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.

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 we keep people at the centre of tech, and build products that are safe by design instead of fixed after harm is done?

Jen and Producer Nico sit down with Nakshathra Suresh, cyber criminologist, UNSW academic and co-founder of Eiris, to talk about what happens when AI blurs the line between our online and offline lives. Nakshathra works with startups, universities and businesses to build with safety, inclusion and human-centred design. She talks about why critical thinking is a bare minimum skill, and why that bar should rise with every tool we use.

You'll hear Nakshathra share how getting her first social media account at 10 shaped her sense of self, and why she believes the problem isn't tech alone, it's the humans who interact with it. She explains the fine line between access and dependence with AI, how generative AI is collapsing the barrier between online and offline, and why people hand over intimate details to tools that may be collecting them. She also unpacks how AI supercharges romance scams, and what it means when your social media can be used to map your whole life.

Nakshathra also tells the story of founders who assume the compliance team will handle privacy, and what happens when she asks how they're using AI. She makes the case for safety by design, points to the free eSafety Commissioner framework, and explains why you don't need a trust and safety team to think like a trust and safety person. Plus: why some cybercrime laws are older than the technology they now cover, and why privacy policies don't need to be 15 pages long.

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

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...

What happens when the data shaping our digital lives forgets the humans behind it?

In this episode of Flip the Focus, Jen and Producer Nico sit down with Dr Nadia Morozova, Chief Analytics and Insights Officer at Enriched Insights, to talk about the human side of data, the ethics of AI and why the most powerful insights come from understanding people, not just patterns.

Nadia talks about the moment she realised data had a human face; moving from psychology and consumer research into roles at major brands like TikTok and Procter & Gamble; and the study that changed how advertisers thought about the platform.

From the building blocks of good data: representation, quality and scalability, to underrepresented communities in research, we get into the need for data to reflect today’s reality to predict tomorrow’s. And the key consideration of the age: why frameworks and ethical baselines need to be in place before any AI model is built.

In a world where human data is under threat at a National level - OpenAI hacking Australia’s Medicare systems, anyone…? Dr Nadia offers a simple but powerful shift: move the conversation from what technology can do to what humans need. Because the most sophisticated AI is only valuable when it helps us understand human needs, aspirations and challenges more clearly.

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 honest stories from founders, funders and leaders asking big questions about tech, work and what comes next.

What happens when the bravest decision a founder can make is to stop - and how do you know when it’s time to let go of the thing you’ve built?

In this episode of Flip the Focus, Jen and Producer Nico sit down with Sam Garven, co-founder of AI HR platform Hello Canopy, to talk about the decision to wind down the business and what happens when the founder journey doesn’t end the way you imagined.

Sam talks about the emotional gymnastics of closing a startup; moving through the decision as a solo founder after her co-founder stepped into an advisory role; and the signals that helped her pressure-test whether to keep going. She shares how customer feedback and investor interest were encouraging, while economic conditions, changing HR budgets, market uncertainty and her own financial reality told a more complicated story.

You’ll hear Sam talk about the implications of taking venture capital, hiring a team and committing to a growth trajectory when you’re no longer certain you can deliver the upside investors expect. She explains why founders need to think carefully about the decisions they’re making today—and where those decisions could leave them, their employees and their families in one, two or three years.

Sam also reflects on the fear and shame attached to closing a business, why she chose to be public about winding down Hello Canopy, and the overwhelming response from the startup community that helped her reframe the experience. She challenges the idea that closing a company is the same as failing, and asks whether we need a different definition for a journey that has changed who you are and what you can do.

For anyone considering a career change, Sam shares what it feels like to lose the identity you’ve built around a company, and how she began working out what comes next. She talks about taking time away from the internet, resisting the pressure to immediately sprint into another opportunity, and rewriting her résumé to identify the skills she developed as a founder.

It’s about making pragmatic decisions in the middle of uncertainty, recognising when persistence becomes pressure, and understanding that the skills you build in one chapter can travel with you into the next. Because sometimes success isn’t about making the company work at any cost. Sometimes it’s about seeing the signals clearly, taking responsibility for the people involved and having the courage to change direction.

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 honest stories from founders, funders and leaders asking big questions about tech, work and what comes next.

This is Sam’s second conversation with Flip the Focus, and a very different chapter in the Hello Canopy story.