Upcoming Events

You had the perfect point in that meeting. Then the moment passed. And someone else said it. Sound familiar? Confidence isn’t something you wait to feel. It’s something you decide. And the rest is a skill you can practise.

Public Speaking Workshop with Desmond John is a practical, no-cringe workshop to help you speak with confidence, whether it's a pitch, a meeting or a room full of strangers.

Ever had something to say and kept it to yourself because speaking up felt like too much?

This is a hands-on workshop for founders, operators and anyone who wants to communicate with more clarity and confidence. No stage fright lectures, no jargon. Just a simple framework you can use straight away.

What we'll cover:

• Confidence: why it's a decision, not a feeling
• Content: how to shape what you say using Problem, Insight, Action
• Delivery: slowing down and using pauses on purpose

What you'll do:

You won't just sit and listen. You'll jump into live practice rounds in pairs, give a 60-second talk and get friendly feedback from a partner. Everyone's in the same boat, so it's a safe place to try things out. We'll finish with a bit of time to mingle with the CDH community.

Who it's for:

Founders, freelancers, team leads, students and anyone with a pitch, presentation or opinion they'd like to get across with more ease.

Your host:

Des runs Vibe Guide Ventures and has spent about 10 years guiding tours, hosting startup events and managing speakers at conferences. He's helped plenty of people find their voice, and he's pretty good at making it fun.

Spots are limited, so grab yours early!

VC is the default story for startups: raise a round, hire fast, raise again. But most businesses that take venture money don't return the fund, and plenty of great companies never raise at all. So should you be raising VC?

​The Venture Debate is the second half of our day. It follows Founder Day, where VCs walk founders through how funds work and what they look for. Once you've heard how venture works from the inside, we ask whether you should take it at all. We're bringing together founders and investors who land on very different sides of that question. Some have raised big rounds and would do it again. Others have built without VC, or have taken it and wished they hadn't. It's part panel, part debate, and nobody's there to agree politely.

​What to expect:

​Joining us on the panel are Hugh Stephens (Galileo Ventures) and Matt Allen (Tractor Ventures), with CDH’s Alan Tsen moderating. Alan will put the big questions to the panel and let them argue it out. When does VC make sense, and when does it quietly break a good business? What do you give up when you take the money? What does the alternative actually look like? Then the floor opens to you, so bring your questions and your own experience.

​Expect strong opinions, real numbers and a few uncomfortable truths about how venture works, from people who've lived both sides of it.

​Schedule:

• ​5:30pm - Doors open, drinks and networking
• ​6:00pm - The Venture Debate, panel discussion followed by audience Q&A.
• ​7:00pm - Drinks and networking
• ​7:30pm · Wrap

​Who should come?

​Founders who've been told they need to raise, and aren't sure they believe it. Anyone who's watched a well-funded startup burn out, or a bootstrapped one quietly win.

​It's a good fit if you're:

• ​A founder deciding whether VC is the right path for your business
• ​Building something profitable and wondering if venture money would help or hurt
• ​An investor who wants to test your thesis against some pushback
• ​An operator or aspiring founder who wants to hear both sides before you pick one

​Spending the day with us? The Venture Debate follows Founder Day, an afternoon on how VC funds actually work, venture debt and campfire chats with investors. Registration for the two events is separate, so register for both if you're coming to the whole day.

​Ask a founder where the business is thin and you get an answer straight away. Finance is held together with a spreadsheet and hope. Hiring is guesswork. The strategy doc has not been opened since the business changed shape.

​A ranked list of weak spots is not a plan. Fix them in the wrong order and the fix does not hold, because half of them are sitting on top of something that has not been built yet. So which of your weak spots is load-bearing for the other three?

​Pick right and the rest get easier. Pick wrong and you spend a quarter on work that needs doing again.

​Join Jane Korneyko and Ian Hunt for an afternoon of laying your own business out as a structure, then working on the part of it your own assessment says to start with.

​Jane works with founders on the fundamentals most skip, and her diagnostic is what tells you which nine elements to look at. Ian has spent more than twenty years on business transformation with over 150 organisations, at board level with global companies and hands-on with entrepreneurial startups. The model they work from gets built up live on a whiteboard, in front of you, rather than shown to you as a finished slide.

​How the workshop runs:

• ​You complete a free diagnostic on your own startup using Jane's assessment tool - Sova (invitations to participants will be sent closer to the date). Jane and Ian review all participants' trends and build a workshop targetted for you.
• ​On the day, Ian builds the business design model live, the same one used with startups and with global companies in Europe, so you watch it assemble instead of receiving it finished
• ​You sketch your own business the same way as it goes up, then map your Sova assessment results onto it, so a weak element shows up in relation to everything holding it
• ​A read of the room, collated and de-identified: which elements the businesses in the room are strongest on and which are hardest for everyone
• ​Tables grouped by assessment result, so every founder at yours is working the same element, with evidence-based tools and templates matched to it
• ​Jane and Ian move between tables while you work, pointing out what is missing while there is still time to change it

​Who should attend?

• ​Founders who want to build out a strong foundation to their startup
• ​Founders who need dedicated time to assess their business
• ​Founders who don't know what to prioritise next
• ​Operators at scaleups who inherited a structure nobody designed on purpose

​Founders at any stage are welcome, from an idea through to a business that is growing and needs to scale.

