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

There's a version of a tech event where someone shows you a product, tells you it's the future, and leaves you with a slide deck and a promo code. Last Thursday's evening at Cremorne Digital Hub wasn't that.

We had the pleasure of hosting Alex Dam, Notion's APAC Startup Lead and former VC, for a two-part evening that was equal parts practical and candid. The room was full of founders, operators, and small team leads. What followed was an hour of live demos, honest conversation, and a few genuine "wait, it can do that?" moments, before the evening opened up into something broader.

Here's everything that happened — and what you can take from it.

Part One: The Workshop

Alex was hosted by Darren Huang, our Community and Memberships Coordinator, and we were joined by Tim Jeffries, Certified Notion Consultant and Founder of Smooth Ops Consulting, for a hands-on deep dive into Notion's new agentic AI updates. The group built a live investor CRM from scratch, using the Notion's new agent product to populate records and surface contact details in real time.

From Chatbot to Custom Agent

If you've used Notion AI before, you're probably familiar with the chat experience — you ask a question, and it responds based on whatever page you're on. Custom agents flip that dynamic entirely. Instead of waiting to be asked, they monitor your workspace and act autonomously based on triggers: a database property changes, a meeting ends, or a checkbox gets ticked. The analogy that resonated best in the room was this — the old model is like tapping an assistant on the shoulder every time you need something. Custom agents are like hiring someone who watches your systems, notices when something needs attention, and handles it without being asked.

What We Built — and What It Takes

AI is only as good as the context you give it, and in Notion, that context lives in your databases. Not spreadsheets, but smart lists that talk to each other across your workspace. A Projects database connects to Tasks, connects to Meetings, and connects to your CRM. That web of relationships is what gives an agent something real to act on. Building a live investor CRM in the room made this concrete: what might take hours of manual research was done in minutes, with the agent populating records, surfacing contacts, and flagging duplicates for human review, all from a standing start.

From there, the workshop walked through how custom agents are actually configured: defining a purpose, setting permissions, choosing a trigger, and chaining multi-step instructions in sequence. A meeting processing agent, for example, reads the transcript, extracts action items, creates tasks, assigns them, and updates the relevant CRM record without anyone touching anything. The practical tip that stuck was to prompt your agent to draft its own operating instructions first. A super useful tip.

Part Two: The Fireside Chat

After the workshop wrapped, Alan Tsen, our General Manager, sat down with Alex for a more personal conversation. It was a chance to hear directly from someone who's sat on both sides of the table, as an investor and now as an operator, on what's actually changing, and what isn't in startup land.

During the conversation, Alex spoke about why he made the move from investor to operator. Unsurprisingly, one of the major reasons he moved to the other side of the table was that he genuinely loved what Notion had built.

On Notion's place in the market, two things stood out. First, the Australian expansion wasn't a top-down push. It was a response to over two million users who were already here before Notion officially launched in the market. Second, Notion deliberately chose to go beyond project management as a category by adopting a "Lego box" approach rather than a finished kit with instructions on the lid. That restraint is what keeps the platform's ceiling high, allowing users to build a product that suits their needs in a flexible way.

Some Insights Worth Taking With You

→ It's harder than ever to build a successful SaaS business. The differentiator now isn't features — it's brand, content, and how you show up in the market. Building in public, creating content, owning a narrative — Alex sees this as the real moat for the next generation of SaaS companies.

→ AI makes it dangerously easy to hoard data nobody ever uses. Transcripts that pile up. Meeting notes that never get read. The risk isn't that AI does too little — it's that it produces so much that none of it gets acted on.

→ Australian founders move fast, think globally from day one, and carry a balance of humility and sales confidence that translates well in the US market. An underrated edge.

→ Enterprise search is one of the most overlooked AI use cases. The ability to instantly surface the right information from across your tools saves real time every day. Unglamorous, but compounding.

→ When asked for a contrarian belief, Alex said he's extremely bullish on voice dictation — not as a future trend, but right now. Faster, more accurate than typing, and almost nobody is using it seriously yet.

We've kicked off the year with a bang!

We started the year the way we intend to continue it — by putting founders in rooms and connecting industry with innovators.

Our Cowork and Connect Day brought serious builders into the Clubhouse for a full day of focused execution, peer connection, mentoring, and a live VC deck breakdown. It was practical, high-signal, and built around one goal: momentum.

We carried that same energy into our new ecosystem networking night - The Guzzle. The event was all about founder supporting founders and rallying the ecosystem behind those who are building. On the night we had a "founder asks" segment — giving founders the floor to make specific asks of the room, from beta testers to strategic introductions. Clear requests. Real follow-through.

On the industry front, we’re hosting The Best of GTC 2026 (Melbourne) — a curated half-day event on Tuesday 31st March featuring hands-on workshops, expert panels, and a GTC Watch Party to close out the day.

Thanks to our friends at NVIDIA and MMT, we’re also giving away an NVIDIA DGX Spark — a personal AI supercomputer worth thousands of dollars.
More access. More activation. More meaningful collisions between builders, capital, and industry. More details below.

2026 is shaping up to be a defining year at CDH.

