AI, payments and Aussie startups with Carolyn Breeze

Over the last decade, Carolyn has helped build some of the most important payment rails in the world. In this episode of Pinch Me I’m Dreaming, she joins us to unpack how AI is changing payments, why Australian founders are forced to do more with less, and what happens when capital and talent keep leaving the country.

For founders, operators and finance leaders, this is a grounded look at the tech, money and policy forces that will shape your next decade.

Democratising complex technology for real-world businesses

Democratising complex technology means taking tools that once belonged to global giants and making them usable by small, non-technical businesses without extra headcount, bank-grade risk teams or massive budgets. In payments, this is where platforms like GoCardless, Zepto and newer players such as Pinch sit — turning hard problems like recurring billing and reconciliation into everyday infrastructure.

Carolyn’s career is essentially a tour of this idea in action. At eBay, she watched a bloke selling fishing hooks from his garage compete with major retailers on the same global marketplace. The “secret herbs and spices” weren’t about glamour; they were about infrastructure that quietly levelled the playing field.

That theme continued at Braintree. The team helped build the “Uber-esque” experience where you could land in Singapore, open the Uber app and pay seamlessly without re-entering card details. Behind the scenes, that involved tokenisation, local acquiring and complex settlement rules in every market. On the surface, it felt simple: you tap a button and get a ride. Underneath, it was a sophisticated payments machine.

Crucially, Braintree didn’t reserve that tech for Uber. The same rails were offered to other merchants, so non‑Ubers could offer a similar experience. That’s democratisation: the cutting-edge experience comes first to a flagship customer, then gets packaged so everyone else can reach the same standard.

GoCardless extended that logic to direct debit. Historically, a small business owner who wanted a direct debit facility needed to convince their bank, sign their life away and effectively run a mini-payments operation in-house. GoCardless took that complexity, wrapped it into a product, and gave window cleaners and lawn-mowing franchises the same bank‑to‑bank rails that big billers enjoyed.

It’s the same problem Pinch and other modern payment platforms are tackling from different angles: the grind of getting paid for work you’ve already done. When hundreds of thousands of small businesses spend hours every week chasing invoices, the opportunity isn’t a shiny feature — it’s a simpler system that lets the work and the money line up.

What ties Carolyn’s journey together is this: the most important payment innovations are rarely visible. They sit behind the scenes, quietly making it possible for regular businesses to look and operate like much larger ones.

How AI is reshaping payments, fraud and assisted living

AI in payments isn’t just about chatbots. It’s about using intelligent agents to strip out manual processes, catch fraud faster than humans can, and give businesses “assisted living” for the admin they neither enjoy nor do particularly well.

From Scalare’s vantage point, Carolyn sees three waves of AI adoption in startups.

The first wave was internal. Founders used AI to speed up research, test go‑to‑market assumptions and handle repetitive operational work. It was about doing the same things faster.

The second wave was product‑side. Teams started asking, “Where does AI create real differentiation in our vertical?” In Scalare’s portfolio, Jeddle is a good example. It began as a way for students to get feedback on schoolwork, then evolved into Jeddi — an AI‑enabled platform that maps directly to the curriculum and gives structured, real‑time feedback for teachers and students. AI moved from back‑office helper to front‑of‑house value.

The third wave is deep tech sectors: medtech, biotech, agritech. Here, AI is compressing research cycles that used to take months or years. Instead of running one experiment at a time, teams can explore vast search spaces, simulate outcomes and narrow their focus much faster. When those tools are pointed at “hard” problems — diagnosing disease, improving crops, reducing waste — the upside goes well beyond software.

In payments, the parallel is clear. AI agents are already being used to automate onboarding, KYC and AML checks in ways that static rule sets never could. Fraudsters are using AI to scale their attacks; the only realistic defence is to meet them with AI‑driven detection that can adapt in real time.

For everyday life, Carolyn is unapologetically pro “assisted living”. She doesn’t want to micromanage what’s in the fridge, when insurance renews or whether a bill is still on the best deal. Those are perfect jobs for agents that understand your accounts, preferences and risk appetite — and quietly just get things done.

The thread through all of this is practical: AI is most powerful when it takes on the jobs‑to‑be‑done that humans find tedious, error‑prone or impossible to do at scale. In payments and finance, there’s no shortage of those.

Agentic payments, answer engines and the future of buying

Agentic payments are what happens when an AI agent, not a person, completes a transaction end‑to‑end within constraints you’ve set. Instead of tapping a card, you tell an agent your budget, ethics and preferences — and it does the buying.

Today, the plumbing is still emerging. Card schemes are experimenting with ways to authenticate AI agents at checkout so a merchant can trust that an agent is genuinely authorised to use a card. Once that problem is fully solved and scaled, the implications are massive.

Carolyn and Joe sketch a plausible near‑future: you delegate your entire household or business budget to an agent. It sees your income via open banking, understands your spending patterns, knows what you value, and has explicit constraints on what it can and can’t buy. You set the rules in your clearest, most rational moments — not at 11pm when you’re doom‑scrolling and half‑tempted by a sale.

