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.

[NEXT] Founder Day & The Cremorne Guzzle — A Day Built for What's Next

On Thursday 25 June, Cremorne Digital Hub hosted one of its most ambitious days yet. Over 150 people filled the building from 11am to well past sunset — founders, builders, operators, and ecosystem partners — all gathered around one through line: what does it actually look like to build a company in the age of AI?

[NEXT] Founder Day was a working day. Three sessions from practitioners who are deep in it, followed by open-build rooms where the learning kept going. Then, as the sun went down, the crowd shifted into The Cremorne Guzzle — drinks, energy, and six founders who got up and showed the room what they're building.

And if you want to catch the sessions in full, we are bringing them to our YouTube channel. Subscribe so you do not miss them when they drop.

Cremorne Digital Hub

Cremorne Digital Hub (CDH) is where innovation meets industry. Melbourne’s home for founders who are building something real. Subscribe for talks, workshops, and events straight from the heart of Melbourne’s tech precinct — covering AI, product, fundraising, sales, and everything in between that founders actually need to hear. This is also the home of CDH Lunch & Learn: founder-focused sessions with practitioners, operators, and experts who’ve actually done the thing.

YouTube

Here's what went down.

Building an AI-Native Company

Darius Monsef opened the day by reframing what it actually means to build with AI — not as a tool layered on top of a business, but as the operating system underneath it. Fresh from building Calling Round, he shared how he runs his entire company from his phone, a couple of hours a day, with Claude as the central orchestrator.

• An AI-native company is built around AI as the operating layer, where the founder is the decision-maker but not the bottleneck
• SaaS built dashboards for humans to see metrics and take action — the shift now is building for agents to do the same
• One Claude orchestrator with dedicated threads for Sales, Ops, Product, Legal, and Marketing connects the whole company through a shared brain
• The engineering workflow removes almost every human bottleneck — a need gets described, an agent specs it, a second agent challenges it, and code gets built, reviewed, and shipped to a PR before Darius touches it
• The only human gate is at the merge point
• The starting framework: use Claude for all thinking and strategy first, get a shared brain set up, add connectors, then progressively hand more work off

Takeaway: Start with the one task that takes the most time and adds the least value. Automate that first. Then build from there.

Talk to My Agent with Notion with Tim Jeffries

Tim Jeffries of SmoothOps has spent nearly a decade helping businesses structure their information before AI made that work matter. In this session, he showed exactly how that foundation translates into a Notion-powered operating system that runs most of the sales process without human input.

• The quality of AI output is a direct function of the quality of thinking behind it. Structured data and documented process are the foundation.
• Skills are the detailed SOPs: scope, inputs, steps, edge cases, and outputs, written the way you would brief a new hire
• Guides are the IP layer: the reasoning, the voice, and the decision logic that makes output sound like the person who built the business
• Skills without guides produce confident but generic results. The guides are where the edge lives
• A 13-step sales pipeline runs almost entirely through Notion AI: intake automation, lead qualification against a real IP-backed rubric, and on-brand email drafting, all before a human gets involved
• Not everything should run through a language model. Deterministic tasks belong in code or workers, LLMs should be reserved for reasoning-heavy work

Takeaway: The edge is not in which model you use. It is in how well you have encoded what you know. Strong guides and rich context matter more than model selection.

Best Practices for Claude Code with Rye Smith

Rye Smith, Claude Ambassador for Australia and fresh from presenting at Anthropic's Code with Claude conference in Tokyo, opened with a story about a 25-year dream that Claude finally made real. Manager Eleven, a live multiplayer football management game built on a 1999 C++ engine, now runs in 16 countries. He shared the tools and mindset behind that kind of output.

• The barrier to building ambitious things has collapsed — the constraint now is depth of focus, not capability
• /goal is a terminal command that loops until a complex task is complete, removing the need to re-prompt every few minutes
• A Council of Agents spins up specialised roles across SEO, UI, QA, and copywriting to work in parallel on multi-disciplinary tasks
• Consulting the Skeptic introduces a critical agent that challenges confident outputs before they become problems
• Claude CoWork handles scheduled tasks like lead triage, proposal drafting, and live dashboard generation without human input
• Stop describing the work. Start delegating it
• Build vertically into the specific problem only you are solving — the models will handle the wide

Takeaway: Pick the one task you do more than once and hate doing. Automate it through CoWork. That is the start of the workflow automation journey.

Building on Solana with Sal Samani

Sal Samani from Superteam Australia brought a different angle to the afternoon. Setting aside the noise around price action and speculation, he made the case that on-chain infrastructure is now a legitimate and practical foundation for building real companies — and that the timing has never been better for founders to explore it.

• Stablecoins have unlocked business models that were not viable before — streaming payments, micropayments, and pay-per-use services that card infrastructure cannot support
• X402 pay-to-proceed flows let founders charge cents for microservices like ABN lookups, KYC validations, and API reports — creating new revenue models around tasks that previously had no monetisation path
• Building on-chain means building with immutable, public, decentralised infrastructure — no intermediary can block a transaction, modify a record, or shut a program down
• The Solana Superstack at sol.new/dev gives founders a full build environment: Next.js frontend, Rust smart contracts, X402 payments, and automated deployment in one place
• A working product with a booking flow, photo upload, and payment layer went from idea to deployed app in under 45 minutes during the session — not as a demo, but as a genuine build
• The /roast my product feature stress-tests an idea before a founder invests weeks in the wrong direction

Takeaway: On-chain is not a category. It is an infrastructure choice. If the business model involves payments, verification, or access control, it is worth asking whether building on Solana makes the product more defensible and the revenue model more direct.

The Cremorne Guzzle: Founder Asks & Lightning Pitches

The Guzzle brought a different kind of energy to close out the day. With drinks in hand and the room buzzing from a full day of sessions, six founders took the floor and made their case to a crowd that had spent the last seven hours thinking about what it means to build something real. Each pitch was two minutes — tight, focused, and personal. Antler's was on hand to offer the winner a 1:1 session, with CDH adding two months of membership on top.

The six founders who pitched:

• Kyra Gupta, Founder of Z Signal — a platform where young people aged 13 to 19 provide structured, certified feedback on founder pitches, with reviewer credentials recorded on Solana
• Jed Wong Founder of CareNeighbour — a context layer for aged care coordinators that surfaces all relevant participant information directly to their cursor, cutting hours of admin from incident reports
• Jane Korneyko Founder of Sova — a data-driven diagnostic platform that maps a founder's stage, surfaces relevant playbooks, and gives access to frameworks used by the world's leading accelerators
• Peter Christo from DACS (Digital Asset Compliance Solutions) — audit-grade cryptographic proof of cryptocurrency ownership, built for the SMSF market and expanding into exchanges and custodial services
• Samin Haque Founder of The Melbourne Bionics Company — multi-modal athlete data across video, lidar, and sound to predict injuries and generate robotics training data from elite athletes
• Tom Kellett Founder of Effit — a community accountability platform for movement, partnered with Beyond Blue, with 50% retention at eight weeks and a UK founding partner about to run 5,000 kilometres across 77 cities in 99 days

Tom Kellett and Effit took the night. Born from a personal 35-kilogram transformation, Effit is building the home for movement communities — connecting people, keeping them accountable, and proving that retention is possible when accountability is shared. The passion was obvious. The traction backed it up.

Joining the room for the evening was the Hon. Minister Steve Dimopoulos, Minister for Economic Growth and Jobs, and Minister for Sport and Major Events, whose presence added a meaningful signal of government support for what this ecosystem is building.

How CDH Supports Founders Through Events Like This

CDH programming is built around one principle and it is to bring in people who are actually doing the thing. Founder Day was designed to give founders a cut-through on the tools and mindsets shaping how AI-native companies are being built right now, and to create space for them to start applying it before they even left the building.

The Guzzle adds another dimension. Founders pitch their real companies, make real asks, and walk away with real connections. When those two formats run back to back on the same day, the learning from the morning feeds the energy of the evening.

Thank You to Everyone Who Joined

To every person who walked through the doors, a massive thank you. Over 150 people showed up to learn, build, connect, and back the founders in this room.

And a lot of appreciation to the experts, Darius, Tim, Rye, and Sal, for sharing your real workflows, real tools, and real thinking so openly. To our partners at Notion, Claude Code, Solana, and Superteam Australia, none of this happens without you.

A special thank you to the Hon. Minister Steve Dimopoulos for joining us at the Guzzle. His words to the founders in the room were a reminder of how far this ecosystem has come — and how much further it can go.

To Kyra, Jed, Jane, Peter, Samin, and Tom, kudos to your courage to stand up and show your work.

See you at the next one.

Whether you watched our workshop live or missed it - here's a recap on what you missed with your key takeaways.

The total addressable market has been mapped. The beachhead identified. The deck is built, the pitch rehearsed, and the conviction is there. That capturing even a fraction of this market means having something real.

Chaz Mee has seen this story play out more times than he can count. As VP of Product at Keep Labs and a product veteran with years of experience building across industries, he's also lived it himself. And his message to early-stage founders is equal parts liberating and confronting:

Being wrong isn't a risk to manage. It's the method.

At a recent CDH Lunch & Learn, Chaz walked shared the framework he calls The Art of Being Wrong.

Every founder has a version of the same story. The idea was sound. The market was real. The team was all in. And yet somewhere between the first prototype and the fifth pivot, something went sideways. For Chaz Mee, VP of Product at Keep Labs, that moment isn't a warning sign, it's the whole point. The art of building great products, he argues, isn't about avoiding being wrong, it's about learning to use it.

Here are some of the insights we took away from the session — and a few that might just change how you think about your next product decision.

Stop Selling to a Market. Start Finding Your 50.

The TAM slide is a fixture of almost every pitch deck. We operate in a $X billion market, and if we capture just Y%, we have a business.

Chaz calls this the "magical unicorn slide." Not because the market isn't real — but because it's the wrong unit of thinking entirely.

The goal isn't market capture. It's finding the first 50 users — people with such an acute unmet need that they don't just try the product, they evangelize it. When a team optimises for 50 specific people, decisions get sharp. When they optimise for a percentage of a market, decisions stay broad.