- Alan Tsen, General Manager, CDH

Cremorne Connect: Build smarter. Scale faster with Notion

🗓️ Thursday 26th February (Tonight)
🕠5:30pm - 7:30pm 
📍80 Balmain Street, Cremorne 

​We're teaming up with Notion to bring you our FIRST Cremorne Connect of 2026, and trust us, you won't want to miss this one!

​What does it take to scale across APAC - and what are the smartest founders building with right now?

​Alan Tsen sits down with Alex Dam (Notion's APAC Startup Lead & former VC) for an unfiltered conversation on Notion's expansion into the region, what he learned backing startups from the other side of the table, and how Notion is doubling down on the Australian startup ecosystem.

​Plus: drinks, nibbles, and networking with Melbourne's innovation community!

The Best of Nvidia GTC 2026 (MELBOURNE)

📅 Tuesday, 31st March 2026
🕛 12pm – 4pm (Part 1: Build) + 5:30pm – 8pm (Part 2: Celebrate)
📍 80 Balmain St Cremorne

We're hosting NVIDIA and Multimedia Technology to bring the best of NVIDIA's GTC 2026 to Melbourne — and we'd love to see you there for a full day at the Cremorne Digital Hub.

GTC is the world's leading AI conference — and this year, we're curating the highlights and delivering them right here in our own backyard.

▶ Part 1: BUILD (12pm – 4pm)
A hands-on afternoon for developers, engineers, and technical founders. Dive deep into NVIDIA's Deep Learning Institute with Solutions Architect Luke Boyce, connect with experts from NVIDIA and MMT, and walk away with free NVIDIA Brev credits to keep building.

▶ Part 2: CELEBRATE (5:30pm – 8pm)
An evening Watch Party open to Melbourne's entire AI community. We'll be screening highlights from Jensen Huang's GTC keynote, followed by a live panel of local leaders unpacking what it all means for Australian founders, developers, and businesses building with AI.

And to top it all off — we're giving away an NVIDIA DGX Spark, a Grace Blackwell personal AI supercomputer, live on the night.

Giant Leap: Now Taking Conversations for Next Investment Round:

Giant Leap is an impact fund looking for their next five investments. In 2025 they backed Ovum AI, FlyORO, The indi App, Foremind and Teacher's Buddy — five companies tackling meaningful problems across climate, health and people. If you're a founder building something that matters in those spaces, or you know someone who is, Giant Leap wants to hear from you. This is how they find exceptional founders: early, quietly, and through the community.

Reach out directly to start a conversation.

Latrobe LaunchPad:

Do you have a technology-led startup idea and the ambition to turn it into a scalable venture? La Trobe University's LaunchPad is a 12-week Pre-Accelerator Program for emerging and aspiring founders. Powered by La Trobe and Startmate, the program covers everything from problem validation and MVP development to pitching and company formation. You'll get a full-day kickoff bootcamp, weekly learning sessions, a Pitch Mastery Clinic, mentor support and the chance to pitch for $5,000 in prizes at the LaunchPad Lift-Off showcase.

Open to La Trobe students, alumni and aspiring founders from across Victoria.

Only 50 places available — heavily subsidised at $249 for Victorian participants.

Applications close Sunday 1 March 2026 at 5pm.

The Pitch by Deel: Win $1,000,000 in Investment

Got a 2-minute pitch? The Pitch by Deel is a global startup tournament giving founders from anywhere in the world the chance to win life-changing investment. Submit a quick application online, pitch live at a regional final, and compete for up to $1M in SAFE funding. Up to 100 regional winners each receive a $50,000 investment, with up to 10 Global Champions winning the $1,000,000 grand prize. Open to pre-seed, seed and Series A startups from any industry and any country. All applicants also receive free access to an exclusive startup perks marketplace and global founder community.

Regional finals run March–May 2026 across Tel Aviv, Dubai, Paris, Berlin, London, Singapore and New York.

Scaling MedTech: From Australia to the U.S. Market

A free online session run by SelectUSA and MedTech Actuator for Australian medtech companies looking to enter the U.S. market. Hear practical insights on market entry, regulation and partnerships from founders who've done it.

AI at Melbourne Colloquium: Music and AI Futures

A free in-person lecture hosted by Melbourne Connect and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, featuring Professor Georgina Born (UCL) exploring how AI is reshaping music-making and what it means for culture, creativity and the humanities.

🗓️ 7 March: MLAI x StartSpace Monthly Saturday Co-working Day | Startspace
🗓️ 12 March: IWD - A Breakfast with Change Makers of the Startup World | AFC
🗓️ 11 March: AFC Presents: Getting Seen in 2026  | Aussie Founder's Club
🗓️ 19 March: Heidi Unlocked: Live in Melbourne 2026 | Heidi
🗓️ 30 March: Planet Taboo 2026: Unconventional Connections | SxTech Pioneers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Led by Luke Boyce, Solutions Architect at NVIDIA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🕐 5:30pm – 8:00pm

GTC Watch Party with Expert Panel Discussion

This one's for everyone!

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

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

🏆 WIN A DGX SPARK

A Grace Blackwell AI Supercomputer — on your desk.

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

Here's how to enter:

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

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

The founders winning right now? They're building different.

We're kicking off 2026 with something special - Notion is coming to CDH on Thursday 26th February for a double feature event you won't want to miss!

