What advice do experienced Australian founders give first-time founders?

“So I would say to them, do it. It's a great journey and you will get so much experience out of all the jobs I've had, and I've had a few in my life. The job I learned the most from was running my own business and running my startup. It set me up in a career that— thought I would be running a government agency, but here I am and loving it. But a lot of what I do was learned at the wheels of leading a startup. So I think it's a great experience. I'd also say make sure you get as much help as you can early on to set your business up as well as you can. And that means having the right team around you. It means having the right investors around you, having the right mentors around you and making sure that you really are getting top-quality advice. I certainly wish I had better advice in the very early days, because in my startup, I made decisions that, in hindsight, put some writing on the wall that would have meant we could have had a very different future had we played our cards differently. And they were simple mistakes, getting the wrong investors very early in the business and, and structuring the business from an investment perspective. Mm-hmm. In not the soundest way was a key mistake I made. I've certainly seen founders have challenges with co-founders and not having agreements in place on how they manage those challenges. Making sure that you are getting great advice from people that really understand how to grow a business, not great advice from business leaders who often don't have an experience at working at a tiny company. They've got fantastic business experience with huge amounts of HR support and finance support and team and all the rest of it behind very large corporate structures. So, you know, get the right advice. Advice at the right time from the right people is really critical.”

“Yeah, absolutely agree there. A hard yes from me. So let's finish up with the advice question. So if a new wannabe founder entrepreneur comes to you, what's the most important piece of advice that you'd wanna make sure you give every single person that you meet the first time you meet them that might help to help increase their chances of success?”