marketing dollar spent, years of science before the first product launch. That same instinct for evidence over hype shapes her sharpest argument yet: most of the anxiety about AI isn't really about the technology. It's about who we've stopped trusting to control it.
Read the article →Their First Startup Got Catfished by Fake Athletes. Their Second One Fixed It With a Phone Camera.
Cordelia King's first company matched footy players with clubs — until she realised players were lying about how good they were, because there was no data to check. The fix required teaching a computer to watch an entire game of sport, and it only worked once they gave up on football completely.
Read the article →The Term Sheet That Died in Lockdown — and the Pivot That Saved the Company Anyway
Eden Shirley had bootstrapped AutoGuru into Australia's biggest car-servicing marketplace. Then, the week international borders shut in March 2020, a signed investment term sheet evaporated. What actually saved the company wasn't the marketplace at all.
Read the article →He Tried to Mine Asteroids. He Ended Up Photographing Spy Satellites Instead.
On a panel about whether founders need to be "damaged" to build something big, Hiranya Jayakody didn't take the bait. He just mentioned, almost offhand, that he grew up through a civil war and the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka — and that surviving it didn't leave him feeling owed anything, just recalibrated about what actually counts as hard.
Read the article →Shaking Up the Snow Globe: Inside Australia's Legal Psychedelic Clinics
In February 2023, Australia became the first country where authorised psychiatrists could legally prescribe MDMA and psilocybin. Dr Michael Winlo, Chief Scientific Officer at Emyria, describes what an actual eight-hour dosing session looks like — and what still stands between this and mainstream medicine.
Read the article →Ideas Are Free. The Pain Is in the Execution.
Taryn Williams started a modelling agency at 21 with $30,000 and no roadmap, and has built and exited six companies since. The part she's only recently started saying out loud: two relationships that didn't survive the businesses, a heart-rate variability she calls "absolutely shot," and the realisation that enough never actually feels like enough.
Read the article →He Left School at 16 to Clean Toilets in the Outback. Now He's Trying to Keep AI Honest.
Dr Simon Longstaff left school at sixteen, cleaned toilets on a remote Gulf of Carpentaria island, drove ambulances, and was adopted into an Aboriginal clan before becoming one of Australia's most respected moral philosophers. His argument for governing AI borrows a single sentence from everyday life: the fact that you can do something does not mean that you should.
Read the article →She Ran a $20 Million Student Union at 23. Then a Friend Called Her Work "The Trinkets."
Kirstin Hunter co-founded Australia's first fossil-fuel-free super fund, then walked away from it when her co-founders chose growth through acquisition over the mission she'd joined for. Now she runs Birchal, betting that ordinary people funding ordinary founders is a better filter than the VCs who still put 98% of their money into teams with at least one man.
Read the article →The App That Shuts Off the Moment You Look Away
Chris Fresle dropped out in year nine, spent his teenage years in trouble, and had zero technical background. At twenty, one news segment convinced him to spend years and a six-country patent building an app that uses facial recognition to make sharing someone's intimate photo without consent almost impossible.
Read the article →She Sold Her AI Company at 2PM. By 7PM She Was Drinking Ayahuasca.
Dr Catriona Wallace went from NSW police officer to founding one of the world's first enterprise AI companies, took it public on the ASX as one of the only woman CEO/chair pairs in the exchange's history, then watched Amazon and Google give away her product for free. The same afternoon she finally closed the sale, she drove to her first ayahuasca ceremony.
Read the article →He Raised $40 Million, Then Shut It Down. Twice.
Darius Monsef has sold two companies and raised more than $40 million for a paediatric healthcare startup that treated 50,000 sick kids — then watched it collapse under U.S. insurance billing codes. His theory of why founders fail isn't the market. It's that nobody lies to a founder as effectively as the founder does.
Read the article →She Made a Fake Nude of Herself in Under Five Minutes. Then She Held It Up in Parliament.
New Zealand MP Laura McClure Googled "deepfake nude," found a site that needed no login, and had ten convincing fakes of her own face within minutes. She used them to force a vote nobody in Parliament wanted to have.
Read the article →She Raised $4 Million in Four Weeks. Then Her Own Board Locked Her Out.
Yas Grigaliunas built the circular economy in Australia before the term existed — a charity garage sale that grew into a $4 million capital raise. Then, in the middle of her divorce, the company she founded barred her from her own office for nine months. This is what she learned about power, trust, and building back.
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