Notion's APAC Startup Lead Alex Dam is heading to the Hub to help you work smarter and scale faster - with a hands-on workshop AND a fireside chat with Alan Tsen!

Here's what's on:

🔧 PART 1: Building Your Edge - AI Workflows for Fundraising Workshop
Fundraising is a grind. What if your workflows did the heavy lifting? Build AI workflows that automate your founder fundraiser pain points. Hands-on, practical - you'll leave with tools you can use straight away. → 30 spots only. EOI required.

🎤 Fireside Chat (5:30pm): 🎤 PART 2: Building at Scale - Notion's Journey into APAC (Fireside Chat)
What does it take to scale across APAC - and what are the smartest founders building with right now? We sit down with Alex for an unfiltered conversation on Notion's expansion into the region, what he's learned working with startups across APAC, and how Notion is doubling down on the Australian startup ecosystem.Plus drinks, nibbles, and networking. → Open to all.

Meet our Speaker:

Alex Dam leads Notion's startup program across APAC, helping early-stage companies scale faster with AI-powered tools. Before Notion, he spent 3+ years as a VC Principal at Hillfarrance Venture Capital, giving him a deep understanding of what founders need to succeed. He's also part of Airtree's Explorer Cohort 9.

We're thrilled to have Alex join us at the Hub to share his knowledge with our community - see you there!

Whether you're deep in a raise or just want to level up your systems - this one's for you. See you (and your workflows!) at the Hub 👊

Welcome to The Monthly Signal

Welcome to The Innovation Download — a monthly read on what’s shifting in Australia’s startup and innovation ecosystem, and what it means for people building inside it.

This isn’t a link dump. Each issue pulls together a small set of signals worth paying attention to, then does the harder part: translating them into practical implications for founders, operators, investors, and ecosystem leaders.

This is our first issue for 2026, and this month's theme feels hard to ignore: Substance over Speed.

It’s easier to build than ever. Thanks to AI, you can prototype a product in a weekend, generate a brand in an afternoon, and spin up a pitch deck in an hour. The surface area of “done” has expanded — and so has the volume of work that looks finished but doesn’t survive contact with reality: unclear positioning, brittle systems, messy handovers, governance gaps, and experiences that feel polished until a real user tries to rely on them. Gradient AI design slop anyone?

That’s why advantage is shifting. Not to the teams who can produce the most (or just the fastest), but to the ones who can turn speed into something durable: products that feel coherent, operations that run cleanly, and decisions that are obvious to the next person who has to execute them.

In Australia, this compounds quickly. It’s a smaller market with long memories. Buyers are cautious, especially in enterprise and government. Credibility is earned through execution, integration, and trust. Speed still matters — but the teams that pair it with craft, clarity, and real-world rigour will keep pulling ahead.

Stories On Our Radar

Gen Z won’t settle for boring design. Here’s what it means for the future of work (Canva)

Canva’s research finds that most Gen Z workers prefer visual communication over text, yet many workplaces still rely heavily on written documents and linear processes. The article outlines how this mismatch affects comprehension, collaboration, and productivity, drawing on survey data and workplace examples to illustrate the gap between modern communication preferences and current organisational practices.

Takeaway: The real implication is structural, not generational. Visual communication reduces cognitive load, shortens feedback loops, and accelerates decision-making, while text-heavy systems quietly slow organisations down. Teams that treat visual thinking as a core operating capability gain speed and alignment. Those that don’t accumulate friction, misinterpretation, and delay. This is not about aesthetics. It is about how efficiently work moves from idea to execution.

Government's New AI Plan (The Saturday Paper)

The Albanese government has released its National AI Plan, pivoting Australia’s approach to artificial intelligence toward an “opportunity first” model that largely relies on self-regulation rather than a standalone AI law. The plan emphasises building an AI-enabled economy, leveraging existing consumer protection and privacy laws instead of prescribing new, overarching legal guardrails, and encouraging voluntary transparency and best practices for businesses deploying AI.

Takeaway: Australia’s decision to lean on self-regulation makes it easier to build and ship AI, particularly for large companies and fast-moving teams that are comfortable operating in grey areas. By avoiding hard rules, the system prioritises speed and flexibility, but shifts responsibility away from government and onto individual organisations to decide what is acceptable.

This rewards those with the resources and appetite to move first, while leaving smaller, more cautious teams waiting for norms to form. In practice, innovation accelerates, but accountability becomes uneven, defined less by law and more by who is willing to take on risk.

Leverage has shifted to the builder (Startup Daily)

The roles rising fastest in Australia are not purely technical or purely creative. They sit at the intersection of capability, risk, and execution. Alongside AI engineers and directors of AI, the job market is dominated by roles responsible for regulation, safety, governance, partnerships, and delivery. Mechanical engineers, power system engineers, legal and regulatory roles, and organisational leaders feature prominently.

What stands out is that as technology accelerates, so does the demand for people who can stabilise, integrate, and operationalise it. Innovation is expanding, but so is the need to manage complexity, risk, and real-world impact.

Takeaway: The market has already shifted toward builders. What matters now is who can make progress safely, legally, and at scale. As tools become more powerful and accessible, value is moving away from creation alone and toward translation. It’s easy to build quickly. Much harder to integrate that work into systems organisations can actually run. Execution, governance, and integration are no longer supporting functions. They are central to growth. The future of work isn’t just about unlocking new ideas and capability. It’s about making that capability compliant and sustainable in the real world.