You know those conversations that just happen? The ones over a beer, a wine or a coffee, where someone says something that sticks with you for days? That’s exactly what we’re trying to bottle with Couch Conversations.

​Couch Conversations brings together a small group of people actively building Victoria’s startup ecosystem to sit down and talk. The conversation starts, goes wherever it goes, and you get to be in the room for it.

​This season, we’re asking a big question: where to next for Victoria’s startup ecosystem? For our next conversation, we’re coming back to it from a different angle: the community view.

​Joining us on the couch is Megan Luttrell from Aussie Founders Club. Megan spends her days close to the founder community, so she’s the perfect person to talk through what’s really changing, what founders need right now, and where she thinks we’re heading together.She’ll be joined by Alan Tsen from CDH.

​This one’s for you if you’ve been wondering:

• ​What all these ecosystem changes actually mean for you as a founder
• ​What the community is really saying behind the headlines
• ​Where the support gaps are, and who’s stepping in to fill them
• ​How you can have a say in what Victoria’s ecosystem looks like next

​So grab a drink, pull up a seat and come join the conversation. We’d love to have you there.

No two VCs work the same way. A pre-seed fund doing dozens of small deals a year wants something different from a Series A fund writing a few large cheques, and a corporate VC often has strategic reasons to invest on top of the financial ones. And this just relates to stage, not even firm idiosyncrasies. Understanding the differences between funds helps founders work out who they're best suited to work with.

​This Founder Day unpacks those differences. The funds in attendance will walk you through what a VC actually does and how fund strategy and incentives shape every decision they make. Then we explore venture debt in session 2. The investors stay for an informal campfire chat to finish the day.

​Stay on for the second part of the day, where we sit down and debate whether you should raise VC at all.

Stay on for the second part of the day, where we sit down and debate whether you should raise VC at all.

Schedule for the day:

• 12:00pm ·Session 1: Inside the Fund Leila Oliveira (Antler), Rebecca Shot-Guppy (Firemark Ventures) and Harry Lamb (Artesian), moderated by Darren Huang (CDH). What a VC actually does, and why. First, how a fund is built, who it answers to, its financial incentives and what a fund's thesis means for founders. Then how that drives behaviour: fund size and stage, portfolio construction and what that means for the deals they chase and the ones they pass on. Audience Q&A to close the session.
• 1:00pm · Lunch and networking
• 2:00pm · Session 2: Debt Before Dilution Shawn Li (OneVentures), moderated by Alan Tsen (CDH). Most founders have only been shown one instrument. This session covers what venture debt is and who writes it in Australia, the revenue profile where debt beats equity and, most importantly, who venture debt is best suited to.
• 3:00pm · Break and Cowork
• 3:30pm · Session 3: Campfire Conversations with VCs We'll close the day with an intimate set of conversations with investors on topics they're passionate about. No stage and no slides, just an open, informal chat. Pull up a chair and ask your questions. The downstairs event space stays open for coworking and networking alongside these sessions.
• 4:30pm · Cowork and Networking
• 5:00pm · Founder Day wraps and a short break before The Venture Debate

Who should come?

Early-stage founders thinking about raising, or wondering whether they should. Anyone who has sent a deck into the void and wants to know what happened to it.

It's a good fit if you're:

• A pre-seed or seed founder getting ready for your first raise and working out which funds suit your stage
• A founder who's had a few VC meetings and wants to understand why they went the way they did
• Weighing up whether VC is right for you at all, or whether venture debt or other funding might fit better
• Thinking about applying to an accelerator and want to know what they look for
• An operator or early employee planning to start something and wanting to understand how funding works

You don't need to be raising right now to come along.

Cremorne Digital Hub is hosting another Guzzle. An evening of high-impact networking where Melbourne's builders, backers, and ecosystem people actually talk to each other.

Whether you're fundraising, hiring, looking for a co-founder, or just keeping a pulse on what's being built, this is the space to find your next collaborator.

This isn’t just about swapping business cards. We’re carving out time for “Selected Founder Asks”

What to Expect:

• Casual Networking: Cold drinks and warm introductions with Melbourne’s best tech minds.
• The "Founder Asks" Segment: A few selected founders will take the floor to ask for specific help, think product beta testers, UX feedback, or niche industry intros.

• Community in Action: Not just who you'll meet, but what you'll contribute. The ecosystem grows when the room shows up for each other.

Building something or just want to make meaningful connections? Come and join us!

Most founders price the same way. Find the nearest competitor, come in slightly under, charge per user per month, then leave the number alone while you go and fix everything else. That has worked well enough for a decade.

Then AI arrived and your feed filled up with people announcing that the seat is dead, that you should be charging per outcome, per resolution, per thousand tokens. Some of that is real. A lot of it is the same argument software had in 2012 with a new noun dropped into it. So which parts of your pricing has AI genuinely changed, and which parts were wrong long before any of this?

Price too high and a customer tells you on the first call. Price too low and nobody says a word, for years.

Join us for a session with Jon Manning on what the standard pricing myths are costing you, and how AI is and is not changing the way products get priced.

