Each of you started with just an idea and you took that leap. So you might be well beyond those early days of your startups, but I’m sure that feeling has stuck with you and you can remember what it was like to start that startup.

For me, there were a number of reasons. The original genesis of the company was born out of the back of my PhD. It was an accidental discovery. And then I didn’t actually take the startup leap until my son had a number of respiratory conditions. I had to go back to the drawing board and actually build the product in my kitchen. I drew it on my kitchen bench and built it for my family and myself.

I think mine was really cumulative and iterative. Those are startup words. But essentially what happened for me was I just did one thing and then I just did another thing. I never had that moment of, oh my gosh, I’m going to solve employability or build an alternative higher education company. That was not what I sat there at my desk at the bank thinking. What I did think was, gosh, there are colleagues here that, if only they could communicate a bit better what they were good at, they could get better jobs. And there are a lot of young people who could be more than what their parents tell them to be. Just those little moments of going, well, how could I maybe put something in front of them to help?

I started doing really basic stuff. I charged people a few hundred dollars to do a LinkedIn profile or a resume and just built that out. Then all of a sudden I thought, okay, let’s take a leap and bring seven students to Silicon Valley to show them what it’s like in the innovation ecosystem in a different country. After that two-week programme, with just seven students and one university partner, it was like, okay, this is something—let’s do it again. So I think it’s important to bust the myth of the lightning bolt idea. For me it was curiosity, action, do a thing, learn a thing, do a thing, learn a thing.

It’s way more accessible than a lot of people realise. There’s something in that story which can be scary for people entering the startup world, because of the obsession with outliers and billion-dollar companies. That narrative can be intimidating, especially for someone not from a business background or who hasn’t grown up immersed in startup culture and media. Looking back, if I had known that narrative, I actually reckon I would have been too scared to enter.

What got me in was simply trying to make a difference with the resources I had, being scrappy, creative, and having fun with it. That’s not the cool VC narrative, but that’s what brought me in. So I think it’s important to open the invitation for people to join—even if you’re not sure you can be that outlier. You need some delusion that you can be something, that you can be ambitious and global.

What would you do or build if you knew you could not fail—removing that doubt? Psychologically, it does take a leap of faith to go out and do it.

Especially if you’ve got kids or a mortgage—real financial responsibilities. Entering this world doesn’t always feel like you’ve got nothing to lose. That’s where a mindset shift is sometimes required.

I echo that point because when I first told my bosses at the hospital that I was doing this, they thought, oh my God, are you crazy? And that’s true, but it’s also where a little naivety comes in. I thought, no, I’ve got this, because if nothing else I can get to the customer myself. I had the technical capability, and that gave me confidence. If nothing else, I could get to my first customer on my own and then build the right people around me.

I didn’t know what a VC was. To this day I’m still figuring it out. But I knew I had to be obsessed with the customer. That’s true no matter where you are. If you take the view that you’re going to get to the market as fast as you can—whatever it takes—you’ll find a way. With MedTech, there’s so much red tape to push through, but at the end of the day it’s about getting a product into the hands of a customer who will be delighted by it.

Yeah.