Podcast Episodes Worth Your Time

Dialectic #35: Brie Wolfson - Loving Attention & Ease in Craft

Brie Wolfson, the Head of Employee Experience at Cursor, spends much of this conversation reflecting on the role of craft in building.

Craft is usually associated with physical objects. A well-made chair. A solid table. Something you can inspect, feel the weight of, and trust because of the care that’s gone into it. In technology, craft is harder to point to, but no less real. It lives in how something feels to use. The clarity of an interface. The coherence of an experience. The way an article reads, an app responds, or a workflow holds together without friction. It’s not always visible, but it’s immediately felt.

Brie returns to the idea that this kind of judgement can’t be rushed or outsourced. It’s developed through doing. Through iteration. Through paying attention and calibrating taste over time. Advanced tools make it easier to produce quickly, but they don’t shorten the path to discernment. If anything, the standards are raised as a result.

This is where expectations often break. Moving fast is attractive, but quality product usually takes longer than you think. What's needed is often more thought. More care. More attention. Craft isn’t about slowing down. It’s about building with enough focus and patience to develop that je ne sais quoi. The "finger feel" of excellence that tells you something is truly well made, even if you can’t quite explain why.

Helpful Resources:

💻 Free Replit Vibe Coding Guide
💻 Lovable's Ultimate Prompt Guide
💻 12 Rules to Vibe Code Without Frustration by Peter Yang
📤 The Ultimate Cold Email Guide for 2024 by Yurii Veremchuk

Join us at the Cremorne Digital Hub for an evening of high-impact networking. Whether you’re a founder building the next big thing, an investor looking for talent, or an ecosystem supporter, 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 Requests.

What to Expect:

• Casual Networking: Cold drinks and warm introductions with Melbourne’s best tech minds.
• The "Request" 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 Spirit: A chance to give back to the ecosystem while growing your own circle.

The Details:

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

As we close out 2025, it’s clear this has been a big year at Cremorne Digital Hub. One where we’ve meaningfully accelerated our goal: to be the best platform for connecting industry with Victoria’s innovation ecosystem.

That focus has sharpened what we do and why we do it. And at the centre of it all has been our community, the founders, partners, and supporters who have helped turn ideas into action.

This year, we hosted over 120 events and welcomed more than 2,500 people through our doors. Founders, investors, corporates, and ecosystem builders all came together to push Victoria’s innovation ecosystem forward.

We hosted numerous international delegations, reinforcing CDH’s role as a global gateway to Victoria’s innovation ecosystem. Our NEXT [Founder Community] has also grown to 140 members, founders who are building, scaling, and supporting each other through the challenges that come with building a startup.

This year we launched NEXT [Founder Day], an event series designed to be an access point to the markets, talent, and capital every startup needs to scale. From our first event in April, From Front Door To Funded, to our ecosystem-focused NEXT [Founder Community Day], which connected founders with organisations such as LaunchVic, Breakthrough Victoria, Euphemia, and Antler, these events have become a cornerstone of how we support founders as they scale.

We also officially launched the CDH Clubhouse, the “third space” for industry and innovators to work from. REA Group came on board alongside Versa AI as corporate members, and we welcomed our first cohort of startup members. But the Clubhouse is more than desks and meeting rooms. It includes hands-on workshops, one-to-one mentoring, and capability building designed to help industry and innovators accelerate their growth. It is shaping up to be exactly what we hoped: a value-led membership platform that meets founders and innovators where they are.

Some of our proudest moments this year came from collaboration:

• Kicking off 2025 with Melbourne’s only official NVIDIA GTC satellite event
• Hosting LaunchVic’s Basecamp and CivVic Labs accelerator cohorts
• Co-hosting events with Aussie Founders Club, including The Great Victorian Startup Debate and the Big Christmas Bash (if you missed it, check the video and prepare for FOMO)
• Hosting Artesian’s inaugural Yield agrifood innovation summit, two days, 80+ leaders, and real conversations about Australia’s agricultural future
• Working with brilliant partners like Carta, Breakthrough Victoria, The Community Collective, and more

We also got out and about, from Coffee and Croissants at SXSW Sydney with FKS and The Community Collective, to judging a hackathon with the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Engineering and IT, to partnering with HEX on HEXPO 2025. Every event reinforced the same lesson: when you bring the right people together, great things happen.

Looking ahead to 2026

As we head into 2026, we are kicking things off with CDH Cowork and Connect Day, a selective, application-only founder immersion day designed to help start the year with focus, momentum, and the right people around you. It’s also a chance to experience what the CDH Clubhouse can do to help startups accelerate their growth.

EOIs are open now, with limited spots available.

We will also be back with more of what our community loves through our 2026 event program. Expect more VC deck breakdowns with our friends at Galileo, high-value Lunch and Learn sessions from our community, stellar guests for our next Cremorne Connect, a new networking series, and much more.

Make sure you are signed up to our Luma calendar so you do not miss what we have planned for the new year.

To everyone who walked through our doors this year, whether for the first time or the fiftieth, thank you. Your ambition, generosity, and willingness to show up for each other is what makes this community what it is.