The Ladder: 50 → 500 → 5,000

Scale doesn't happen in a leap. It happens in a ladder.

When a team nails the experience for its first 50 users, they learn what it takes to find the next 100. From 100, the path to 500 becomes visible. Then 5,000.

This is also a fundraising story. A founder with 50 deeply engaged users and a laddered growth path is far more compelling to a VC than one waving a TAM slide. The math works out but only after founders have done the work to earn the right to talk about it.

Two Kinds of Wrong and One Is Far More Dangerous

Most founders accept being wrong about features. Ship, learn, adjust. That kind of wrongness is productive.

But there's a second kind that's far more costly: being wrong about the value proposition.

Chaz lived this at Keep Labs — iterating extensively on a medication adherence product, only to realise they were solving a problem people didn't actually want solved. The real need was somewhere to talk about the lived experience of having a rare disease. A completely different direction.

If a team is refining endlessly without meaningful movement, it's rarely a design problem. It's a signal to question the foundation.

The Superpower Standard

Ben Horowitz once said the best software gives its users superpowers. Chaz has built his product philosophy around this idea.

Most products solve pain points. The ones that stick do something more — they open up entirely new capabilities. They make people feel like they can do things they simply couldn't before.

At every major product decision, the question worth asking is: what is the superpower we are handing to people? That one question reorients a team away from feature debates and back to what actually matters — the value being created.

Earning the Right to Build

Before thinking about what to build, teams need to earn the right to build it. That means prototyping, testing, and learning enough about the problem space to enter the build phase with conviction — not just enthusiasm.

The Takeaway

The feature cycle is a trap. Traction doesn't come from completeness. It comes from fit — and fit only comes from deeply understanding the job the product is hired to do.

The best product builders share one quality: intellectual honesty. The willingness to sit with being wrong, question the value proposition when iteration stalls, and ask the harder question underneath the feature list.

Being wrong, done well, isn't a failure state. It's a method. And for founders trying to build something people would genuinely miss — it might be the most important skill in the toolkit.

Based on a session from the CDH Lunch & Learn series — supporting founders with the skills and knowledge to scale. Watch the full session on the CDH YouTube channel.

What does a VC actually think when they open your deck? Where does their attention drop? What would make them stop scrolling and book the meeting? Founders spend weeks getting the story right, the numbers clean, the design sharp but the investor's read is a completely different experience.

Hugh Stephens is back and we brought him fresh set of decks to break down.

Join CDH for the next VC Deck Breakdown, a virtual Lunch & Learn where Hugh Stephens, Partner at Galileo Ventures, pulls apart real founder pitch decks and shares the unfiltered feedback most founders only hear after a pass.

Saaspocalypse Dilemma

On one side: AI is moving fast enough to make entire SaaS categories redundant overnight. Features that took teams years to build are being replicated by a well-structured prompt. Margins are compressing. Churn is up. And buyers are asking harder questions about what they're actually paying for. The threat is real, and founders who aren't feeling it yet probably will soon.

On the other side: Software isn't going anywhere. Humans still need systems, workflows, and structure, and someone still has to build them. The question isn't whether SaaS survives. It's whether your version of it does.

This is the current argument and the SaaSpocalypse 2026 event started the conversation.

What happened at SaaSpocalypse 2026

One question has been hanging over the ecosystem for months. SaaSpocalypse was built to answer it. Is SaaS really dead?

Through the partnership between Aussie Founders Club and Cremorne Digital Hub, we brought that debate to life and put it in front of the people who actually know. VCs, exited founders, and operators packed the room and brought their hottest takes. Some agreed. Some pushed back hard. All of it was worth hearing.

Takeaway:

SaaS isn't dying but the way you build it, price it, sell it, and think about it is. The founders who move first on that realisation are the ones worth watching. Speed, distribution, and deep customer understanding are the new moats. Features can be copied overnight. Everything else is what compounds.

The playbook is dead. The opportunity isn't.

Why this conversation matters?

The future of SaaS is still being written and founders are the ones holding the pen. The narrative around SaaS has been a little doom-and-gloom lately but what last night made clear is that the most interesting founders aren't mourning the old playbook, they're already building the next one. AI isn't just disrupting SaaS. For the right founders, it's the biggest opportunity the space has seen in years. The business models are shifting, yes. But the builders are adapting faster.

The team that made it happen

Kudos to Aussie Founders Club who had a hand in bringing SaaSpocalypse 2026 together.

And to the experts who took charge of the conversation, Jessica Christiansen-Franks, Darius Monsef, Kate Pollard, and Alan Jones. Massive thank you for showing up with lived experience, from exits, investments, builds, and failures that gave every founder a roadmap to what's next for SaaS.

The problem most founders don't see coming

For most founders, the biggest fear going into a raise is the pitch. Getting the deck right, nailing the story, surviving the Q&A. But what often derails a raise — or quietly costs founders equity, control, and leverage — isn't the pitch at all. It's the paperwork.

The legal side of raising capital is dense, jargon-heavy, and largely written by people who have done it a hundred times before. Your investors have. You probably haven't. And by the time you're staring at a term sheet, it can feel too late to ask the questions you should have asked months ago.

At our recent CDH Lunch & Learn, we sat down with Claire Thompson, Partner and Co-Head of Venture at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, for an honest, jargon-free walkthrough of everything founders need to understand before they raise.

The full recording of this Lunch & Learn is now live on YouTube. Whether you're preparing for your first raise or already in the process, it's worth watching end to end.

Tips every founder should know before raising:

Understand your raise structure before you talk to anyone

There are three main ways to structure a raise:

• A SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity),
• Priced Equity (shares)
• Convertible Notes.

Most early-stage founders will start with a SAFE, it's simple, only a few pages long, and doesn't require agreeing on a valuation upfront. The investor puts money in now, and converts into shares at your next priced round, typically at around a 20% discount as a reward for backing you early.

The catch? The conversion calculation can get complicated especially if you have multiple SAFEs and other convertible instruments on your cap table. Model it out before you sign anything.

Your first priced round sets the tone for everything that follows

Your first shareholders' deed sets the standard for every round that follows. Whatever rights you grant in round one, future investors will expect the same and more. Rights don't go backwards.

Go in knowing what you're comfortable with and treat that first document as the high watermark of founder control.

Read your term sheet like it's already binding

A term sheet is technically non-binding, but once you sign, everyone moves based on those terms. Changing things later wastes time, money, and goodwill. If there's anything you don't understand, get advice before you sign, not after.

Know what preference shares and anti-dilution actually mean

Investors receive preference shares, not ordinary shares. The founder-friendly standard is a 1x non-participating liquidation preference. Investors get their money back first on exit, but nothing more. If the upside is bigger, they convert and participate like everyone else.

Anti-dilution clauses kick in during a down round, adjusting investor shareholdings to account for the discount. Stick to the market standard, broad-based weighted average, and you'll be fine. It's when founders accept 2x or participating preferences that things get complicated.

The ESOP dilutes you, not your investor

The ESOP pool, typically 8–10%, dilutes you, not your incoming investor. Put the cap table on the back cover of every term sheet, so everyone is clear on the maths before anything is signed.

On structure, the standard is a four-year vesting period with a one-year cliff. Employees earn nothing in year one, then vest pro rata from there.

Be deliberate about your cap table from day one

In Australia, proprietary companies are capped at 50 shareholders. Issue 30 SAFEs in a pre-seed round and you've burned through more than half before your first priced round. Be selective about who you take money from and make sure your angels are people you can actually reach, because you'll need their signatures at every future milestone.

Good cap table hygiene from day one will save you headaches later. Tools like Carta can help.

Think carefully about who you raise from, not just how much

Capital is just the starting point. The right investor brings mentorship, board guidance, networks, and even brand association. Angels, exited founders, strategic partners, celebrities, and athletes are all fair game.

Think about what your business actually needs right now, and find an investor whose experience genuinely complements it.

Start earlier than you think in your journey and in the calendar year

Raises always take longer than you think. In Australia, the market closes over summer so if you're considering raising, start now. Aim for a clear inflection point where your numbers are strong and the opportunity ahead is compelling.

And if you're on the fence about raising at all: a smaller slice of a much bigger pie is the logic. Just remember, it comes with a partner, not just a cheque.

Why this matters

Most raises don't fall apart in the pitch room — they fall apart in the paperwork. The founders who get it right are the ones who understand their structure before they start, read every document before they sign, and build a cap table they can actually manage.

Know your raise structure. Respect your term sheet. Guard your cap table. And choose your investors like the partners they are — because the right ones bring far more than a cheque.

Start early, get good advice, and go raise.

Welcome back to Innovation Download, our monthly look at the news impacting Australia's startup scene.

This month we’re talking about the SaaSpocalypse. It's dramatic, but has become the go-to phrase to describe the sudden turn against traditional SaaS companies in the public markets, and it had a clear trigger. Anthropic dropped a set of Claude features that just do the work for you, data analysis, expense tracking, the stuff that used to need a paid seat, all in plain language. Investors responded by going into full “voting machine” mode, as the Warren Buffett quote goes (ps. here's a great read on Mr Market). And the selling has come in waves, one Claude release at a time. Claude Cowork, launched in January, and on its own took double digits off Adobe and Salesforce. Then the security tools landed: Claude Code Security pulled around 5% off the cybersecurity sector in February, and in March, word of a model that finds software vulnerabilities on its own, Claude Mythos, sent CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks down roughly 6% in a single day.

So in this issue we dig into what’s causing the voting machine to go into overdrive and why it may head back to being a “weighing machine”. Hint: it’s unlikely SaaS is dead.

Let’s kick things off with a video, and who better than Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the man arming the AI companies with their weapons of choice, GPUs. He has a view which you might not expect.

