Show Notes
There are people who think about culture. And then there's Didier Elzinga. Fifteen years running CultureAmp. 7,000 organisations. A front-row seat to how culture forms and fractures - the writedowns, the departures, the hard conversations that don't make it into announcements. During this episode, Didier draws on Buddhist philosophy, Buckminster Fuller, spiral dynamics, Brené Brown and more. Not as decorations but as working tools for a CEO who has spent two decades in the room when things go wrong and when they go right. He knows the difference between organisations that are succeeding and ones that are performing success. That's the vantage point he brings to AI. Not the model specs or the market positioning. The human question: what happens to culture, identity, and the way we work together when the tools change this fast? Who holds the values of an organisation when part of its team isn't human? And does context - the real context, the stuff that lives in a company's bones - survive the remaking? He also has a question he's been considering that has nothing to do with AI. The one every founder eventually faces, usually alone. When your identity and your company have been the same thing for twenty years - who are you when that changes? Kate sits down with Didier to go there. On culture, on AI, on what a leader owes the people who follow them. And on what, exactly, is worth protecting.
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Dr Eamonn Colley and Dr John Carroll met as PhD researchers more than a decade ago. Together they focused on understanding how blood moves through the body, and how tracking changes in vasculature could help predict, and potentially prevent, heart attacks and strokes. Today, they are co-founders and co-CEOs of Vexev, a Sydney medtech startup whose medical device scans the blood vessels of the arm in 3D. In 2024, when Vexev locked in a clinical trial for their device in San Antonio, the device wasn’t yet ready, but with a dwindling runway the date couldn’t be shifted. What followed was a race to get their device ready, through safety checks, and shipped to the US with the Vexev team in tow. They made key updates to the device’s algorithm just days before the start of the trial. Once the trial started, the hardware and software were locked, so there was no going back. In this conversation with Kate Glazebrook, Eamonn and John tell the story of an overnight drive to Melbourne to make a last minute safety check, why they wrang a sumo wrestling club asking for help, how the pair approach their co-CEO working relationship, and plenty more.
Could Australia build a frontier AI model to rival OpenAI or Anthropic? If it’s a competition of scale and raw compute, certainly not any time soon. But two Australian founders think there’s another angle: smaller, specialised models built to be the best at a specific thing. Pip Bingemann co-founded Springboards, an AI platform for advertising and marketing teams that is optimised for creativity and novelty. Jesse Clark founded Celeris, which is focused on speed: LLMs that can respond in milliseconds, with utility in use cases that benefit from real-time responsiveness. Both companies started by building applications then went on to train their own AI models, and both leverage advancements in open-source AI technologies. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, described the AI industry as a five-layer cake, with raw energy at the bottom, and AI models and applications at the top. Both of the founders in this episode are vying for a bigger slice of that AI cake, and if Australia is able to successfully compete at those top levels, the potential upside is huge. Tom Humphrey, Partner at Blackbird, is the guest host for this episode, and speaks with Pip and Jesse about what it takes to actually train an AI model, how open-source and open-weight models are changing the AI landscape, and why Australia developing its own AI models could be important for national security. Springboards: https://springboards.ai Celeris: https://celeris.ai
Dilani Kahawala has three kids, a partner with a busy job in tech, and a startup to run. At the dinner table, with twenty minutes to get the kids fed, all too often she’d be thinking about what goes in tomorrow’s lunchboxes and planning logistics for the week ahead, rather than simply being present with her kids. That’s the mental load that Anna, the AI assistant for parents, was designed to carry. Dilani path to co-founding a startup was a winding one. She got a PhD in theoretical physics, before deciding physics and academia moved too slowly for her tastes. Following a stint at McKinsey, and working product roles at Etsy, Meta and Atlassian, she co-founded a company and developed Braid, an AI powered tool designed to help software teams with project management. After deciding Braid didn’t have product market fit, the team went through a period of rapid exploration, experimenting with eight or nine different product ideas in a five month period. After gaining strong early traction, Anna was the idea that stuck. In this episode, Kate Glazebrook sits down with Dilani about the decision to move away from using frontier models in favour of open source AI models, how the Anna team internally leverage AI agents “up the wazoo”, the surprising fact that most of their users eschew the Anna app in favour of communicating with Anna directly in messaging apps, and why Dilani isn't too worried about OpenAI launching a parent product.
As a cardiac surgery trainee in Sydney, David Bell saw how much a stroke patient’s chances of recovery depended on their postcode. If they lived in Sydney and got treatment quickly, their chances of recovery could be 75-80%. But in much of the developing world where treatment options were often far more limited, it could be as low as 10%. Today, David is cofounder and CEO of Remedy Robotics, a startup with the goal of making endovascular surgery – the catheter-based treatment for strokes like these – available to anyone who needs it, wherever they live. The need is enormous: stroke is the world's second leading cause of death and a leading cause of disability, and every hour of delay makes it less likely a patient will live independently again. Yet only about 3% of the world has access to the kind of care that lets patients not just survive a stroke, but get back to something like normal life. Remedy Robotics have built a robot that is designed to be operated by a surgeon remotely. The aim is that a specialist in Sydney could one day treat a stroke patient in Suva. Remedy has already run the first fully robotic endovascular procedure in a human, as well as procedures on four patients fully remotely, in Toronto. In this episode, Kate Glazebrook sits down with David to talk about his experience going from surgeon to startup founder, the nuanced details about how hospitals decide which technology to invest in, how remaining in stealth caused Remedy Robotics some challenges when it came to recruiting talent early on, and plenty more.
Once a technology gets good enough, the only real ceiling left is what you can imagine for it. Satya Tammareddy and Rowena Westphalen watch OpenAI's models improve week by week, and work closely with organisations implementing AI across multiple industries. In their view, the hard part isn't the limits of the tools. It's the pace. Even people working at the frontier can't quite get their bearings before the next model lands. No wonder everyone else feels like they're chasing something that keeps moving. The upside, they'd argue, makes the vertigo worth it. If you can dream it, you can probably build it now. Satya leads OpenAI's go-to-market across Australia and New Zealand. Rowena leads Applied AI Architecture, whose forward deployed engineers build inside a customer's business rather than handing over a finished product. From moving beyond traditional software implementations to embedding forward-deployed engineers directly inside teams, Rowena and Satya share front-line insights from working alongside some of Australia and New Zealand’s most ambitious organisations. Whether you are a founder scaling internal tools or an executive rethinking your company's core value chain, this conversation offers a practical roadmap for navigating the pace of modern AI development.