If that becomes normal, a lot of traditional marketing logic breaks. Instead of persuading an emotional human in real time, product companies will fight to be the rational choice inside an agent’s decision tree. Discovery shifts towards answer engines, not search engines. That’s where answer engine optimisation comes in: structuring your data, reputation and customer experience so an AI tool consistently picks you as the best answer.

This isn’t abstract. We’re already using AI tools to plan holidays, compare products and shortlist suppliers. The leap from “recommendation” to “purchase” is shrinking.

For businesses, the lesson is simple but uncomfortable. If your entire value proposition rests on clever ads and impulse‑driven funnels, an agentic world will be brutal. If you have a genuinely good product, strong reviews, clear pricing and a track record of looking after customers, you’re in much better shape.

Why Australia struggles to keep its best startups onshore

Australia produces world‑class founders but struggles to keep them — and the liquidity they create — in the country. The result is an ecosystem that builds innovation locally, then exports the upside overseas.

Carolyn frames this through the lens of global “nodes”: Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, London, New York, Bengaluru. These hubs share a few ingredients that Australia hasn’t fully nailed.

First, proximity and collaboration. Successful hubs bring together government, universities, corporates, industry bodies and startup spaces in tight geographic clusters. People bump into each other. Deals, pilots and partnerships happen faster.

Second, well‑trodden international pathways. Founders in those hubs know exactly how to expand into the US or other major markets, supported by trade agreements, visa pathways and friendly tax settings. Australian founders, by contrast, often have to work it out from scratch.

Third, domestic capital that actually backs local innovation. Carolyn points to research showing that over a recent year, more than $1.5 billion was invested into Australian startups — but only about a third of that came from domestic capital. The rest was offshore money that will, inevitably, recycle its gains elsewhere.

Fourth, recycling of talent and IP. In leading hubs, a meaningful share of startups are founded by repeat founders who’ve already built and exited a company. They bring scar tissue and pattern recognition back into the system. In Australia, that repeat founder rate is much lower. When companies hit serious scale, many redomicile to markets where late‑stage capital, tax settings and customer access are more attractive — and often don’t return.

The end result, as Carolyn puts it, is that Australia is at risk of becoming an incubator of liquidity for other countries. We’re brilliant at generating ideas and early traction, but the compounding benefits — reinvested capital, experienced operators, second‑time founders — too often land somewhere else.

CGT, superannuation and the missing startup funding engine

Capital gains tax settings and superannuation allocations might sound abstract, but together they decide whether Australia backs its own innovation or outsources it. Right now, the system leans heavily towards outsourcing.

Carolyn is blunt about this. On one side, you have a superannuation sector measured in the trillions of dollars. On the other, you have a local tech ecosystem that receives less than half a percent of that pool in direct startup and innovation investment.

Compare that to other leading hubs, where pension and sovereign funds are often mandated to allocate 5–7% into local tech and innovation. Those settings don’t guarantee success, but they dramatically increase the odds that when a local company breaks out, its value flows back into the same economy.

At the same time, proposed CGT changes risk making it even less attractive to found, fund and exit technology companies in Australia. Removing or diluting CGT discounts on startup equity isn’t just a tax tweak; it’s another signal that the system doesn’t particularly value the long, risky work of building a tech business.

Carolyn’s concern isn’t that every property or investment rule change is bad — it’s that startups keep copping collateral damage in reforms that weren’t designed with them in mind. When you stack that on top of underweight super allocations, inconsistent support for ecosystem organisations and limited government procurement from startups, you get a clear picture: the funding engine that should be compounding inside Australia keeps stalling.

For founders, this makes the “why move overseas?” question less emotional and more mathematical. If capital, tax and customer access all look friendlier elsewhere, staying becomes the exception, not the norm.

Card surcharges, A2A payments and who really pays in the end

Banning card surcharges sounds like a win for consumers, but in practice it mostly reshuffles costs and nudges the system towards account‑to‑account (A2A) payments. Someone still pays — just not where the headline suggests.

The Reserve Bank’s move to eliminate card surcharges has been framed as consumer‑friendly. No more 1–2% add‑ons at the checkout. In reality, small businesses still need to cover payment costs. The simplest response is to raise prices across the board.

That creates two side‑effects. First, the “choice architecture” for consumers changes. When all payment methods cost the same at checkout, people lose the ability to decide whether a surcharge is worth the loyalty points or flexibility a particular card offers. As Carolyn notes, plenty of people are happy to pay a bit extra to chase upgrades; that option quietly disappears.

Second, it accelerates interest in A2A payments at the point of sale. If merchants can’t transparently pass on card fees, they have more incentive to steer customers towards cheaper rails — especially as newer A2A providers build smoother, tokenised experiences for ecommerce and in‑person payments.

Underneath the policy debate, there’s a strategic game playing out. Card schemes, banks and A2A providers are all positioning for a world where AI agents initiate more payments, and where cost transparency becomes a competitive lever. Surcharging rules are one tool in that contest.

The takeaway for service businesses is practical. You still need to get paid reliably, in a way that doesn’t erode your margin or confuse your customers. Whether that ends up being cards, direct debit, A2A or a mix of all three, the important thing is understanding the true cost of each option once regulation, fraud and admin time are factored in.