▶️ Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on AI's pressure on software stocks (CNBC)

In the clip, Jensen Huang argues the market has overreacted. As you might expect, he thinks the disruption is real, just nowhere near as deep as the selloff might suggest, and points to the companies using the tools that are apparently going to destroy them. He goes on to say that what is more likely than collapse is that the incumbents adjust, and his example is ServiceNow (the most prehistoric of all enterprise companies): his view is that data is the game, and the players that have it are in the driver’s seat.

Obviously, Jensen is selling the GPU firearms that the AI upstarts and the incumbents will be using in their battle for customer supremacy, so he wins either way. However, the fact that he thinks the incumbents aren’t dead in the water is likely reassuring to many in their C-suites – or at the very least, they can forward the video to their boards.

Hit play, then read on.

This Month's Reads

Is the share market headed toward a ‘SaaS-pocalypse’ – and what would that mean? (The Guardian)

Rundown: This is the piece that put a name to the panic. The Guardian lays out how a US software selloff became the “SaaS-pocalypse,” and why it travelled so fast: if an LLM can do the job, why keep paying for bespoke software seat by seat. The same local names from up top all got caught in it, though they’ve clawed back a fair bit in the last few weeks. The line that sticks is Morningstar’s, in a somewhat reductionist tone: if one person can now do the work of two, seat counts fall.

The Takeaway: "AI makes software redundant" is what many will take from this, and you can see why. The FUD writes itself: digital photography killed Kodak and Netflix marked the end of Blockbuster. But a selloff, as I noted above, is the voting machine doing what it does.

We saw it with the GameStop short squeeze in 2021, when the meme stock rocketed on nothing but a Reddit narrative. The “wisdom of the crowds” isn’t always wisdom, sometimes it’s just sheep following each other sheep.

As the build part gets easier, the other parts remain hard. Maintaining and improving software is still difficult. Granted it’s easier with agents running around making PRs, but we’re still not at the point where the whole stack is self-driving. That day may come, but do you really want to build, maintain and improve your own HR or payroll software? Maybe just leave that to ServiceNow. Which is what I think the vast majority of companies will do.

Rethinking the SaaS Apocalypse (Forbes)

Rundown: Steve Banker, who covers supply chain and enterprise software for Forbes, reckons the selloff that wiped hundreds of billions in software value is a massive overreaction. His own first take was that pure workflow apps were exposed and optimisation tools safer, until a LinkedIn piece by ReverseLogix CMO Chuck Fuerst changed his mind. Fuerst's argument: AI made the easy part fast, writing code, which creates a dangerous illusion that building software was ever the hard part. It isn't. AI handles the visible layer, the interface and the first version. It doesn't touch architecture, reliability, integration, compliance or maintenance, and most internal builds don't fail at version one. They fail at everything after, as APIs change and what worked six months ago quietly breaks. That's why companies aren't ripping out core systems for AI-built replacements. They're extending the platforms they already trust, not rebuilding them.

The Takeaway: AI did collapse the cost of building, and the weekend-build stories are real. But building was never the business. As Fuerst puts it, the maintenance, the compliance, the integrations that break at 2am aren't edge cases, they are the operating environment. Version one is the easy part. Version two is where companies quietly go to die, and AI only made the first one free. The value moved to the part AI can't carry. An agent is brilliant at processing information but still needs a filing cabinet, and the firms holding decades of data aren't going anywhere, the same point Jensen made up top. So if you're an incumbent, your moat was never the software, it's the data and the trust nobody wants to leave. If you're building new, become the operating environment, or bring AI to where the data already lives. The real question isn't whether a customer can build version one without you. It's whether they want to hold the filing cabinet when version two breaks.

Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff on the All-in Podcast

On the All-In Podcast, the hosts sit down with the SaaS GOAT Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a 40-year veteran of enterprise software. Everyone right now is debating whether AI is triggering a SaaSpocalypse. Benioff's response is that it isn’t his first rodeo. The more interesting line of questioning from the Besties isn't whether software dies, it's whether the AI hype ever shows up in the revenue, because so far the market has re-rated hard on a story the numbers haven't told. Salesforce is down 37% and its compadres are down too, yet by his account they all just posted strong quarters while trading at two times sales. His take is that there's a hypnosis around AI the financials have yet to confirm, and in the meantime a lot of software is still being sold.

In a moment of lucidity, Chamath splits the market in two: the low end is finished, but the high end, the large incumbents with deep C-suite relationships and twenty years of trust, is safe and arguably positioned to win. Benioff explains why. AI is probabilistic, so it only works when it's grounded in real data and a single source of truth. As he puts it, none of this stuff works if you don't have context. The companies that own that context, the decades of customer data locked inside their platforms (here’s the data hypothesis again), hold the thing a generic agent cannot conjure. It's the same conclusion the rest of the issue keeps reaching. The moat was never the software, it's the data underneath it.

He closes on something that is sure to land with anyone building right now. You can't get drunk on the stock price, he tells his team, because it's the one thing you can't control. The anchor is customer success, revenue, cash flow, the work itself (amen). To the founders nursing private valuations and waiting for the market to love them again, his advice is blunter: valuation is fantasyland until someone actually pays you. Focus on the customer, and let the multiple sort itself out. Coming from a man on at least his third SaaSpocalypse tour of duty, buying his own stock back while everyone else heads for the exits, the calm is hard to argue with. He has watched this story play out before, and software was still standing at the end of it.

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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.

Most founders need a system that works hand-in-hand with their business, but end up stuck in a Notion graveyard. Starting projects without a clear plan or outcome is one of the most common mistakes founders make in Notion. Without boundaries, the system sprawls and quietly stops doing what it was built for.

As part of our Lunch & Learn series, we invited Notion expert Tim Jeffries from Smooth Ops Consulting to lead a session on how to build Notion pages that align with your business and turn day-to-day workflows from chaotic into efficient.

Tim walked us through everything: figuring out what your business actually needs, building a minimum viable Notion setup, mapping your digital operating system, and where Notion AI and agents fit into the picture.

Where Do You Start?

Don't Start with The Tool

People assume that having the tool means they can do anything. Then they blame the system when it goes wrong. They ask, "What can Notion do for me?", but that's the wrong question. The right one is, "What does the business need?"

There are three things you need to identify before starting in Notion:

• Outcome: the actual result you're looking for.
• Components: the pieces you need to get there. Clients, projects, tasks, status, people.
• Connections: the workflows linking those components. These need to be intentional, not accidental.

How to really start?

After working with dozens of teams, Tim landed on six core databases that almost every organisation needs: Companies, People, Projects, Tasks, Meetings, and Knowledge. Start here, make them your own, and build from there. Every business is different, but the bones behind every organisation are consistent. Tim calls these The Starting Six.

• Companies: the organisations your business deals with. Mostly clients, suppliers, and partners, all in one place. Tim's advice is to keep it generic and consolidated. Have as few as possible, but as many as you need. Start with one Companies database and only split it when the differences between client, supplier, and partner become genuinely hard to manage together.
• People: the humans connected to those companies. The most common early mistake is not grouping and segmenting people properly. Linking them to companies creates the interconnected web where one company surfaces all of its related contacts.
• Projects: the spine of the whole system. Everything relates back to projects. Tim defines projects broadly on purpose: the container, the grouping of the work. Start with one Projects database and split only when the differences between project types become genuinely too hard to manage together.
• Tasks: the granular, day-to-day actions connected to your projects. The actual actions tied to a project. What used to be a sticky note. Only add properties like priority or urgency if your team will actually use them. Unused fields are just friction.
• Meetings: where your calendar and workspace connect. Tim's key point here is avoiding duplicate records. Your Meetings database links back to People, Projects, and Tasks so everything stays in one place.
• Knowledge: the catchall for reference information that doesn't belong anywhere else. Unstructured information builds up in the corners of every business. The Knowledge database is where it lives.

Keeping a Minimum Viable Operating System

People tend to over-engineer Notion. As Tim says, we're not building a spaceship, we're building a skateboard. The point: that's all you need to get going. Start simple and add complexity later. If you're building a system, set your priorities. It's a balance between what you need and what you can use.

AI in Notion

Before you use AI, you need a structured system. If your databases are in chaos, you're likely making the agent hallucinate, and we don't want that. You can't leverage AI or build effective agents if there's no structured system behind the scenes for them to work on.

The process should be run by you, and AI does the heavy lifting.

How to Let AI Do Its Role:

• Set up your personal instructions. This is the foundation that everything else sits on. Every time you open a new chat, the AI loads those instructions first, which means it already knows your context, your preferences, and where everything lives before you've typed a single word.
• Talk to it like a colleague, not a search engine. Once your instructions are in place, you don't need to over-engineer your prompts. A voice-to-text shortcut is often enough.
• Build smarts into your skills, not your prompts. When you're crafting skills, go beyond the basics. Give the AI ways to cross-reference its own work, check for consistency, and course-correct before it hands anything back to you.
• Stop rebuilding context from scratch every chat. One of the most common frustrations with AI tools is having to re-explain everything at the start of a new conversation. The fix is well-built skills, which are focused, clearly-scoped instructions that define exactly what the AI needs to do and the output it's working toward.

That's the framework. Now it's your move. Open your workspace and see what needs to change.

Additional Resources

Tim put together a Personal Agent Starter Kit to help you get your instructions right from the start, tested patterns, clear examples, and a practical framework to make your Personal Agent work the way your business actually thinks.

If this Lunch & Learn session got you thinking, Notion in Practice is the podcast worth adding to your list. Each episode features real founders, consultants, operators, and marketing leaders sharing how they actually build and scale their workflows in Notion

Want bite-sized Notion tips straight to your inbox? Tim shares quick, practical insights on systems, workflows, and making Notion actually work for your business — no fluff, just the good stuff. Subscribe here: https://substack.com/@smoothopsconsulting

Dive deeper on the practical tips, Notion 101 full video is available on YouTube.

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.

The best opportunities for founders rarely sit inside one city or one market. They show up when ecosystems start connecting to each other. That's where new customers, partners and capital get unlocked, and it's how the ecosystems themselves grow stronger, more open, and better wired into the world. The businesses moving fastest already know this. They build relationships across borders early, in person, and grow alongside them.

That's the thinking behind Cremorne Connect: Singapore Meets Melbourne.

