Topic - The Future of Possibility

 MILKRUN 

Dany Milham is one of the most successful and high-profile start-up owners in NSW. Hailing from Byron Bay, Dany started his entrepreneurial journey at the tender age of 13, selling custom gaming computers in his local community.

 From here, he went on to build a portfolio of successful ventures from Mude Creative in his university days, to the hugely successful online bedding company Koala. 

Dany raised one of the largest early stage venture capital raises in Australian history, banking $75 million for his grocery delivery start-up Milkrun. 

Milkrun currently operates in 35 suburbs around Sydney, with 500 staff delivering groceries to customers in a record time. As of 2023, Milkrun was acquired by the Woolworths Group.

 DARWINIUM 

Alisdair is an expert in online fraud, cybercrime and identity theft and CEO and Co-Founder of Darwinium, the next evolution in continuous digital risk protection for growing companies.   

Prior to Darwinium, Alisdair was Co-Founder and Chief Products Officer of ThreatMetrix the world's leading Digital Identity company which was acquired by RELX for $830M USD in 2018.  

ThreatMetrix was started in Chatswood and grew to protect 1 in 3 ecommerce transactions in the US and over 1 billion global accounts across 4 billion devices for the world's largest global banks and brands prior to its acquisition.

PREZZEE 

Claire is the Co-Founder and a Non-Executive Director of Prezzee. She believes the secret to success is having a great team, company culture combined with a clear vision and strategy for the future.  

Before Prezzee, Claire founded her first company, Apple&Bee with offices in Sydney and New York and distribution throughout Asia, Europe and North America.   She received multiple AGDA brand awards as Art Director at Moon Design before joining Marie Claire Australia as their Art Director for five years.   

Claire was part of the 2018 Springboard Founder Cohort, 2019 Heads over Heels Program and won the 2019 Women in Finance Award for Entrepreneur of the Year.  In 2020 Claire also received 8th place in the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 Female Leadership award with Prezzee's 509% growth.  

 WORK CLUB GLOBAL 

For over twenty years, Soren Trampedach has been shaping the way we work. A major thinker in the optimisation of workplace design, culture, systems and management, Soren draws on his antidisciplinary approach as well as his Danish heritage to influence and disrupt traditional working environments, improving business outcomes for the solopreneur, the small-to medium sector as well as major corporate entities. Consulting to industry leaders Google, Deloitte and NAB and Facebook, Soren is an authority on the complexity of productivity, using a holistic approach through design, diversity, connections and community to drive motivation and purpose from employee to management to CEO. 

Soren created Work Club to provide established businesses with a unique, boutique solution to the challenges posed by the rapid pace of change in business. His fascination with the Future of Work has in recent years taken Work Club from flexible workspace operator, to workspace consultants, specialising in building better connected human ecosystems. 

 PIONEERA 

Danielle, a former corporate executive, founded start up Pioneera in 2018 to improve our mental health by tackling the crippling issue of workplace stress and burnout. 

Pioneera’s AI platform combines technology with psychology to prevent workplace stress whilst promoting positive productive cultures and is gaining strong interest across both corporate Australia and small businesses. 

Danielle speaks regularly on wellbeing, AI, women in technology, leadership; and preventing burnout.

 VLOGGI 

Justin Wastnage started his career in 1997 launching interactive digital TV pioneer Static 2358 (later PlayJam) in Silicon Valley. He went on to found Microsoft’s video case study unit and ran a small video production company.   

Wastnage coined the term ‘video blog’ in 2004 while producing editorial videos at the Reed Elsevier publishing house. Wastnage was more recently a lobbyist and an innovation research fellow within the University of Sydney. 

Rare Birds 

Jo is one of Australia’s most successful serial female entrepreneurs. She founded ‘Inspiring Rare Birds’ with a mission to empower more women entrepreneurs, after she found that school students in 2013 either hadn’t heard of an entrepreneur or thought it meant ‘a man’.

In 2017, after achieving great inroads for women entrepreneurs, Jo extended the Rare Birds mentoring program to corporate organisations to drive greater impact from their diversity and inclusion strategies.