01:05 - The CEO Board Seat Debate

09:26 - AI Comes For Big Law

24:29 - Yo-Chi’s $2bn Valuation

29:54 - Why Yo-Chi Worked

38:55 - Yo-Chi’s Global Upside

Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/

We’re very much looking forward to seeing you all later today at The Commons in Cremorne for our first proper Contrarians Live!

Some housekeeping:

• Please arrive from 3.45 - we want to start recording at 4.00

• Please submit any questions on this link

• We’ve had a small group cancel - feel free to grab any last minute tickets here

Otherwise - see you then and there!

We’re looking forward to seeing you this Thursday at our first (proper) live recording of the pod at The Commons in Cremorne!

As way of reminder, we will start recording from 4pm, so please aim to get there in advance if you want to get the best seats. We’re expecting the room to start filling up from 3:45.

We will have a mic (and a Mike…) for questions, but if you’d like to submit yours in advance, please use the form here.

See you on Thursday!

Watch on YouTube above or listen on Spotify at the link below.

The Contrarians catchup

• Adam did an “Ask Adam Anything” session for year 11 and 12 accounting students at his sister’s school. Three of the 80-odd students who came up to him afterwards said they already run their own genuine businesses. Adam: “In our day, no one would have had their own business at sixteen.” Adir: “These kids are great examples of that. And they’ve got real genuine AI-driven businesses doing real things for real customers.”

• Adir’s take on Gen Z’s sleep habits: “Gen Z have decided to adopt the behavior of boomers in nursing homes who basically wake up at five in the morning and then have dinner at 3.30 in the afternoon.”

• Alastair Clarkson was fired by North Melbourne mid-contract in an unusually blunt press conference where the president and football chief publicly criticised him on the way out. Adir: “Professional sport is entertainment and entertainment is a brutal industry. The minute you’re not performing, getting an audience, winning, making fans excited, you’re gonna be brutally shown the exit.”

• Student politics at Monash University: one party called Change! (aligned with Labor Left) holds every office-bearing position. Only 11% of students vote, in person only, and the experience of going to vote is reportedly unpleasant enough to keep most students away. Adir: “This is where politics starts. And if the Liberal Party and the Labor right can’t get a foot in here, I think it bodes badly. I think people need to get the vote out to go and stop this happening.” Adam: “I’m more shocked that you’re not more shocked about this.”

• The Iran blockade update: Iran attacked US warships last week and the US hit three Iranian tankers over the weekend. Five million barrels a day of crude oil, essentially none of it Iranian, are now exiting the Persian Gulf via alternative routes. AMPOL is at all-time highs. Adir: “Attacking US warships is a move of desperation.” On the deal he thinks Trump would still do: “Iran could say we’re going to allow freedom of movement to the Strait of Hormuz and you sign a deal that says you won’t attack us for the next ten years and we will freeze a nuclear program. And I think Trump would do that deal in a second.”

$13B, bought by NVIDIA, athlete-backed

NVIDIA acquired Hugging Face, the open-source AI model hub, for $13B. The acquisition came just two weeks after a major hack of the platform, which is used by serious developers globally to access open-source models including Chinese models. Basketball player Kevin Durant reportedly turned $300K into $60M as an early investor, a return that may explain his appearance on the world’s highest-earning athletes of all time list. The episode also explored the growing trend of athletes becoming tech investors in Australia vs. the US.

Adir: “People basically know a few of the most well-known frontier models, models like Anthropic and ChatGPT and Gemini. But there are a gazillion open source models and serious developers and people working with these models. They want to use these open source models. And so Hugging Face is basically this place where you can use all these different open source models in one place.”

Adam: “These VCs are all mostly male fanboys of athletes. Their dream is to befriend athletes. And the founders are often star-struck by the athletes as well. So it’s free PR as well. What we’re seeing now is athletes becoming a significant part of the early stage cap table.”

Adir: “In Australia, appeal is very geographically specific. Lots of people are not in Melbourne and not Sydney and vice versa. Athletes do not have the pull in Australia that they do overseas. They can’t just shift stock by their brand being attached to it.”

Expert360: the golden window closes

Expert360, the online talent marketplace backed by Airtree, Rampersand, and UniSuper, was sold to US firm Swipejobs for just $16M, well below the $30M raised since 2013. As recently as June, Street Talk had reported the business was profitable with $140M in revenue. Co-founder Bridget Loudon-Harris, who stepped down from the Telstra board the same week, will receive nothing despite years of work.

Adam: “There was a golden window for this business. And I just want to emphasize again and again, when there’s a golden window, sell some stock. You don’t have to sell $20M. Sell $2M. Sell $5M. Like sell whatever you can sell that still leaves you with a big chunk. That will de-risk you dramatically.”

Adam: “I don’t think any CEO should take an external board appointment ever. And even more so a startup founder. You’re taking twenty percent of my time and giving it to these other guys when you’re paying me and you’ve invested in it.”

Adir: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with the founders having self-interest for their own outcomes in doing a startup. And I would go further and say, I do not want to be involved in a founder that does not have self-interest. Because ultimately on dark and lonely nights, that is what’s going to drive.”

Adir: “This is what happens with startups. Founders eat last, and in this case, there was no food left for them. I think it was a very respectful and high integrity outcome from the outside.”

