big bets and bad calls

The CTG machine sitting in every maternity ward? It was developed in the 1970s. Fifty years old and essentially unchanged — until Emerson Keenan and Fiona Brownfoot decided to build something better.Kali Healthcare has developed a wearable fetal monitoring sensor that sits on the abdomen and picks up the fetal heart rate regardless of where the baby is or whether the mum can make it to hospital. No ultrasound probe to position. No signal dropout when the baby moves. And critically — it can be used at home.In this episode, Emerson (CEO/CTO and electrical engineer) and Fiona (practicing obstetrician, academic at the University of Melbourne, and mother of two) join Clint and Andrew to walk through the full journey: from a PhD cold call and a serendipitous introduction, to GE Healthcare EMR integration, a pivotal clinical trial, and an out-of-the-blue email from the Australian Flying Doctor Service.They cover the stillbirth rate (1 in 170 pregnancies — more common than the road toll), the moment the AI model finally cracked fetal heart rate detection at 7pm on a random Tuesday, co-designing the device with midwives (it's now shaped like a makeup compact), and what $1.7M in investment versus $10–15M USD in the US actually looks like on the ground.Big bets, bad calls, and a device that could change how the world monitors pregnancy.

This week Clint and Andrew sit down with Sara Kurosani and Michael Sankey, co-founders of Flowing Bee — a Melbourne startup using AI to work out why your customers are choosing you (or quietly walking away).Sara's background is F1, not marketing — she spent years at Williams working on simulation tech before doing a PhD, including a stint commercialising crash-tech originally built for race cars into transport units for premature babies. Michael spent 15 years running commercial behavioural science for Fortune 500s out of New York, working from a studio apartment two metres from his bed before landing an office on Madison Avenue.Together they're compressing three-month, quarter-million-dollar behavioural research projects into a couple of weeks — using PhD-level behavioural science layered with AI, not just "ask ChatGPT to write an email."In this one: the sausage sizzle explanation of what Flowing Bee actually does, the classic dropped-shopping-cart myth in ecommerce analytics, how they raised a seed round without pitching every investor themselves, the bad call that cost them along the way.

An aerospace engineer walks into a NICU and doesn't leave the same person. On this episode of big bets & bad calls, Clint and Andrew sit down with Alex Newton, co-founder and CEO of Navi Medical Technologies, whose company has spent seven years building a device to solve a problem most people never knew existed: confirming catheter placement in critically ill newborns without repeat X-rays and dangerous delays. Alex brought the actual device into the studio. We talk about the bet of leaving a stable aerospace career for a pre-revenue medtech startup, what it takes to raise hardware funding in Australia, and how Navi landed an FDA Breakthrough Device designation along the way.

50,000 researchers. 400,000 downloads. Used in COVID vaccine validation, Great Barrier Reef science, cancer treatment development, and CRISPR research. And it nearly collapsed because there was no money to maintain it. Mixomics co-founders Kim-Anh Lê Cao and Mike Rennie sit down with Clint and Andrew to talk about building a global scientific standard on no budget, the big bet of going from academic project to real company, and why their biggest bad call was letting other people's doubt become their own.

Rob de Burgh Day has been an electrician, a talent agent, a venue owner, and the guy running a call centre out of Cambodia. So yeah — the Brightspace story didn't start in a boardroom.In this episode, Rob walks us through a winding founder journey that pivoted hard when COVID wiped out a million dollars of equipment sitting in boxes. Out of that chaos came a genuinely interesting idea: a live digital twin for buildings — tracking people, air quality, temperature and energy use in real time, so that the whole place runs smarter.Today Brightspace is installing at the International Convention Centre in Sydney, working with major asset owners across Singapore and Malaysia, and chasing Changi Airport as the crown jewel.We get into the real stuff: what it actually costs to build hardware (and why you probably shouldn't), the hidden nightmare of integrating into buildings that have been patched together for 80 years, raising money when the tank is empty, and why consistent investment agreements will save you thousands in legal fees — eventually.Rob's also one of the more privacy-conscious founders we've had on — he's literally built hardware limitations into his product so it can't identify individuals. In a world where 40% of his clients would happily go further, that's a genuine values call.Good stories, hard lessons, and one very memorable charity bike ride that landed his first client.