“What does it take to scale one of the most trusted brands in Australia without losing its soul?” Today’s guest is Michael Schneider , Managing Director of Bunnings since 2016 and a 20-year veteran of the business. Bunnings is more than a retailer. It’s a cultural institution. With more than 380 stores, $18b in revenue and 55,000 team members, it’s hard to imagine a time when Bunnings wasn’t the default answer to every home improvement question. But behind that dominance is a story of quiet lead...
Jul 14, 2025•51 min•Season 9Ep. 4
When Steven first joined us in 2019, GYG was already making noise—130 stores, a cult-like customer base, and a founder who was across every detail of the business from avocado sourcing to store design. That episode became one of our most replayed for good reason: it was raw, passionate, and incredibly insightful. But so much has changed since then. GYG has nearlydoubled its footprint, gone public, entered the U.S., scaled a drive-thru model, launched a new app, and pushed network sales past the ...
Jun 27, 2025•49 min•Season 9Ep. 3
We are reaching back into the archive to revisit a conversation from 2019 with Steven Marks, the co-founder and CEO of Guzman y Gomez. This was one of the most electric conversations of the early years of the show. Steven shared his passion for food, brand, technology, and most of all, people—with a clarity and energy that defined him as a founder on a mission. At the time of this recording, GYG had around 130 stores. Steven was founder-CEO, still obsessing over every ingredient, every system, e...
Jun 18, 2025•44 min•Season 9Ep. 3
Tim Doyle is the co-founder and CEO of Eucalyptus , a digital healthcare business that in just a few short years has redefined what 'patient first care' can look like in this country and abroad. If you haven't heard of Eucalyptus, you might know it via its house of Brands, Pilot, Kin, Software, Juniper, each delivering vertically integrated care in everything from men'shealth to fertility to weight loss. Before founding Eucalyptus, Tim was part of the founding executive team at Koala, the mattre...
Jun 05, 2025•47 min•Season 9Ep. 2
Silvija Martincevic, the Croatian born, San Francisco based CEO of Australian founded Unicorn Deputy. Silvija's executive career has been immense in the world of fast-growing technology, as the COO of Group On, and then the chief commercial officer of Affirm, that scaled annual revenue through the billion-dollar ceiling and beyond IPO. Silvija grew up in Croatia and while she didn't learn English until she was 18, she's an incredibly lucid storyteller. We traversed some key scaling challenges fr...
Apr 06, 2025•48 min•Season 9Ep. 1
Very rarely do you get to tell the story of a wildly successful entrepreneur that is largely unknown beyond the immediate circle of influence. Today on Scaling Up, Greg Boorer, the CEO and Founder of CDC, formally Canberra Data Centres, which is in some rarefied air among companies globally, having compounded earnings at over 30% for the last 15 years. It's now valued well in excess of $10 billion and is at the centre of the beating heart of Australia's critical infrastructure. All this, and it ...
Aug 22, 2024•57 min•Season 8Ep. 3
Bill Beament grew up in a working class family out of Esperance in Western Australia. He dreamed of being a general manager of a mine one day. Instilled at a young age with a deep work ethic and an acute commercial sense, he achieved much, much more than this as CEO and Executive Chair of Northern Star. Bill reshaped the underground gold mining industry and built from scratch a $16b, ASX 50 behemoth. Not resting on his laurels though, Bill has more recently turned his attention to wrapping up al...
Jul 15, 2024•47 min•Season 8Ep. 2
Hiroki Takeuchi, the co-founder and CEO of GoCardless started in 2011. GoCardless is a star of the blossoming UK FinTech scene- last valued at $2.1b, the business is on a mission to take the pain out of payments for businesses of all shapes and sizes – from your local gym collecting monthly membership right through to the Uk’s biggest utility companies. Payment collection is a problem as old as time, and in creating a bank payment network to rival the card networks like Visa and Mastercard , it ...
Jun 27, 2024•36 min•Season 8Ep. 1
What is a high-performing culture? It's a question some think as straightforward as it is philosophical. In these special episodes, we explore high performing cultures; what they are, how to create them, and most importantly how to not just maintain them, but scale them. By drawing upon the wisdom of the previous CEOs, founders, leaders who I have had the pleasure of interviewing over the last six years between them have created some $150b in market capitalisation. After 42 episodes of Scaling U...
Apr 23, 2024•35 min•Season 7Ep. 2
What is a high-performing culture? It's a question some think as straightforward as it is philosophical. In these special episodes, we explore high performing cultures; what they are, how to create them, and most importantly how to not just maintain them, but scale them. By drawing upon the wisdom of the previous CEOs, founders, leaders who I have had the pleasure of interviewing over the last six years between them have created some $150b in market capitalisation. After 42 episodes of Scaling U...
