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  1. How to Build a Side Project That Goes Global Before You Graduate with Anna and Viv from Toastie

    3D AGO

    How to Build a Side Project That Goes Global Before You Graduate with Anna and Viv from Toastie

    Episode SummaryAnna Zhou and Vivian Shen, the co-founders of Toastie, join Georgie Healy for one of the warmest and most personal conversations the show has had. Two software engineers at Google by day, they have quietly built one of the most thoughtful health tracking apps in the world by night, all without spending a single dollar on marketing. Toastie was born from a problem they were both living. Anna was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and handed a few photocopied sheets to figure out the rest of her life from. Viv has been managing PCOS for years, experimenting with medications and diets on her own. They realised the tools available simply were not built for people like them, so they built one themselves. Today Toastie helps users track symptoms, food, body signals, lab reports and scans, surfacing the patterns and irregularities that would otherwise go unnoticed. In this episode they unpack why almost one in two Australians live with a chronic illness but no one talks about it, why slapping AI on everything is the wrong instinct and how they decide which features actually need it, and the cold LinkedIn email that landed them their first global partnership before they even had a product. They also share why ChatGPT and Gemini are not enough when the stakes are this high, what their users actually write to them in the feedback form, and the story of the user who quietly security audited their app and was so impressed they wrote in to tell them. Plus the early hackathon they won by faking the backend in real time, why they call themselves boomers when it comes to social media, the worst startup advice they have ever received, and a special offer just for In The Blink of AI listeners. 🎁 Use promo code ITBOA2026 to get a 90 day free trial of Toastie 🍞 Find your Toastie personality: https://toastie.au/quiz Time Stamps00:00 Intro 02:20 AI Hacks and Life at Google Sydney 07:00 How They Met and Their Hackathon Wins 10:51 What is Toastie and Why It Matters 13:50 The Personal Stories Behind the Product 16:23 How They Use AI (And Where They Don't) 17:37 The Cold Email That Landed a Global Partnership 20:00 Why General AI Models Aren't Enough 23:25 Building, Prioritising and the Competition 25:13 Why They Refuse to Call Themselves an AI Company 27:57 Trust, Security and User Feedback 30:00 Going Viral With Zero Marketing Spend 33:33 Handling AI Hate Online 35:43 Rapid Fire and What's Next 38:45 Special Offer for Listeners In the Blink of AI is made possible by our wonderful partnersDeelFounders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders. It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone ✨ Connect with Georgie HealyWeekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/ The Day One NetworkIn The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors. Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter Mentioned in this episode: Deel x PX_Post Intro

    41 min
  2. Closing the Gender Investment Gap with Data with Noga Edelstein

    6D AGO

    Closing the Gender Investment Gap with Data with Noga Edelstein

    Episode SummaryNoga Edelstein is the lead of the Equity Clear initiative, a not-for-profit effort to get Australian investors tracking pipeline diversity data with a common standard. She's also a former General Counsel at Yahoo, a multi-time founder, and has had her fingerprints across the Australian startup ecosystem for over a decade. In this episode, Cheryl and Maxine unpack why pre-seed funding to women is at its lowest level ever and how Equity Clear is building the data infrastructure to finally see where diverse founders are falling out of the pipeline. Noga shares what the UK's five-year head start has revealed, including that angel groups with at least 15% women invest in 10X the number of women-led companies, and why the mere act of tracking your own pipeline drives better outcomes. You'll also hear how a broken website form accidentally proved that women disproportionately use cold inbound to reach investors, why male founders and LPs should be asking their investors about diversity tracking, and what sport can teach us about leveling the playing field through systemic tweaks like funded childcare for founders. Noga closes with her Big Cojones moment: quitting her General Counsel role at Yahoo with a newborn to go all in on a startup. Time Stamps00:00 Intro 02:27 – Noga's first investment: dollar-mite savings accounts in primary school 10:02 – What is Equity Clear and why pipeline data is the missing piece 14:40 – Why closing the gender gap matters now: productivity, economics, and AI bias 19:27 – Pre-seed funding to women is at its lowest ever despite lower barriers to building 24:44 – Why collecting diversity data feels hard but isn't 28:32 – Lessons from the UK: what five years of tracking has revealed 32:02 – Maxine's accidental experiment: when a broken form hid all the women founders 37:39 – How male founders and LPs can push for change by asking simple questions 48:16 – Why funds are missing a trick on sourcing diverse founders 51:32 – Breaking the archetype: leveling the playing field with systemic tweaks 57:15 – Big Cojones moment: quitting law with a newborn to start a company First Cheque is part of Day One.Day One helps founders and startup operators make better business decisions more often. To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new First Cheque episodes and upcoming shows. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