When Singapore Came to Melbourne

Singapore has been one of the world's key innovation hubs for years now. It's home to the APAC headquarters of many of the world's leading companies, a thriving startup scene, and a government that actively backs its founders in taking their ideas global.

For one evening, we had a slice of that ecosystem right here in Cremorne.

In partnership with Haymarket HQ and Enterprise Singapore, we brought 12 of Singapore's most promising startups to Cremorne Digital Hub. What followed was one of those nights that reminds you why in-person still beats everything else.

Twelve Founders, Sixty Seconds Each

Each of the 12 founders had one minute. One minute to tell the room who they are, what they're building, and why Australia is the next move. It sounds tight, and it is, but a one-minute pitch has a way of cutting through the noise. Here are the founders who took the floor:

• Vishnu Saran, CEO, Invigilo. Looking for high-risk industries where workplace safety is a top priority.
• James Miles, COO, TalentHero. Looking for Shopify, ServiceNow and Salesforce partners, and companies building tech teams in Southeast Asia.
• Rohini Krishnamurthi, Co-Founder, Eight Vectors. Looking for 3PL operators, warehouse operators, and service providers.
• Johnny Slattery, CEO, EarthTrack. Looking for distributors and connections into the mining and heavy industry sector.
• Joo Seng Wong, CEO, Spark Systems. Looking for banks and institutional trading firms needing e-FX solutions.
• Raymond Moh, CEO, iCOMPASS. Looking for compliance advisory firms and regulated businesses.
• Glenn Tan, CEO, Zavior. Looking for organisations wanting to streamline governance and compliance.
• Dr. Billy Yu, Chief AI Architect, PadmaAI. Looking for multilingual enterprises wanting to simplify how they search and access knowledge.
• Helene Mayne, Director of Customer Success, AIQURIS. Looking for enterprises deploying AI systems, and tech vendors.
• Jonathan Tostevin, CEO, Muuse. Looking for high-footfall hospitality venues ready to ditch single-use packaging.
• Joshua Errett, Founder & CEO, Friends & Family Pet Food. Looking for pet food distributors, retailers, and influencers.
• Ivan Mun, Founder, ELLO. Looking for channel partners in the assisted living and elderly care space.

Want to connect with any of them? Find them on LinkedIn and start the conversation.

After the pitches, the founders took the floor for a panel and went deep on the things that actually matter when you're entering a new market. We covered the gaps in Australia's industrial tech stack, what it really takes to work with Australian financial institutions, and where the AU and SG consumer markets line up versus where they genuinely diverge.

We wrapped with open networking, which is where the real value lived. Founders connected directly with potential partners, distributors, and collaborators from across Victoria's startup ecosystem. New relationships, new conversations, new doors, all opened over drinks.

What the Night Proved

The Australia and Southeast Asia opportunity is real, but access has always been the gap. Events like Cremorne Connect exist to close it by putting the right people in the same room and letting the conversations do the work. The night proved what we already suspected. When you bring motivated founders together with a curious, open ecosystem, good things happen fast.

The strongest ecosystems are built on genuine connection, not just locally but globally. Shaping a community that looks outward, welcomes the world in, and grows together is at the heart of what we do at Cremorne Digital Hub.

We're doing something we don't usually offer outside of Clubhouse.

We're opening a few spots for 1:1 mentoring sessions with Claire Thompson from Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer. If you've got legal questions about your raise that go beyond what a webinar can cover, this is your chance to get direct, personalised advice from one of Australia's most experienced startup lawyers.

Claire has led legal work on some of Australia's highest-profile funding rounds — she knows exactly what founders get wrong, and how to fix it.

In your 30-minute session, you can:

• Ask about your current legal challenges
• Get advice on your investor relationships
• Learn what to look out for in your next raise

Spots are limited — if you're raising or preparing to, don't miss this one.

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.

Most people know AI can help them work faster. Yet many are still figuring out how to make it work for them. The gap between "I've been meaning to try this" and "I shipped something real" is where most of us get stuck. Not for lack of interest, but for lack of structure, time, and someone to build alongside.

What Happened

Notion AI Labs Melbourne brought together people from the community for an afternoon of doing, not just watching. The event kicked off with a live agent demo and a walkthrough of the three things that make an agent build actually succeed. Then came the real part: everyone built a simple agent together, before branching off to tackle their own real workflows with expert support floating around the room to help troubleshoot.

The day closed with some teams sharing what they'd made. Live agents. Real use cases.

Kudos to Notion Team

None of this would have happened without the incredible Notion leads who showed up, rolled up their sleeves, and shared their expertise. Many thanks to Vanessa Intan, Maddison Silk, Louisa McSpedden plus Notion expert Tim Jeffries!

This is Innovation Download, a monthly update on what's moving in Australia's startup and innovation ecosystem.

This issue is about AI and the workforce. Who is losing jobs, where the investment is going, and what happens when the technology promising efficiency is quietly making work harder. We dig into the wave of layoffs hitting Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, and ask whether this is a market correction, "AI taking all the jobs," or something else. We look at why Australia's Employment Minister is less worried about job losses and more worried about burnout, and at Microsoft's $25 billion bet that skilling three million Australians is how this country gets ahead of the curve. Plus Balaji Srinivasan on why the SaaS apocalypse is overhyped, and why AI inside the right team is genuinely transformative.

This Month's Reads

20,000 job cuts at Meta, Microsoft raise concern that AI-driven labor crisis is here (CNBC)

Rundown: Major tech companies are cutting jobs at an alarming rate while pouring record sums into AI, and the tension is hard to ignore. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Nike have announced tens of thousands of layoffs in 2026, pushing the year's tech job losses past 92,000 and the total since 2020 to nearly 900,000. Yet Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are projected to spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone, with Oracle cutting up to 30,000 roles partly to free up cash for its own AI buildout. In the startup world, lean AI-native teams are reaching $50 million in revenue with fewer than 50 staff, and investors are increasingly backing small headcounts over traditional team sizes. The result is a workforce caught in a difficult spot. The same technology driving record investment is the one eliminating their jobs.

The Takeaway: "AI is replacing jobs" is the easy narrative, and it isn't wrong. But it isn't the whole story either. The more interesting read is that AI is refactoring what work actually looks like, and that's a different conversation. Every previous platform shift, the internet being the most recent, ended the same way: jobs disappeared, new ones emerged, and the shape of work changed. New categories of work will emerge here too. What's different this time is the breadth. AI doesn't just create new jobs at the edges, it changes how everyone in the middle does their existing one. The most useful frame for what's coming isn't replacement, it's that everyone becomes a manager. A manager of agents. The skill that compounds over the next decade isn't writing the email or the code or the brief, it's knowing what to delegate, how to brief it, and how to verify the output. Some of the 92,000 will land in jobs that didn't exist two years ago. Most of the people who keep theirs will find the job has quietly changed underneath them. The real question for leaders isn't whether AI replaces workers. It's whether their organisation is set up to help everyone become a good manager of the work AI now does.

AI burnout and phony productivity gains among minister’s top concerns (AFR)

The Rundown: Australia's Employment Minister Amanda Rishworth is sounding the alarm on AI in the workplace, not over job losses, but over work intensification. At the Financial Review Workforce Summit, she warned that AI's constant, real-time performance tracking is raising expectations faster than it's reducing workload, citing a Harvard Business Review study showing generative AI tools intensified work rather than lightened it. Safe Work Australia is reviewing AI through a health and safety lens as part of its national Best Practice Review of the model WHS laws. NSW has already passed the Digital Work Systems Act, the first Australian law to make excessive AI-driven workloads, surveillance, and performance metrics a workplace safety issue. Recent Jobs and Skills Australia data also shows a slight softening in growth for the occupations most exposed to AI, such as filing clerks and keyboard operators. On regulation, Rishworth is keeping the door open without committing to a bottom line, but her position on the productivity question is firm: where AI delivers gains, workers should share in them, through pay rises and more fulfilling work.

The Takeaway: Rishworth's view is one of the more interesting takes on where we are with AI right now, whether you ultimately agree with it or not. The framing is that AI is intensifying work rather than reducing it, and the gains, such as they are, are being absorbed into expectations rather than shared with the people producing them. That might be exactly right. But it's also worth holding open the possibility that what looks like intensification is the early shape of work changing, and the two are genuinely hard to tell apart from the inside. Every previous platform shift produced the same tension at the start. Email made everyone feel busier, not freer. The same was said of the smartphone, of online collaboration tools and so on. Some of that effect resolved into actual productivity gains. Some of it just became the new floor.

Yes, the productivity question is a real one. It might also just be the question of work changing, which is the same conversation in a different costume. This is the messy middle of AI, and a lot of the regulatory and corporate posture being set right now is being set before the question is settled. The leaders most likely to navigate it well are the ones treating their own organisation as a place to gather evidence rather than a place to defend a thesis, because AI will look like both stories at once for a while, and being honest about which one you're actually in is harder than it sounds.

Tech giant Microsoft unveiles $25 billion plan to reshape the Australian workplace (9News)

The Rundown: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a A$25 billion investment in Australia through 2029, covering AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and workforce skilling. Announced in Sydney alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, it is Microsoft's largest commitment in Australia to date and will expand its local cloud and AI footprint by more than 140 per cent. On jobs, Nadella was reassuring, framing AI as an amplifier of Australia's existing strengths rather than a force replacing the people doing the work. On skills, Microsoft tripled its previous target to three million Australians by 2028 and launched the Microsoft Elevate for Educators program. It also signed on with the newly established Australian AI Safety Institute, expanded the Microsoft–ASD Cyber Shield to more federal agencies, and convened a first-of-its-kind summit with the ACTU on AI in the workforce. Nadella's closing message: AI will amplify what Australia does well, not disrupt it.

