DESCRIPTION

Most people teams wait until someone with an HR background is in the room before they build a culture function. Ella Brennecke didn't have one, and Everlab's culture is stronger for it.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Ella Brennecke, People Operations Manager at Everlab, the preventative health company that has grown past 130 people across Sydney and Melbourne. They get into how Ella broke into people and culture from a hospitality and founder-support background, why she deliberately targeted startups with nobody yet in HR, and how she uses AI as a research partner without letting it write the memo a human is meant to read.

It's a hands-on look at building culture at speed: onboarding designed to start before day one, an "everybody unpacks the dishwasher" ownership principle that runs through hiring and customer care alike, and why Everlab puts every new hire through its own health protocol before they touch the product. They also cover the real tension in AI-assisted hiring, why a genuine cover letter still beats a strong resume, and what years in hospitality taught her about designing experiences long before she had a people title.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open

00:43 Intro: why culture is the glue past 100 people

02:57 Designing experiences where people excel

04:03 Magic is designed, not accidental

05:20 Holding culture across Sydney and Melbourne

07:31 Supporting technical people leaders

09:28 Leaning on your VC as a resource

10:56 Breaking into people and culture with no HR background

14:45 Creating your own luck

16:11 Just ask for the title

16:41 Why she stays close to the founder

18:51 What breaks as you scale: onboarding first

21:43 The interview is a two way sell

25:01 Inside the hiring process

26:26 What a culture interview actually looks like

28:27 New York restaurants and fast feedback loops

31:36 Get the ops right, then add the magic

33:12 Automating the busy work

35:38 AI can level you up or level you down

37:52 Teaching the next generation to still think

39:44 AI slop: produce better, not more

41:29 Using AI to synthesise, not to judge

42:37 Why she still reads every cover letter

45:30 The win: annual review cycles

48:07 Design for the people you're actually serving

49:05 Everybody unpacks the dishwasher

51:41 Every employee sits with a customer each quarter

54:34 Final advice: leave threads for people to pull

56:37 Wrap

ABOUT THE GUEST

Ella Brennecke is People Operations Manager at Everlab in Sydney, where she has built the people and culture function largely from scratch since joining roughly nine months ago. She came to Everlab via the Founder Success team at Blackbird Ventures and the guest experience team at cabin retreat company Unyoked, and works closely with Everlab's founder on hiring, onboarding and culture across the company's Sydney and Melbourne offices.

LINKS

Ella Brennecke, Everlab · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariella-werner-seidler/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau · Site: ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Jack Rudenko hasn't written a line of code himself in nine months. In that time, his team has shipped six or seven products used by millions of people, and he says that gap, between who writes the code and who's actually building, is the whole story of engineering right now.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Jack Rudenko, Chief AI Officer at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building an AI-native engineering practice from the ground up. They get into the project everyone called impossible before AI made it a three-month build, why working with AI agents is more exhausting than writing code ever was, and what actually separates an engineer from an artist or a scientist now that the code itself isn't the hard part.

It's a hands-on, practitioner's take on what building with AI agents actually looks like day to day, not the conference-keynote version. They cover Jack's own workflow for briefing an AI agent, why he doesn't trust any project's security the moment an API key exists, the "non-engineering builders" quietly out-building agencies, and why he calls Claude Code some of the worst-engineered software he's ever used, and also the tool he loves most.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Cold open: the line that explains why most AI engineering doesn't work

0:31 - Who Jack Rudenko is, and what's ahead in this episode

1:27 - Welcome, meet Jack Rudenko, Chief AI and Technical Strategist at 10x Labs

1:48 - The real bottleneck in AI engineering is human, not technical

3:36 - Why "AI native from scratch" beats bolting AI onto old processes

8:53 - Inside Magus, treating AI skills like versioned software packages

11:20 - 500 skills later, building a curated knowledge base for AI agents

14:56 - The rise of the "non-engineering builder"

17:06 - Why enterprise software is the real mess, not startups

19:32 - The unexpected cost of working with AI, burnout, not laziness

21:24 - Jack's actual workflow, plan mode, research, and acceptance criteria

27:26 - Dark factories, evals, and "religion" versus "engineering" in AI

29:49 - The skill nobody measured, loaded less than half the time

32:52 - Why AST trees beat graph databases for AI code memory

36:07 - From 10X to 50X, two projects AI made possible

41:35 - What team size looks like when one person can do it all

42:53 - Why no project is secure once a key exists

46:44 - Artist, scientist, engineer, what actually makes you one

51:04 - What junior engineers need to learn now

54:45 - Cursor, YC founders, and the rise of the non-engineer builder

59:35 - The addictive, exhausting superpower of building 10X more

1:02:57 - Why "impossible" projects are worth the budget now

1:04:55 - The future of software, giant platforms and a million small ones

1:08:04 - Why consultancies are thriving, for now

1:09:12 - "Claude Code is the worst software ever. I love it."

