The Inflection Points Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Every successful Australian tech company follows roughly the same playbook: build the product here, test it in our market, then export it overseas. Atlassian, Canva, Safety Culture—they kept a lot of their engineering and R&D in Australia, while their sales teams conquered international markets. 

The secret to Australian tech success is to treat it like an export industry. 

Brandon Sheppard is the COO at Instant and has been in Australian tech since 2012—back when major VC funds didn't exist here and Canva was just being founded. He's lived the reality of building products in Brisbane while competing for talent against companies offering three times the salary in San Francisco.

Read the full essay on Inflection Points 

In this podcast episode, we're joined by Jessy Wu, who spent four years on the inside of Australian venture capital, first at NAB Ventures, and then as a partner at AfterWork Ventures. She was part of a team that deployed $20 million into 30 companies, building a community-powered model that challenged how VC traditionally works.

And then she left. Not for another fund, not for a bigger partnership, but to build the kind of company that would never be in the mandate of a VC fund—a professional services company in the AI era. Because after years of evaluating whether founders were pursuing their life's work, she realised she wasn't pursuing hers.

What follows is a conversation about cognitive bias dressed up as intuition, about the $2 trillion professional services market that VCs typically ignore, about what it costs to speak truth in an industry built on relationships, and about why democratizing venture capital isn't charity—it might just be the key to the next generation of Australian innovation.

After a decade of sluggish growth—the slowest productivity gains in 60 years—Australia faces a fundamental question: how does our nation capture the dynamic potential of the 21st century? How do we build an economy that rewards innovation, enables competition, and creates opportunity for all?

This is a conversation with Andrew Leigh about both personal and national productivity.

In the first half of this episode, we dive into Andrew’s personal systems and productivity trade-offs, from four-hour sleep experiments to the art of the strategic No. Then, we zoom out to the national challenge: how do we translate individual excellence into collective prosperity?

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Andrew Leigh is the current Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury.

Our country gets better when good people do good work. Here are three stories of change, from the changemakers themselves. 

To launch Inflection Points, we brought together three great changemakers to give three great case studies in how they changed policy and moved the needle toward a fairer, better, and more prosperous Australia. 

This podcast version of the event features:

• Michael Brennan on how Australia abolished non-compete clauses
• Brendan Coates on reforming Australia’s skilled migration system
• Katie Roberts-Hull on the fight to mandate phonics in Victorian schools

And a panel chaired by Myriam Robin of the Australian Financial Review. 

Read a transcript of this episode here: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/moving-the-needle

Australians aren't apathetic. 

If anything, we care a lot more than our reputation suggests. 

But when the conversation about our country's direction is either a one thousand-word op-ed that barely scratches the surface, or a 400-page report that almost nobody reads — the real work of changing Australia becomes inaccessible. 

Even for the people who want to see it the most.

Welcome to the Inflection Points Podcast: the home of in-depth policy discussion for a bigger, better Australia.