The Takeaway: A $25 billion is a serious commitment by Australian standards, and worth recognising as such. For global context, the four largest US hyperscalers are projected to spend around US$700 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone, so what looks transformative locally is meaningful but modest at that scale. The more useful read is what the package unlocks for the Australian startup ecosystem. Three million people gaining workforce-ready AI skills by 2028 is roughly twenty per cent of the workforce, which lifts the floor on AI literacy across every hiring funnel. Pair that with the Educator program reaching teachers and students, the AI Safety Institute collaboration, the expanded Cyber Shield, and the ACTU dialogue, and the investment starts to look less like a single deal and more like a foundation. The rails get laid down once. If they are laid down well, the hope is the one Nadella named: AI amplifies what Australia already does best.

Podcast Episodes Worth Your Time

Why Balaji Srinivasan Thinks the SaaS Apocalypse Is Overhyped (The a16z Show)

On The a16z Show, host Erik Torenberg sits down with Balaji Srinivasan, angel investor, former Coinbase CTO and former a16z partner. Everyone right now is debating whether AI is triggering a SaaSpocalypse. Balaji thinks this isn't actually the most interesting question. The more interesting one is what happens when AI lowers the cost of creating things and raises the cost of verifying them. That asymmetry, not the SaaS panic, is what reshapes the AI economy (or so his theory goes).

The framework worth taking from the conversation is about where humans still do the work AI cannot. AI doesn't sense the world. It waits for a prompt, executes, and stops. It doesn't read markets, culture, or the room. Humans do. In a world where everyone has access to the same tools, the edge isn't the tool, it's the quality of thinking you bring to it. As Balaji puts it, humans are the sensor, AI is the actuator. Taste is the sense.

He closes on something that lands for anyone building a team right now. Inside a trusted circle, where context, goals and standards are shared, AI is genuinely transformative. Between tribes, it generates noise. Spam, low-quality outputs, content that costs more to verify than it is worth. His rule is short. No public, undisclosed AI. Be transparent about when AI is in the mix, because the moment people can't trust what they are receiving, the whole thing breaks down.

Resources:

• Why Australian businesses are offshoring – and it’s not about cutting costs
• The Lean AI Startup: How Founders Are Building $10M Businesses With Teams of 5
• AI in Product Development: Redefining How We Innovate in 2026

Most founders think PR starts when you have news. Greg Kirby thinks that's already too late.

Greg Kirby is a CDH and Startmate mentor, former journalist, and founder of Signala. Greg has reported from some of the UK’s biggest newsrooms, including the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, as well as newswire services such as PA Media and SWNS. Now he helps founders get the coverage their startup deserves through Signala, his AI-assisted PR platform, currently onboarding pilot partners with upcoming company announcements.

At our latest Lunch and Learn, he spent an hour telling founders why their pitches often fall flat, and what to do to boost your chances.

Here's what we took away.

Want to attend our next Lunch and Learn?

Sign up to our [NEXT] Community here

PR is not about blasting generic press releases to as many journalists as you can find

It's about what people think when they hear your name. That's the frame Greg opened with, and it resets everything else.

Before you do anything, know who you're actually trying to reach and why. Investors need credibility and social proof. Customers need trust. Potential staff want to see somewhere worth joining. Each audience needs a different approach. One generic press release doesn't serve any of them well.

Start before you have something to announce

The founders who get consistent coverage aren't the ones with the biggest news. They're the ones who built relationships before they needed them.

If you wait until you have an announcement to start pitching journalists, you have no relationships, no track record, and no one knows who you are. By then you're starting from zero. Start engaging with relevant journalists right away. You should know the journalists and publications that will cover your company by name. Even just reading those publications puts you ahead of most founders.

There's no rigid rule that says you need a Series A to land a national. Pre-seed founders do get into Tier 1 papers, if the story is right. And Series A raises often fall flat too if the news hook is buried.

Signs of traction help. A funding round, a recognisable customer, a credible investor, all of it justifies a story and gives it legs. But traction on its own isn't enough. There needs to be a stronger story sitting behind it.

That story can take a lot of shapes. A founder journey, like someone who launched their company while still at school. A product innovation that opens up something genuinely new, like Death Tech, or AI bots helping butchers run their deliveries. A broader trend your announcement encapsulates, proves, or contradicts. A gap in what journalists are currently covering that you happen to fill.

The raise amount matters more for some publications than others. The AFR weights financial scale heavily, especially when it comes to company valuations. The Age and The Australian care less about the dollar figure and more about whether the story stands up on its own, and has a strong Australian merit.

The honest test isn't "what stage am I at?". It's "would a the intended audience care about this story even if they didn't care about my company?" If yes, you're in the conversation. Figuring out which angle clears that bar, and which publication it fits, is what Signala exists to do.

A product launch is not a story

This is where most pitches die. "We launched a product" gets deleted. "We launched a product that's already saved 200 nurses three hours a day" gets read.

The hook is almost never the product. It's the outcome, the human behind it, the problem it solves in a way people can feel. And most founders bury that hook in paragraph four.

The things that reliably work: a market nobody else has tackled, a personal founder story directly tied to the problem, something technically new that eliminates a recognisable frustration, a trend your company proves or disproves, taking on a well-known rival, landing a recognisable partner or customer, or being first in your category.

Signala uses a structured newsworthiness model to assess whether a story is ready for a journalist. It looks at multiple dimensions, including the strength of the hook, the human story, the trend it speaks to, the numbers behind it, and the gap it fills in what's currently being covered. A published story almost always scores highly on more than one measure.

Different publications want completely different things

Greg broke this down clearly. The AFR wants financial scale and external validation. SMH and The Age want a story a non-founder would retell at dinner. Forbes Australia wants a founder worth profiling, the company is almost secondary. TechCrunch wants a defensible technical claim and a reason it's happening now. SmartCompany covers relatable founder wins where narrative matters more than scale. Capital Brief wants deal mechanics and market context, often requiring little or no founder story.

And regional news or trade publications? They're screaming out for content, easier to land, and national journalists pick up local stories too. Don't overlook them.

You don't need a big announcement to build a media presence

LinkedIn is the highest-return channel most founders aren't using properly, especially if you harness video properly. You don't need a big following. You need one post the right person sees.

Opinion pieces in trade publications can be quick wins and build real credibility in your sector. When a major story breaks that relates to your company, pitch yourself as a source, journalists are actively looking for comment when a trend is in the news cycle.

Build relationships with journalists before you need them. Follow their work. Comment genuinely. Offer yourself as a source, not a story. Who knows, you might become the story?

On pitching over email

Keep it short, five sentences maximum. Personalise every single pitch, but be genuine. One line showing you've engaged with their work is enough. If your story is a strong fit for multiple publications, offer one journalist an exclusive rather than blasting the same pitch to everyone.

And one more thing Greg stressed: the funding raise is not the story. It's the credibility signal that makes the story worth running now. The actual news hook is something else.

Found this helpful? Greg and Signala can help you craft a story that lands.

Get in contact with Signala here

This is what mentorship looks like at CDH

Greg didn't gate this behind a course or a consulting retainer. He walked into a room of founders, shared what he knows, and made everyone in it sharper for it.

That's the Lunch and Learn format. One expert practitioner, one topic, one hour. Real knowledge from someone who's lived it — shared freely with founders who need it.

We run these regularly at Cremorne Digital Hub, and we're always looking for founders and operators who have something worth sharing. Whether it's fundraising, hiring, product, sales, legal, or — clearly — PR.

If you've got hard-won expertise that could save another founder six months of trial and error, we'd love to hear from you.

Here's something most people won't tell you about hackathons: the technology is never the hard part. The hard part is the blank page. The moment you have an idea, a teammate you just met, and six hours to prove it's real. That's exactly what the Vibe-a-thon event, hosted by Archangel Ventures in partnership with AWS, Vercel, Cremorne Digital Hub, and Heidi, set out to solve.

Why "Vibe-a-thon" and not just another hackathon?

Traditional hackathons can feel like a pressure cooker given the limited time for ideas, what to build, and the team plan. We wanted something different. The Vibe-a-thon was designed around a simple belief: the best products come from people who are genuinely excited about what they're making. The name isn't just a gimmick; it signals a different energy in the room. Less competing, more creating. Less fear of failure, more momentum from curiosity.

How the Day Unfold

The day kicked off with a welcome session that set the tone and focused on making the most of the day: how to scope an idea quickly, how to find the right collaborators, and how to stay focused on the user rather than the tech stack. The message was simple: start with the problem, not the solution.

Then came one of the most insightful moments of the day. Brandon Vincent, Engineering Lead at Heidi, shared his insights on how to build products that people actually love. Brandon explained how tools like vibe coding and Claude Code have fundamentally shifted how his team works. Then he said something that made the room pause. In 10 to 15 years, he believes there won't be developers in the traditional sense, just product developers. People who understand users deeply, make sharp decisions quickly, and use AI as the hands that build what their minds design.

The focus then shifted from mindset to execution. The workshop on accelerating MVPs with Vercel's v0 and AWS gave attendees a hands-on look at how quickly a working prototype could take shape when they have the right infrastructure behind them. The gap between idea and product has never been smaller, and this session made that tangible for everyone in the room.

And then the building began in earnest. Roaming support from experts at Vercel, AWS, Heidi, and Archangel Ventures meant that no team stayed blocked for long.

The day closed with demos, drinks, and the particular kind of energy that only follows a day of genuine effort. Teams presented what they'd built honest and real.

A Huge Thanks for the Champions

None of this happens without the people who believe in it before it's proven. The vibe-a-thon wasn't just an event, it was a statement about what building a community around product creation can actually look like. And that statement only gets made when the right people stand behind it.

A heartfelt thank you to Archangel Ventures for leading this from the front for seeing the gap between traditional hackathons and what builders actually need, and for having the conviction to fill it. And to AWS, and Vercel for guiding every builder in that room. Your expertise, your energy, and your willingness to share what you know is exactly what this community needs to keep building, keep shipping, and keep growing.

Last Friday, we brought Melbourne's founder community together at the Cremorne Digital Hub for another Cremorne Guzzle. Cold drinks, warm conversations, and the kind of connections that stick after you leave the room.

Founders got to meet, swap stories, and geek out over what they're building. And just when the room was warmed up, we took it a step further. A few brave founders took the floor for Founder Asks, sharing their biggest challenges and asking the community for help.