For providers like Pinch, this is exactly where education matters more than hype. The winners will be the platforms that help businesses pick the right mix of rails for their model — not just the trendiest one.

Closing thoughts

AI, payments and policy can feel like separate conversations, but they collide in the day‑to‑day reality of founders and operators.

If there’s a single through‑line in Carolyn’s story, it’s that the best technology disappears into the background. When democratised properly, it lets you run a better business — get paid on time, reduce admin, make smarter decisions — without needing to become a payments or policy expert.

The challenge for Australia is making sure the benefits of that innovation land here, not just in the markets our best founders eventually move to.

Full Podcast Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity, readability and blog formatting. Timestamps, filler words and auto‑caption artefacts have been removed where possible while preserving the meaning and flow of the original conversation.

Carolyn: Last year, over $1.5 billion was invested into startups in the Australian ecosystem.

Joe: Oh, that’s amazing. What an amazing number. The market’s lifting. This is brilliant.

Carolyn: Only 34% of that was domestic capital.

International investors are betting on Australia, and that is great news. But what it also means is that when liquidity is realised, those funds are not recycled here. They’re recycled in other countries.

So we’re basically building an incubator of liquidity for other countries.

Joe: Pinch Me, I’m Dreaming, Episode Seven, and I’ve got a very special guest today.

I was going to try to come up with a nickname, but then I thought any nickname I come up with isn’t going to do it justice.

I’ve got the wonderful Carolyn Breeze with me, CEO of Scalare Partners and payments industry queen.

Carolyn: I’ll take queen.

Joe: You’re going with queen? Okay.

That was actually going to be my nickname. I was going to call you the Queen of Payments, but I thought it was a little bit cringey.

Carolyn, how are you going?

Carolyn: I’m really, really well.

I didn’t know this was the seventh episode. Seven is my favourite number.

Joe: Well, then that means this is a turning point in both of our weeks. It’s going to be smooth sailing from here on in.

We’ve got Carolyn here today to talk through a whole range of stuff, but to start with, I think it’s always a good idea to do a little bit of scene setting.

Who are you? What is it that you do? What have you done? And most importantly, why?

Let’s start at the beginning. What’s the Carolyn Breeze story?

Carolyn: Right now, I’m the CEO of Scalare Partners.

Scalare is a listed company that helps startups scale and invests in them.

We own a number of brands in the market that startups, scale-ups and some of your clients may recognise.

There’s Tank Stream Labs, which is co-working spaces; Tech Ready Women, which is an accelerator program for female founders; Planet Startup, which provides virtual CFO services; the Australian Technologies Competition, which is a 12-year-old, highly regarded tech competition; and In-House Ventures, just to name a few.

One hundred per cent of the profits we generate across those assets, and through the platform that pulls them all together, which is the Founders Union, are invested back into Australia’s best startups.

The best way to think about it is like a circular economy.

I’ve been there now for three and a half years. It feels like 30 years and three months at the same time.

You know when you’ve been in a job and you feel like you don’t remember what happened before that, but you also feel like you’re learning every day? That’s how I feel in my role.

My background before Scalare was payments for close to 12 years.

I kind of grew up in eBay and then PayPal in the mid-2000s.

I was exposed to fast-growing companies with boots on the ground internationally, and Australia was one of those markets.

Being able to experiment and lead go-to-market planning, strategy and sales for these big organisations with big budgets and cool logos, and being able to fast-fail and make mistakes and grow, was a really fun time.

My first pure payments role was as Head of Australia for Braintree.

For those who don’t know Braintree, it was essentially the Stripe of its day. It was a credit card acquiring company based in Chicago.

They also owned Venmo, so a lot of people know Venmo even if they don’t know Braintree anymore.

PayPal acquired Braintree, and the Braintree tech stack became the tech stack of PayPal and the yellow button. It allowed PayPal to do more than just the yellow button and wallets. That’s when they got into credit card acquiring.

That was a really wild ride because I got sucked back into PayPal and was there for another few years.

What I realised I really loved about my roles at eBay, PayPal and Braintree was almost being a startup inside a large company.

You had a small, fast, nimble team moving quickly, making decisions, and essentially building greenfields into a market.

I really loved that pace.

Then I joined GoCardless when they were opening in Australia and New Zealand.

I was the first boots-on-the-ground country manager and helped scale that business for close to three years.

That was wild because it was also stepping out of credit card acquiring and into bank-to-bank payments.

I thought it would be same-same-but-different, but there’s actually a lot to learn when you move into account-to-account payments.

They were also UK-based.

I’d been working for US entities for close to 10 years, so moving into the world of the UK and Europe came with a whole new set of learnings.

Scaling that business through partnership distribution channels and directly to small businesses was a lot of fun.

Then you get to those moments in your career where half the time your career is leading you.

People are presenting you with opportunities, putting you in rooms, and your career is kind of moving in a direction for you.

For me, it’s been pretty rare that I’ve been deliberately leading the career.

It’s hard to step back retrospectively and ask, “What am I really enjoying? What do I want to do more of? What do I want to be challenged by and learn?”

I’ve probably been a combination of right place, right time, right attitude.

When I left GoCardless, I had an opportunity to think about what I really loved.