Jon has spent around thirty years in pricing and now runs PricingProphets, working with SaaS companies, professional services firms and early stage startups on value-based pricing, pricing models and the pricing of AI products. He mentors founders through accelerators up and down the east coast. This is the working version of how pricing decisions get made, not another round of predictions about where AI pricing is heading.

We'll get into:

• Why pricing is the forgotten P of marketing, and the myths that keep founders anchored to what their product cost to build rather than what the alternative costs their customer
• Whether pricing is art or science, and which half of it you can hand to a spreadsheet
• How AI is changing pricing, and the larger part it has not changed at all
• Pricing quick wins you can apply the same week, sized for a company where the pricing function is one person and that person is the founder
• Open Q&A, which is where the specific question about your product gets answered rather than the general one about everyone's

Who should attend?

• Founders who set their price in an afternoon and have not touched it since
• Founders who suspect they are leaving money on the table but do not want to be the one who tests it
• Anyone building an AI product and stuck between charging per seat, per usage and per outcome
• Operators heading into a price rise who need to defend the number internally before they defend it to a customer

About Jon Manning:

Jon is the founder of Pricing Prophets and specialises in pricing, the forgotten P of marketing, working with companies large and small on an advisory, fractional or project basis. No two engagements look the same, though he is usually somewhere near value-based pricing strategy, pricing model evaluation and change management, revenue analytics, migration playbooks, dynamic pricing, SaaS and subscriptions, and the pricing of AI products and services. He has run more than eighty pricing workshops, talks and webinars around the world, works mainly with services and technology companies across health, property, education, financial, legal and workforce management SaaS, and counts early stage startups, PE and VC backed companies and large corporates among current and past clients. He is a micro and behavioural economist, a mentor at accelerators along the eastern seaboard, and the author of what he calls the most ridiculously titled pricing book of all time, Overcoming Floccinaucinihilipilification: Valuing and Monetizing Products and Services, a value-based pricing guide for startups, entrepreneurs and side-hustlers.

Founders get told to think big from day one, but few people talk about what it takes to actually move into a new market. The culture is different, the buyers are different, and a lot of what worked at home needs to be rethought when you make the leap internationally.

We've put together a panel of founders and operators who've spent years expanding overseas. They learned most of it the hard way. They'll be talking about what caught them off guard, what they'd do differently, and the things that are easy to miss even if you've built a company before.

This is for you if:

• You're thinking about expanding overseas
• You're already selling into one market and looking at a second
• You own the GTM or ops plan for an international expansion
• You want an honest account of what it's like, not the pitch-deck version to go "global"

You'll walk away with:

• A clearer idea of what to fix at home before you expand
• Mistakes you can skip, from people who've already made them
• A better sense of which market suits your business first

Brought to you by Cremorne Digital Hub, with Zavior, SGN and Eight Circle. All three work with founders planning an overseas move every day.

About the hosts

• Zavior: an all-in-one compliance platform built for teams to get their cyber security and data protection requirements in order. Zavior helps startups attain and maintain the certifications enterprise and government buyers ask for before they will sign, including ASD's Essential Eight and ISO 27001.
• 8 Circle: a community of 2,000+ founders and industry experts guiding startups and SMEs through incorporation, accounting, tax, work permits, funding and regulatory filings, with a vision of connecting communities across major global cities to enable cross-border expansion.
• Singapore Global Network: Supported by Singapore Global Network (SGN), a community of changemakers, professionals and friends globally. Born out of a desire to build meaningful relationships across borders, SGN exists to connect people to opportunities that Singapore and its network of members have to offer. Join SGN to become a member of our global community of professionals and friends with Singapore at its heart. Learn more at www.singaporeglobalnetwork.gov.sg.
• Cremorne Digital Hub: Cremorne Digital Hub is Melbourne's home for enterprise innovation, connecting organisations to a curated ecosystem of startups, educators and investors.

Seats are limited and the room is the point. Grab yours.

Most founders build the software, then go find the market.

Some who actually win it do the opposite: they build the market first, then sell software into it.

Ron Shell spent years owning the demand.He built the professional pickleball league and had a close to hundred thousand players. Only then did he created a software and sell it back into the market he had spent three years making.

Join us for an evening with Ron on what it takes to earn the right to sell software into a market you developed.

Ron is the co-founder and CEO of the National Pickleball League, and the founder of LADER, tournament software built specifically for the sport his own league created. This is the working account of how that sequence actually happened, not a story about pickleball.

We'll get into:

• What the filter was for picking pickleball off a list of ten ideas, in a market that did not exist yet
• Why creating share is a completely different job to taking it, and what that costs you in years
• Why LADER was built by people who had run tournaments themselves, and what that has to do with a sixty person dev team where almost nobody had ever placed a bet
• What is left to defend when anyone can clone your product in a weekend

​Every founder has heard that you'll know product market fit when you feel it. Customers start pulling the product out of your hands, usage climbs, the thing just works.

​The trouble is that some of the signals can be misleading. A free product with strong retention is great signal, getting people to use something free is genuinely hard. But if you intend to build an exceptional business where customers pay, neither answers the question that eventually matters: will they pay for it?

