watched a founder raise $360M and shut it down ~ Phaedon Stough Artwork

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.

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Fayl Tales

watched a founder raise $360M and shut it down ~ Phaedon Stough

April 14, 2026 • Loveth Ochayi

0:00 | 46:22

HHey Crew! What do you do when you build a recruitment firm from a cockroach-infested Surry Hills office into a nearly 100-person, $20M-a-year global business, and then look back and say, yeah, I was faking it the whole time?

That's Phaedon. He founded Mitchell Lake at 26, exited, and co-founded Innovation Bay, the longest running startup community in Australia. He's been inside more founder journeys than most of us will ever meet.

In this one he gets into a US founder who raised $360M from tier one VCs and still shut it down, Sequoia's "PowerPoint of death" during the GFC, an investor whose whole philosophy is "I drown puppies," and the mentor who told him mid-spiral: you're stuffed, stop everything.

We cover:

How Mitchell Lake scaled to $20M across three countries and what he'd do differently
The $360M raise that still ended in a shutdown
Why Australian founders hold on too long and what it's costing them
Why US VCs specifically back founders who already failed once
Keeping a co-founder relationship alive when everything is on fire
Building from Hobart and what other states are getting right