1:11:22 - Open source, Jack's origin story, and why it built him

1:15:23 - James's takeaway: religion vs engineering, and the challenge to measure your own AI rollout

ABOUT THE GUEST

Jack Rudenko is Partner and Chief AI Officer at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building the team’s AI-native engineering practice, Magus, from the ground up. He has deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, Go, Kubernetes and complex systems, and has delivered production platforms that would have been considered technically impossible before AI, including a three-system integration project used as a case study on this episode. Jack is also a longtime open-source contributor, including to the Linux kernel.at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building the team’s AI-native engineering practice, Magus, from the ground up. He has deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, Go, Kubernetes and complex systems, and has delivered production platforms that would have been considered technically impossible before AI, including a three-system integration project used as a case study on this episode. Jack is also a longtime open-source contributor, including to the Linux kernel.

LINKS

Jack Rudenko, 10x Labs · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erudenko/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau · Site: ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

---

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team who helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Most companies treat compensation as a math problem: get the number right and the rest takes care of itself. Matt McFarlane says that’s backwards, and it’s the reason so many pay conversations go sideways even when the number itself is fair.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN, the compensation consultancy he built after years running People Operations inside fast scaling startups. They get into why counteroffers rarely work, the exact headcount where pay problems start to bite, why equity has stopped doing its job as a retention lever in Australia, and how the AI hiring market has quietly made token costs a bigger line item than payroll.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Cold open: the number is only half the story

0:44 - Who Matt McFarlane is, and why James wanted him on

1:30 - Welcome, and the trust problem behind every pay number

3:08 - Pay compression, and getting ahead of the market before you're asked

5:54 - Rebalancing cadence, and when a counteroffer is worth it

9:37 - Bringing in outside help, and titles as currency

11:35 - Building a real pay philosophy, and hiring your first people leader

13:52 - The 50 to 100 headcount inflection point

15:32 - Why the people function is bigger than most founders think

17:31 - Onboarding, ways of work, and staying focused in the age of AI

20:50 - What Zapier gets right about AI adoption

23:29 - The AI engineer bidding wars, and the "jump is too big" excuse

26:29 - Token costs vs headcount costs, and mission over salary

29:20 - Is equity still worth offering

32:50 - The naivety of chasing the next Canva

34:08 - Building a team with a blank cheque

37:52 - Rock stars, superstars, and hiring past 100 people

40:38 - How AI agents are reshaping org structure

42:47 - The Ralph Wiggum loop, and why AI leaderboards backfire

47:13 - Attraction and retention beyond salary

48:50 - The ComBank toilet tracker

49:39 - Advice for individuals chasing a pay rise

53:41 - Why "prove it first" is dying: Gen Z's pushback

56:31 - Staying technical, and why people teams need to get technical too

1:01:27 - Building a personal brand from scratch

1:02:22 - How the podcast happened by accident

1:05:37 - What personal brand does for individual engineers

1:08:17 - The Startup People Summit

1:10:50 - One trend to watch

1:11:50 - James's takeaway, and the gap you need to close

ABOUT THE GUEST

Matt McFarlane is the Founder and Director of FNDN, a compensation consultancy helping startups and scaling tech companies build pay practices that are clear, fair and competitive. He previously led People Operations functions at companies including Oyster, a global employment platform, where he was Senior Director of People Experience. Matt also publishes the FNDN Series newsletter and podcast, co-founded the Startup People Summit, and was named to the 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 for ANZ and LinkedIn’s Top Voices Australia.

LINKS

Matt McFarlane, FNDN · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/ · Site: https://www.fndn.com.au/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau/ · Site: https://ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

---

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Most technical interviews still ask a candidate to write a function on a whiteboard. Adam Witanowski says that question is already obsolete, and what should replace it says everything about how AI is changing who gets hired.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Adam Witanowski, AI Architect at nib, where he has spent the past several years building the insurer's AI engineering practice from the ground up. They get into why most enterprise AI projects underperform (nobody is measuring the right things), what "back pressure" means for AI-generated code, why Australian salaries can't compete with the US for senior AI talent, and why the technical interview needs a full rebuild.

It's a hands-on, practitioner's take on what's actually happening inside enterprise AI teams, not the conference-keynote version. They cover the real dollar gap between hiring an AI engineer in Australia versus the US, why "the whiteboard should come back" as an interview tool, how Adam built his own AI agent to interview for jobs on his behalf, and the testing harness his team uses to check whether AI-generated work is actually any good.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Cold open: the line that explains why most AI investments don't work

0:44 - Who Adam Witanowski is, and why James wanted him on

2:06 - Welcome, and building an AI SDLC from scratch inside a regulated insurer

5:12 - What "back pressure" actually means, and why solo AI coding doesn't scale

10:52 - Startups vs enterprises: re-engineer whole processes, not thin slices

13:24 - Why most companies can't even measure the problem they're trying to solve

17:10 - Software eats the world, and why that makes engineers apex predators

19:44 - Build in-house or buy: the blind spots consulting companies won't tell you

23:57 - Forward deployed engineers, and the rise of the hybrid product-engineer

26:38 - Tangent: his 13-year-old builds an AI auto-aimbot

30:43 - Build, upskill or outsource: the renters, owners and caretakers test

34:18 - What AI talent actually wants beyond a bigger title

38:30 - The real dollar gap: $220K in Australia versus $500K in the US

46:37 - What to actually pay your first AI hire

49:01 - "What you don't measure, you can't change"

51:01 - Redesigning the interview: show me your harness

56:45 - Why the whiteboard should come back

58:38 - Building a harness to test his harness

1:03:46 - He built his own AI agent to interview for him

1:07:28 - Why motivation and taste still beat any technical test

1:12:19 - Apex predator, Jedi, stallion, unicorn: Adam's closing line

1:13:00 - James's takeaway: it's a measurement problem, not a technology problem

ABOUT THE GUEST

Adam Witanowski is an AI Architect at nib in Sydney, where he has built Prometheus, an integrated suite of agentic AI tools now running in production across the business. He works at the intersection of senior engineering and AI leadership, and has spoken publicly on enterprise AI engineering discipline, including harness design, testing and evals, and AI governance.

LINKS

Adam Witanowski, NIB · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/witanowski/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau/ · Site: https://ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

---

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Most organisations are asking which AI model they should use. Patrick McQuaid thinks that is the wrong conversation.

Patrick is Group Head of Data, Analytics & AI at NGM Group. He joins James MacDonald to explain how leaders can build practical AI capability without getting trapped by hype, vendor lock-in or an endless cycle of new tools.

They discuss how NGM approaches AI inside a regulated banking environment, where privacy, risk and customer trust make it impossible to turn a weekend prototype straight into production. Patrick explains why teams need both strong foundations and useful short-term wins, why the people closest to the work should own their technology costs, and where generative AI should not be used for decision-making.

The conversation also explores what AI means for technical careers. Patrick shares why he hires for attitude, curiosity and problem-solving ability, rather than waiting for candidates with years of experience in technology that has only just emerged. He and James discuss the continuing value of junior engineers, the rise of AI enablement and orchestration roles, and the human skills that remain difficult to automate.

If you are responsible for introducing AI into an established organisation, hiring a technical team or preparing your own career for the next wave of change, this episode offers a grounded alternative to the fear and hype.

• 0:00 — Stop arguing about AI models
• 0:46 — What this episode covers
• 1:15 — Meet Patrick McQuaid
• 1:38 — Leading experts without being the deepest technical expert
• 4:37 — Deployment, flexibility and avoiding model lock-in
• 6:45 — Vibe coding versus production inside a regulated bank
• 8:30 — Shadow AI and choosing enterprise tools
• 10:10 — Junior engineers and hiring for attitude
• 16:15 — Who should own AI and token costs?
• 19:34 — Building, buying or partnering for AI capability
• 21:21 — Where generative AI does not belong
• 25:41 — Joining NGM during a major data transformation
• 30:17 — Building foundations and delivering quick wins
• 34:20 — Planning in a fast-moving AI market
• 35:45 — Agentic tools and the value of staying flexible
• 37:04 — Can specialist software companies defend their advantage?
• 39:18 — What organisations should and should not build themselves
• 41:33 — Technology's role in a human business
• 49:44 — The human skills AI cannot replace
• 52:33 — What AI could mean for the next generation
• 54:33 — Remote work, relationships and learning together
• 58:35 — Cutting through AI FOMO and LinkedIn hype
• 1:00:27 — The AI advantage for smaller organisations
• 1:01:24 — Managing legal, financial and reputational risk
• 1:06:43 — AI sycophancy and why chatbots agree with you
• 1:07:57 — The skills technology professionals should build now
• 1:09:26 — AI enablement and orchestration roles
• 1:12:46 — James's key takeaway

Patrick McQuaid GAICD is Group Head of Data, Analytics & AI at NGM Group, one of Australia's largest customer-owned banking groups. NGM Group operates the Greater Bank and Newcastle Permanent brands.

• Patrick McQuaid — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-mcquaid/
• NGM Group: https://www.ngmgroup.com.au/
• National AI Centre: https://www.industry.gov.au/science-technology-and-innovation/technology/artificial-intelligence/national-ai-centre
• James MacDonald — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-macdonald-au/ · NTP Talent: https://ntptalent.com.au/
• Day One: https://dayone.fm/

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Every great team she has ever seen shares one trait: they are comfortable with discomfort. Claudia Barriga-Larriviere has spent nearly 20 years building people and culture inside startups and global enterprises — and she thinks most of the AI conversation is quietly dodging the hard, human questions. In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Claudia Barriga-Larriviere — people-and-culture leader and founder of Startup Flamingo — for a practitioner-to-practitioner conversation on how capable people actually build teams. They get into self-awareness as a muscle rather than a gift, why Australia's love of harmony quietly kills direct feedback, and the difference between a team that is genuinely high-performing and one that is just stressed and running fast off a cliff together. Then it turns to AI — not as weather to brace for, but as a tool you have to point somewhere. Are your people more productive, or just faster? What do you lose when you automate the uncomfortable parts of the job — the feedback loop, the one-on-one, the human connection — and who is a flattened, agent-run org actually built for? Claudia makes the case that AI should augment an already good team, that you have to build that team first, and that the leaders winning this moment are the ones asking better questions instead of racing to be first. It's a conversation about discomfort, storytelling, balanced teams, and keeping the human in a human organisation.

• 0:35 — The one trait every great team shares: comfortable with discomfort (plus self-awareness)
• 1:46 — Is self-awareness born or built? Temperament, empathy and psychological safety
• 3:28 — Why leaders dodge the hard conversation
• 3:59 — Cutting her teeth on GFC redundancies: directness and an American education
• 6:04 — Australia's harmony problem vs direct feedback
• 6:43 — What "high performance" actually means (and what it doesn't)
• 7:42 — The feedback loops we outsource because they're uncomfortable
• 9:17 — Protect the plan, or chase the Nazis? An Indiana Jones lesson for leaders
• 11:18 — Read fiction: storytelling, empathy and depersonalising feedback
• 14:35 — Praise the person, critique the work — and when to call it out
• 16:55 — Overconfident founders and the case for yin-and-yang teams
• 18:39 — Powers of Two: debunking the lone genius (Lincoln, Lennon & McCartney, Jobs & Woz)
• 23:13 — Hire for change, not to fit in
• 24:20 — The maths of a founding team: builder, organiser, learner
• 26:41 — Glue vs grease: does your team need cohesion or speed?
• 28:53 — Project or person? The metabolism of a team
• 29:47 — AI is a tool, not the weather
• 33:16 — The narrative vs the technology — and the Tickle Me Elmo problem
• 41:14 — Slow down to speed up: when the market rewards layoffs
• 42:32 — The CPO's dilemma: more productive, or just faster?
• 45:04 — When is the risk no longer worth it? (You're paying by the token)
• 48:21 — Longevity isn't impact: off-ramps and the retention vanity metric
• 49:52 — Is AI making the manager redundant?
• 52:54 — The automatic ball thrower: what you lose when you automate connection
• 58:31 — AI augments a great team — but you have to build that team first
• 59:18 — Departing advice: play the tape to the end, and be in the business you're in
• 1:03:32 — Purpose over "who gets there first" — go touch some grass

Claudia Barriga-Larriviere is a people-and-culture leader with nearly 20 years building teams across startups and global enterprises, and the founder of Startup Flamingo.

• Claudia Barriga-Larriviere — Startup Flamingo: startupflamingo.com
• James MacDonald — LinkedIn · NTP Talent (NewyTechPeople): ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.