​Put a price on the thing and some users leave. Whoever stays tells you something new about the value you have created. A paid pilot tells you one thing, repeatable demand and customers pulling the product into their organisations tell you something more. Product market fit isn't binary, it develops in levels.

​Rachana Mansinghka puts it plainly. Businesses cannot run on delusion. And if you do not know which level you are at, you do not know where to invest, so you can over-build one part of the company while starving another for a year without noticing.

​Join us for a session on working out where you actually sit, and what to do from there.

​We'll get into:

• ​What usage, retention and willingness to pay each tell you about product market fit
• ​The First Round Capital framework, from nascent through developing, strong and extreme, and how to place yourself honestly on it
• ​Why product and go to market are one job at early stage, and what specifically goes wrong when go to market is filed away as a later phase
• ​A live diagnosis of a real B2B founder with early customers, mapped onto the framework in front of the room
• ​What happens when you start charging, and how deciding your business model early changes what you build
• ​What to do at each level, including the case where the honest read is that you are ready to raise and hire

​Examples run B2B, but the framework travels. Worth the hour whether you sell to businesses or consumers.

​Who should attend?

• ​Founders with strong usage numbers that have not yet tested willingness to pay
• ​Founders with early customers or pilots trying to work out how much fit they really have
• ​Founders who have decided to work out go to market once the product is ready
• ​Product leads and operators who need to tell a board, or a founder, where the company honestly sits

The best conversations happen organically. They happen over a beer, a wine or a coffee, when people engage with ideas and let the conversation flow. That's what we're trying to capture with Couch Conversations.

Couch Conversations is an event unlike others you've been to. Fewer questions asked and answered, more conversation. Each Couch Conversation will be with a small group of people actively building Victoria's startup ecosystem, with no moderator, no slides and no lectern. Then the conversation starts and goes where it goes.

This season of Couch Conversations is centered on the question of where to next for the Victorian startup ecosystem. We've seen some fairly big changes here in Victoria, with LaunchVic and Breakthrough Victoria merging, a new capital gains tax regime, and a little thing called AI changing what and how people are building. These are all areas we'll explore during the first season.

For the first conversation, we talk innovation hubs and supporting founders. On the couch: Ben Colley from Stone & Chalk and Alan Tsen from Cremorne Digital Hub.

Are you still looking for a co-founder?

Finding someone you can work well with is among the most important decisions you'll make, and it's hard to find someone who's genuinely a good fit. Random encounters. Potential friends. Or just hoping the right person happens to sit next to you at networking.

Following the success of our first Co-founder Connect, we’re running it back on September 9 and this time we’ve taken some suggestions on board for a different format.

Half the room has an idea. Half the room wants in on one.

Last time everyone arrived holding their own thing. This time we're splitting registrations down the middle. Half are building something and need a person. Half are looking for the right thing to throw themselves at. Same ambition, different starting point, and that's exactly why the conversations work. You’ll be labelled on if you’re looking for something to join, or you want someone to join you.

This time we’ll start with a fireside from some founders to get you thinking and inspired.

Opening with a Fireside

Ron Shell co-founded the National Pickleball League and turned a sport most Australians hadn't heard of into a national competition with a Tennis Australia deal. It started with two social leagues in South Yarra and Thornbury.

Then he hit the problem every operator hits, which is that the software to run it properly didn't exist. So he built it. LADER launched this year, running live scoring, event management and broadcast in one platform, and it powered the Australian Open Pickleball Slam. Two companies out of one obsession, and a co-founder story in each.

Plus one more guest, announced closer to the day. Twenty years building and backing internet companies. Some of you have already met him.

They're here for the part nobody posts about. How you found the person you started with. What you got wrong about them. What happens when someone's effort drops and their equity doesn't.

Who's this for:

• Founders actively looking for a co-founder, technical, commercial, product or domain
• Builders with an idea who know they can't and shouldn't do it alone
• Operators ready to jump into something early with the right person

How the afternoon works:

• 2:00 Doors, coffee, name tags
• 2:15 Fireside
• 3:00 Industry tables
• 3:55 One-on-ones, matched from your answers
• 4:35 Lock it in, book the coffee before you leave
• 5:00 Close

How to register:

Spots are limited and registration is by short application. Pick your side when you apply, whether you're bringing an idea or looking for one, and both sides are capped so the room stays balanced. Your answers are what we use to build your one-on-ones, so give us something real. Takes 90 seconds.

Check-in closes 2:15 sharp. We build the matching from who's actually in the room, so late arrivals can join a table but will miss the one-on-ones.

Staying on?

VC Rosetta Stone runs from 5:30 in the same room. Two rooms, one day. The person who builds it with you, then the person who funds it. Separate registration below.

Cremorne Connect: Return of the VC Rosetta Stone: Decoding VC-Speak
📅 Wednesday, 9 September | 5:30PM – 8:00PM AEST
📍 Cremorne Digital Hub (80 Balmain St., Cremorne)

REGISTER NOW

Everyone knows roughly how Google search works. You publish, you rank, you get found. Twenty years of advice exists on it and SEO is was created for that very purpose.

