Four episodes this month and I'm not sure which one to recommend first, so I'm telling you to binge all of them.

Dr Simon Longstaff, Director of the Ethics Centre, makes the ethical case for slowing down with a line that has been rattling around in my head ever since: "can does not imply should."

Katelyn Lesse, Head of Platform Engineering at Anthropic, sat down for their first ever Sydney interview to make the technical case for speeding up, with the spicy advice that you should build on the edge of what models can barely do today.

Annabel and Vivian from Toastie share one of the most heartfelt founder stories of the year: two engineers with chronic illnesses building the health app they wish existed when they got diagnosed, complete with thousand word emails from users they have never met.

And Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma, argues that taste, not features, is now the only real moat, and that we are living through the golden era of side projects.

The range is wild, and it makes for the perfect 3-4 hour morning run or commute. Queue them up.

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Visit deel.com/dayone

If you have ever finished a month of freelancing and quietly realised you priced everything too low, this Pick My Brain episode is for you. Quinnie Chen is the founder of Profit Plainly, a web app built for solo founders and freelancers who have no finance team, no CFO, and no clear picture of whether their business is actually working for them.

Recorded live at Cremorne Digital Hub in Melbourne, Quinnie joins Alan to unpack the messy early stage decisions every founder faces before they have customers, pricing, or any real clarity. Alan pushes her to rethink who her first customer really is, why accountants and bookkeepers might be the smartest go-to-market channel, and why per-usage pricing could unlock the kind of growth a traditional SaaS model would quietly block. It is candid, practical, and full of the kind of advice you wish someone had given you before you started.

Ask a question, get advice from Alan, or give feedback - https://www.speakpipe.com/pickmybrain

Pick My Brain is supported by our wonderful sponsor Galah Cyber

Supperrr excited to welcome Flip the Focus Podcast to the Day One Network!

Each episode, Jen Dobbie and Producer Nico Engelbrecht shine a light on the people in tech doing things differently. Who's smashing ceilings and challenging stereotypes? Who's using tech to tackle real societal problems? From household names to the ones just getting started, they're changing how we think about tech, one conversation at a time.

From policing Sydney's underworld to listing one of Australia's first AI companies on the ASX, to sitting with ayahuasca in the Peruvian Andes, Dr. Cat Wallace has lived several lives most people wouldn't dare imagine in one. This conversation with Pauline goes places most podcasts won't. Cat talks openly about the sacred wound driving her ambition, why she thinks 95% of AI companies will fail, and what she believes leaders must do before the window closes.

The part that stuck with me? The idea that the fire fueling your biggest achievements might be the same thing quietly burning down everything else. Tune in if you're building something, betting on something, or trying to figure out who you actually are underneath all of it.

Pre-seed funding to women in Australia is at its lowest level ever recorded. That stat opens this month's First Cheque conversation with Noga Edelstein, the lead of Equity Clear, the initiative quietly building the data infrastructure that will finally show where diverse founders fall out of the pipeline. She also drops the gem that angel groups with at least 15% women invest in 10X more women-led companies.

Join the full conversation to hear what the UK figured out after five years, why male founders and LPs should be asking their investors about diversity tracking, and how a broken website form accidentally proved women disproportionately use cold inbound.

Cheryl and Maxine also go back to basics with a Pre-Seed 101 episode. They unpack why pre-seed is not actually two to three times riskier than seed despite the valuations suggesting it is, why Australia is starved of pre-seed capital while drowning in great deals, and why angels are uniquely placed to fill that gap. If you have ever wondered whether to start investing earlier, this is the one that makes the math click.

Every role in cybersecurity is changing fast, but most practitioners are still treating AI like a glorified search engine. In this solo episode of Secured, Cole shares his unfiltered take on three things on his mind: entrepreneurship in a tough market, the growing threat to SaaS product businesses from roll-your-own culture, and why the cyber industry needs a fundamentally different approach to AI.

Cole's argument is sharp: saying "hey Claude" is the least effective way to work with AI today. The real conversation has nothing to do with which model you pick. It is about the harness you build around it, and how you stop letting third party wrappers make all the decisions for you.

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