Mar 19, 2024•39 min•Season 7Ep. 1
Adam Schwab is our guest on Scaling Up, the CEO and co-founder of Luxury Escapes – a travel marketplace with almost $1b in bookings annually. Adam’s story is that of a quintessential and accomplished entrepreneur – one of trial and error, learning from mistakes and applying it to the next chapter as is always required. Luxury escapes and its coming to being is exactly this – the twist and turns of a variety of businesses, over almost a decade, that eventually spun out something that was scalable...
Dec 13, 2022•47 min•Season 6Ep. 9
Reggie Aggarwal is the co-founder of Cvent , a $600m revenue Software company, that is listed on the Nasdaq (ticker CVT ). Cvent is allows organizations to more efficiently run, manage and host all formats of events from virtual to in-person and hybrid. If you have been to a large conference recently, chances are it hasa been powered by Cvent. Reggie is in a very unique position, having founded the company in 1999, he has seen 3 recessions, an IPO, A SPAC, a merger, competitors come and go and e...
Dec 01, 2022•49 min•Season 6Ep. 8
Ruslan Kogan, the CEO and co-founder of Kogan.com ( ASX:KGN ) is the guest on this episode of 'Scaling Up'. Kogan.com is Australia’s largest pure play online retailer with over $1b in sales. Many listeners over the years would have no doubt been introduced to Kogan.com via their incredibly successful own brand electronics business that catapulted the business to a size and scale that has allowed them to enact a phenomenal e-commerce playbook. Aside from expanding their direct to consumer product...
Nov 10, 2022•48 min•Season 6Ep. 7
After a mini hiatus, 'Scaling Up' is back, and we have some incredible guests lined up in the coming months, none more so than this episode. Alex Vynokur came to Australia as a 16 year old from Soviet Ukraine, not speaking a work of English, but with a steely determination to make something of himself. And that is an understatement as to what he has achieved since – in the midst of the GFC, he co-founded BetaShares , a passive Exchange Traded Fund (or ETF) fund manager, with roughly $23b under m...
Oct 27, 2022•41 min•Season 6Ep. 6
Joel Montaniel is the Co-founder, and CEO of SevenRooms , a private software company devoted to improving the way hospitality operators leverage their data to enhance business operations, build better direct relationships with customers and deliver an unforgettable customer experience. In their own words, SevenRooms allows ‘the big to feel small and the small to feel big’ when it comes to customer relationships. The conversation traverses a wide range of topics; from scaling a global business fr...
Sep 15, 2022•49 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Hugh Williams probably isn't a name that pops to the front of mind when talking Australia's greatest technology exports - but it should. His career leading huge teams on cutting edge projects at global tech giants Google, Microsoft and eBay have fundamentally changed the way we live our lives. Globally, few possess the depth of domain expertise as Hugh. This episode dives into 'what great looks like' when it comes to individual engineers, small product teams and larger organisations, and his ins...
Aug 25, 2022•47 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Our guest today on scaling up is Jenn Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway ( Nasdaq:RENT ). From a thought bubble to ringing the bell on the Nasdaq and being the first business to do so with a female CEO, CFO and COO, Jenn has been at the helm of a business that is a classic two-sided network case study. We dive into this, and the scaling challenges of growing both sides of the network in creating a closet in the cloud for over 2.5 million American women. The network playbook has been ro...
Aug 10, 2022•38 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Mike Serbinis is the CEO and co-founder of League – a healthcare platform on a mission to empower people to live the lives that they want to lead; happier, healthier and longer. League started on the premise that the future of healthcare and its delivery was going to be less bureaucratic, less institutional, and consumer first. This simple insight came about both from personal interactions with the health ecosystem in the United States, but also more importantly from Mike’s previous experiences ...
Jul 27, 2022•49 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Series 6 of Scaling Up kicks off with Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger, the co-founders and co-CEOs of AllBirds . From a Kickstarter campaign, to listing on the NASDAQ (NASDAQ:BIRD) in a little over six years, this is an insane scaling story of one of the fastest growing brands in history. Originally born out of hustle and grit and then of thoughtful growth and innovation, Allbirds’ brand has always centered on a promise that great products have to be sustainable. Allbirds is the leading brand wh...
Jul 17, 2022•45 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Phil McKenzie, the CEO of Pacific Smiles Group , the ASX listed ( PSQ:ASX ) dental services business is our final guest of Season 5. Phil joined Pacific Smiles in 2018, taking over the previously founder led business and completely reshaping the corporate culture. Many listeners may be familiar with Pacific Smiles given its listed nature, or as a customer of one of its 115 dental clinics around Australia. Phil is a wonderful leader – someone who intertwines himself deeply within the business, un...