Wishing you a well-deserved break with the people who matter most. We will see you in 2026, ready to build.

Ready to start 2026 with real momentum, not just good intentions?

Join us at Cremorne Digital Hub for the CDH Cowork and Connect Day, a curated, full-day founder experience for people who are actively building and want to move with more momentum, clarity, and confidence.

This isn’t a coworking trial. It’s a full day inside the CDH Clubhouse, designed for focused work and value-driven conversations. You’ll spend the day alongside serious founders who are actively building, want to move forward, and value being in a room with others who share the same mindset.

Attendance is free, but places are limited and selected via expression of interest.

Why Are We Hosting This?

Building a startup can feel lonely, distracting, and fragmented. This day is designed to cut through that noise. It gives you dedicated time to work, space to think clearly, and access to people who genuinely understand the founder journey.

What to expect:

• We'll kick the day off with a facilitated Founder Hour, a time for founders to connect and support each other on their journey.
• Mentoring from Dan Thomas from One Clear Story and office hours with our GM, Alan Tsen, an experienced ex-founder and operator.
• A live VC Deck Breakdown with Hugh Stephens from Galileo Ventures.
• Finish off the day with networking drinks alongside others from the ecosystem.

Who This Is Designed For:

• Founders who are actively building a startup or scaling a product.
• Builder and founders serious about progress, not just activity.
• Founders who are open to contributing to the ecosystem.
• Those looking for their people and a place to connect with them.

Why CDH and Why Cremorne

Cremorne is where Australian startups collide with capital, talent, and opportunity.

CDH sits at the centre of this ecosystem. Connecting founders, operators, corporates, and investors through space, programs, and community.

This day is your chance to experience that density, not just hear about it.

How Selection Works:

This is a curated event designed to bring together an aligned group of founders. Every expression of interest is reviewed to ensure the room is a good fit for everyone involved. If selected, you’ll receive a confirmation email with full details and next steps.

If 2024 marked the slow climb out of the trough, 2025 showed us what a rebound looks like at full speed.

At last night’s event — with our amazing panel, Thea Ngo (Archangel Ventures), Mitchell Hughes (NextGen Ventures), and Emma Tibballs (Gandel Invest) — the conversation centred on where Australian venture really sits today and the shifts reshaping how founders build and how investors back them.

Across the panel, one thing was unmistakable: the market is more competitive than ever again, and the pace is only accelerating.

AI Fueled the Rebound — But Depth Now Matters More Than Hype

The surge in investment across 2024 and into 2025 wasn’t random. AI was the engine. Capital flowed into teams exploring new modalities, rethinking workflows, and building products that stretched beyond incremental improvements.

But the panel drew a hard line: AI alone doesn’t make a company investable.

The strongest businesses aren’t thin wrappers on models; they’re the ones tackling real problems with genuine depth. They build defensible technology, draw on deep domain insight, and create distribution advantages that competitors can’t simply replicate overnight.

In other words, AI was the catalyst — but execution was the differentiator.

Australian Founders Aren’t Waiting Anymore — They’re Going Global Earlier

One of the clearest shifts of the past year is how early Australian startups are entering global markets.

This isn’t a “post-Series A” decision anymore. Founders are now going overseas a lot earlier.

This early push is reshaping the ecosystem in meaningful ways. Rounds are forming sooner, global investors are appearing earlier in the pipeline, and local VCs are being forced to move faster and build conviction far earlier than before. The overall bar for ambition has lifted, and founders are responding by operating with a sharper pace and a much broader horizon.

Pre-Seed Became a Knife-Edge Competitive Stage

With founders accelerating their timelines, investors have followed.

Pre-seed and seed rounds in 2025 were getting more competitive according to the panelists. They were contested spaces where funds had to show more than capital to earn a place at on the captable.

It’s no longer enough to be early. You need to be show conviction and more importantly value.

Resilience: The Quiet Signal That Still Predicts Outcomes

Amidst all the noise — AI breakthroughs, global expansion, competitive rounds — one theme continued to anchor the discussion: founder mentality.

The panel emphasised that the founders who broke through this year were the ones who:

• stayed grounded through uncertainty
• used capital with discipline
• held conviction in their direction
• didn’t get distracted by the noise

In a year defined by speed, resilience still separated the durable from the fleeting companies.

A Contrarian View: Fundraising Might Be Easier Than We Pretend

One of the night’s boldest points came from Thea, who argued that fundraising can be one of the easiest problems for the right founder to solve.

Her reasoning was simple: When a founder is exceptional — sharp insight, strong execution, clear ambition — their incentives naturally align with investors. The money follows.

It’s a refreshing counterpoint in a market that often treats fundraising as a barrier rather than a by-product of building something compelling.

Onwards and Upwards

It feels less like a return to 2021 and more like the start of a new cycle — one driven by depth, speed, and ambition rather than exuberance.

Australian venture didn’t just rebound. It's levelled up.

🗓Tuesday 2 December​
🕘5:30pm – 7:30pm​
📍Cremorne Digital Hub, 80 Balmain Street, Cremorne​
🔗Register Here: https://luma.com/h6qi7rln​

This year, we're switching it up! Instead of the usual suspects, we're bringing you perspectives from the emerging voices in venture and funds reshaping the Australian VC landscape.