CTM returns to trade, down 85%, and still probably overvalued

Corporate Travel Management returned to the ASX after more than a year of suspension, opening at $3.21 per share for a $500M market cap. That is 85% below its pre-suspension valuation of $2.2B. Forager CIO Steve Johnson, whose firm had written down CTM by 80%, said he was disappointed it didn’t fall further. Bell Potter’s Richard Coppleson said the only thing holding the stock up on day one was short covering. By week’s end, shares had fallen a further 31% to $2.25.

Adam: “The business claimed it generated a profit after tax of $25M last year. But note that $25M also included $23M in one-off accounting and forensic costs. So really they’re claiming their net profit last year was $48M, which is pretty remarkable. That said, it won’t include PEP’s loan, probably about $20M in interest there.”

Adam: “Most concerningly was corporate travel reporting revenues in July falling from $58M last year to $53M this year. And they also refused to provide guidance on future trading.”

Adir: “I think that drop to me is a good sign, not a bad sign. And I think there’s a good chance they might report a good next period. If this is as bad as it got in the worst time, that’s actually impressive.”

Adam: “Credit to the CTM team for keeping it alive. The new CEO and CFO inherited this mess. They’ve actually done an unbelievable job here. This is a rabbit out of the hat.”

On founder Jamie Ferris apparently selling his entire remaining stake via Morgan Stanley block trades:

Adam: “For him to still be able to pocket $50M after being the leader of that business into the grave is pretty remarkable. Yeah, he could have some legal action himself he has to face. So they might have some legal fees coming.”

Five other stories worth following:

1. UK startup Strolll is developing augmented-reality glasses to guide neurological patients through physical therapy at home or in hospitals, while new AI software aims to automate therapy validation and significantly shorten research timelines overall.

2. Adult dollhouses are booming as creative, nostalgic stress relief and increasingly serious business. Pandemic hobbies and social media accelerated demand, with luxury miniature homes, commissions, classes and content rapidly helping drive a multibillion-dollar market.

3. Scientists propose searching lunar soil for microscopic debris from extinct alien civilisations, arguing technological remnants could drift through space and settle on the Moon. Finding convincing evidence would be extraordinarily difficult amid human contamination.

4. Germany’s far-right AfD won a record 44% in Saxony-Anhalt, narrowly missing a majority but dealing Chancellor Friedrich Merz a major setback. Its platform includes stricter immigration, renewed Russia ties and reduced military Ukraine support.

5. Sam Altman says AI is enabling the “revenge of the idea guy,” letting nontechnical founders build businesses faster and cheaper. New US business formations are at record levels, though the opportunity remains unevenly accessible.

00:00 - Intro
12:20 - Alistair Clarkson & North Melbourne
25:08 - Student Politics at Monash
36:17 - The Athlete Rich List Quiz
50:30 - Iran and the Straight of Hormuz
1:02:30 - Expert360
1:16:04 - CTM

 Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/

Try Braze

Meanwhile, Cettire has lost 95% of its value in two years and its latest results raise even more questions about how long the luxury retailer can keep going.

00:00 Australian Retail Stocks Are Getting Smashed
12:41 Kogan, Temple & Webster and Koala
16:40 Cettire’s Collapse & The Art of Contrarian Investing

Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/ 

Try Braze

Watch on YouTube above, or wherever you get your podcasts (Spotify link below).

The Contrarians catchup

• Adir wore his DEF CON t-shirt into the episode. Getting it required blending into a six-hour merch queue at the world’s largest hacker conference. His hack: join the queue four hours in and pretend you’ve been waiting. “I inadvertently just blended into the line. And that’s how I was able to get the t-shirt.”

• Tanssu update: the luggage brand had a strong first week with no marketing at all. The TC20 promo code (free $290 tote with any purchase) sold out almost instantly. Adir has reactivated it: go to tanssu.com and use code TC20 to get the tote free with your case. The first run of 1,000 individually numbered cases is selling fast.

• GTA 6 is creating an all-time high share price of US$44B for parent company Take-Two Interactive. Will revealed he went to school with founders Sam and Dan Houser. “Were they stealing a lot of cars at school?” Adir asked. Will: “Uh, mostly prostitution (JOKE!).”

• A Nobel Prize laureate called Leo Esaki, 101 years old and the world’s oldest living Nobel prize winner, gave five rules for succeeding in any field: don’t allow yourself to be trapped by your past experiences, don’t become overly attached to any one authority in your field, don’t hold on to what you don’t need, don’t avoid confrontation, and don’t forget your spirit of childhood curiosity.

• Eureka Pet Co, a private Australian business doing $16M in revenue and losing $2.8M, leaked a Street Talk piece projecting $79M revenue and $10M EBITDA by FY28, seemingly trying to attract a Lyka-type buyer at a $40M valuation. Adam: “I presume there was probably not much news that day and they need to write something.” Adir: “I’d be very cynical about it. I mean, I’d also take $40M for that business on the sell side.”

Australia’s greatest hardware miss

Amazon acquired Zoox, the autonomous vehicle startup co-founded by Australian Tim Kentley-Klay, for US$1.2B in June 2020. The company had raised approximately US$1B beforehand from Grok Ventures, Blackbird, Lux Capital and others, leaving essentially nothing for the founder. Today, Adir believes Zoox is worth $100B+, compared to Waymo’s US$180B valuation, based on superior vehicle design and a more advanced product.

Adir: “So Australian VC could have had a better than Canva outcome if they would have been prepared to continue. Even better, this business will continue to get better and Canva continues to get worse. So we’re talking like multiples better than Canva actually.”

Adam: “A real tragedy for the Australian ecosystem as well. Could have been an Australian leader in AV and we’ve got no one now. We don’t even have AVs in the country other than Tesla.”

Adir: “What separates a momentum investor that just backs whatever everyone else is backing, and an investor that makes a genuine bet on a thesis they believe in, like autonomous cars, is that they know that whatever time horizon anyone thought was the case at the start is going to be out by between two and ten times. And so if they believe it, they have to keep backing it. And I think this was a huge loss for Australian investment.”

Adir: “Hardware is making a comeback as an investment class and as an innovation catapult. I think we’re entering a phase of an era of really a lot of hardware stuff.”

The turnaround case at Canva gets harder

Following the growth downgrade announced last episode, Canva’s customer community has turned sharply. Adam wrote a LinkedIn article calling for the founders to sell the business and found the overwhelming comment theme was “I used to be a subscriber and now I just use other stuff.” The founders appear trapped: unable to sell at prior valuations, unable to IPO, and watching the product narrative collapse.

Adam: “I don’t recall seeing a company being turned on as quickly as this ever. So fast.”

Adam: “The counterposition that got counter-positioned is the problem. That’s what happened. They used to be the cool counter positioning Adobe. Adobe is this big corporate thing. We’re the cool young upstart. We’re so much better, we’re really cheap. It’s free for most people. And that narrative, they just got counter-positioned.”

Adir: “The time to sell is when people are buying. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s the time that people least want to sell, generally speaking. If you think the price is X and people are buying, most people have got this loss aversion of like, if I sell now it goes to 5X, I’ll be a moron. But the problem now is it’s very hard to sell and you’re not going to be selling at X now. I suspect you’ll be selling at one-third X if you want to get out of this business.”

Adir: “This would be a terrible moment for Canva inside the company, especially for the founders. Like they’ve spent their whole lives from day dot. But they’re such good operators. They were one of the most loved software businesses on planet Earth. Absolutely. Everyone loved them. And now everyone’s turned on them. Yeah. It’s happening.”

On the bull case:

Adam: “Get the AI cost to close to nothing in their own models. That’s the bull view. And they effectively have another freemium model again that competes really well with Claude Design. Claude Design isn’t the panacea that some people might think it is.”

71% vote against remuneration, board and CEO must go

Shareholders delivered a 71% against vote on Xero’s non-binding remuneration report at the AGM, up from 49% the prior year. Despite this, the board increased CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy’s pay from US$15M to US$18M. One shareholder captured the mood at the AGM: “I do not understand why on earth would the chief executive sell all her shares if she believes the company is doing well.”

Adir: “The argument is: if the share price was going well, you wouldn’t care. I mean, I think that is a good summary of business in general. When you’re making money for us, we’re broadly happy. When things are going badly, and then you go and pay the person who’s making them go badly a huge amount of money, that makes us sad.”

Adam: “Not only are they paying her too much, they’ve actually just said to the shareholder, stuff you, we’re gonna give her even more money in spite of bad performance.”

Adir: “The worst thing about this from a shareholder point of view is the REM Committee Chair is literally gaslighting the shareholder base. And so they’ve had two strikes. An Australian company would have to get rid of the whole board and have them re-elect. They have no consequences. None. Zero.”

Adam: “It’s a pretty easy solution here. You reduce her salary, you don’t increase it. And if she leaves, let her leave. Like I don’t think anybody’s gonna be disappointed when this person, who’s really done only a disastrous acquisition, leaves.”

On whether Thodey should stay:

Adir: “If I was David, I’d be looking for a very good-looking exit out of this situation. He’s a guy whose personality and ethics are very different to what’s going on here. And of all the people you might meet in upper echelons of corporate Australia, he cares at least as much about Australia and the outcomes for Australia as anyone I’ve ever met. So I just think this is not the right place for him. Is he too nice for this role? Is he being played by this Singh Cassidy character?”

A rabbit out of a hat

Corporate Travel Management announced a US$175M lifeline from PEP Credit, Blackstone’s credit arm, carrying a 4% fee on market cap plus high interest, buying the company enough runway to avoid liquidation. Free cash of only $100M remains after the raise. Despite the chaos, the company is still alive, audited accounts have finally been released, and the new CEO and CFO have been credited for keeping the business breathing.

Adam: “Credit to the team of CTM for keeping it alive. The fact that they’re not dead is a huge win. And so why do you think I owe you a lunch? I certainly can’t claim victory here. This is a credit to the team of CTM, and this is a rabbit out of the hat if I’ve ever seen one.”

Adir: “I did not know how this would play out. I was just confident that too many people had too much of a vested interest. Being early is as bad as being wrong.”

Adam: “For every dollar of TTV, this business makes half a cent of profit. Even for a travel business, that’s pretty bad. Look at Flight Centre. They’re about two percent net profit margin. So they’re four times better than these guys.”

Adir: “If somehow CTM turns around and is a billion-dollar business over a five year period, they could double their money on this investment. It’s equity-like returns. The downside risk feels somewhat mitigated by the underlying asset that could be sold.”

