Vantage Point: Driving Success in the Australian Market

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Welcome to "Vantage Point," the podcast where we engage in enlightening conversations with influential business executives who have achieved remarkable success in their respective fields. Join us as we gain unique insights and perspectives from these accomplished leaders, exploring the secrets behind their achievements and uncovering the valuable lessons they've learned along the way. In each episode of "Vantage Point," we sit down with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who have made a significant impact in the business world. Through thought-provoking discussions.

  1. Oct 5

    Saluda Medical's Fight for a Slice of a Multi-Billion Dollar Pain Market

    Saluda Medical Inc's (ASX: SLD) Chief Financial Officer Jim Erickson sat down with the host of Vantage Point Podcast Simon Hinsley to discuss the technology behind Evoke®, Saluda's closed-loop spinal cord stimulation system, and the commercial strategy driving the company's growth in the US$2.2 billion chronic pain device market. Jim explains how Evoke® differs from legacy spinal cord stimulation, which delivers a fixed dose of energy that becomes inconsistent as patients move through daily life, by measuring the nerve's actual response to stimulation and adjusting the therapy fifty times a second. He details how that closed-loop approach addresses the industry's two biggest long-standing problems: durability of relief and high explant rates, pointing to Saluda's three-year randomised controlled trial, which recorded zero explants due to loss of efficacy, and real-world data from a 140-patient study that mirrored those trial results. The conversation turns to the recent leadership transition, with Chief Commercial Officer Mark Matthias stepping up to CEO, and the sales strategy the two of them built together to scale Saluda's US commercial footprint, growing from roughly 55 fully trained reps in FY25 to 161 by the end of FY26, on the way to US$90 million in global revenue. Jim also unpacks Saluda's newly FDA-approved paddle lead, the first sensing-enabled paddle on the market, which opens up a further third of the total addressable market that was previously inaccessible to the company's existing sales force. It's a candid look at the economics of scaling a med-tech sales organisation, the shift in focus from headcount growth to territory-level profitability, and what Saluda needs to prove next to close the gap with the market's largest incumbents. #VantagePoint #SaludaMedical #ASX #ChronicPain #SLD

  2. Sep 29

    The human layer: Appen's critical role in the AI ecosystem

    Appen (ASX: APX) Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Ryan Kolln sat down with host Simon Hinsley to discuss the 30-year journey to becoming a critical data supplier to a diverse set of customers globally, including the world's leading AI labs in both the US and China.#VantagePoint #Appen #ASX #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #APX

  3. Sep 14

    Beyond the subtitles: AI-Media's AI-native transformation

    AI-Media Technologies Ltd (ASX: AIM) Co-Founder, Director and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Abrahams sat down with the host of Vantage Point Podcast Simon Hinsley to discuss the 23-year journey from a captioning start-up for Foxtel to a global, AI-native broadcast technology business.   Tony walks through the pivotal 2021 acquisition of US based EEG, the maker of captioning encoders that sit at the very last point of the broadcast signal before it goes to air and why owning that hardware turned out to be the key strategic asset behind everything that followed.   Tony details the company's 2025 shift to being fully AI-native, retiring its last human live captioner and replacing legacy revenue with a growing suite of LEXI products, including LEXI Voice, which live-dubs broadcast content into other languages. Tony shares real examples in action, including a Taiwanese broadcaster needing live Mandarin translation of Donald Trump.   It's a candid conversation about surviving early cash flow scares, scaling without returning to the market for capital, and what needs to happen next to grow the company across EMEA, APAC, government, and enterprise.

  4. Sep 8

    Undervalued and underrated: Calix's case for a re-rate

    Calix's (ASX: CXL) Managing Director and CEO Phil Hodgson returns to the Vantage Point Podcast with host Simon Hinsley to discuss the company's journey from a 53-cent IPO to a peak valuation north of $1 billion, and the sharp reset that's followed as clean tech sentiment has cooled. Phil is candid about the lessons learned, including why Calix should have pivoted to a leaner, lower-cost model a full year earlier than it did.   Phil unpacks the quiet turnaround underway in the water treatment business, where the US magnesium hydroxide operation has scaled from just $300,000 to $3.8 million in EBITDA by hitting critical mass, and why Calix believes it's still only scratching the surface of that market. He also details the progress of zesty, Calix's hydrogen-based iron-making technology, walking through how the core kiln technology works, why Rio Tinto backed it after its own in-house solution stalled, and what's left to solve, including the ARENA grant funding and a newly announced hydrogen supply partnership, before the Kwinana project can move to a final investment decision.   It's a frank conversation about resetting a business after riding a boom-bust cycle, why Phil believes the market is undervaluing Calix's big-name industrial partnerships (Rio Tinto, Adani, Heidelberg) by treating the stock purely as a clean tech proxy, and what needs to happen for that to change.   #VantagePoint #Calix #Decarbonisation #CleanTech #ASX

