Founders Like Going INSANE

Your weekly dose of AI & startup news on our path to 1,000 Aussie startups.

🫖 The Realisation

This week’s realisation is for every founder who said, “I’m fine,” while answering emails at midnight, forgetting to eat lunch, and calling it ‘getting locked the F$#kK in’.

Locked into an early grave maybe.

Burnout doesn’t arrive as a dramatic breakdown.

It arrives quietly.

Cancelled plans.
Days to respond to a text message.
Short replies.
As waking up and checking the website ‘isfable5back.com’ before remembering you are a human being.

So this one is about the part of building a startup nobody puts in the pitch deck:

How to build something big without slowly disappearing into it, from somebody that has done exactly that.

This Week’s Line-Up

• Your startup isn’t you

• 🚗 The July AI Road Trip

• 🚀 AGI on Your Mac

• 💲Need A Job?

• 🦘 Memes of the Week

Written by: Jun Kai Chang (Luc), Julia Ponder, Dr Sam Donegan

Your startup isn’t you.

It feels like forgetting who you were before you became an emotionless productivity machine.
You suddenly have a weekend off and you realize you USED to have hobbies, but now you really just wanna get back to working on the ol’ ball and chain (your startup).

When I first started building my startup, I thought I knew exactly what I was signing up for.

Long hours? Fine.
Weekends? Optional.
Stress? Character development.
Investor rejection? Didn’t need ‘em anyway.
Living off coffee and whatever was left in the office fridge? Founder lore. Also **violent diarrhea ensues**

“Wow, you’re doing so much, and you’re not even burnt out!? What’s your secret?”

Yeah.

That thing hit me like the PS2 Harry Potter game crashing five minutes before I realised I never hit save. And it took me SO LONG to pass Snape’s stupid potions class.

---

I never REALLY listened when people said it was hard.

Everyone tells you starting a startup is hard.

I was like, ‘of course, that’s why I’m doing it’

What they don’t tell you is which part is hard.

First, you think it’s building the product.

Then you think it’s getting customers.

Then you realise ‘OH they were talking about raising money is the hard part.’

Then hiring.

Then firing.

Then cash flow. (P.s never f$#k with cashflow)

Then legal action.

Then taxes.

And somehow, your genius solution is replying to one more Slack message at 3:04 a.m.

Newsflash:

The company is not a Tamagotchi.

It will not die because you got eight hours of sleep.

---

The hard part is distancing yourself from your big beautiful ugly baby.

The hard part is when your entire personality slowly gets replaced by your startup.

You stop asking your friends how they are going. They stop asking you to hangout.

Every conversation somehow circles back to your company.

You cannot watch a movie without thinking:

“That’s actually a pretty good marketing campaign.”

or

“When you think about it, The Human Centipede is actually pretty good product design”

Someone asks:

“How have you been?”

And your brain immediately opens the pitch deck, and you respond “It was a good week because ‘number on chart is up and to the right'“

That was the scary part for me.

I did not just build a startup.

---

🚩 Put down a little detective crime scene flag if...

• LinkedIn is the first app you open every morning.

• You check your inbox while waiting for the microwave.

• Every unknown number might be an investor, so you answer anyway. (It’s always a random AI spambot calling, you’ll never learn”

• You have said “things will calm down after this” at least twenty times this year.

• Every middle-aged person in a blazer looks like someone you should probably introduce yourself to.

• You have cancelled plans because “this week is just crazy” for the fourth month in a row.

• Someone asked what your hobbies are and your brain genuinely buffered.

• Your startup is your first thought in the morning and your last thought before bed.

If you put down more than three flags...

Welcome.

The membership fee is not money.

IT’S YOUR SOUL.

---

What actually helped

For the love of God and all that is holy don’t look for another productivity hack.

1. Stop treating every problem like it’s the end of the world

I used to treat every hiccup like an emergency.

Now I ask:

“Will this still matter in two weeks?”

It is shocking how many urgent problems quietly solve themselves when you do not immediately sprint into the fire wearing a founder-branded anxiety vest.

2. Acknowledge that you’re cooked

Founders have invented a thousand ways to avoid admitting they are struggling.

“I’m flat out.”

“It’s been a big week.”

“We’re heads down asses up.”

“I’m just in execution mode.”

Just say you are cooked.

You will be surprised how many people stop pretending and admit they are too.

3. Stop “never stopping”

Literally just stop doing startup stuff. Go away for a week. Do NOT check email, slack etc.
Effectively fake your own death.

It will be uncomfortable at first, but once your brain switches off productivity mode, you’ll slowly start coming back (stronger). Plus faking your own death is GREAT for tax purposes.

4. Spend time with people who do not care about your startup (aka the loser Normies)

This sounds backwards.

But spending time with people who could not care less about my vibe-coded app, ARR, pitch deck, runway, or “strategic positioning” reminded me that I actually have a personality outside of being the startup person.

Honestly, it was nice remembering that version of myself.

---

The bright future ahead

The biggest lie I told myself was:

“I’ll look after myself once things settle down.”

But startups do not settle down.

They literally just get worse.

There is always another fire.

Another impossible deadline that somehow becomes possible through sheer willfull ignorance and blunt force trauma.