Now with seemingly everything running through an LLM, the important question becomes, how does AI actually search, process your information, and decide which company to recommend? Same buyer, same question, completely different machinery underneath, and no second page of results to fall back on. You are either one of the top names or you’re not.

Join us for a session on how those decisions actually get made, and how to end up on the right side of them.

Lucia Kim builds the systems at Inflect that track how AI models describe, cite and recommend brands. She's giving the working version of how it functions, not another round of predictions.

We'll get into:

• How AI models actually read, weigh and store information about your company, and why it has almost nothing to do with ranking
• Where AI search really sits today, what the numbers support, and what is noise from people with something to sell
• The jargon translated into plain English, so you can brief a marketer or an agency without nodding along
• What actually moves the needle on being recommended, sized for a company with no traffic and no domain authority yet
• How Inflect measures this properly, and what you would be looking at if you ran it yourself

Who should attend?

• Founders who suspect buyers are finding their competitors first
• Early stage founders with no traffic, no reviews and no authority who assume this is out of reach for now
• Operators and marketers watching organic search soften and wondering what replaces it

About Lucia Kim
Lucia Kim is a Founding Member of Technical Staff at Inflect, where she builds the systems that track how AI models describe, cite and recommend brands. She comes to it from software engineering and solution architecture, with project work at Intel and CMC. She was part of the team behind EcoMove, Grand Winner at AngelHack's hackhcmc 2024 in Ho Chi Minh City, and has since won the AI Singapore and AWS challenge and come through the AWS ABW program. She is an ambassador for both AWS First Cloud Journey and RMIT's School of Science, Engineering and Technology. Working out how machines read information is the through line, and it is what she is bringing into the room.

About Inflect
Inflect is a managed AI visibility service for B2B teams, helping companies get found, cited and recommended when potential customers ask AI tools for answers. Founded by Jonathan Liem, it runs on an evidence first loop: show where a brand is missing from AI answers, improve the pages and proof those systems rely on, then report what actually changed once approved fixes go live. Inflect was recently featured in Tech in Asia for making AI search measurable.

Founders often hear phrases like “you’re too early” or “the total addressable market isn’t big enough” and are left wondering what investors really mean.

The VC Rosetta Stone is here to crack the code on venture capital. In this interactive session, common VC phrases are decoded by an investor, revealing what they actually mean, what’s really going on behind the feedback, and what founders should take away.

Cremorne Connect takes participants inside the world of venture capital. Joined by Hugh Stephens, General Partner and Co-founder of Galileo Ventures, the session brings practical insights, candid perspectives and a founder-first approach to understanding how investors think.

A founder, operator and investor, Hugh built bootstrapped SaaS company Sked Social and now backs early-stage founders through Galileo Ventures. A Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, Hugh is known for his ability to “speak founder” and connect with entrepreneurs on the realities of building and raising capital.

Expect equal parts insight and lively discussion in a live, interactive experience that decodes founder fundraising and brings VC-speak to life. Whether you’re a founder, student or part of the broader innovation community, you’ll leave more fluent in the language of venture capital.

AI made building cheap. That's the problem.

You can spin up a prototype in an afternoon. Claude will generate convincing output whether or not you've defined the right problem. And six months later you're still saying "just one more feature and people will use it."

Chaz Mee is back for round two. His first session, The Art of Being Wrong, was about being wrong quickly. This one is about being wrong in the right way: small, cheap, and recoverable, instead of strategic and fatal.

He'll show you the exact pre-work he uses at Keep Labs before a single line gets built. The job stories that define who your product is for and why they'd care. The product brief that acts as a contract with yourself, so you know when done is. And how both keep you from getting lost inside Claude.

This one's interactive. We'll put real founder products up in front of the room with zero context and work out together what problem they solve and why it matters. Then we'll write job stories for them live, using Chaz's own tools.

What you'll walk away with:

• How to write a job story that actually communicates, not a template you fill in
• The product brief structure Chaz uses before building anything at Keep Labs
• How to tell when Claude is being convincing versus being right
• A proof test you can run on whatever you're already building, even retroactively

Every so often a technology arrives that resets the rules for entire industries. The steam engine did it. Electricity did it. Reichental's argument is that AI is doing it again, faster, and he calls this moment the Cognitive Industrial Revolution.

Dr. Jonathan Reichental has spent his career at the front of these shifts. He was a Silicon Valley CIO, he writes on technology for Forbes, and he has authored bestselling books on data, smart cities and the future of work. He is one of the clearer voices on what AI changes in practice, without the hype and without the doom.

Join us at Cremorne Digital Hub, in partnership with La Trobe University's Eagleworks Innovation Centre and the La Trobe AI Institute, for a keynote by Dr. Jonathan Reichental on the most significant technological transformation of our time and what it means for the next generation of students, founders and innovators. Expect a practical framework for navigating the AI era, identifying where the real opportunities lie, and building businesses that can thrive in a rapidly changing world. A facilitated Q&A with Alan Tsen from Cremorne Digital Hub and networking will follow.