  5. Aug 4

    "10% of Victoria's Gas for 20 Years": Lakes Blue Energy on the Wombat-5 Discovery

    Lakes Blue Energy has had an eventful 12 months since its last appearance on Vantage Point Podcast, moving from relisting on the ASX to drilling its first 1.5km horizontal well, Wombat-5, in Gippsland, Victoria.  On this episode of Vantage Point Podcast, we are re-joined with CEO Richard Ash, alongside newly appointed Senior Technical Advisor and General Manager Mike McGowan and Reservoir Engineer John Mackintosh to unpack the story of Lakes Blue Energy over the last 12 months. We discuss the Wombat-5 well, which confirmed 237 metres of gas-bearing sands across three separate zones, but also encountered formation damage from drilling fluids reacting with clays in the reservoir, delaying the path to a commercial flow result. The team discusses the remediation program now underway to fix it,  including re-establishing fluid compatibility, then perforating the well using propellant-assisted technology to drive deeper into the formation and reconnect the wellbore to the reservoir. Richard also outlines the scale of the opportunity: a 2C contingent resource of around 329 Bcf, enough to supply roughly 10% of Victoria's gas needs for the next 20 years, along with early-stage discussions around powering data centre demand given the field's proximity to existing pipeline infrastructure. Testing is planned for late August/early September, subject to regulatory approval, with results expected to be communicated by around November. A grounded, technical conversation on what it takes to turn a gas discovery into a commercial outcome, and why the team believes the risk profile has improved materially since drilling began.

  6. Jul 23

    Round Two: From Empired’s Takeover to Monvia’s IPO

    Life insurance is one of the last corners of financial services still running on decades-old technology, and the businesses trying to modernise it are usually competing not against rivals, but against the internal IT teams of the insurers themselves. Listing at 12pm today, we sit down with Board Chairman Russell Baskerville and CEO Simon Bright of Monvia (ASX: MNV), a SaaS platform built to help large life insurers modernise the end-to-end client experience, from new business and policy administration through to claims. The pair previously worked together at Empire, and have reunited to take Monvia to market, with the board and management now owning around 40% of the stock post-IPO. Russell and Simon walk us through the 30-year history of the business, why a five-year-old cloud-native platform gives them a head start most competitors don't have, and how one long-standing client has grown at a 66% CAGR in its retail insurance book since adopting the software. They also cover the enterprise licensing model behind the business, plans to expand into Southeast Asia, how they're building AI into both their own operations and the platform itself, and what "success" looks like three years from now.

  7. Jul 2

    Flying under the radar: Orbital’s quiet rise in engines powering drones

    Orbital’s CEO Stephen and CFO Mark join us to talk through how the business has repositioned itself over the past two years. They unpack Orbital's proprietary dual fuel injection technology, which allows its two-stroke engines to run cleanly on heavy fuel at altitude, something competitors coming from gasoline and hobby engines still struggle with, and why that translates into market-leading time between overhauls and a lower cost of ownership for operators. Stephen and Mark walk us through Orbital's three go-to-market models, from the historical partnership program built around tier-one military customers, to the emerging "power by the hour" model, where drone operators lease engines rather than buy them outright. We also get into the commercial opportunities now opening up in pipeline and infrastructure surveying, logistics, and agriculture, and why the company is targeting a more even split between defence and commercial revenue in the years ahead. It's a candid conversation about diversifying away from customer and product concentration, overcoming a reputation for being expensive, and what's actually changing in the broader drone propulsion market. #VantagePoint #Orbital #UAV #Drones #Defence

  8. Jun 25

    11x in 12 months and “We’re just getting started” | Yoav Amitai, CEO, Elsight

    Elsight (ASX: ELS) is the connectivity layer powering the world’s drones and unmanned systems, and the company’s transformation over the past 12 months has been one of the most compelling operational stories on the ASX. We sat down with Yoav Amitai, CEO of Elsight, who joined the company as an operations manager in 2017 and has since built it into a global defence technology business with a rapidly growing revenue base and real free cash flow generation. In this conversation, Yoav breaks down what Elsight actually does and why it’s fundamentally different to DroneShield and EOS, the Halo product and the critical distinction between concurrent connectivity and failover, and how the business went from 5% defence revenue to 90% in just a few years. He also addresses the bear case on customer concentration, explains what being trusted by US Special Operations Command means for future growth, and shares his view on when the commercial drone market will finally hit its inflection point. For investors watching the ASX defence and drone technology space, this is essential listening.

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About

Welcome to "Vantage Point," the podcast where we engage in enlightening conversations with influential business executives who have achieved remarkable success in their respective fields. Join us as we gain unique insights and perspectives from these accomplished leaders, exploring the secrets behind their achievements and uncovering the valuable lessons they've learned along the way. In each episode of "Vantage Point," we sit down with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who have made a significant impact in the business world. Through thought-provoking discussions.

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