Hear from emerging voices in VCs: fund managers with unique investment theses and views on where the next unicorn start-up will emerge from. During the panel, we’ll reflect on the year that was and get their insights into what themes, opportunities, and challenges will shape the 2026 investing landscape.

Then, we will switch gears to a rapid bull or bear session with our panellists – no fence-sitting here!

Whether you're fundraising, venture-curious, or just want the inside scoop from those deploying capital, this is a must-attend event!

Our Speakers: More to be announced soon!

Thea Ngo - Investment Analyst, Archangel

Thea is a venture investor combining consulting and hands-on startup experience. Ex–PwC Strategy& New York and Southeast Asia venture builder, and creator of Founders In Motion.

Mitchell Hughes - Founder, Nextgen Ventures.

Mitchell is a Founding Partner of NextGen Ventures, Australia’s first student-focused venture capital fund, that empowers the next generation of ambitious founders before anyone else. At 24, Mitchell has co-founded NextGen from the ground up over the past two years, where they've now met over 1000+ student startups, raised $3m+ for their first fund, and made ten investments in the country's most ambitious young founders.

​Emma Tibballs - Investment Analyst, Gandel Invest

​Emma joined Gandel Invest in 2025 with a background in transaction services, ESG, and not-for-profits. She is passionate about making positive, sustainable change and is energised by meeting people and discussing ideas. Emma has a Bachelor of Commerce, having majored in Accounting and Behavioural Commerce (i.e. the Psychology of business), and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.

Some of the topics we’ll be discussing:

• The year that was in VC. What were the themes that shaped 2026 from a venture perspective?
• What’s changed from an investor perspective with the rise of AI?
• What did venture investors miss in 2025?
• Predictions and trends to watch in 2026.
• How founders can navigate this evolving landscape and what companies and segments are going to be hot — and which are not.

On Thursday night, we decided to stop speculating and start talking.
Cremorne Digital Hub partnered with Aussie Founders Club to host The Great Victorian Startup Debate—bringing together some of the ecosystem's most influential voices for an honest, unfiltered conversation about where we stand, what we're getting right, and what needs to change.

The room was packed. The panel was stacked: Kate Cornick (LaunchVic), Paul Naphtali (Rampersand), Garry Williams (Group Group), Jodie Imam (Tractor Ventures), and Andrew Rowse (City of Melbourne). And moderator Megan Luttrell (Aussie Founders Club) wasn't here for surface-level answers.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Let's start with the data, because perception and reality don't always match.
Kate opened with a reality check: "Back in 2016 when we began, [the ecosystem] was $5 billion and 1,000 startups. Today there are 4,300 startups and we're valued at $146 billion."

That's 26x growth in valuation. By any measure, that's momentum.
But Kate also acknowledged the gap: "If we want to get to those top ecosystems, we've got to be worth about $600 billion. So we've got quite a long way to grow in maturity."

Translation? We're growing—but we're not done yet.

The Conversations That Needed to Happen

Then came the moment that got the room buzzing.

Paul Naphtali didn't hold back: "Melbourne is the only place in the world that's still talking about COVID." His message? "Let's draw a f****ing line under it and move on."

It landed. Hard. Because he's right—while other cities have moved forward, Melbourne has stayed stuck in the past, using it as a reference point instead of chapter we've closed.

Garry Williams brought another uncomfortable truth to the table: "We've got a 20% productivity gap at the moment. It's called Fridays. Can we just get back to work and do our stuff?"

The point wasn't about working harder for the sake of it—it was about ambition. About hunger. About showing up with the same intensity that ecosystems in Sydney, San Francisco, and Singapore bring every day.

Andrew Rowse put it bluntly: "Melbourne produces 40% of the country's high-quality research and we do so little with it." He called out our tall poppy syndrome—the cultural tendency to downplay success instead of celebrating it—and imagined a future where "we see innovators and researchers celebrated like sports figures."

And Jodie Imam delivered perhaps the most provocative take of the night: "If you're a founder and you think you have to rely on an ecosystem or the government to help you, then you're probably not going to be successful. Founders need to just make opportunity happen."

So, Who's Responsible?

When Megan asked the panel who needs to step up to build a better ecosystem, the answers were varied—but the message was consistent: everyone.

Paul argued that government has a "fundamentally critical role to play," but that it's on the tech sector to educate them and make the case. Kate pushed back gently: "Ideas have to come from the community first—government backs great ideas, but if people aren't bringing them forward, where do you back?"

Andrew pointed to infrastructure gaps like Fishermans Bend and called for stronger government leadership on big, strategic projects. Garry circled back to education, advocating for in-person, industry-led training models to close the talent gap.

But perhaps the most powerful moment came when Paul said: "Stop caring about keeping people here. Start here, grow here, sell where the customers are, and come back as boomerangs to reinvest."

It reframed the entire conversation. Melbourne doesn't need to compete with Sydney or San Francisco—it needs to be the best place to start, even if founders eventually scale elsewhere.

What Happens Next?

The debate didn't end with easy answers, and that's exactly the point. Real progress doesn't come from consensus—it comes from tension, from honest conversations, and from people willing to call out what's not working while championing what is.

