australian-founders
(8)
Jack Lu and the Art of Starting Over
The Magic Eden co-founder built a marketplace in two weeks, watched it reach a billion-dollar valuation, then faced a harder task: admitting the market had changed.
Steve Legge and the Ten Billion Tiny Decisions Behind Every Call
Before a call connects or a text arrives, a quiet chain of decisions has to be right. Steve Legge has built a career inside that invisible machinery, from Australian television control rooms to the global registry business now fighting fraud in real time.
Cliff Obrecht and the Small Kingdom That Learned to Think in Billions
Before Canva reached a quarter of a billion monthly users, Cliff Obrecht helped rule a tiny realm: Australian school yearbooks. The habits that carried him out of Perth - candour, thrift and a taste for the practical - still shape what came next.
Cameron Adams and the Beautiful Usefulness of Being Wrong
Before Canva reached hundreds of millions of people, Cameron Adams built beautiful things that failed. Those failures taught him the useful difference between making a product impressive and making it belong to everyone.
Daniel Gibbon Gave Up Medicine to Fix the Red Pen
He had a medical-school place, a perfect university GPA and a tidy future. Then hundreds of teacher conversations persuaded him that the higher-leverage problem was hiding in a pile of unmarked essays.
Grace Brown Is Teaching Robots to Read the Room
The Andromeda founder started with a student-built robot that could ask about her day. Now she is scaling a company around a harder engineering problem: creating machines people actually want in the room.
Daniel Vassilev Is Building for the Moment Software Stops Waiting
The Relevance AI co-founder went from teenage apps with millions of users to a $24 million Series B. His enduring idea is simpler than the jargon: software should take a brief, do the work, and know when to bring a person back in.
Maxine Minter
Maxine Minter is Australia's first solo female General Partner at a venture capital fund, and the Founder & GP of Co Ventures - a $5M pre-seed fund dedicated to backing software-led companies with at least one Australian founder building for global scale. Based in San Francisco, she started her career as a tech lawyer, pivoted into startup founding and operating, and began angel investing with $2,500 cheques before raising her own fund. She co-hosts the 'First Cheque' podcast with Cheryl Mack, champions a 'belief capital' philosophy, and has built a portfolio with over 50% women founders.