    1 hr
  3. The New Rules of Design (with Andrew Hogan | Head of Insight at Figma)

    APR 30

    The New Rules of Design (with Andrew Hogan | Head of Insight at Figma)

    "Code is getting cheaper. Which means taste is getting more expensive." That one idea from Andrew Hogan reframes everything people think they know about competing in AI right now. Andrew, Head of Insights at Figma, joins Georgie to make the case that features are no longer a moat, and that the companies quietly investing in how their product feels are the ones building something that's actually hard to copy. In this episode they get into why 56% of non-designers are already doing design work, why the job title "designer" isn't going anywhere, and why anyone who's still treating design as a finish-line coat of paint is going to get lapped. They also unpack what agent management platforms actually need to get right, why design matters even more when kids are the users, and what GeoCities taught us about creative ownership that most product teams have completely forgotten. Plus: the prompting-together technique that turns prototyping into a team sport, why "no tech at all" is unnecessarily painful for parents, Andrew's verdict on Australian coffee, and why the golden era of the side project might be the most important shift nobody's naming loudly enough. ✨ Connect with Georgie HealyWeekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/ The Day One NetworkIn The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors. Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

    44 min
  4. How Dam Secure Puts Guardrails on AI Generated Code

    APR 29

    How Dam Secure Puts Guardrails on AI Generated Code

    Episode SummaryVibe coding is here and most organisations are nowhere near ready for what it means for security. In this episode of Secured, Cole Cornford sits down with Patrick Collins and Simon Harloff, founders of Dam Secure, to unpack how AI is reshaping software development and why the old AppSec playbook is not keeping up. They cover the shift from artisanal to factory model engineering, why skills and agents.md files are less reliable than people think, and why the SaaSpocalypse narrative is mostly a distraction from the work that actually matters. Patrick and Simon also walk through how Dam Secure enforces organisational security rules at plan time, before a single line of AI generated code gets written. Timestamps00:00 Trailer 01:01 Chainguard ad 01:28 Meet Patrick Collins and Simon Harloff from Dam Secure 03:00 Why existing AppSec tooling never worked for developers 05:30 The artisanal vs factory model of software development 08:30 Hacker News, polarisation and the AI sentiment shift 11:00 Agile, standups and processes that no longer make sense 14:00 Bigger PRs, higher velocity and workflows without an IDE 17:00 Skills, agents.md and the limits of deterministic guardrails 20:00 The AppSec to developer ratio problem 23:00 The SaaSpocalypse and why rebuilding tools is a side quest 27:00 React, digital certificates and security through business incentives 30:00 How Dam Secure works: secure spec and plan time enforcement 34:00 Vibe coders, Lovable and the risk beyond professional developers 36:00 Where to find Dam Secure and closing remarks 🐙 Secured is grateful to be sponsored and supported by Chainguard. Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. Get hardened, secure, production-ready builds so your team can ship faster, stay compliant, and reduce risk. Download your free CVE Reduction Assessment at https://dayone.fm/chainguard Secured is part of Day One.Day One helps founders and startup operators make better business decisions more often. To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new First Cheque episodes and upcoming shows. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

    38 min
  5. From Police Officer to AI Pioneer to Psychedelics: Dr. Catriona Wallace’s Unfiltered Story (Part One)

    APR 29

    From Police Officer to AI Pioneer to Psychedelics: Dr. Catriona Wallace’s Unfiltered Story (Part One)