What became clear is that Melbourne has the ingredients: world-class research, strong government programs like LaunchVic, The Cremorne Digital Hub and Breakthrough Victoria, affordable talent, and a tight-knit community. We just need to get better at being loud about it, ambitious with it, and relentless in building on it.

Making It Happen

A night like this doesn't come together without incredible people showing up and leaning in.

Huge thanks to Megan Luttrell and Aussie Founders Club for co-creating this event and moderating with the perfect mix of curiosity and courage. Megan's ability to pull the best out of people while keeping the conversation sharp is exactly why she's become such a cornerstone of this ecosystem.

To our panelists—Kate, Paul, Garry, Jodie, and Andrew—thank you for bringing bold perspectives, honest takes, and the kind of energy that reminded everyone why this work matters. A massive shout-out to Katie Troutman and FB Ventures for sponsoring the event and for backing Melbourne's ecosystem in such a tangible way. If you haven't checked out their new fund yet, it's worth your attention.

Thanks also to Marty McCarthy Media for capturing the night, and to Deepak Singh, Liz, and Felicia Coco for helping make sure everything ran smoothly. And of course, to our CDH team—Alan Tsen, Tristan Dwyer, and Des—for bringing this vision to life.

As the night wrapped up and the crowd moved into networking, you could feel it—the energy, the momentum, the sense that something is shifting.

Melbourne's spark isn't lost. It's just waiting for more people to show up, speak up, and build something worth celebrating.

At Cremorne Digital Hub, we're here to keep these conversations going—and to provide the space where industry, innovators, and ideas collide.

The Great Victorian Startup Debate was presented by Cremorne Digital Hub and Aussie Founders Club, sponsored by FB Ventures, and supported by LaunchVic.

Victoria’s startup ecosystem is thriving, but for founders, knowing where to start can be the hardest part.

It’s something I hear time and time again: “There’s so much out there – accelerators, investors, programs, networks – but which one’s right for me?”

It’s a good challenge to have. Victoria is home to one of the most vibrant and well-supported startup ecosystems in Australia, with an incredible mix of government programs, venture funds, accelerators, and founder communities. But the sheer range of options can make it difficult for founders to find the right path for their stage of growth.

That’s exactly why we hosted the [NEXT]Founder Community Day at Cremorne Digital Hub — to help founders cut through the noise, connect directly with the people behind the programs, and walk away with practical insight into how to access the right support at the right time.

A Day of Connection and Clarity

We kicked off the day with an energising Founder Circle led by Desmond John, where founders spoke openly about the realities of scaling a startup while staying true to their values. It set the tone for the day — honest, thoughtful, and focused on community as much as capital.

From there, we heard from some of Victoria’s leading ecosystem partners, including LaunchVic, Breakthrough Victoria, Euphemia, Antler, and Aussie Founders Club.

Each shared invaluable advice – from choosing the right accelerator to understanding investor expectations, refining storytelling, and navigating early-stage fundraising. The sessions were practical, interactive, and full of the kind of insights that come from real experience.

The Startup Network Pitch Night: Energy, Insight, and Big Ideas

To wrap up the day, we hosted in collaboration with The Startup Network their final Pitch Night of 2025 — and it did not disappoint.

The room was packed with founders, investors, and supporters, all there to celebrate the ideas shaping the next wave of innovation in Victoria. The atmosphere captured what our ecosystem does best: founders showing up with bold ideas, investors leaning in, and a community cheering on their progress.

The founders delivered high-quality pitches from right across the fintech spectrum:

• Nichola Patterson – Billie Loans
• Kian Jackson – Frontcover
• Ishan Dan – RegenX

Congratulations to RegenX, winner of People’s Choice, and Frontcover, winner of Judges’ Choice.

A huge thank you to our judging panel — Leila Oliveira (Antler), Kyle Austin (Triple Bubble), and Tony Hood (William Buck) — and to our surprise guest, Dom Pym, co-founder of Up Bank, who joined us for an impromptu fireside chat. Dom shared candid lessons from his journey building and backing some of Australia’s most successful startups, offering founders honest reflections on what it takes to build something enduring.

As I said on the night, it takes real courage to pitch to a packed room. Every founder who stepped up contributed to the energy that makes this community special.

Why Events Like This Matter

Days like these remind me why Victoria’s ecosystem is so unique. It’s not just the depth of programs and funding available, but the openness and generosity of the people who make it all work.

When we bring founders, investors, and partners together in the same room – to share, collaborate, and support one another – that’s when real momentum builds.

At Cremorne Digital Hub, we’re proud to help make those connections happen and to keep growing the networks that power Victoria’s innovation economy.

Description

Learn the importance of factoring artificial intelligence into policy design and implementation

Learning outcomes

By the end of this Melbourne MicroCert, you'll be able to:

• Critically discuss and analyse social and ethical concerns of AI and automation and the implications for policy
• Assess and critique AI policies, initiatives and strategies from leading global frameworks and workplaces

Study mode

Online - Facilitated and Self-paced

Study load

This course runs over six weeks, including four weeks of teaching and two weeks to complete the final assessment.