If I looked back at eBay, PayPal, Braintree and GoCardless, the thing that tied them together was the democratisation of something quite complex and making it accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

I realised that really aligned with my values.

At eBay, I could spend one part of the day sitting on a crate in someone’s garage having a cup of tea with a husband and wife who sold fishing hooks and earned enough to support their family.

Then that afternoon, I might be in the boardroom of Appliances Online trying to convince their ecommerce team to give me their new line of fridges instead of grey stock.

It was a weird mix.

But at the end of the day, the secret herbs and spices of eBay meant that a mum-and-dad business could sell to the same customers globally as someone like Appliances Online, as long as they did the right thing by the customer.

I loved that.

Then at Braintree, one of the biggest clients they had when PayPal acquired them was Uber.

Braintree and Uber created that frictionless payment experience — that Uber-esque payment experience — where you didn’t even have to push a button to check out.

It was all about tokenisation and closed-loop tokenisation in the background.

To make it really hit home how complex that is, imagine flying to Singapore, getting off the plane, opening the Uber app, hailing a car, and having all your payment information recognised and tokenised while settlement happens locally.

That’s really complex.

They were able to do that globally.

But Braintree also made those same tools and that same frictionless payment experience available to retailers of all shapes and sizes.

So I loved that they were able to democratise that technology and give non-Ubers access to the same experience.

GoCardless was similar.

The problem they were solving isn’t unlike a big part of what Pinch solves for businesses today: the pain of simply getting paid.

It sounds so rudimentary, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of small businesses in Australia spending time chasing money for work they’ve already done.

That blows my mind.

For someone like a window cleaner or a Jim’s Mowing franchise to go and get a direct debit account from a bank, historically they might have had to put their house on the line, work through all sorts of payments compliance and effectively manage payments like a PayFac.

That’s impossible for a small business.

I loved that GoCardless made that capability available to small and medium businesses.

That’s where the momentum of my career really began to make sense to me.

Then I met the team at Zepto and fell in love with that business.

They were the first payments company in Australia to become a connected institution to the NPP, the real-time payment network.

So think account-to-account payments on steroids.

I loved what that could do for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Not waiting three days to get paid. Not dealing with all these payment declines. Being able to do things in real time.

One of the biggest opportunities I saw at the time was that we were moving into a gig economy and a pay-by-consumption economy.

Uber is a good example because I knew the payment system so well.

Those Uber drivers might wait a week to receive their payout, but every day they still need to spend money.

They need petrol. They need to feed their families.

They might want to draw down on their Uber earnings multiple times a day or multiple times a week.

The payout mechanisms in place just weren’t aligned with real-time expectations or the gig economy.

I loved my time at Zepto too.

When that came to an end, I started to think more broadly.

Across all the companies I’d worked with, technology was always the enabler that allowed this democratisation to happen and made complex things more accessible.

I realised that must be happening in all kinds of other sectors too.

Maybe those skills were transferable.

So I started looking at other technology companies and eventually joined Scalare.

With my background in commercial go-to-market and my passion for democratising technology, I had the ability to help lots of companies scale and grow and get exposure to lots of different businesses.

That’s how I got here.

Joe: This was Episode Seven of PMID. That was Carolyn.

I’m just kidding.

While you were talking there were about five different jump-off points I could have gone into.

But let’s start at the very end.

That’s a monumental career, obviously. Congratulations.

You’ve been at the forefront of a huge amount of disruption and innovation in the payments industry over the last decade.

I love that you keep bringing up this idea of democratisation of technology and how it opened your eyes to how that must be happening in other fields.

So I’ve got to ask: AI.

I almost feel like if I just said the word AI, you’d start stream-of-consciousness talking for the next hour.

Are there any particular applications of AI that really interest you?

What about in the context of Scalare and the Founders Union? What’s your vision for where the whole AI movement takes us?

Are you an accelerationist? Do you think it’s the end of everything?

Talk me through your high-level perspective.

Carolyn: There are so many angles I could take.

One way to answer it methodically is to talk about my exposure to AI and how that has grown.

We have hundreds of startups come to Scalare every year looking for funding, which means we’ve been fortunate to see the trajectory of AI and how it’s played out across these companies.

It started with companies using AI to streamline efficiencies and operations in their businesses so they could accelerate growth and go to market faster.

It was about getting rid of repetitive or binary tasks and helping with things like research, testing go-to-market assumptions and testing commercial assumptions.

Then it pivoted into companies saying, “Hang on. I think the core business we already have has an opportunity to use AI as a differentiator within our vertical.”

There’s a company in our portfolio called Jeddle.

It started as a platform for high school students and teachers.

When it was first incorporated, it was almost like a marketplace where students could upload their work and get feedback and mentoring to help them produce better outcomes at school.

It also gave teachers and tutors another source of income.

Then it moved into the school stream.

About 18 months ago, they launched Jeddi, where they actually have the curriculum inside the system.

They’re live-mapping to the curriculum and giving feedback using AI in schools for good.

That was Jeddle saying, “AI can actually become a differentiator for us.”

So AI moved from being something they used internally to accelerate the business into something that actually differentiated the product.

Then you’ve got sectors like medtech, biotech and agritech.

Those probably excite me the most because of the accelerated learning possibilities for organisations, research labs and people solving very real-world problems.