If you keep postponing your life until the company succeeds, one day you might wake up and realise you built something amazing.

But somewhere along the way, you misplaced the person who was supposed to enjoy it.

And I do not think that is the exit any of us signed up for.

🚗 The July AI Road Trip

Pack your laptop. Charge your phone. Pretend your calendar is a map.

We’re taking a strange little trip through AI builders, founders, robots, healthcare, startups and 3D printing.

Some stops are in Melbourne. Some are in Sydney. Some overlap, because apparently time is still a constraint.

Here’s the route 👇

Stop 1: StartSpace, Melbourne

Melbourne | AI Builder Co-working Day x StartSpace

👀 Your AI project wants to see other people.

Saturday 4 July | 10:00 am - 1:00 pm
State Library Victoria, 328 Swanston St, Melbourne

Join the waitlist here: Melbourne | AI Builder Co-working Day x StartSpace

Stop 2: King Street, Melbourne

Melbourne | Claude For Cybersecurity

Expect lightning talks, dinner, Q&A and time to meet people working across AI, security and startups.

Thursday 9 July | 5:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Stone & Chalk Melbourne Startup Hub, 121 King St, Melbourne

Register here: Melbourne | Claude For Cybersecurity

Stop 3: King Street, Melbourne

nerds unite | mlai x archangel

Come meet builders, talk startups, compare notes, and maybe realise your customer discovery needs customer discovery.

Tuesday 14 July | 9:00 am - 10:30 am
121 King St, Melbourne

Register here: nerds unite | mlai x archangel

Stop 4: Codex Melbourne & Sydney Same Day?

Codex Community Meetups

Bring curiosity, a project, or just the emotional baggage of your current codebase.

Register here: Codex Community Meetup – Melbourne

Register here: Codex Community Meetup - Sydney

Stop 5: Sydney Health Tech Detour

Sydney | Claude For Healthcare

Expect lightning talks, dinner, a panel, Q&A and conversations across clinician support, patient communication, operations and insurance processes.

Thursday 16 July | 5:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Stone & Chalk Tech Central, Haymarket NSW

Register here: Sydney | Claude For Healthcare

Stop 6: Stay in Sydney

HealthHack | Sydney (aka ‘The Big One’)

HealthHack brings clinicians, builders, engineers, designers, data people and students together to prototype real solutions for real healthcare problems.

There’s a pre-hack networking night, coding track, pitching track, mentors, food, coffee, clinical feedback and enough chaos to accidentally become a startup.

Pre-Hack Networking: Friday 17 July (optional) | Ticket sold separately ($5)
Hackathon Weekend: Saturday 18 July - Sunday 19 July | Starts 10:30 am
Stone & Chalk Tech Central, Haymarket NSW

Register here: HealthHack | Sydney

How to Raise Your First Million

Led by Sonia Kaurah, with experience across both the founder and investor side.

Saturday 18 July | 10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Stone & Chalk Melbourne, 121 King St

Discounts for Australian startup founders available

Register here: How to Raise Your First Million

Build Your First Robot: Hands-On Rover Workshop

👀 Stop watching robot videos. Build the small metal child.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll build a Wi-Fi controlled rover from scratch, compete with it, and take it home at the end.

No robotics, coding or electronics experience needed.

Saturday 18 July | 10:30 am - 5:30 pm
Stone & Chalk Melbourne, 121 King St

Register here: Build Your First Robot

How to Start a Startup | Melbourne & Online (we’re trying some online events now)

👀 Your startup idea is standing outside your window.

For aspiring founders, students, makers and early-stage teams who want to turn an idea into something real without wasting six months building the wrong thing.

Wednesday 22 July | 5:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Stone & Chalk Melbourne, 121 King St

Register here: How to Start a Startup

Final Stop: Print Anything - 3D Printing and Modeling Workshop

You’ll use Claude to design a 3D model, learn FDM printing basics, export an STL, slice it in Bambu Studio, and queue it on Bambu Lab printers.

No CAD or 3D printing experience needed.

Saturday 25 July | 11:00 am - 2:30 pm
Stone & Chalk Melbourne, 121 King St

Register here: Print Anything

See you somewhere on the map.

🚀 AGI on Your Mac

In Melbourne we have cold hands

Base Compute has officially launched, and they are building the runtimes and infrastructure that make powerful AI run on device.

Their mission is to bring AGI on device by building infrastructure that allows advanced AI systems to run locally. Faster responses. Better privacy. Lower marginal cost. Less dependence on the cloud. More intelligence running directly on the devices people already use.

The best part: you can use it now. BaseRT is publicly available on GitHub, so builders can try it, benchmark it, and start experimenting with local AI inference on Apple Silicon today.

Check out the launch here: https://www.basecompute.co/press_release

Website: https://www.basecompute.co/

BaseRT GitHub: https://github.com/basecompute/baseRT

They are Hiring!!

Founding ML Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4434966321/

Founding ML Researcher
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4434953171/

🦘 AI & Startup Memes

By Ty coon:

By Matt:

By Martin:

By Rob:

By Timothy Yang:

The Valehart Project:

By Dave Morrissey:

By Saad: