Damien Mahoney from Stackla Welcome to Day One

Hi, and welcome to day one, the podcast for regional startups and the organisations that support Australian entrepreneurship. Welcome to day one is brought to you by the city of Newcastle and Newihub. Newihub is a growing and vibrant community of Newcastle's startups & founders. It's a central hub where you can learn about what's going on in our ecosystem, with events, available jobs and other resources. I'll tell you more about Newihub later in the episode, but for now, let’s jump into the story of Damien Mahoney.

Today, Stackla is a global company with dozens of employees and offices in the US and UK. Many of their clients are household names: Macdonalds, Nintendo, Toyota, and Sony just to name a few. But the growth of the company has not always been smooth sailing, and in recent years they've weathered two major storms: the pandemic, which all but wiped out many of their key clients, and a legal battle with Facebook which required Damien to make an incredibly difficult decision to keep the company afloat.

But before we hear about how Stackla has been able to emerge from multiple catastrophes, first we need to go back to day one, and hear the story of how a part-time job in radio that was too good to pass up would ultimately lead Damien to become the CEO of a global technology startup.