You’re talking about things like solving cancer or other incredibly difficult problems.

These agents are being used to accelerate research that would previously have taken months or years.

That’s probably the most exciting thing I’m seeing come through Scalare.

Then if we go back to payments, it’s crazy.

A lot of what AI agents are doing now in payments is basically what the cloud did for banking.

There are companies building AI tools that let you start a new business, create a website or build a product yourself.

You can vibe-code your way to a business.

Payments are increasingly just becoming part of that environment.

The frictionless payment component is almost built into the experience.

These AI companies are now competing in a world where embedded payments and embedded finance are being taken to a whole new level.

Even just thinking about onboarding into a payments company, or onboarding as a client or end customer, some of the technology coming out around KYC and AML automation is crazy.

Then the last thing I’ll say about AI and payments, because it’s crucial but also really interesting, is fraud.

Fraudsters are using AI faster than we can keep up.

The only way we’ll be able to combat that is with AI.

I get really excited when I see RegTechs and fraud platforms coming out of this AI-native space, where they’re pulling together data, staying on top of what’s happening in the market and feeding it back in real time to payment facilitators and banks.

Joe: Do you think AI is a good thing?

Carolyn: Yeah, I do.

I know what you’re about to say.

Joe: I don’t know. Do I think it’s a good thing?

Carolyn: I get asked all the time when I’m on panels, “What about people’s jobs? Are people going to lose jobs because of AI?”

And yes, some people will lose the job-to-be-done because of AI.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be other jobs to be done.

I heard an interesting train of thought from a partner at a VC fund recently.

They were giving an overview of what they’re seeing in the market.

They said the AI-driven SaaS platforms going into conversations with financial stakeholders are no longer just asking for the SaaS or IT budget.

They’re now able to help forecast the impact the product will have on the people budget as well.

That’s an interesting shift.

Joe: I have a particular vision for one of the ways AI could disrupt payments.

At the moment, the card schemes are trying to work out how to do agentic payments in a way where they know the agent making the purchase online is actually authorised.

Let’s use a really simple example.

You give your ChatGPT agent your credit card details and say, “Go and buy me some boots.”

At the point of checkout, how does the actual payment rail know the agent has authorisation to use that card?

Once they solve that problem — which theoretically they have, although it hasn’t been rolled out everywhere yet — I think people are going to start outsourcing the management of their entire budget to agents.

That could be a household budget or a business budget.

Think about how we make purchase decisions as consumers.

We’re manipulable. We’re emotional. We buy things because of how we feel in the moment.

Buyer’s remorse exists for a reason.

Being bad with money exists for a reason.

A lot of that starts to disappear if you outsource those decisions to something that has parameters you set when you’re at your best.

Imagine setting those parameters.

You plug it into open banking so it knows your income.

It can instantly see the things you buy that you probably shouldn’t.

You can say, “I only want to spend this much. I want to save this much. These are my tastes. These are my ethical perspectives and moral values.”

If you use AI enough, it probably already knows a lot of that anyway.

Then think about the implications of outsourcing all your purchasing behaviour.

Even at the household or individual level, the disruption is enormous.

It basically destroys a lot of the traditional marketing industry.

Carolyn: It does.

Joe: Exactly.

If I’m a product company, my job is no longer just to convince you to buy from me.

It’s to convince your agent.

It’s answer engine optimisation.

I started as an SEO, so I’ve spent my whole career trying to out-game Google.

Very quickly, my philosophy around SEO became that Google’s mandate is to give people the most relevant result.

So the best way to win SEO is just to be the best result.

That means having the best company, the best customer service, the best product, the best reviews and the best reputation.

I’ve always had that mentality.

Good SEO is basically just being a good business and knowing how to say it out loud.

In the AI world, that gets compressed even further.

If someone asks ChatGPT what to buy in a certain category, it aggregates all those endpoints and gives them what it thinks is the correct answer.

You can keep teasing out more options, but it isn’t that different from SEO.

The difference is that now you might not need to search, go to a website, read information and click.

You can just go straight to the AI.

Carolyn: Aren’t we already doing that now?

Think about booking a family holiday.

We’re already using AI to help with a lot of those decisions.

I’m a huge fan of assisted living, by the way.

I think that’s definitely the way of the future.

I don’t want to worry about what’s in the fridge and what’s running out.

I don’t want to worry about when the insurance renews and whether I’m still on the best deal.

I don’t want to do any of that stuff.

I’m all for it.

I think there are probably two huge business opportunities in what you’ve described.

One is discovery.

How does someone become discoverable in that world?

There still has to be a way you can market to Carolyn and have her feed you into her agent as something she likes, something she saw on someone else, or an experience she heard about.

Maybe it’s a restaurant someone mentioned.

How do you become the conduit of discovery?

There’s a whole business in that.

The other opportunity is around how much we trust the agent and how far assisted living goes.

You touched on saving money.

But it could go much further.

You could say, “I’m this age. By the time I retire, I want this much in savings. I want a home that’s paid off. I want stocks. These are the things I care about.”

It almost becomes a wealth management system.

You don’t need to know the path.

You tell it how much of your salary it can contribute and what you want the end goal to be.