Five other stories worth following:

1. OpenAI plans to end Cursor’s access to its models after SpaceX acquired the coding agent, citing concerns over terms compliance. The decision escalates tensions between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who dismissed the move.

2. Iceland narrowly voted against restarting European Union membership talks, with opponents fearing threats to the country’s valuable fishing industry. Supporters argued membership could strengthen the economy and geopolitical stability, while boosting Europe’s Arctic presence.

3. NASA launched the $4.3B Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, whose vast field of view will study dark energy and Earth-like planets far faster than Hubble. Congress preserved the ambitious mission after proposed cancellation.

4. French startup ArcSpace raised funding to develop an electron-beam system for repairing satellites in orbit. Its technology aims to cut, join, and weld spacecraft, extending satellite lifespans and reducing the amount of space junk.

5. Generation Lab is expanding its study of a blood-rejuvenation treatment to more than 100 people. The two-injection therapy aims to mimic blood exchange and slow aging, with participants, including founder Irina Conboy, reporting benefits.

00:00 - Defcon Merch and Tansu’s First Week
07:14 - Zoox
16:31 - Vanguard Smart Glasses
23:05 - Leo Esaki's Five Don'ts
27:47 - Disney's Hidden Powers
35:53 - GTA VI
43:13 - Eureka Pet Co.
48:20 - Victoria's Crime Problem
58:04 - Canva
1:13:19 - Xero's Shareholder Revolt
1:20:40 - CTM

The first 20 listeners to use code "TCfirst20" at Tanssu.com will redeem the offer mentioned in this week's episode: https://www.tanssu.com/discount/TCfirst20. Add “The Set” to your cart in any colour. Then at checkout, the code will remove the cost of the tote.

Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/

00:00 - OpenAI, Anthropic and The AI Money Problem
14:39 - Temple & Webster Gets Whacked 

Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/

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Buy Vicki's Book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Negotiate-without-Fear-Strategies-Maximize/dp/1119719097

UPDATE: The Contrarians Live

The first 100 tickets to The Contrarians Live have now sold out!

Due to unprecedented demand we have added another 10 TICKETS - buy now at this link, these will sell out today!

Join Adam and Adir, plus a special surprise guest, as they film the show in front of a crowd at The Commons in Cremorne, Melbourne, on September 10th from 4.00 until 5.30.

The Contrarians catchup

• Adam gave himself a serious RSI from a badly positioned hotel desk in Sydney. The silver lining: he discovered Whisper, an AI-driven voice dictation tool. “Mine was hovering around the 200 words a minute mark and it was getting it pretty accurately. Imagine the output I was churning out with this thing.”

• Telstra put Bender from Futurama on its free phone boxes campaign. The problem: in Futurama, a phone box is a suicide box. Adir: “I find it completely perplexing that that passed through Telstra’s marketing team. They’ve found this obscure character and they’ve gone and whacked it on a phone box and no one’s thought to say, hang on, might there actually be a phone box in Futurama and what’s it used for? And the answer is certainly not phone calls.”

• Adam on the Governor-General Sam Mostyn commenting on the Pullman Five allegations before any charges had been laid: “She was definitely not the only person who commented on the case. She was the most high-profile and highest-positioned person. And when you start calling people actual victims, that certainly implies a pretty significant level of guilt.”

• Adir on the same: “You can believe the victim and have a presumption of innocence simultaneously. You might believe the victim and also believe in judicial process. That means you’ll say the alleged victim. I thought it was even worse when people said the incident is terrible. It’s an alleged incident. No one has confirmed that that’s happened yet.”

• Adam on the media response broadly: “The public is being far more mature than the media. And the media is this sort of dying asset now that is clinging to anything it can. We saw how it disgraced itself during COVID and people died as a result of the overreaction.”

Data privacy: nobody is reading the terms, and that’s the problem

Culture Amp changed its terms of use to explicitly opt customers into having their anonymised data used for AI model training. Separately, Spirit Airlines’ liquidator sold the company’s entire email server history to Google for US$14M as a training data asset. Adam and Adir used both stories to dig into a wider question around data privacy in the AI era.

Adir: “What does anonymised mean? And is anything really anonymised? If you pixelate a face, long ago AI was able to reverse the pixelation. It’s just a mathematical algorithm. So pixelating faces is not secure at all as a way of hiding faces. Now if you apply the same philosophy to anonymized data, the question is, could an AI model figure out who the individual was based on the nature of the anonymized data forming a pattern?”

Adam: “The Culture Amp example is a little different in that the clients of Culture Amp aren’t getting any benefit from the data they’re sort of involuntarily giving. Culture Amp customers are paying Culture Amp for the privilege of using Culture Amp, and then they’re taking that data and making money off them. I think if they are using that data, there should be some sort of payment back. Maybe it’s a discount in use or whatever.”

Adir: “I think we’re in an era where we’ve got to take data privacy more seriously. If you run a company, you should sit down very purposefully and think about what you’re going to do with customer data. Are you going to use it for training? Are you going to let them opt out or not? Be transparent about it. What are you going to do when people cancel accounts? Because we are going to end up in an era pretty soon, I think, where there are going to be deeper consequences for the misuse of data.”

Adir: “People will go and they will take relatively small gains in convenience, and in return, they will trade off very large losses in privacy. And that is a lot of what’s going on today. People whine about having to do two factor authentication and taking an extra five seconds. But privacy and security should be paramount in the age that we live in.”