Potential Areas Explored:

• Why he frames AI as an industrial revolution, not just another software cycle
• How careers and whole job categories shift when cognitive work can be automated
• Which industries move first, and what that means for the people inside them
• Where the genuine startup opportunities sit, and how to tell them from the noise
• A practical framework for building something that lasts through the transition

Who should come 

Founders and aspiring founders, especially anyone building in or around AI. Students and early-career people trying to work out where to place their bets. Operators and leaders thinking about what AI does to their industry. Investors, university and research people, and anyone who wants a clear-eyed read on where this is all heading. If you are trying to make sense of the AI era rather than just react to it, this is your evening.

Run of show

• 5:30 Doors, drinks and networking
• 6:00 Welcome and introduction (Chatham Vidanagamage - La Trobe AI Institute and CDH)
• 6:05 Keynote and in-conversation with Dr. Jonathan Reichental
• 6:45 Audience Q&A
• 7:10 Drinks and networking
• 8:00 Close

Walk away with a practical read on where the real AI opportunities are. Reserve your spot.

There are countless podcasts and workshops on how to raise capital, build product and land your first customers. Very few talk about the ins and outs of selling a company to a big tech acquirer.

Exiting is every bit as complex as fundraising, but for founders it's a one-time event with high stakes. It stays off-limits to even talk about until you're in the middle of it, which is exactly when it's too late to learn.

Join us for a session about the end of the founder story, not the beginning.

Jessica Christiansen-Franks spent eight years building Neighbourlytics before selling it to REA. She's giving the honest version, the stuff that you don't learn till it's too late.

We'll get into:

• The moment the board stops rowing in the same direction (spoiler: it's the second an exit lands on the table)
• Why founders and shareholders end up speaking completely different languages about the same deal
• The early structural decisions that decide whether you do well or end up last money out
• What actually happens after the deal closes, including the parts that can leave you personally exposed
• Why founders never really do it for the money, and what that costs them at exit

Who should attend?

• Founders who want the unfiltered reality of selling a company
• Founders weighing an exit who want to know what to look out for before it's on the table
• Founders making early decisions right now that will quietly shape their exit later
• Anyone startup-curious who wants a real founder story, not the press-release version

At CDH, we know finding a co-founder can be one of the highest-stakes decisions you'll make, and it can be hard to find someone who's genuinely a good fit. Cold DMs, awkward meetups, or just hoping the right person happens to sit next to you. Too often, founders end up building alone not because they want to, but because they lack the right kind of support and environment.

On August 5, we’re running Co-founder Connect: a structured evening with a single goal. You’ll leave with two or three people genuinely worth following up with as potential co-founders.

This isn't speed networking with a new label. Every part of the night is designed around how co-founder matches actually form: guided rounds that skip the small talk, deeper conversations with the people you click with, and a final push to get the follow-up booked before you walk out the door.

Who's this for:

• Founders actively looking for a co-founder (technical, commercial, product, or domain experts)
• Builders with an idea who know they can't (and shouldn't) do it alone
• Operators ready to jump into something early with the right person

How the night works

• Before you arrive. Fill in a short questionnaire telling us what you're looking for, what you're working on, and where your expertise sits. We use this to sort the room before the night, so conversations you have is with someone worth meeting.
• 5:00pm. Doors + networking. Arrive, get a name tag (your name tag tells the room what you bring), grab a drink.
• 5:30pm. Kickoff. We set the goal for the night and how it all runs. Come with an open mind. The aim isn't to find your co-founder tonight, it's to leave with the right coffees booked.
• 5:45pm. The rounds. We sort the room based on your categories, and you'll find yourself sitting with people who bring what you don't. Guided prompts get you straight past "so what do you do."
• 6:15pm. Open floor. Move around, find the people you clicked with, and get into the whys. What are you building? Why are you building it? Cut through the usual questions by asking each other the harder ones. Don’t worry if you’re not sure what to ask, we’ll provide the questions you should be asking.
• 6:45pm. Lock it in. Phones out. If you've found someone worth exploring, you book the coffee or online chat before you leave. That's the whole point.
• 7:00 to 7:30pm. Open networking. Drinks, free flow, wind down.

How to register:

Spots are limited and registration is by short application — four quick questions so we can balance the room across technical, commercial, product, and domain expertise. Takes 90 seconds.

Anyone can ship a product now. What they can't ship overnight is how the market sees them.

​Brand isn't your logo. It's your position, and the feeling people attach to it. It's also the one thing you can't vibe code.

​Simon Hakim from Hunter has spent years helping founders work out what their brand actually is before they spend a cent making it look good. This one is about the smallest set of brand decisions that lets you go to market with conviction, and knowing when to stop there. We'll close on a live deconstruction of a real start-up brand.

​Who should come along

• ​First-time founders who can build the product but freeze when asked what makes it different
• ​Non-technical builders who already know the look isn't the point
• ​Anyone about to drop money on a logo or a rebrand before they've nailed their positioning

​What you'll walk away with

• ​A definition of brand you can actually use to sharpen your positioning
• ​A clear line between what's worth building now and what can wait
• ​A real start-up brand pulled apart end to end, so you can see the process in action

In November 2025, Salesforce acquired Apromore, a process intelligence company that started as open-source research code at the University of Melbourne.

That is not the usual Australian startup story. No pivot-of-the-week, no overnight raise. Apromore was built patiently over more than a decade of academic research, grew out of university consulting when customers started asking to buy the software, and ended up important enough that Salesforce bought it to power its AI agents.