Dec 21, 2021•45 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Episode 2 of our People and Culture mini series features the phenomenal Anna Binder , the CPO of Asana , the $15b NYSE and LTSE listed technology business that is changing the way businesses work, collaborate and thrive. The genesis of Asana is important to frame this conversation; When co- founders of Asana Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein were both working at Facebook, of which Dustin also co-founded, they discovered amongst the hyper scale journey that that business was on, everyone was...
Dec 19, 2021•51 min•Season 5Ep. 6
This episode is the start of a Scaling Up mini series hoping to illuminate some amazing growth stories in regards to people and culture. We go deep on the scaling challenges that all companies face when it comes to people and culture and highlight what best in class can look like - from the role of a great, strategic CPO, to operationalising the values of the business, we are hoping this mini series really illuminates some amazing growth stories in regards to scaling a business' most important a...
Dec 13, 2021•41 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Cameron McIntyre is one of Australia's most respected executives, having played a major part in the Carsales.com (CAR:ASX) journey over the last 15 years, initially as the CFO in the late 2000s where he was charged with seeing the business' transition to the ASX boards, and most recently as the CEO, where he has been guided the business tremendously well through their next stage of growth. Carsales is now a beast of the business, with a market capitalisation of over $7b and a top line revenue of...
Dec 09, 2021•40 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Pro Medicus may well be one of the most under the radar growth stories of the world. Many listeners would not have heard of Pro Medicus (ASX:PME) , nor its low profile and humble CEO and founder, Dr Sam Hupert. Which is funny, given that the business started in 1983 and has a current market capitalisation c$6.5 billion. This is a story of patience, persistence, and perseverance. An inspirational story that needs to be told. There is some ground to cover for sure - in 1983, the IBM personal compu...
Dec 05, 2021•42 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Katherine McConnell, the founder and CEO of Brigte is revolutionising how Australians are financing and decentralising sustainable energy solutions in their homes. A former Macquarie banker, and mother of two, Katherine initially mortgaged the family home to go after the opportunity of becoming the leading consumer finance business in the space. And that she has – Brighte has financed ten percent of the solar installations in Australia and processed over a billion dollar of applications across 9...
Nov 28, 2021•41 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Welcome to the fifth season of "Scaling Up"! Expect an ecclectic mix of incredible Australian growth stories, told by their founders and CEOs. Some of the episodes are with businesses at the earlier stages of their scaling up journey, as well as a few of Australia’s largest listed businesses. Regardless of scale, or business model, there are some common scaling pain points, and we try again to uncover how these leaders have overcome them. Like our last series, we also have a little mini series, ...
Nov 21, 2021•48 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Abhishek Gupta is the co-Founder of Circles Life , Asia’s first fully digital telco. Everything a Circles customer experiences is completely online, bringing the same level of sophistication to the telco world that consumers enjoy in many other walks of life, such as their food delivery or ride sharing. Circles is currently kicking off its second act. Having penetrated Asia initially with it direct to consumer telco offering, they soon realised that their in house technology stack could be rolle...
Jun 23, 2021•46 min•Season 4Ep. 7
David Obstler is the CFO of Datadog (NASDAQ:DDOG) , a $30b hyper growth monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Few current active CFOs have been at the forefront of fast growing technology companies like David has - he is the seasoned pro that founders and CEOs have turned to to help them scale effectively for the last 25 years. You may remember from a previous episode the anecdote that Ethan Berman told of the CFO doing investor calls in his ski boots, as the financial world c...
Jun 18, 2021•33 min•Season 4Ep. 6
The first episode in this mini series is Jill Woodworth, the CFO of Peloton (NASDAQ:PTON) . Since 2018, when Jill joined, Peleton has been on a hyper scale journey – she took the reins of the finance function when the business was a private, $200m revenue company. In under 4 years since then, it is now a $4b revenue business listed on the NASDAQ. The next two episodes are moving the spotlight away from the CEO and Founder to their most important partner in the business, the CFO. You can liken th...
Jun 08, 2021•34 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Ethan Berman, was the CEO and founder of the NYSE listed Risk Metrics, until it was bought by MSCI in 2010 for US$1.55b. RiskMetrics, which was spun off from JP Morgan Chase in 1998 and became the market leader in risk management software systems. We need to transport ourselves back to the late 90s – a time of floppy disk distribution and only a handful of pioneer SaaS companies. From writing plays in Paris, Ethan ran one of the fastest companies, software or otherwise, anywhere in the world dur...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 4Ep. 4