Then it gets you there.

Joe: I could sit and talk about this all day.

My mind pretty quickly goes to: if it becomes that easy, does it defeat the purpose?

Once the chase is gone and the adventure is taken out of it, do you even value the outcome anymore?

There’s probably an argument that the internet is automating itself to a point where it becomes less relevant to human experience, and we all go back to being physical beings again.

But anyway, enough of that.

Let’s talk about something else briefly.

You work for Scalare Partners.

I’m not sure we’ve explained the whole Scalare Partners thing enough yet.

So go into a bit more detail about what Scalare actually does, its mission and objective, and then I want you to talk about the whole CGT reform conversation and the argument that Australia is disincentivising startups.

Carolyn: Scalare at its core, without talking about all the other brands, is a self-perpetuating investment model.

We provide services to the startup and innovation ecosystem that we know founders need to be successful in those first five to 10 years.

Then we use the profits from those services to invest in the best technology companies we see coming through those channels.

So if you were an investor in Scalare, which you can be because we’re listed, you’d assume that because of the reach we have and the number of founders we work with across all our assets, we get to see the pick of the bunch.

We see the best of the best.

That makes it a relatively de-risked investment model compared to going out completely cold.

I’m really passionate about this broader topic, and I feel like you stalked me online to bait me into talking about it.

Joe: Is it stalking if your stuff just appears in my LinkedIn feed while I’m minding my own business?

Carolyn: Fair point.

The CGT conversation is another blow to one cog in an ecosystem that is already dysfunctional.

If you look at startup ecosystems around the world, it’s too hard to compare Australia with entire countries because of size and population.

It’s fairer to compare us with startup nodes.

So think Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, Tel Aviv, New York, London.

When you look at what drives a successful startup ecosystem, there are lots of components, but there are probably five fundamentals those markets do really well.

Those things create a liquidity cycle that grows and expands.

Markets that do well in innovation have a lot of capital, IP and operators recycling through the same ecosystem.

We don’t.

One of the things those hubs do really well is proximity.

People work in spaces together.

Government, industry bodies, corporates, universities and startup incubators are all collaborating in relatively tight ecosystems.

The second is well-trodden international pathways supported by government and industry.

Trade agreements. Tax exemptions. Visa pathways. Ways for people to travel easily and reasons for them to come back home.

Those pathways are well established in other markets.

India to the US is a no-brainer.

Tel Aviv to New York is well trodden.

London to the US is well trodden.

Australia hasn’t really worked that out.

We haven’t had meaningful pathways in place for long enough to even know what they should look like.

Another thing those countries do is invest in their own innovation sector.

Last year, I think over $1.5 billion was invested into Australian startups, according to the Cut Through Ventures report.

Everyone says, “That’s amazing. The market’s lifting. This is brilliant.”

But only 34% of that was domestic capital.

The positive side is that international investors are betting on Australia.

That is great news.

But when liquidity is realised, those funds aren’t recycled here.

They’re recycled back into other countries.

So we’re effectively building an incubator of liquidity for other countries.

If you compare us with the other startup nodes I mentioned, around 60 to 70% of funding in those markets is domestic.

Then there’s superannuation.

Our superannuation pool was around $4.33 trillion last year as of June.

It punches well above its weight compared with the pension and superannuation pools in many other countries.

But in Australia, less than half a per cent of superannuation funds go into local innovation and technology.

In some other markets, it’s more like 5 to 7%, and in many cases that allocation is mandated.

Joe: Mandated?

Carolyn: Yes, mandated that pension or superannuation funds invest into technology and innovation.

Joe: When you say startups in that context, do you mean any new business or specifically technology businesses?

Carolyn: Technology businesses.

Then think about tax.

If you look at those nodes and the way their tax systems support early-stage tech companies, they’re far more favourable than Australia, both during growth and on exit.

That’s why we keep seeing founders leave.

They get to Series A or Series B, their lead investor comes from the US, and they’re out of here.

We don’t just lose liquidity.

We lose talent, operators and IP.

They very rarely come back.

In Australia, less than 12% of technology startups are founded by repeat founders.

In many of those other nodes I mentioned, it’s more than 40%.

Joe: Isn’t part of that simply because when they scale to a certain size in Australia, they need to move into a larger market?

They might just feel more comfortable having feet on the ground there.

Do you think it’s all because of tax laws?

Carolyn: If we had the right trade agreements in place and were investing in our own technology sector and supporting it properly, those founders could put boots on the ground in those markets without having to redomicile.

Joe: What would the right trade agreements practically look like?

What are we actually missing?

What would it look like if it was working?

Carolyn: In a perfect world, there needs to be tax exemptions and government support around keeping operators in the country and making liquidity an acceptable and reasonable thing to realise here.

If we cut through all the noise around CGT, this is another nail in the coffin.

About 18 months ago, there was also discussion around taxing unrealised gains in super funds.

That would have sent a lot of us broke.

It also doesn’t make logical sense because startup valuations can change dramatically over time.

My fear with this kind of reform is what it opens the door to next time.

Once we allow these types of changes to impact the innovation sector, it becomes very hard to reverse.

Joe: The idea of mandating superannuation funds to invest in technology startups feels like something that would be fairly popular.

