Fayl Tales
"failing" is a normal part of building, especially when you're at the frontier of great innovation.
so i sit down with founders and investors and get into the messy version of their story: the pivots, the near-misses, mistakes and everything usually edited out.
and i break down jargon and deep dives into the things nobody explains properly.
Fayl Tales
Would You Still Build This If It Took 10 Years? | Riana Shah
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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?
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