Your total time commitment is approximately 42 hours, which includes:

• 6 hours guided learning
• 16 hours independent study
• 20 hours assessment

Entry level

Foundational

Potential job outcomes

This course is ideal for working professionals who want to understand how their industries may be impacted by technology – and how they can future-proof their skillsets. It's particularly valuable for women who want to upskill to ensure they succeed in their professions now and into the future.

There are no eligibility requirements.

​Your compass to navigating Victoria's startup ecosystem

​Day: Tuesday, 28th October

Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm

Where: Cremorne Digital Hub

​Melbourne's startup ecosystem is bursting with support for founders, accelerators, government programmes, investors, and community builders. But knowing who does what (and when to reach out) can feel like navigating a maze blindfolded.

​[NEXT] Founder Community Day brings the ecosystem to you.

​Spend the day at Cremorne Digital Hub meeting the organisations that can actually help you move forward. From early-stage validation to scaling challenges, funding pathways to market access, hear directly from the people behind Victoria's most valuable founder resources.​

​Each session cuts through the noise:

✅ Who they are – no jargon, just clarity

​✅ How they help founders – real support, not just theory

​✅ When to reach out – so you know exactly when to make the call

​✅ Actionable insights – take away something you can use immediately

​Whether you're pre-revenue or scaling fast, wrestling with product-market fit or planning your next raise, this is your chance to understand the ecosystem landscape and connect with the people who can help you succeed!

​The day includes:

• ​Founder circles to share challenges and learn from peers
• ​Sessions with ecosystem leaders
• ​Live deck breakdown with Antler's Leila Oliveira & Alan Tsen – watch real pitches get honest VC feedback in real-time

​Then stick around: The programming leads straight into The Start Up Network Pitch Night at 6:30pm – see founders pitch live, meet investors, and keep the momentum going over drinks.

​Spots are limited. RSVP now to map your ecosystem advantage!

Agenda

10:00am - 10:45am - Session 1: Founder Circle with Desmond John
Start the day connecting with fellow founders. Share challenges, swap insights, and hear what support others are tapping into across the ecosystem.

11:00am - 11:45am - Session 2: Ecosystem partner session: LaunchVic with Josh Lipscombe & Elle Phillips

12:30pm - 1:15pm - Session 3: Breakthrough Victoria Ecosystem partner session: Nazieh Fazli

1:30pm - 2:15pm - Session 4: Aussie Founders Club Ecosystem partner session: Megan Lutrell

2:30pm - 3:30pm - Session 5: Deck Breakdown with Antler Leila Oliveira & Alan Tsen
Watch real pitch decks get broken down live. Hear honest VC feedback and see the decision-making process in action.

When: Wednesday 29 October1

Time: 2:00 pm - 1:00 pm AEDT

What really goes through a VC’s mind when they see your pitch deck? What makes them lean in… or tune out?

​Join us for a rare behind-the-scenes session with James Alexander from Galileo Ventures as he breaks down real founder decks live. You’ll see exactly how investors think, what they notice first, and the red flags that can kill your pitch in seconds.

​Expect unfiltered feedback and a chance to watch the VC decision-making process in action, no sugar-coating, just honest insights you can apply to your own deck.

​👉 Founders are also invited to submit their pitch deck to be reviewed in this session. Get direct insights that could change how you pitch forever. Submit your deck here.

​This event is exclusive to the Cremorne Digital Hub NEXT [COMMUNITY] for High Growth Founders.

​🎤 Share your Questions in Slack

​Do you have a question for James? As part of our CDH Founder Community, you’ll be able to share your pitch questions in Slack.

​Not in slack? Join here.

At the Clubhouse, ambition meets community. It’s where Australia’s most driven founders, investors, and industry leaders gather to share ideas, form partnerships, and turn vision into impact — all from the heart of Victoria’s tech precinct.

• Founders looking to grow their network and connect with capital and talent.
• Investors seeking early access to high-potential startups.
• Corporate Innovators exploring partnerships and new ideas.

At CDH, you’re part of a network — not just a space. The Clubhouse connects you to the people and opportunities shaping Australia’s innovation landscape.

• Based in Cremorne’s tech heartland
• Curated introductions and events
• Backed by Victoria’s leading innovation ecosystem players

The Clubhouse is more than a workspace — it’s where Melbourne’s innovation ecosystem comes together. Our members include founders, operators, investors, and corporate leaders who believe in building what’s next.

Whether you’re scaling a startup, exploring partnerships, or just want to be part of a community that gets it, the Clubhouse gives you a front-row seat to Victoria’s tech ecosystem.

Cremorne Digital Hub is Victoria’s home for innovation — connecting startups, corporates, and investors. We sit at the centre of Melbourne’s tech precinct, giving you direct access to the people and partners who matter.

• Backed by leading companies, universities and government
• Part of a connected network of partners
• Proven track record supporting high-growth ventures

At CDH, we help corporates move beyond strategy decks and innovation theatre. Our programs are designed to turn ideas into outcomes — connecting you with cutting-edge startups, researchers, and emerging technologies that deliver measurable business impact.

Whether you’re exploring new technology applications, building your innovation capability, or looking to engage directly with startups, we’ll help you design and execute the right approach.

Cremorne Digital Hub sits at the centre of Victoria’s technology precinct — connecting corporates, startups, investors, and researchers.

We bring together the right partners, networks, and execution capability to make innovation work in practice.