The AFR funding announcements, the San Francisco expansion, the glamorous exit headlines.

That's mostly what gets the spotlight on our social feeds. Life after Launch Pod is all about decoding the unsaid, exploring the mess, and voicing all the bold stories it actually took to get there. The podcast that takes you inside the hearts and minds of founders navigating the startup world.

Hosted by Megan Luttrell 🤝 (MD at Kairos Recruitment and founder of Aussie Founders Club) and Geo George (partner at Mayfly Ventures), Life After Launch cuts through the startup noise with unscripted stories and tactical advice from the founders who have built before us. This show is about what happens after you launch: the business lessons, the life lessons, and everything in between.

First episode with Dom Pym is LIVEEE 🍿

Update on the podcast chart chaos: In The Blink of AI just cracked the Top 10 Business Podcasts ✨🔥😍 in Australia and sat at 188 across every podcast on Spotify, entertainment, pop culture, all of it. That is entirely down to you listening, sharing, and ranking the show. Thank you! 🥹

Two episodes this month that could not be more different.

Robin O'Connell, who leads LinkedIn's Creative Studio team in ANZ, joins Georgie to break down how to actually grow on LinkedIn in 2026. Why you should try replacing parts of your own job with AI just to find out what it can't do, why comments and DMs beat impressions, and why brands should be pink when their competitors are blue.

Freddie McKenzie, CEO and Co-Founder of Manifest, joins fresh off a $2 million pre-seed raise to build the platform that kills the timesheet. He does not hold back: why automating your inbox is a catastrophic idea, why almost nobody is actually using AI agents despite the hype, and why he thinks the SaaSpocalypse is a myth.

Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

Deel's 5th employee scaled the company's sales from zero to hundreds of millions in ARR, and this episode is packed with the operator-turned-investor lessons to prove it. Ilana Elbaz joins Cheryl and Maxine to unpack why she looks for founders with the "house is on fire, save the kids" urgency over the ones repainting the walls, why Australian founders' isolation is actually their biggest edge in going global from day one, and how Deel's pitch competition pulled in 50,000 applications in two months. Her framing on hiring as a growth problem, not an HR problem, is worth the listen alone.

The author of The Lean Startup, the book that basically built the startup playbook, returns with a very different message. Eric Ries joins Cheryl and Maxine to talk about his new book Incorruptible, why so many of today's "best practices" for boards and investors are quietly value-destroying, and the "spiritual holding company" structure behind Anthropic, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk that lets companies resist short-term pressure for decades. His line that will stick with you: harder is easier.

Mitchell Baker spent 12 years as the guy manually re-entering data on multi-million dollar construction projects, including Facebook's London headquarters, before deciding to fix it himself. He joins Alan Jones live from Cremorne Digital Hub to talk through building ClaimStack, a platform for the $320 billion that moves through Australia's construction industry every year, entirely solo, coding it himself in Cursor and Claude Code with zero engineering background. Alan digs into the tension of bootstrapping without a co-founder, why lived industry experience is breaking down sales barriers faster than any pitch deck could, and the exact milestone conversation Mitchell had with his partner before going all in.

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

Mark Samlal grew up as one of the only Indian families in a small Perth township, went on to co-found a payroll company from a secondhand desk in Singapore with his wife Samantha, and eventually listed it on the ASX as PayGroup. In 2022 Deel acquired the business in an all-cash deal worth $120M at a 143% premium to market. In this conversation Mark talks about the racism he faced growing up, the "4 or out the door" sales mentality that shaped his early career, what it actually feels like to run a public company, and why he's stayed on at Deel almost four years after the acquisition. He also opens up about the guilt of building a business while raising three daughters, and the pull he's feeling to reconnect with his roots in Fiji and India.

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