Do you have any idea why it isn’t happening here?

Is it just that governments lack the vision?

Carolyn: I don’t know if the left hand is talking to the right hand.

I can’t personally confirm this with a plane ticket in front of me, but I heard from multiple sources that a couple of months ago, while I was presenting this data at South Start in Adelaide and getting a huge response online and in person, a group of superannuation CEOs were being taken on a roadshow through Silicon Valley with VCs.

That kind of thing blows my mind.

I just don’t think we do a good enough job of supporting our own local technology.

Our governments and large Australian corporates also don’t engage enough as first customers of startups.

Less than 13% of Australian tech startups have government or large corporates as an early customer, whereas in some other markets it’s more than 35%.

It doesn’t matter which way you look at it.

We just don’t eat our own dog food.

Joe: Part of the problem, I think, is that the Australian economy centres around two huge areas.

One is resources.

There’s big money, lobbying and a lot of the national economic narrative tied to what we dig out of the ground.

The other is property.

So much mum-and-dad investment, and professional investment, goes into what is effectively an unproductive asset in the form of residential property.

It grows in value without producing much for the broader economy.

I’m not even talking about the impact on young people trying to buy homes because that’s not what this podcast is about.

But the consequence is that wealth that might otherwise go into productive investment or new businesses ends up in something that mainly benefits the investor and the bank financing it.

I’m hopeful that the pushback we’re seeing from the accounting industry and startup sector causes the government to reconsider at least the startup and shares components of the CGT reform.

When it comes to reducing the CGT discount on property gains, I can at least see the logic.

How do you feel about that?

Carolyn: That doesn’t concern me as much.

When the reform was first announced, my main lens was the effect it would have on the startup ecosystem.

That’s not to say there aren’t other areas where that kind of reform could be beneficial to the broader economy.

But for startups, I think it would be detrimental.

Joe: I see it as an opportunity to move wealth from one area to another.

If they’d said, “The property gravy train is slowing down, so now let’s incentivise people to invest in businesses,” that could have been a really positive transition.

Next subject.

I want to ask about another bureaucracy-related issue: surcharging.

The RBA has announced changes around card surcharges.

Most coverage is framed around whether it’s good for consumers.

At face value, most people say yes.

But nobody is really asking what it does to small businesses, service providers and the fintech ecosystem.

What conversation are people missing?

Carolyn: I think all it’s done is shuffle the cards.

Costs flow downhill.

Someone has to pick them up.

Once the dust settles and we end up in a steady state again, the consumer is probably still paying roughly the same amount.

Joe: Jacob Aldridge came on PMID and made an interesting point.

He said that as soon as small businesses realise they have to increase prices to absorb the surcharge, they may increase prices by more than the surcharge amount.

So it could actually become a net detriment to consumers.

Carolyn: Exactly.

But another thing it does to consumers, which doesn’t get talked about enough, is remove choice.

People choose payment methods for different reasons.

Maybe they want loyalty points, Qantas Frequent Flyer points, or to use a certain debit card.

That choice gets reduced.

I’m a points girl.

I don’t mind paying a surcharge if I know it helps me push towards an upgrade next time I’m flying.

At the end of the day, the pricing will probably settle to roughly the same level for the end consumer.

This just causes 12 months of card shuffling while the ecosystem works out how to absorb it.

Even when surcharging was capped years ago, the question has always been how people want to manage their own money and how they want to pay.

This takes some of that decision-making away from the consumer.

So it may be presented as an improvement for the consumer, but I’m not completely convinced it is.

Joe: I have a conspiracy theory.

I think this is secretly designed to accelerate adoption of account-to-account payments at the point of sale.

Carolyn: A2A?

It’s one way to do it.

The RBA has been pushing hard on this for a while.

Joe: You’re the first person who’s agreed with me.

I keep saying this and people look at me like I’m crazy.

Carolyn: I don’t think they’d necessarily design the whole thing purely for that purpose because of the backlash they’d get from the card schemes.

But remember how all these companies make money.

Mastercard is massively innovating in A2A itself.

They’re building account-to-account technology that sits on top of the ecosystem.

As long as Mastercard and Visa keep participating economically, they won’t necessarily have a problem with it.

Smart companies saw this coming a long time ago.

If you’re Mastercard and you look at a world where surcharging continues to be compressed in markets outside the US, you need to think about how you compete.

That means finding other ways to stay relevant.

There are lots of companies doing a great job innovating around making A2A payments more relevant at point of sale and in other parts of our lives.

Even ecommerce is still heavily built around tokenised credit cards.

So I do think there’s a huge opportunity there.

I think A2A providers will be some of the winners out of this.

They’ve been working hard on it for a long time.

Do I think the consumer is materially better off?

Not necessarily.

Joe: Exclusive announcement.

We’re going to be doing a partner summit later in the year with Fiserv, Clover, Pinch Payments and Mastercard involved.

Do you want to come talk?

Because I feel like we should have this exact conversation in front of people for 45 minutes.

Let’s move on to the next segment.

This one is a little bit of fun.

Michaela has put together a list of rapid-fire questions.

I’ll ask you a question and you answer in one or two sentences.

Ready?

If it’s terrible, we’ll edit it out.