GYG is a masterclass in building powers

Guzman y Gomez delivered a full-year result that the market loved: network sales up 18%, same-store sales up 5.3%, underlying EBITDA up 28% from $66M to $85M, and net profit after tax up 40% year on year. EBITDA margins have grown from 4.1% in FY23 to 6.2% now, a 50% expansion in four years. The share price, which dropped to $16 in early 2025, has recovered to $27, a $2.7B market cap.

Adam: “This is a classic story of a business building its powers. They’ve got their drive-through stores making 60-70% more profit than non-drive-through stores. They’re in a unique position to roll out these drive-through stores. There’s process power, there’s clearly real brand, there’s probably some scale benefits coming out in packaging costs. They’ve got the model down pat, they’ve got an incredible CEO-founder, a great management team. I think they’re just rolling this model out across Australia, picking up all this white space, and as you do it, you just get better and better.”

Adir: “22% revenue growth only resulted in 9% growth in cost of food and packaging. To me, that is the most salient point. That is possibly the best of all signs that the core fundamental economics of this business does seem to be in a very good place due to scale.”

Adir: “Net cash from operating activities is $76M. Now that doesn’t include the rent, but even if you drop that down to $55M after rent, that is absolutely real money that is being made.”

On whether it’s still a buy at $27:

Adam: “It’s a less obvious no-brainer than when it was at $1.6, $1.8 billion. But this business makes genuine money. It’s in that beautiful sweet spot where there’s space for around a thousand stores. They’re probably at two hundred and fifty to three hundred now. I think they’re just rolling this model out.”

Adir launches a luggage brand

After two years of product development, a factory hunt across Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, and China, and a manufacturing cost that blew well past original estimates, Adir has launched Tanssu, a premium cabin luggage brand. The first run is 1,000 individually numbered pieces at $890 each. The headline feature: a front pocket that opens on a hidden hinge and closes completely flush, so it’s invisible until opened, never been done before in fabric-covered luggage. The wheels are hollow skateboard wheels, manufactured from scratch.

Adir: “I was in Kyoto in Japan, and I was in this store that sold all of this very old antique stuff, and there was this beautiful chest there with wheels on the bottom. And I said, what’s this? And they said, oh, this is what they used in this period when they had expensive personal items. They would put it into this cabinet and close it and it was secure, but it had wheels on the bottom so it could go with them. And I thought, what a perfect analogy for a cabin luggage suitcase. Okay, I’m gonna try and build my cabin luggage with exactly what I want. And so that was a terrible decision.”

Adir: “I chose an industry where I felt very passionately about the problem and was completely ignorant about how to solve it. I wanted something I could put a laptop in the front of and access it very easily, but I hate the zips at the front. They look so ugly and I hate when you put stuff in the front pocket and it bulges out and doesn’t fit in the overhead. And so it’s like, how do I do a front pocket that opens on a hinge, but I don’t want you to be able to see the hinge? It turns out that’s never been done before with a fabric cover over the top of it. So that took a long time.”

Adir: “The first trip I went on, someone stopped me and said, what’s that suitcase? I said, oh, it’s this new brand, it’s Tanssu. And she’s like, oh, I really like it, where can I get one? And I literally had to say the words, there’s actually only one of these in the whole world at the moment. That has been an interesting journey. And I would say, you get punched in the face every day with problems.”

Adam: “A couple of businesses I know that started with making luggage. One was called Louis Vuitton, one was called Hermes. So you’re following in the footsteps of giants here.”

The Contrarians listeners: use the promo code in the show notes to get a free tote (valued at $290) with your purchase. Limited to the first 20 buyers.

Five other stories worth following:

1. PennPoa is commercialising Poa annua, once dismissed as a weed, for golf greens. Its Penn State-developed strain creates dense putting surfaces in 8–12 weeks, with demand exceeding supply and 2026 harvests nearly sold out.

2. London teenager launched KidsHustle, a gig-work app for under-18s seeking babysitting, dog walking and tutoring jobs. Unlike adult-only platforms, it includes live GPS sharing with parents while teens are completing jobs for added safety.

3. CaaStle founder Christine Hunsicker will serve five years in prison for defrauding investors of $300M. Her lawyers blamed the startup’s collapse on a 30-pound mirror injury, but extensive evidence of fabricated financial records prevailed.

4. Chinese humanoid robot Lightning ran 100 metres in 9.32 seconds, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58 world record at Beijing’s World Humanoid Robot Games. Built by Honor, it celebrated by crashing directly into a wall afterward.

5. Paramount Skydance and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are set for preliminary settlement talks over Paramount’s $111B Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. Both sides face pressure, though Bonta insists any deal include robust structural remedies.

00:00 - Wispr, RSI and The Curse in Disguise
07:12 - Telstra’s Futurama Phone Box Fail
10:13 - Mobile Phones, Parenting and Always Being Contactable
12:35 - Uber, Taxis and Airport Chaos
18:28 - Adir’s New York Cafe Story
22:23 - DEF CON, Delta Wi-Fi and Executive Deepfakes
36:01 - Sydney's Pullman Five and Presumption of Innocence
47:52 - Culture Amp, AI Training Data and Privacy
58:57 - Guzman y Gomez’s Big Result
1:21:06 - Tanssu Launch

The first 20 listeners to use code "TCfirst20" at Tanssu.com will redeem the offer mentioned in this week's episode: https://www.tanssu.com/discount/TCfirst20. Add “The Set” to your cart in any colour. Then at checkout, the code will remove the cost of the tote.