It's more than drinks and networking. The Cremorne Guzzle was built to connect people, but what we keep seeing is something bigger than that. It's a testament to what we're trying to do at CDH: drive an ecosystem where people genuinely help each other. No agendas, no awkward small talk. Just good people showing up for one another, which is what Founder Asks is all about.

Why this works

There's no polished deck, no pitch-ready script, no formal setup.

Founder Asks exists because the most powerful thing you can do at an early stage is build in public. Take people along on the growth journey. Say what you're working on, say what you need. All it takes is two minutes of sharing your challenges, and the right person might already be in the room. They just didn't know where to find you, and the Guzzle is making it possible.

Every founder who took the floor last Friday left with something: a connection, a solution, or a peer who gets it. Not because their pitch was polished, but because they were willing to ask.

The Founder “Ask”

Each founder got a two-minute slot to tell the room who they are, what they're building, and what they need. No slides. No formal pitch. Just them, their logo, and a room full of helping hands.

The conversation doesn't stop here. They might still need your help. Here are the founders who asked:

• Dan Borthwick, Founder at NiceGit
  Dan is looking for a COO co-founder to take his platform from beta to boom rolling out to thousands of users and leading the charge through a full commercial launch.
• Athy Giannopolous, Founder at StrataBoss
  Athy is keen to connect with Strata property owners, particularly owners corporation committee members, to understand the challenges they're experiencing with their strata property management.
• Billy Ka Keung Chan, CEO & Co-Founder at Alfred Travel Technology
  Billy is looking for user feedback, particularly on user experience.
• Narendra Santosh Nagarajan, Co-Founder at Edithly
  Narendra wants to validate whether his product truly fits the market and get a better feel for what's happening in Melbourne's startup world.
• Grant Fullston, Founder at Just Say Hey
  Grant is on the lookout for beta testers for to step in as event hosts and share real feedback from the ground up.

Got something that could help? Connect with them and keep the momentum going.

Want in on the next one?

Founder Asks slots are open to the CDH community, and Clubhouse members get priority. If you want to be front of the queue next time, find out more about CDH Clubhouse membership here.

If you're coming to the next Guzzle and you're working on something, put your hand up. Submit your Ask by filling out the form below.

Thirteen of Singapore's most promising startups are coming to Melbourne, and they're looking to connect with the local ecosystem. This is your chance to meet them, explore potential partnerships, and be part of the conversation as these companies look to enter the Australian market.

In collaboration with Haymarket HQ and Enterprise Singapore, we're bringing these companies to Cremorne Digital Hub for an evening of pitches, panels, and real conversations. Whether you're a founder, operator, investor, or advisor, if you're part of Melbourne's innovation community, you won’t want to miss this event.

What to expect:

Each company will pitch what they're building and who they're looking to connect with. You'll hear directly from founders across AI, compliance, sustainability, fintech, and more, all actively seeking Australian partners, distributors, and collaborators.

Then we'll open the floor for networking, where you can connect directly with the teams that interest you.

The evening:

• 5:30 PM — Doors open, drinks and networking
• 6:00 PM — Startup pitches, panel discussion, and Q&A
• 7:15 PM — Open networking, drinks, and nibbles
• 8:00 PM — Close

Whether you're exploring Southeast Asian partnerships, venture-curious, or just want to see what's coming out of Singapore's startup scene, this is a must-attend event.

This is the Innovation Download, a monthly update on what's happening in Australia's startup and innovation ecosystem.

This issue is about capital. Who has it, where it's going, and what happens when it gets cheaper to build but harder to exit. We dig into the Cut Through Venture and Carta reports on Australian startup funding, look at why the country that produces more unicorns per VC dollar than anywhere else still can't take its best companies public. Plus Marc Andreessen on the cost of not backing something versus the cost of backing something that fails.

This Month's Reads

State of Australian Startup Funding 2025 (Cut Through Venture)

The rundown: Australia's startups raised $5.4 billion across 390 deals in 2025, a 31% jump and the third-largest funding year on record. But the headline simplifies the picture. Deal count dropped 20%, the top 20 deals captured 58% of all capital, and two companies alone account for a disproportionate share of the total. What the report describes is a two-speed ecosystem: AI-native companies with strong metrics moved fast, everyone else waited longer and worked harder. 66% of deals included at least one international investor, with local cheque sizes struggling to keep pace at Series A and beyond. The exit engine remains stalled, with just two ASX tech IPOs in all of 2025.

Takeaway: The headline number is real, but it obscures more than it reveals. Strip out the top deals and the picture looks different. What this report describes is an ecosystem maturing in the places investors can see, deal quality, founder discipline, international interest, while a structural problem builds in the places they can't. The exit backlog isn't just a liquidity issue. It's a recycling issue. Capital that doesn't return to investors doesn't return to founders. And capital that doesn't return to founders means the next generation of companies gets funded by a smaller, more selective pool than the one before it.

The Next Phase of Australia’s Tech Story Depends on Deeper Global Capital (HSBC Innovation Banking)

The rundown: Australia enters 2026 producing 1.22 unicorns for every billion dollars of VC invested, more than any other country on earth. The piece argues that Australian founders are capital-efficient by necessity. The small domestic market forces founders to think globally from day one. Australia sits on $4.5 trillion in superannuation, one of the largest pools of retirement savings on earth. This isn't a country short on capital. It's a country where the capital is pointing in a different direction. Only 4.4 cents in every dollar touches venture. Global pension funds allocate three times that. The money exists. It's just parked somewhere else.

Takeaway: 1.22 unicorns per billion sounds impressive. But per-capita and per-dollar stats can flatter small sample sizes. Australia has produced roughly 30 unicorns total. The US has produced hundreds. When your denominator is small, a handful of outliers can move the ratio dramatically. The stat tells you something about efficiency, but it doesn't tell you whether that efficiency is repeatable, structural, or just a few strong cohorts doing the heavy lifting. The more useful question isn't whether Australian founders are efficient. It's whether that efficiency survives contact with more capital, or whether it was always a product of having less of it.

The Australian Startup Outlook 2026 (Carta)

The rundown: Carta surveyed 500 Australian startup decision-makers and found a market caught between ambition and survival. 96% of founders still plan for an IPO. But 65% have less than 12 months of runway, and 86% saw burn increase over the past year. Exit timelines are stretching, with 47% now expecting a listing five or more years away. On AI, 80% privately believe there's a bubble, and 63% think the pressure will fade within 12 months, yet 40% have already reshaped their investor pitch around it. More than half of founders planning an IPO are eyeing dual or offshore listings, with Nasdaq the most cited target.

Takeaway: The gap between what founders believe and what they say is the real story here. When 80% think AI is a bubble but 40% have already reframed their pitch around it, it's hard not to wonder how much of the current AI positioning is conviction and how much is just good fundraising strategy. The offshore listing data is less surprising than it looks. Founders outgrowing their domestic exchange isn't unique to Australia. It happens in the UK, Canada, and most mid-sized markets. The difference is scale. When your best companies list elsewhere, the local market loses the signal that attracts the next generation of capital. In a market already short on exits, that feedback loop matters more than it would somewhere with a deeper bench.

Podcast Episodes Worth Your Time

Marc Andreessen: Will a16z Go Public & Why Labour Displacement with AI is Wrong? (20VC with Harry Stebbings)

Marc Andreessen is the A in a16z and probably doesn't need an introduction, but for context: he co-created the first widely used web browser, co-founded Netscape, and now runs a venture firm managing over $90 billion.

He spends a lot of this conversation with Harry Stebbings on how venture capitalists (namely him) think about risk, and why most of them get it backwards. His argument: the biggest losses in venture don't come from bad bets. They come from the ones you never make. He calls it the "scalded stove" effect. An investor backs a category, it doesn't work out, and they avoid the whole space for years. AI was a reliable way to lose money in venture from 1945 to 2017. The investors who stayed away in 2018 because they'd been burned before made a category error dressed up as experience.

He also argues that the tech industry is more concentrated in Silicon Valley than at any point in its history, and that AI is the reason. Nearly 100% of what he calls "quality AI companies" sit within a 20-mile radius. For Australian founders who've always had to think globally from day one, "global" may increasingly mean getting to San Francisco earlier than previous generations needed to, for the capital and the been-there-done-it talent that's consolidating there.

The broader question he raises, and the one that sits beneath the surface of this whole issue, is what AI actually changes about work. In his view, large companies are overstaffed by 25 to 75%, and AI isn't displacing workers so much as giving companies a socially acceptable reason to fix hiring decisions they made during COVID. If that's true, it reframes the competitive landscape for startups. There's a window between "incumbents are distracted by their own restructuring" and "incumbents emerge leaner and more dangerous." The question for founders is whether they're building fast enough to matter before the other side finishes sorting itself out.

Helpful Resources:

💻 UTS Startup Guide for new founders
📝 Download the State of Australian Startup Funding 2025
🤖 Vibecoding basics for your first app
💻 Airtree: What investors look for in early-stage startup investments

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? Come prepared with your biggest challenge—you never know who’s in the room with the solution.

GTC is one of the best windows into where AI is actually heading. Not just the next product cycle, but the next decade. Every year, Jensen Huang takes the stage and lays out a vision that shapes how industries think, invest, and build. For founders and builders in Melbourne, that matters. The pressure to stay ahead of AI isn't abstract. It's daily. And knowing what's coming is only half the challenge. Having the tools, the training, and the right people around you to act on it is the other half.

That's exactly why we wanted to bring a piece of it to Melbourne. The Best of NVIDIA GTC 2026 was our way of taking the most important conversations from this year's event and making them relevant for Australian founders and builders. A half-day of hands-on learning and honest discussion about what GTC 2026 really means for the local industry.

Building Deeper: Hands-On Learning with NVIDIA and MMT

Knowing AI is moving fast is one thing. Knowing where to get the skills and how to use the tools is another. That's the gap these two sessions were built to close.

