How do you build a tech career, and a community, that makes room for the whole person?

In this episode of Flip the Focus, Jen and Producer Nico sit down with Renece Brewster. Funder, Founder, Leader and community builder, for a conversation about falling into tech, finding your people, and turning personal experience into systems that support others.

We walk through Renece’s story from a fast growing startup to a love for scaling businesses, and eventually building and selling her own company to News Corp. She shares how becoming a mother also exposed how quickly women can be made to feel invisible at work; an experience that reshaped how she leads, hires and builds community.

You’ll hear why she rejects the idea that you have to be an engineer or deeply technical to belong in the industry, and how becoming a young mother shaped the way she leads. Renece also explains why work-life balance is often the wrong framing, and why whole humans make stronger teams and better businesses.

Renece shares why intentional community matters in a sector facing a projected shortfall of 1.3 million tech workers in Australia by 2030, and offers a hopeful counterpoint to AI anxiety: the technology may be moving faster and at greater scale than anything before, but if enough people use it for good, it can create more opportunity, more iteration and more positive outcomes.

If you love this episode, subscribe, leave a star rating, and give us a quick review. It helps more people find the show and supports our mission to share stories from leaders shaping tomorrow’s tech, startups, and female-founded innovation — like Renece Brewster, Brittany Fox, Georgie Healy, Victor Dominello, Cindy Gallop, Ida Tin and more.

What advice would you give younger you if you started over? What would you love to change about your industry? Whose name should we all be shouting? These are the big 3 questions we ask every guest on Flip the Focus. Their answers get real deep, real fast...

How can founders fund growth without giving away more equity than they need to; and what would it take to make debt a normal, founder friendly part of the startup toolkit?

Jen and Producer Nico sit down with Jodie Imam, three time founder, investor and cofounder and co CEO of Tractor Ventures, to talk about why the startup world has treated debt as a dirty word, and how alternative capital can give founders more options as they scale. Jodie has built businesses across marketplaces, co-working and community, and now helps founders use funding strategically rather than defaulting to selling shares.

You’ll hear Jodie share how watching colleagues face redundancy early in her career planted the idea that she needed to build something of her own, and how a home-renovation budget problem led to her first tech company. She explains why she and her then-business partner built Occasional Butler without testing customers first, how launching one of Melbourne’s early co-working spaces helped pay the bills and build community, and why she would now build community before product every time.

Jodie also unpacks what debt funding actually looks like in practice, from principal and interest term lines to “sleep at night” lines of credit. She explains why debt works best for founders with regular revenue and repeatable growth, why equity still has an important role in experimentation and pre revenue stages, and how fast access to capital can help founders meet customer demand before an opportunity disappears.

Plus, why Tractor backs “tractors, not rockets,” what founders should ask any funder about what happens when things go wrong, and how Tractor’s community, investor network and growth partners support founders beyond the money.

If you love this episode, subscribe, leave a star rating and give us a quick review. It helps more people find the show and supports our mission to share stories from leaders shaping tomorrow’s tech, startups and impact-led innovation: like Brittany Fox, Amy McLennan, Victor Dominello, Cindy Gallop, Ida Tin and more.