    Win $2,000 in credits with the Day One Network — take our 2-minute audience survey before 30 June: dayone.fm/survey From policing the streets of Sydney’s King’s Cross to founding one of the world's first enterprise AI companies, Dr. Catriona Wallace has navigated a career arc that defies convention. As one of the few women globally to list an AI company on the ASX, she scaled Flamingo AI to New York and back, all while raising five children and operating on a frontier that barely had a name. But behind the milestone of a $20M capital raise and the adrenaline of the public markets lay a deeper story of personal cost, identity, and the "sacred wounds" that fuel high-performance leadership. In this deep-dive episode of Perspective X, Dr. Cat shares her unfiltered story of transition: from the corruption and shadow-side of law enforcement to the high-pressure world of venture capital, and eventually, to the jungles of Peru. We explore the "hard thing about hard things," the brutal reality of having your product commoditised by tech giants, and why she chose to sit with ayahuasca the same day she exited her company. This isn't just a talk about technology; it’s a masterclass in the human operating system. We dive into why AI poses a 1-in-10 existential risk, the intersection of ancient ritual and modern innovation, and why Dr. Cat believes the next generation of leaders must undergo a "rapid transformation" of consciousness to ensure humanity isn't left behind by the machines we’ve built.

    1h 4m
  6. Why Investors Keep Saying No (And What to Do About It) | Justin Wastnage from Vloggi

    APR 28

    Why Investors Keep Saying No (And What to Do About It) | Justin Wastnage from Vloggi

    Win $2,000 in credits with the Day One Network — take our 2-minute audience survey before 30 June: dayone.fm/survey Justin Wastnage is the founder and CEO of Vloggi, a platform that transforms everyday mobile phone footage into trusted, structured, legally owned video assets for businesses and enterprises. What started as a tool for tourism boards to crowdsource location content has evolved, through COVID, multiple pivots, and years of customer-funded development, into an infrastructure layer that verifies, structures and processes video for some of the world's most compliance-heavy industries. In this episode, Justin joins Alan to talk honestly about the challenges of pitching a business that investors think they already know. Vloggi has worked with Major League Baseball, Netflix, the NSW Government, Google Ads and RFK's presidential campaign, yet raising in Australia remains stubbornly difficult. Alan digs into why that is and what Justin can do about it, from repositioning the pitch, to rebranding, to putting someone else in the room. If you're a founder who has pivoted hard but can't shake what investors remember about your old story, this one is for you. 00:00 - Intro 02:03 – Meet Justin Wastnage and the origins of Vloggi 04:57 – What Vloggi does: video as content, data and evidence 07:11 – What changed with synthetic AI video and why it matters now 09:00 – The pivot story: from tourism boards to enterprise compliance 12:35 – Bootstrapping and the team behind Vloggi 13:03 – The current raise: $800k to bring the enterprise product to market 17:03 – How Vloggi verifies that uploaded video is authentic, not AI-generated 19:33 – Commercial model: per project vs ongoing enterprise licensing 22:31 – Why Vloggi wants to be infrastructure, not a consumer brand 24:48 – Alan's challenge: how to reposition when investors think they know your old story 29:08 – Should you rebrand? The case for and against 32:26 – Pitch deck strategy: teaser first or full deck upfront? 35:23 – Alan pitches Vloggi back to Justin the way he'd do it 38:51 – The airline use case and how to open with one vertical then go broad Sponsors:Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsors:Galah Cyber offers the Foundations of Application Security course: a practical, hands-on AppSec course built for engineers who actually ship code. Two days of real-world lessons you can apply immediately. Learn more at galahcyber.com.au/learn. Sponsors:Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsors:Galah Cyber offers the Foundations of Application Security course: a practical, hands-on AppSec course built for engineers who actually ship code. Two days of real-world lessons you can apply immediately. Learn more at galahcyber.com.au/learn.