Luke Boyce from NVIDIA walked through NVIDIA's Deep Learning Institute (DLI), one of the world's most comprehensive AI learning platforms. It's a practical resource for developers, engineers, and technical founders who want structured, hands-on training to build and deploy AI with confidence.

Carey Hassall from MMT followed with a deep dive into robotics, unpacking NVIDIA's robotics stack and giving attendees a clear picture of how NVIDIA is shaping the next generation of intelligent machines.

For anyone in the room still figuring out where to start with AI, both sessions gave them somewhere concrete to go.

Unpacking Jensen Huang's Keynote

GTC's keynote is always more than a product announcement. It's a signal. Jensen Huang has a track record of laying out ideas that feel ambitious in the moment and obvious in hindsight, and this year was no different.

We cut the keynote into clips, pulling out the moments we thought would resonate most with an Australian audience. The shifts in how AI is being built, bought, and deployed. Those clips anchored a panel discussion with leaders from across Australia's AI sector, turning a global stage into a local conversation.

Here are some of the key insights they shared:

Tokenomics will define AI strategy

It's really important to understand those tokenomics as we move forward. And for Australians, if we're not educated buyers of AI, we're gonna be buying and spending the wrong money in the wrong place.— Bass Salah

Orchestration is where we are headed

When I think about the future of my engineers, I think that it's orchestration. That is the future, which is the ability to orchestrate multiple things and bring together an outcome. — Christopher Bartlett

Proprietary data and distribution are the new moats

Proprietary data and distribution are the biggest things they're looking for right now. — Leila Oliveira

Human-first approach in robotics builds trust

We wanna make sure that people will accept the human load. We're gonna be human first. We wanna make sure that people will accept the human load and then we add capability when that's been finalized.— Yan Chen

The clips gave us a shared starting point. What followed was a genuinely useful conversation about what AI means for Australian businesses right now.

Our Special Giveaways

To top off an incredible day, we ran a special giveaway made possible by our friends at NVIDIA and MMT — featuring an NVIDIA DGX Spark, a Jetson Orin Nano, and NVIDIA Brev Credits for the builders ready to hit the ground running. A huge congratulations to our winners — may these tools take your AI journey further than you ever imagined.

What This Means for Australian Builders

The gap between global AI innovation and local application is closing. Australian developers no longer have to watch the AI revolution from the sidelines. They have access to world-class tools, expert guidance, and a community that's moving fast.

At CDH, that's exactly the kind of environment we're building. A place where founders, innovators, and investors can come together, share what they know, and build what's next. Events like this one are a big part of how we get there.

Big news! Jensen Huang's GTC 2026 keynote is LIVE.

Thanks for submitting your EOI - the quiz is now open and you're the first to know! 🎉

Here's everything you need to do:

Step 1: Register on the GTC Virtual Portal

• Head to the GTC Virtual Portal website.
• Click 'Register' and create your free account - it takes about 2 minutes.
• Check your inbox for a confirmation email and verify your account

Step 2: Find Jensen's Keynote

• Log in to the GTC Virtual Portal. Use the account you just created.
• Find Jensen's keynote. Search for "GTC 2026 Keynote" or look for the Jensen Huang session - it'll be front and centre on the homepage.
• Watch the keynote. Jensen will unveil NVIDIA's biggest AI announcements of the year. Check out the quiz questions first so you know what to look out for!

Step 3: Enter the Competition

• Answer 3 short multiple-choice questions. Check out the quiz questions first so you know what to look out for!

• You're in the draw! We'll announce the winner LIVE at The Best of GTC 2026 on 31 March at CDH Clubhouse.

Need extra help? Here's a step-by-step guide to walk you through it:

Any trouble registering? Reply to this email and we'll help you out.

Good luck! 🤞

The Guzzle is our signature networking event — and a reflection of something we're genuinely proud of at CDH: a strong, tight-knit tech and innovation community right here in Cremorne.

Cold drinks, warm conversations, and the kind of low-key Friday energy that reminds you why being part of a community like this actually matters. Every time we run it, the room delivers. Founders meet investors. Operators meet collaborators. People find common ground on their ideas on how they want the world to change.

This one was no different — except we added something new.

The Guzzle is just one of the regular events we run at CDH — from founder workshops and lunch & learns to accelerator programming and everything in between. If you're not already across what's coming up, follow our Luma calendar to stay in the loop.

Introducing Founder Asks

A two-minute slot for founders to tell the room who they are, what they're building, and what they need. No slides. No formal pitch. Just you, your logo, and a room full of people who actually want to help.

That's it.

The Featured Startups:

A few of our clubhouse and community members stepped up and put it out there:

Matthew Maley, Founder @ Viridis Power ⭐ CDH Clubhouse Member — open-source intelligence for identifying, tracking, and winning government opportunities. If B2G feels like a black box, Viridis Power is the key. Matt's looking for anyone with government connections or experience navigating that space.

Dr Sumedha Verma, Founder @ Deep Sleep Health — evidence-based sleep programs that translate research into real-world care. Not another sleep tracking app — actual clinical rigour applied to how people sleep. Sumedha is looking for beta testers and warm connections into HR and wellness teams at larger companies.

Cooper Tielen, Co-Founder @ Gnositukoi — aeroponic farming systems designed for automation, scale, and urban deployment. Making growing food at home feel more like owning a fridge than tending a garden. Their first product, the Havilah, is already taking reservations. Cooper is looking for a co-founder who believes food should be grown, not just bought.

Madeleine Orr, Co-Founder @ Wake Health — a holistic women's health companion that brings together data, lifestyle, and clinical insight in one place. Think of it as the health platform women have always needed but never had. Madeleine is looking for a chief medical officer to come on as a co-founder.

Think you can help? You can still connect with them on their LinkedIn above.

What Happened After Two Minutes

This is the part we love most.

By the end of the night, those two-minute moments had already turned into something real:

• A potential co-founder connection in the works
• Multiple meaningful conversations with founders on similar journeys
• Two investor meetings locked in
• Warm introductions into medical networks and healthcare staff

Not bad for a Friday night in January.

Why It Works

You don't need to be pitch-ready. You don't need a polished deck, a rehearsed script, or a spot on a formal pitch night just to get a word in.

Founder Asks exists because the most powerful thing you can do at an early stage is build in public — take people along for the ride, say what you're working on, say what you need. The right person might already be in the room. They just didn't know to find you.

Founder Asks slots are open to the CDH community — with Clubhouse members getting first pick. If you want to make sure you're front of the queue for next time, Find out more about CDH Clubhouse membership here.

If you're coming to the next Guzzle and you're working on something, put your hand up. Two minutes, your logo, and and a specific ask of the room.

We'll take care of the rest. See you there.

I've spent most of my career in conversations with people. Hospitality, where you learn quickly that every interaction is a transaction (and opportunity) of some kind — trust, goodwill, experience. High-volume real estate, where lead generation is a numbers game and the feedback is immediate and potentially brutal. High-ticket EdTech, where you're asking someone to invest serious money in something intangible, and the sale lives or dies on whether they see the value that will follow the progress.

Across all of it, I've learnt that sales is not the dark art people make it out to be. It's not a personality type, and it doesn't require you to become Jordan Belfort — celebrating a close like you've just conned someone. Modern customers are too educated for that. With the internet and LLMs, anyone can get across a topic in minutes. The old tricks don't land the way they used to.

I built the Selling Before You're Ready workshop off the back of conversations with founders — smart, capable people who had built something genuinely useful but couldn't see themselves selling it. Not because they lacked the ability, but because they were missing structure, systems, and the right mentality. The trepidation was the obstacle, not the skill gap. Usually, you just need to start and keep going.

Here are a few key lessons I've learnt to make sales seem less daunting:

The best salespeople don't sell. They coach.

The most effective sales conversations are almost entirely problem-focused. Your job in the first meeting isn't to explain what your product does — it's to make the prospect feel genuinely understood. To demonstrate that you're listening and you've seen their situation before, you know the shape of the problem, and that you understand what it costs them to leave it unsolved.

A great coach wouldn't force a solution on you before understanding what you're looking for. Quality coaching starts with discovering, why you're here, what's being felt, what you've tried so far. A complete picture. Then comes the diagnosis in the form of a tailored solution + demo.

One of the highest performing sales consultants I ever worked with started out coaching a local footy team. He told me:

I still think about this. The best coaches don't impose a game plan on their players — they ask questions until a solution emerges. Your relationship with a prospect should work exactly the same way. Less pitch, more dialogue. Less presentation, more understanding.

Email to Set Up Calls, Calls to Set Up Emails

Early in the sales process, overuse of email can be a trap. It feels safer: you can craft your words carefully, you don't have to handle a live reaction, you can write something once and send it to many. That safety, however, comes at a cost. Email is a one-way mirror. Silence doesn't tell you whether someone is interested, busy, sceptical, or has already moved on. A call tells you all of that rather quickly.

Emails to give your calls a reason, calls give your emails weight.

The same concept applies to your prospects, especially with how easy it now is to paste a sales email into an LLM and generate a low-signal, low-effort response that gives you nothing to work with.

Calls also let you practice the essential skill of holding a sustained conversation about the problem — the closest thing to an in-person meeting short of being in the room. They double as market research, keeping you in touch with what's actually happening on the ground. Pair that with the unmatched feedback loop of a live conversation, and it firmly cements customer calls as one of the highest-leverage activities available to an early founder. At the exact stage when customer feedback is most valuable, defaulting to mass email means choosing comfort over learning.

The practical rule: calls for discovery and relationship-building, email for light touches and solidifying on things already discussed. A visual, customised summary sent after a strong first call — one that reflects back what you heard and maps your solution to their specific situation, with an actionable next step — is one of the most effective sales tools available. Meeting note AI makes this easier than ever. Tools like Granola and Notion AI can transcribe and structure your calls in real time, so the hard work of capture is already done before you sit down to write the follow-up.

The best sales processes use both. Strong written and verbal touchpoints, working together.

Follow-up is where deals actually live

This concept doesn't just apply to sales — it applies to all outreach. Those who win are almost always the ones who follow up consistently and track their pipeline meticulously, as much as Hollywood would like us to believe there's a magic closing technique. The fortune really is in the follow-up. It's the least glamorous part of sales and the most important.

