Engineering is one of those careers that sounds straight forward from the outside. You build things. You solve problems. You apply what you learned at university and get on with it.

Mark Sproule started where a lot of engineers start curious, hands-on, and drawn to figuring out how things work. As a kid it was old boats. At university it was biomedical engineering. At ResMed it was prototyping with 3D printers, and the thrill of seeing a design come to life. But after four years inside one of Australia's most recognised medical device companies, Mark realised something - he was a very small cog in a very large machine. And he wanted to know what it felt like to build the machine himself.

So he left and joined a University friend and co-founded Reach Robotics a company building underwater robotic arms for underwater drones. Robots sent to disarm underwater mines so humans don't have to. Arms attached to unmanned underwater vehicles monitoring offshore oil rigs for corrosion. Niche, complex, and genuinely important work.

What followed was the founder journey in full and Mark doesn't sugarcoat any of it. The pressure doesn't arrive once and stay constant. It arrives in waves. First it's whether you can actually build the product. Then whether anyone will buy it. Then whether you can make it reliably enough that customers don't call you at midnight saying it's failed in the field. And underneath all of it, every single month, can we make payroll?

He also talks about the ethics decision - their biggest ever purchase order, a foreign buyer, and an Australian Defence Force disclosure requirement that forced a choice between revenue and integrity. They chose integrity.

And he gets honest about the cost. When you're a founder, you never really clock off. The business lives in your head at dinner, at bedtime, and at 2am. That kind of mental load compounds. But Mark also reframes it, if you deeply care about what you're building, is that really a cost?

What surprised him most was what the whole experience gave back. Not just professionally but personally. Building something from nothing, selling a product people were willing to pay for, developing systems he was proud of.

If you're thinking about engineering, curious about what it actually takes to start something, or just want to hear an honest account of the founder life this one is worth 20 minutes of your time.

In this episode:

• How fixing old boats as a kid led Mark to a career in engineering
• What it felt like to leave a stable job at ResMed to co-found a startup from scratch
• What Reach Robotics actually built — and why it mattered
• The wave of pressures every founder faces — and why they never really stop
• The ethics decision when running a business
• Why working with people is harder than any engineering problem
• What building something from nothing did for his confidence
• What Mark would tell his 20-year-old self

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