Fayl Tales
Behind every startup success story is a trail of mistakes, pivots, broken plans and brilliant comebacks.
Fayl Tales is the podcast where entrepreneurs, founders, investors and early employees share the real side of building something new - the failures that shaped them, the lessons they learned the hard way, and the resilience it takes to keep going.
Hosted by Loveth, each episode dives into the raw, funny and honest moments most business stories leave out - so you can learn faster, fail smarter, and feel less alone on your own journey.
Follow the show for weekly conversations that prove: failure isn’t the end, it’s part of the story.
Fayl Tales
Would You Still Build This If It Took 10 Years? | Riana Shah
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Riana Shah was in second year uni with one unit of Python… and somehow ended up co-founding Dugong Technologies - an AI-powered drowning detection startup designed to flag incidents in real time.
And then? When the mission started feeling heavier than the company (and the founders) could carry… she made the call most people avoid: she shut it down.
In this episode we get into the messy, real stuff founders don’t post:
- why “don’t start building” is the most underrated advice (and why everyone ignores it)
- how she went from YouTube tutorials → MVP experiments → the brutal reality of data + oceans
- why AI isn’t “build once, deploy everywhere” (lake vs ocean = totally different game)
- the pressure of accelerators, hype, and not wanting to “let people down”
- tall poppy syndrome in Australia vs the no-ceiling ambition she saw in the US
- and how she went from feeling like “just an investor” to becoming an operator again with a bigger North Star: building healthcare impact for Kenya
If you’ve ever started something because it sounded cool… then realised you don’t want to spend 10 years of your life on it, this one will hit.
🎧 Listen now and tell me: when do you push through… and when do you walk away?
Follow us on all platforms!
Instagram ~ @fayltales
Tiktok ~ @fayltales
LinkedIn ~ @fayltales