And I get it: where does consistent follow-up end and being the person who just doesn't take the hint begin? The answer is in the foundation you lay earlier. Stay curious, don't always have the deal in mind, and vary your touchpoints — LinkedIn, email, calls. A "not right now" or "not interested" is actually useful signal. It might just mean they're not your customer yet, or not at all. Either way, it's far better than a pipeline full of maybes — that purgatory will cost you more time and energy than a clean no ever will. A solid batch of nos tells you something. A hundred maybes tells you nothing.

Every meeting should end with an explicit next step — and contrary to popular belief, this can be low-touch. "I'll be in touch" is fine, as long as you actually follow through. Think of it like catching up with an old friend: without a concrete date in the calendar, things drift. A conversation without a next step is just a conversation.

When a prospect goes quiet, you haven't lost them yet. Use what you know — the pain points they shared, the objections they raised — to re-engage in a way that shows you were listening. If a direct ask goes unanswered, pivot to asking for feedback instead. It's a lower-commitment request and it often reopens the conversation.

A "no" should almost always become a "not right now" with a specific future date attached. People's circumstances change. Budget cycles turn over. Priorities shift. If you've genuinely helped someone understand their problem better, you've built goodwill that survives a missed close — and that door stays open. The foundation will always be there.

Rejection isn't the end of the data

Sales involves rejection. That's not an insight. But how founders process rejection often determines whether their sales function lives or dies. Sometimes, your instinct is to treat a "no" as a verdict — on the product, on the idea, sometimes on yourself. The more useful frame is to treat every "no" as an unanswered question.

And most of the time, it isn't a no — it's a no right now. Circumstances change. The important thing about getting a no is understanding why. Was it timing? Budget? Is this genuinely a low-priority problem for them, or is it a high-priority problem they don't yet believe you can solve? Each of those answers points somewhere different. A "no" you understand is a piece of market intelligence. A "no" you accept without curiosity is just a closed door.

Think of rejection like weather. You can't stop it and you can't take it personally, but you can dress for it. A process gives you that — something to revisit when a conversation goes cold, so that one bad day doesn't knock you off course for a week. Social literacy plays a part too. Know when to push and know when to move on gracefully. Some doors are worth knocking on twice.

Sales isn't a dark art. It's a series of conversations, each one building on the last — with structure underneath and curiosity driving it forward. Most founders who struggle with sales aren't missing talent. They're missing a system and the willingness to start. The willingness to start is on you. The system is learnable.

The best time to build it was before your first customer. The second best time is now.

Here's my sales workshop with the Q&A cut out.

If this resonated, we run community workshops that go deeper on all of it — and well beyond sales. If you're an early-stage founder looking for a space that takes this stuff seriously, come find us.

Or drop me a line at darren@cremornedigitalhub.com.au — always happy to chop it up about your current process and where you're at.

Welcome to The Monthly Signal

This is Innovation Download — a monthly update on what's moving in Australia's startup and innovation ecosystem, translated into everyday takeaways worth considering.

Something happened last year. It really feels like something changed with the release of Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model. On the back of that, we've seen a rapid acceleration of the new tools that go beyond simply prompting to get an answer.

In fact, it's been a tidal wave. The infrastructure surrounding how we work is changing (again), and this time it doesn't wait to be asked. All of a sudden, the agentic world came to life. It just started working.

To understand why this moment feels different, it helps to reflect on how we got here. GPT-1 laid the groundwork for a new way of working, a 117 million parameter model trained on over 7,000 books. Quietly impressive, but narrow. Then ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, built on 175 billion parameters, and proved the concept to the world, triggering a wave of adoption that hasn't slowed since. The underlying models expanded frighteningly quickly, from hundreds of millions to billions and now potentially trillions of parameters. But for all that power, most of it still required a human in the loop. You still needed to write the prompt, review the output, and ultimately put the pieces together yourself.

That's the part that's just changed.

It took four years to get from GPT-1 to ChatGPT. It's now taken just under two years for the agentic world we were promised to go from concept to tools that can run autonomously across your entire work stack.

The iteration cycles are shrinking rapidly. The leaps are getting bigger. AI isn't just moving fast; it's getting faster at getting faster. It's easy, in hindsight, to look back at 2018 and recognise GPT-1 as the beginning of something enormous. But the speed with which we got here is, well, crazy.

As one might expect, this has had a number of second-order effects. The need for compute, energy, and the physical layer of data centres is growing faster than most predicted. This is where the hardware story meets the software story, and where Australia finds itself in an unusually strong position — with AI data centres being established across the country at a pace that would have seemed unlikely two years ago.

The infrastructure is arriving. The agents are here. Infrastructure and access don't automatically produce capability. But the opportunity is here. Whether that opportunity is captured depends entirely on the user sitting on top of it all. It turns out it's "turtles all the way down."

Stories On Our Radar

Australia's AI infrastructure bet is getting serious (Firmus)

The rundown: Project Southgate is Firmus Technologies' national AI infrastructure program, built in partnership with CDC Data Centres and NVIDIA. The first stages are under construction in Tasmania and Melbourne, delivering up to 150MW and 18,500 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs expected online by April 2026. Total planned capacity scales to 1.6GW by 2028, backed by an initial $4.5 billion investment and a potential build-out to $73.3 billion. All facilities will run on 100% renewable energy, and the project is majority Australian-owned.

Takeaway: Australia is building world-class AI infrastructure at the same moment its workforce is being reshaped by the very technology that infrastructure supports. WiseTech cut 2,000 jobs citing AI transformation. Block cut 4,000. Given the trajectory AI is on, it's no surprise, but the question sitting underneath all of it is whether the people being displaced will upskill fast enough to stay relevant — or whether the path of least resistance for most organisations is simply to hire more agents instead.

Agents are officially here and Notion just showed us what that actually looks like (Notion)

The rundown: Notion published a behind-the-scenes look at how their new custom agents are running across their own teams. Knowledge bots answering repeat Slack questions, feedback routers triaging incoming work, security agents filtering noise from real alerts. The agents work across Slack, Calendar, Mail and external tools, so the context your team has already built travels with them.

Takeaway: What Notion is really showing here isn't a productivity upgrade. It's the early version of a single operating system for work, one that spans every platform and absorbs every repetitive task. What's interesting is who's building them.

This (just like Claude Cowork) is built not just for engineers — anyone with a clear goal and a conversational prompt can now make agents work for them. The LLM itself will help you spec and build the agent if you tell it what you're trying to solve. The barrier isn't technical anymore, it's knowing what problem you actually want to hand off. As some have said, this really is the time of the proverbial "ideas guy".

We were lucky enough to host Notion at CDH last week to get a hands on look at their new agent platform. Here's a wrap of the event.

Anthropic ships Claude for your desktop — and the coworking space (Claude)

The rundown: Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in January, describing it as Claude Code for everyone who isn't a developer. Where a regular Claude conversation is a back-and-forth, Cowork can be given access to a folder or files on your computer and works autonomously through it — reading, editing, creating and organising files while you queue up the next task.

Takeaway: The agent conversation has largely been had by people who are "technically inclined" — developers, founders, and early adopters comfortable with new interfaces. Cowork shifts that. When AI can work directly inside Excel, Word, or a folder of PDFs on someone's desktop without requiring them to learn a new tool or change how they work, the addressable market expands dramatically.

When products expand their addressable market, new questions arise. Excel proficiency has been a career cornerstone for decades. Financial modeling, data analysis, reporting — entire professional identities have been built on the mastery of tools that Cowork can now navigate autonomously. Where does that leave the millions of workers who spent years becoming genuinely excellent at the tools AI can now operate? And if the barrier to entry drops, does the premium on specialisation drop with it? Maybe. But what gets rewarded next isn't the ability to use the tool. It's the judgment to know what to build with it, what questions to ask of it, and when to steer it in the right direction. Just like using an LLM to write, the skill isn't in the output — it's in knowing when to step in.

Podcast Episodes Worth Your Time

OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, spends much of this conversation tracing a line between curiosity and agency — the idea that the best things get built not because someone planned them, but because they were annoyed something didn't exist yet.

OpenClaw started as a WhatsApp relay to his own computer while travelling in Marrakesh. When he accidentally sent a voice message the agent had no support for, it independently figured out the file format, found his API key, and transcribed the audio via Curl. He hadn't taught it any of that. From these humble (and surprising beginnings) what is now OpenClaw was born.

The conversation gets more interesting when Steinberger describes an agent modifying its own source code — not because he programmed it to, but because it understood its own architecture well enough to rewrite itself. His distinction between agentic engineering and vibe coding runs through everything. Agentic engineering is knowing the system well enough to direct it. Vibe coding is prompting blindly and hoping. The output might look the same. The control is completely different. And that distinction maps directly onto the question this month keeps circling: as agents take on more of the work, what does the human in the loop actually need to bring?

His answer, implicitly, is understanding. Not just of the task, but of the system executing it. His claim that agents will replace around 80% of existing apps lands differently when you consider he built a billion-device product from scratch. This isn't speculation from someone on the sidelines. It's pattern recognition from someone who's shipped at scale — and who can see clearly what the current tools are pointing toward.

The bottleneck isn't production anymore. It's judgment. The teams that get the most from agents won't be the ones who prompt the most. They'll be the ones who understand their systems well enough to know when the agent is right, when it's wrong, and when to step in. That's the question this issue keeps returning to. The hard part was never the data centres or the compute. It's the human layer sitting on top of all of it.

Helpful Resources:

💻 Claude Cowork Prompt for LinkedIn hooks by Ruben Hassid
📝 How to create a content IP by Brendan Hufford
🤖 Best practices for creating and optimizing a Custom Agent by Notion
💻 10 Claude Cowork Workflows that actually work By the AI Corner
🎉 6 months of free Notion Business for all CDH friends (T&Cs apply)
🎮 Join us for Best of NVIDIA GTC — and be in the running to win a DGX Spark personal AI supercomputer