00:00 - Australia's Housing Crash
10:21 - NVIDIA
24:45 - Canva's Valuation Markdown

Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/

You can expect an amazing surprise guest, incredible giveaways, and 90 minutes of the best business entertainment podcast in Australia.

Secure your tickets here.

Yesterday we announced that we will be hosting our first (proper) live recording of the podcast in front of an audience on Thursday 10th September from 4.00 until 5.30 at The Commons in Cremorne, Melbourne.

Tickets are already 50% sold out!

Do not miss your chance to attend what will be an amazing event with guests, giveaways and guns (Adir’s biceps, that is).

Secure your ticket here before it is too late!

For our listeners based elsewhere who can’t make it to the show - we will be hosting events in other states in the coming months. Make sure you’re on this email list for further updates.

We’ve launched our most commonly requested feature - buy your tickets to a live recording of The Contrarians here. Details below:

• Thursday, September 10th from 4.00 to 5.30

• Hosted at The Commons, Cremorne in Melbourne

• Tickets are an absolute steal at $49 (rumour has it Adir wanted to charge 100x that…)

Buy your tickets now! Expecting this to sell out quickly…

The Contrarians catchup

• Adir went to DEF CON in Las Vegas, the world’s largest hacker conference. His verdict: “Once you call it InfoSec and start thinking about it bigger than ‘how is Mythos going to hack my software’, it’s a very fascinating area. Directors in Australia are deeply underprepared for this. It’s scary what ASIC has said relative to the level of sophistication.” A social engineering demo in real time showed a caller extract enough information from an unknowing company employee to theoretically run a ransomware attack, in a 20-minute phone call.

• Adir also went to San Francisco for the first time since COVID. Figma is the most prolific advertiser in the city, with 40 Figma ads for every one Canva ad. And every single billboard on Highway 101 has either “AI” or “API” on it. “If you’re in tech, you need to go to San Fran because number one, it will be invigorating. Number two, you see the future.”

• Adir rode in a Waymo in San Francisco after previously riding in a Zoox in Las Vegas. His verdict: “A Waymo kind of sucks after you’ve been in a Zoox. It’s much better than an Uber with a driver. But Zoox is a step up.”

• LinkedIn is throttling organic reach. Adir audited his top ten feed posts: six were “commented on by a connection” rather than posted directly by a connection. Zero of the top ten were an actual post from someone he follows. Adam: “LinkedIn’s always been one of the few bastions of organic reach. And having two out of ten paid is a pretty big change from LinkedIn.”

$13B, 100 employees, $600M ARR, and probably losing money

Swedish AI app builder Lovable is raising at a US$13B valuation. It has approximately 100 employees and around $600M in annualised recurring revenue. Its market cap per employee is roughly A$200M, compared to NVIDIA’s A$192M per employee and Coles’ A$270K. The business builds websites and apps via AI prompts, having swept past incumbent Wix.

Adir: “Lovable is a platform that basically lets you make websites. There was Wix, the Israeli business, that dominated this space. And then AI came along and said, “oh, workflow, that’s what we’re all about”. We’re just gonna go and build a native workflow simplification for websites. It’s even simpler than Wix.”

Adir: “Imagine a business that makes $400M of trailing twelve months revenue. They only have 100 employees. Those employees, what are they going to cost on average in cash? $300K a year? So almost nothing. And yet I doubt they’re profitable with $400M because of token costs. The gross profit on businesses built on top of someone else’s models are generally not amazing.”

Adir: “In the casino economy that we live in now, surely the Lovable way to grow is just: if they employ another hundred people, they’re just going to increase another $6B in market cap. Isn’t that the way the maths works? Can you reverse-engineer it?”

It’s not just software, and directors are not ready

Adir attended DEF CON and came away with a dramatically expanded view of information security risk. The conference featured villages dedicated to lock picking, physical security bypass, and social engineering. A live demo showed a caller extract full system architecture and authentication details from an unwitting corporate employee over a 20-minute phone call.

Adir: “Someone’s going to a soundproof booth. A thousand people are listening outside. They get a 1-800 number of a big company and they phone it up. Their job is: see how much information you can extract about all of the software systems and security systems that this company is using, and what the authentication process is. And over the course of a twenty minute phone call, this person basically handed over everything that you would need to be able to hack your way into this company, just through a social engineering interaction.”

Adir: “I told you, like it’s really terribly scarily easy. And no one’s thinking about, do I have a high frequency or low frequency RFID scanner at my door? That is not software.

Adir: “Directors should be able to think about information security in a strategic way. Like, what are the risks for us and why, and what are the different ways that people might get in at a high level? How can we ask the right questions to our CEO and our tech team, and maybe our people and culture team as well? None of it is going to make you bulletproof. If there’s a lock and you can access it, you can open it without a key or someone can. That’s just the reality of things.”

John Stensholt on TechBros, the Atlassian story

John Stensholt, journalist and co-author (with Perry Williams) of TechBros, the book chronicling the rise, fall, and falling out of Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar, joined the pod. The book debuted in the top 10 on Amazon Australia across all books within days of release. Key revelations from the conversation:

On why Mike beat Scott:

Adam: “Mike was the product guy, Scott was the tech guy. Generally the product guys tend to have longer longevity because you can replace the engineering talent. It’s pretty hard to replace that sort of product vision. Felt like Mike was probably the right one if there was going to be just one of them.”