Marcello La Rosa is the CEO and co-founder, and still a professor at the University of Melbourne. Join us at Cremorne Digital Hub for an honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a deep-tech company out of a research lab and carry it all the way to a global exit.

What we'll get into

• How a research demo became a product when customers asked to buy it
• Why he kept the talent and the company in Melbourne, next to the University
• Raising a Series B from Salesforce Ventures, years before Salesforce became the buyer
• The decision to sell, and why joining Salesforce beat staying independent
• Why "process intelligence" suddenly matters in a world of AI agents
• What he'd tell any researcher sitting on technology that could be a company

Who should come: Founders, especially deep-tech and B2B SaaS. University and research commercialisation people. Investors who back technical teams. Anyone curious about process mining and where agentic AI is heading.

Join us for another Guzzle! The evening is the second half of a big day for founders. Earlier, we spent the morning and afternoon at Founder Day, upskilling on the tools and workflows that make you move faster in 2026, with Claude, Vercel, and Notion in the room.

​Now we keep the energy going into the night. The Guzzle is where the community comes together and tonight we're ending it with a spin on our Founder Asks, partnering with Antler.

What to expect: Lightning Pitches

​Selected founders and 2 minutes each. They share what they're building and introduce their company to the room.

​No slides required, no investor panel just founders in front of a community that's already bought in to helping each other. EOIs go out ahead of time so we can curate for a good mix of use cases and stages.

Submit your entry here for a chance to pitch in front of some exciting tech companies and win prizes from CDH and our friends!

​Whether you came or missed Founder Day, come and network with the broader tech community in Cremorne!

Building a venture-scale company has never been easier than it is right now. The tools have changed completely in the last 18 months, and the founders using them well are pulling ahead, not by months, but by quarters.

On June 25, we're hosting [NEXT] Founder Day to put those tools in your hands. We're bringing experts from Vercel, Notion, and Anthropic into one room to show you what the latest generation of tools can actually do, how to use them to ship product faster, and how to wire them into the way you run the business day to day.

Who's this for?

• Founders building with AI today who want to sharpen their stack
• Technical and non-technical founders, all welcome
• Builders looking to get across the latest tools

The sessions:

Three sessions, each led by one of our partners.

• 11:00 – 12:00 | v0 to 1 with Vercel. You don't need a developer to put something on the internet anymore. Vercel walks through what v0 actually does in 2026: capabilities, deployment, and the kinds of products founders are already building with it. Live demos and Q&A throughout.
• 12:00 – 1:00 | Lunch and network
• 1:00 – 2:00 | Talk to My Agent with Notion. Workspace agents and AI-native operations. Notion walks through how founders are setting up real agents to automate the busy work, with examples you can drop straight into your own Notion after the talk.
• 2:00 – 3:00 | Best Practices for Claude Code. An AI engineer who ships software alongside you. This session covers what Claude Code actually unlocks for non-technical founders, from automating workflows that needed a dev team last year, to shipping internal tools without writing code, to turning plain English into working software. Live demos and real examples throughout.
• From 3:00 | Open Build, Networking & Partner Connect. Set up shop next to other founders and ship something side by side, with all four partner teams at their stations ready to chat. Bring your blockers, grab tips and tricks from the speakers, and walk out with your workflow sharper than it was when you came in.

Speakers to be announced soon. Bonus: giveaways from all the partner teams throughout the day 👀

The Guzzle

We close the day with The Guzzle (our regular open social for founders and builders to hang out, swap notes, and wind down together). For this one, we're adding a twist: select founders will do 2-minute lightning pitches in front of Antler and the wider VC community in the room, the people backing founders building with this stack.

You've updated feature after feature, and that drive is exactly what it takes. The next step is learning how to point it in the right direction.

The best early-stage founders aren't building less but they're learning faster. Often, this means getting something out before it feels perfect. Finding the users who are genuinely invested. With the end goal of building something so right for their market that others feel like a compromise.

That is why we're bringing in Chaz Mee, VP of Product at Keep Labs, for a Lunch and Learn and a hands-on conversation about early product design. How to ship before you feel ready. How to get real signal from 50 committed users instead of chasing 500 passive ones.

If you're ready to build smarter, join us! Register via link below.

Want a chance to sit with Chaz Mee for a mentoring session? Be a clubhouse member and access exclusive perks.

The SaaSpocalypse

Software has changed more in the last 12 months than in the previous decade. So where does SaaS go from here? Is SaaS on the way out, or just changing shape? Is AI replacing software, or just how we build it? And who's actually right?

Melbourne's SaaS and AI crowd is getting together to find out. Are you in?

We're bringing the SaaSpocalypse and it's not the usual panel and fireside. Expect genuine disagreement, unfiltered takes, and voices from VC, startups, and tech all on one stage.

Together with Aussie Founders Club, we're hosting SaaSpocalypse. This isn't the usual panel-and-fireside. Expect genuine disagreement, unfiltered takes, and voices from VC, startups, and tech all on one stage.