    42 min
  7. How Springboards Built an AI Model That Actually Thinks Differently

    APR 23

    How Springboards Built an AI Model That Actually Thinks Differently

    Win $2,000 in credits with the Day One Network — take our 2-minute audience survey before 30 June: dayone.fm/survey "Shit at the speed of light is still shit." That one line from Pip captures the entire philosophy behind Springboards, the AI company he co-founded with Amy and Kieran that is quietly pushing back against what the rest of the industry is doing. The three of them join Georgie Healy for one of the most thought-provoking conversations the show has had about what AI is quietly doing to creativity, and what it takes to build a model that breaks the mould. Pip and Amy never planned to start an AI company. Both worked in advertising and got laid off within three weeks of each other, which led them to accidentally build the first version of Springboards themselves to solve a problem they kept running into: existing AI tools were not helping them do creative work better, they were making everyone's creative work look the same. Kieran joined as their technical co-founder and together they have now released Flint, a divergence model designed to break the AI hive mind. In this episode they unpack why 69 out of 70 language models will tell you that time is a river, why mainstream AI has converged into one gray mush of sameness, and why the scariest part of this might be that most people will not even notice. They also get into how they built Flint to score 7.5 on novelty bench when the frontier models score ones and twos, why the smallest possible model was always the goal, and why they deliberately avoid making the tool feel too polished. Plus why humans are evolutionarily lazy and what that means for our brains in the AI era, the unexpected analogy about sourdough and alcohol that changes how you think about creativity, and the honest reflection from all three founders on being the self-loathing AI company in a space full of hype. 00:00 — Intro 02:22 — Introducing Flint and the convergence problem in AI models 04:50 — Why Springboards is uniquely positioned to solve creative AI 07:30 — What entropy actually means in language models 09:44 — Real examples: random cars, pizza toppings, and where to holiday 12:36 — Why this matters for the advertising industry (and everyone else) 15:29 — Inside Flint: how to fine-tune a model for divergence 18:38 — Doubling the score on Novelty Bench (and what that even means) 23:35 — Try Flint yourself: who it's for and how to access it 26:10 — Cognitive atrophy, taste, and keeping humans in the creative loop 35:04 — Choosing a tech provider as an early-stage AI startup 38:20 — What actually matters for founders in the sasspocalypse era 41:12 — Rapid fire: copyright, cover shoots, Eumundi markets, and self-loathing AI ✨ Connect with Georgie HealyWeekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/ The Day One NetworkIn The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors. Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

    49 min
  8. How to Pick Winners in Markets You Don't Live In

    APR 19

    How to Pick Winners in Markets You Don't Live In

    Win $2,000 in credits with the Day One Network — take our 2-minute audience survey before 30 June: dayone.fm/survey Episode SummaryElizabeth Yin is the co-founder and General Partner of Hustle Fund, a pre-seed venture fund now on its fourth fund that backs companies globally. Before Hustle Fund, she was a partner at 500 Global, founded adtech company LaunchBit, and was an early employee at Google. In this episode, Cheryl and Maxine unpack how Hustle Fund sources deals across continents, why Elizabeth avoids noisy competitive markets in favor of "small waves" that will swell over five years, and why valuation discipline matters more than founder pedigree when product-market fit risk is the same at every stage. You'll also hear how Hustle Fund runs a 30-person team with only four on investments, why Fund 2 was the hardest fund to raise, how the AI wave is creating companies that hit $10M ARR and lose it overnight, and why international valuations still offer significant arbitrage. Elizabeth closes with her Big Cojones moment: being called a "meek Asian woman" by an angel investor while pitching LaunchBit, and how building a platform changed the power dynamic entirely. Time Stamps00:00 – Intro 01:54 - Elizabeth's first investment: three shares of Coca-Cola at age 10 06:50 – What Hustle Fund is investing in now and why vertical SaaS still matters in the AI era 09:31 – How Hustle Fund sources deals globally through co-investors and content 15:09 – Elizabeth's two-part framework: founder quality vs. idea quality 18:10 – Why competitive markets are a double whammy for small-check investors 22:57 – The surfing analogy: spotting small waves that grow big in five years 25:06 – Biggest investing lessons from Fund 1 to Fund 4: valuation and follow-on discipline 27:58 – Camp Hustle, content marketing, and running VC like a lead generation business 30:09 – Does valuation really matter at pre-seed? When it does and when it doesn't 37:39 – Growing AUM: why Fund 2 was the hardest and the "event ticket sales" fundraising pattern 44:15 – Which fund graduation was hardest and the DPI reality at pre-seed 46:21 – Big Cojones moment: confronting bias as a female founder and how platform changes power dynamics This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

    51 min

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