John: “He’s more outgoing. He’s better at doing those investor calls and dealing with investors. He’s probably a bit more gregarious in that way. He thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room as well, and he probably is.”

On Scott’s personality and the power struggle:

John: “I’m not sure whether he was, for the want of a better phrase, Machiavellian enough. We really, really tried very hard to find people that liked Mike a lot. And it was hard to find people that liked them both equally. I don’t think that detracts from Mike’s acumen as a business leader and a business builder. But the crusading aspect he undertook in the climate and renewable energy space probably turned some people off. And he was on LinkedIn and Twitter a lot talking about that where Scott wasn’t.”

Adir: “I often look at business and think we’ve moved past this age of monarchy and aristocracy and it’s been replaced by corporations. The people that are at Atlassian that are the consigliere of Mike are never gonna get a job that is as good as this job ever again in their lives. So Mike abdicating simultaneously as Scott abdicated would have seemed inconceivable to the powerful people whose whole careers depended on Mike staying.”

John: “Absolutely, yeah. I think there’s no doubt that the board was encouraged to make sure that Mike stayed. And there was a lot of internal discourse about that. You know, we need him here, he’s the best leader that we have. Once Scott left, the message went around, we could all fly business class again.”

On what the book reveals about the internal culture:

Adir: “I feel like I might be the last defender of Mike that’s left. But I’ve had only positive interactions, limited but only positive. I kind of think it’s special in a way that a guy that is fundamentally a tech nerd can become this successful and this wealthy just by building a tech business. I find that endearing.”

Five other stories worth following:

1. Investors who put nearly $1.2 million into Selena Gomez’s mental health startup Wondermind are suing the company and founders, alleging they misrepresented infrastructure, leadership and partnerships for more than three years to secure funding.

2. AI startup Mirage spent about $50,000 on a 24-hour AI-generated newscast using Reuters stories, avatars and graphics. It drew 50,000 viewers on X, but high-profile errors highlighted lingering trust problems around automated news journalism.

3. As Adir foreshadowed, Las Vegas buffets have fallen from around 35 to just seven as casinos favour restaurants and food halls. Survivors increasingly operate as loss leaders, using cheap or extravagant all-you-can-eat spreads to keep gamblers onsite.

4. Reddit says improving video is a priority as TikTok, Reels and Shorts dominate attention. Its push toward algorithmic feeds reflects an ambition to reach far more users, even if that dilutes Reddit’s quirky culture.

5. Solo travel is booming, with Google searches hitting record highs and travellers valuing freedom, spontaneity and meeting new people. Younger people lead the trend, while demand is rising among older women and even couples.

GET YOUR TICKET TO THE CONTRARIANS LIVE! https://events.humanitix.com/the-contrarians-live

John Stensholt's book 'Tech Bros' is available now: https://harpercollins.com.au/products/9781460769492

00:00 - San Francisco, Waymo and Zoox
08:00 - Figma, AI and the API Boom
17:15 - Lovable’s $13bn Valuation
21:45 - Contrarians Live Show Announcement
26:30 - LinkedIn’s Algorithm Problem
31:30 - DEF CON, Hackers and Cybersecurity
51:15 - John Stensholt on Tech Bros and Atlassian

Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/

Listen in this week for another special episode of the pod, as Adam joins three of Australia’s best VCs for a conversation covering everything:

• Rick Baker, CEO and Co-Founder of BlackBird

• Craig Blair, Chair of Investments and Co-Founder of Airtree

• Ian Gardiner, Investment Partner at Jelix Ventures and Co-Founder of Innovation Bay

All recorded live at the latest Innovation Bay conference on the Gold Coast.

Listen below, or wherever you get your pods!

Join us on Substack for articles, news and more: https://www.thecontrarianspod.com/

The Contrarians catchup

• Adir is recording from Las Vegas where it’s 42 degrees Celsius. His headline stat: 15 of the 25 biggest hotels in the world are on the Vegas strip, and there are 150,000 hotel rooms on the strip alone. The $15 all-you-can-eat buffet has essentially disappeared, with prices up 400-500% in 25 years. He paid $16 USD for a 500ml bottle of water, not including the $10 delivery fee.

• Ben Carroll has kept Victoria’s WFH laws intact, with only cosmetic concessions. Adam: “This is a job-killing, hope-killing law that absolutely penalizes employees and penalises young Victorians.” Adir’s read on the politics: “My only conclusion is that he decided the politics of getting rid of this is bad for him to get reelected. And think about what that says, because when Ben Carroll says we’re not changing this, he’s saying you, the shoppy, you are gonna watch as other people get to work from home.”

• Victoria’s IBAC inquiry found members of the Andrews government engaged in serious misconduct in their dealings with union boss Peter Marshall. Adam paid tribute to the late Jane Garrett: “Very few people in the Labor Party ever stood up to the autocratic Andrews. Jane Garrett is one person who can hold her head up high for doing that. She lost her job, her livelihood, and eventually her life to cancer following the horrendous treatment by Andrews and his cronies.”