Actually, if it’s terrible, I’ll turn it into clips and shame you publicly.

I’m kidding. I’ll edit it out.

First question: what is the biggest lie founders tell themselves?

Carolyn: That they need venture capital to be successful.

Joe: I like it.

One sentence: what do VCs actually invest in? The idea or the person?

Carolyn: I can’t speak for all VCs, but the person.

Joe: Always?

Next question.

Name one thing Australian business culture does better than Silicon Valley.

Carolyn: I’m really sorry. Nothing.

Actually, that’s not true.

Australian founders and business owners have had to do a lot more with a lot less for a very long time.

Resourcefulness.

Joe: We are savvy mofos.

Is that why so many Australian entrepreneurs go over to America and kill it?

Carolyn: One hundred per cent.

American VCs love us for that reason.

If an Australian founder can build a business to a meaningful size here on the smell of an oily rag, imagine what they can do in a much larger market with more capital.

Joe: That’s a really interesting insight.

There are a lot of successful Australian entrepreneurs over there.

What’s one thing Australian business culture refuses to fix?

Carolyn: I’ll stay on my current bandwagon.

We haven’t fixed how we scale businesses and deploy capital for growth here yet.

Joe: Asia or North America?

More broadly, where do you see Australia’s economic future?

If you were a founder and everything else was equal, which market would you choose?

Carolyn: Asia.

Joe: Me too.

Three words that describe a founder who will definitely succeed.

Carolyn: I’m laughing because I once called the best founders cockroaches on stage and never lived it down.

What I meant was that they’re the last thing alive on the planet.

They’re relentless.

Persistent.

And subject-matter experts.

I love founders who have worked inside an industry, seen a real problem and decided to solve it.

They don’t even necessarily need to be technical.

Joe: It’s interesting because I’ve been talking to lots of founders lately through Tech Ready Women, Founders Union and generally being embedded in the startup community.

You see a lot of early-stage founders looking for validation.

That seems to be the standard wisdom: find people who validate your concept.

But paradoxically, I’m pretty sure a lot of the most successful founders ignored almost everyone.

Carolyn: Pretty much.

Joe: The really successful ones often say, “I took advice from that one mentor who really believed in me,” or, “I listened to my first clients.”

That’s very different from listening to random people.

Three words that describe a founder who will definitely fail.

Carolyn: Arrogant.

What’s the opposite of curious?

Naive.

And lazy.

Joe: Fair.

An arrogant, naive, lazy person is probably going to struggle to become successful at much.

Final question of the rapid-fire segment.

Great segment, Michaela.

What’s your unpopular opinion about the Australian startup ecosystem?

And saying it isn’t well supported by government doesn’t count because that’s a popular opinion.

Carolyn: I’d like to see us celebrate companies more for growth, number of employees and bootstrapping.

We’re very good at celebrating, “Such-and-such company raises $15 million in a Series A.”

But all that really means is they gave another slice of their pizza away.

That isn’t necessarily success.

But that’s what we celebrate.

Joe: That reminds me of a startup success story not so long ago.

A couple of payments engineers built a company from the ground up and got acquired by a Fortune 500 company.

Celebrate that.

I’m talking, of course, about Pinch Payments — payments technology by real people.

How much longer do I have you for?

Carolyn: I’ve got a board meeting in 40 minutes.

Joe: All right, let’s wrap it up.

I want to finish on Founders Union and the Pinch Payments partnership.

I’ll spend 30 seconds explaining how Carolyn ended up connected to us.

It was weirdly fated.

At the time, we were looking for ways to expand distribution of the Pinch Payments product.

We were trying to find new markets.

We’d been playing around with the idea of competing more directly with Stripe by offering a local alternative and becoming the developer’s friend and the startup’s friend.

I thought, “This is a great idea. I’m totally going to do it, and I’m going to invest half the 2026 marketing budget into it.”

Then I realised I had to create an entire strategy and program.

Talk us through what happened next.

Carolyn: I came to you with the strategy and program and took all your money.

But yes, it was weirdly fated.

Founders Union is the platform Scalare built so founders in our ecosystem — around 25,000 of them, and anyone else who wants to join because it’s free — can be matched with the right technology providers, investors and service providers based on where they are in their growth journey and what challenges they’re facing.

Being a founder is really hard yakka.

There’s so much noise.

Which event should you go to?

Which dev agency should you use?

Is that lawyer good or bad?

How do you navigate all of it?

The platform takes a lot of that noise away and matches founders with the right providers.

That includes partners like Pinch.

One thing I’d identified was that founders, particularly non-technical founders, tend to rely on their developers and engineers to quickly implement the first payment option that comes to mind when they get their first customer.

And most of the market knows one brand starting with S.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always the right payment partner.

I know that because I come from payments.

There are lots of different ways to structure payments and lots of partners that may be more appropriate or more supportive.

The founder ecosystem often simply doesn’t know that.

So I said to you, “Why don’t we educate the market together?”

And you said, “Yeah.”

Joe: And that we are doing.

Carolyn: Exactly.

We’ve already done some work together.

Pinch sponsored cohort one of the Tech Ready Women program.

You’re sponsoring the Australian Technologies Competition.