What to expect:

• Panel discussion: An open conversation with our experts about the future of SaaS, what AI changes, and what doesn't.
• Audience Q&A: This isn't a spectator sport. Ask the hard questions, challenge the panel, say what's on your mind.
• Drinks and networking: the conversation doesn't stop when the panel does. Keep it going, share your own take, and meet the people building what's next.

Experts Taking the Lead:

• Darius Monsef: A multiple-time founder and YC alum who's raised serious capital across his ventures.
• Alan Jones: Partner at M8 Ventures and one of the most direct voices in Australian venture.

Come join the conversation with the people building, funding, and let's get to the truth about where SaaS actually stands.

Is your pitch deck actually working or are you just hoping it is?

Founders spend weeks perfecting a pitch deck. The story feels right, the numbers are in, the design is clean but the moment it lands in a VC's inbox, they go blind. What is the VC thinking on slide one? Where do they start to lose interest? What would make them want to take the meeting?

Most founders never get that feedback and without it, every pitch is a shot in the dark.

To help founders navigate the art of crafting their decks, we're hosting another Lunch & Learn series that puts a real startup deck in front of a VC with no briefing, no background, no heads-up on what's inside. A live breakdown, an unfiltered first read, and feedback that helps founders know exactly what belongs on their deck.

Join us on for a virtual Lunch and Learn session where Hugh Stephens of Galileo Ventures pulls back the curtain on how VCs really evaluate a pitch deck. He will be reviewing the deck for the very first time, live.

Want your deck to be the one Hugh reviews live?

We're accepting deck submissions from founders who'd like a real VC's feedback, in front of an audience. If that's you, submit below and we'll be in touch.

Most founders spend weeks perfecting their pitch deck and barely an afternoon on their legal setup. The result? Cap tables that don't reflect reality, founder arrangements that fall apart under pressure, and a due diligence process that grinds everything to a halt.

Join us for a hands-on session with Claire Thompson from Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer as she walks through the legal roadmap for an early-stage raise in Australia. You'll see exactly how investors read your cap table, what founder arrangements need to be in place before you start conversations, and the common legal missteps that slow down — or kill — a round.

Expect real scenarios drawn from deals Claire has worked on, practical frameworks you can apply immediately, and a clear checklist of what to fix before due diligence starts.

👉 This is a live online session, open to the public. Come ready to ask the questions you've been too embarrassed to Google.

Every year, NVIDIA's GTC sets the agenda for the future of AI. This year, CDH is bringing it to your doorstep.

The Best of GTC 2026 (Melbourne) is a curated half-day event we'll be hosting on Tuesday 31st March featuring hands-on workshops, expert panels, and a GTC Watch Party to close out the day.

And thanks to our friends at NVIDIA and MMT, we're also giving away an NVIDIA DGX Spark — a personal AI supercomputer worth thousands of dollars!

The Best of GTC 2026 runs across two parts — come for one, or stay for both. Whether you're a developer looking to get hands-on with NVIDIA's latest tools, or simply want to understand what the biggest AI announcements of the year mean for you, there's a place for you on the day!

🎫 PART 1: BUILD | 12pm – 4pm | For developers, engineers & technical founders.

🕐 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Session 1: Accelerate Your AI Journey with NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute

Led by Luke Boyce, Solutions Architect at NVIDIA.

A hands-on session covering the DLI platform — course catalogues, certification pathways, and how to find the right learning path for your goals. Bring your laptop and leave ready to build.

🕐 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Session 2: Co-working & Connect with NVIDIA and MMT Experts
With buffet lunch.

Explore the DLI platform at your own pace with NVIDIA experts on hand, grab lunch, and connect with local supply chain experts from MMT alongside other builders, founders, and AI enthusiasts.

🕐 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Session 3: Introduction to the Physical AI Development Ecosystem
Presented by MMT and Connect Tech.

Ever wondered what it actually takes to build and train an AI robot? This session covers NVIDIA's full-stack Physical AI platform — the hardware, simulation tools, AI models, and SDKs powering the next generation of robots and autonomous systems. Real-world case studies included.

Plus MMT are giving away a Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit on the day.

🎫 PART 2: CELEBRATE | 5:30pm – 8pm| Open to Melbourne's entire AI ecosystem.

🕐 5:30pm – 8:00pm

GTC Watch Party with Expert Panel Discussion

This one's for everyone!

Kick off the evening with drinks and networking, then settle in for something a little different. We're screening highlights from Jensen Huang's GTC keynote — the biggest AI announcements of the year — and having a panel of AI leaders break it all down live, rapid-fire. This is going to be fun!

And to close out the night — we're announcing the winner of our NVIDIA DGX Spark live giveaway!

🏆 WIN A DGX SPARK

A Grace Blackwell AI Supercomputer — on your desk.

Thanks to NVIDIA and MMT, we're giving away an NVIDIA DGX Spark to one lucky member of our community.

Here's how to enter:

1️⃣ Register your EOI → gtccomp.cdhevents.com
2️⃣ Sign up for GTC Virtual (free) and watch Jensen's keynote
3️⃣ Complete our 3-question quiz (opens 20th March, closes midnight 27th March)
4️⃣ Winner announced live on 31st March

Spots are limited — register now for Part 1, Part 2, or both, and we'll see you on the 31st March at Cremorne Digital Hub!