• Atlassian announced a blowout quarter, with 31% growth and $220M in profit, sending shares up almost 30% in overnight trading. The catch: forecast growth next year is just 13%. Adam: “They’ve basically done exactly what you told them to do two years ago. And the share market seems to love it.” Adir: “I wasn’t sure that Mike Cannon-Brooks, as a guy that doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled down on mega growth and no profits, was going to be able to flip this. But I think maybe he’s done it.”

Adir is finally a convert to autonomous vehicles

Adir rode in a Zoox, the fully autonomous vehicle built from the ground up without a steering wheel, pedals, or driver’s cabin, in Las Vegas. It seats four passengers facing each other in a curved pod, controlled entirely via app and touchpads. Zoox was founded by an Australian, Tim Kentley-Klay, backed by Blackbird, and later acquired by Amazon.

Adir: “I can honestly say to you, I just experienced the future. There is no doubt about that. I felt 100% safe. It did feel like a human driving it.”

Adir: “As fast as they can build these things, they should be rolling them out in every city. And yes, I am sold on autonomous cars. If these were rolled out everywhere and you could get one within five minutes of ordering one, there is no possibility that I would own a car. Zero possibility.”

Adam: “Think of the unlock for parents, single parents, parents who are working. How many hours can you save not taking kids to school, not taking kids to activities? It’s just an unbelievable time unlock.”

Jetstar charges for overhead bins

Jetstar announced it will give priority boarding only to customers with one underseat carry-on bag. If you want a second bag or normal-sized carry-on in the overhead locker, you pay a priority fee ranging from $25 to $52. The mainstream media and consumer advocates reacted with horror.

Adam: “You’ve got all these people who haven’t paid a cent more for them. These huge bags take 15 minutes longer to board a plane because everybody wants to shove their bag up the top. And these are the people who complain the loudest and are the biggest free riders who have the most to lose, because they’re the ones costing other people. What Jetstar is really smartly doing is saying you can have a bag, but you’re going to have to pay for the cost of your externality.”

Adam: “I congratulate Steph Tully and Jetstar for this. This is a brave call, but it is absolutely the right call for Jetstar travelers.”

Adir: “Let’s think of all the things that we could strip out in order to let the poorest person who could possibly fly be able to get on our plane. There are people that do not have luggage that goes in the overhead. This is not an unlimited buffet, it’s a la carte.”

The golden window for Canva is closed

Canva told investors that growth will drop to 20% in FY27, down from 49% in 2023, 45% in 2024, and 38% in FY26. The company blamed high AI inference costs for slowing its free tier rollout, meaning the top of funnel that converts free users to paid has essentially stalled. Co-founder Mel Perkins said they “decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture.” Co-founder Cliff Obrecht said “we were too ambitious in our assumptions.”

Adam: “This is basically like telling someone you’ve got a terminal illness. This is horrific news. Not only for Canva, but also its employees who are seeing multi-million dollar paydays evaporate before their very eyes. It’s also catastrophic for a swathe of the Australian VC industry which is really dependent on Canva’s $60B valuation.”

Adir: “Canva exists because they made it easier to do nice things and beautiful things than the previous technology, which was basically Photoshop. And if you’re a workflow enhancement business, that’s what their whole business effectively was, then there is no simpler workflow than prompts in an AI. And as we’ve seen with Claude Design, it’s amazingly good.”

Adir: “Canva has to fight against these frontier models with unlimited money whilst effectively paying the AI costs to fight that war. That is a horrible place to be. They should have sold. They should be selling. I haven’t changed my view.”

Adam: “Their gold-plated razors are a non-starter and I’m competing against people giving away other gold-plated razors like OpenAI for free. They should have seen this a year ago and sold when they could.”

Adir: “Not only is their razor now costing as if it’s made of solid gold, not only is ChatGPT giving out solid gold razors as well, not only are like ten other companies giving out solid gold razors for free. But all of these other companies, the AI companies, it turns out their things are not razors at all. They’re a magic wand that can do a hundred and fifty million other things as well.”

On valuation:

Adir: “I think it might be one of the most expensive misses of a golden window. You know, it’s even cheaper to have been a good idea. And their ability to pay this money diminishes every day.”

Adam: “This could have been a $50B exit for Australia. It’s just such a tragic missed opportunity.”

H3: Five other stories worth following:

1. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel spent heavily in Q2, cutting cash from $397B to $365.5B through Alphabet investment and share buybacks. Operating earnings rose 16%, offsetting weaker insurance performance across the conglomerate.

2. Portland startup HitchPiggy wants to turn spare car seats into a rideshare network, letting drivers post existing trips, choose passengers, and set contributions, while riders review vehicles, routes, timing, pickup points, and costs beforehand.

3. Environmental groups are challenging FCC approval of Reflect Orbital’s first space-mirror test, arguing regulators overlooked risks to wildlife, astronomy and eyesight. The 59-foot mirror would reflect sunlight across 3.1 miles of Earth after dark.

4. San Francisco startup Conduit pays participants $50–$55 for two-hour sessions wearing an electrode helmet while talking, reading and typing. The brain data will train a noninvasive neural headband designed to control AI using thoughts.

5. July was the hottest month recorded across the contiguous U.S., averaging 76.89°F, surpassing July 1936. NOAA said every state ranked in its warmest third, as heat domes and climate change intensified extreme temperatures nationwide.