We’ve got a great episode of Give It A Nudge today as Steve sits down with Nima Kermani, the founder of Kermani Capital. Nima’s business has seen exponential growth over the last year, but the road to building a $7 million property portfolio wasn't exactly a straight line.

Nima shares the story of how getting fired from his last job was the final push he needed to go all-in on his own business. We dive into his history as a hyper-productive paperboy at age 13, and the brutal life lesson he learned at 17 when he lost $10,000, his entire life savings at the time, to an online scam.

The conversation also touches on the patterns in Nima's career, including the time he tried to work two full-time finance jobs simultaneously, his brief stint as a model, and the terrifying transition from being a solo operator to hiring his first staff members. To wrap things up, Nima puts Steve in the hot seat to talk about the hardest lessons he’s learned about ego and leadership.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro and the exponential growth of Kermani Capital

01:14 - Getting fired and why Nima finally decided to give it a shot

05:24 - The wealthy parents banter and the guarantor loan shortcut

07:15 - The 13-year-old paperboy hustle and losing his savings to a scam

14:53 - The secret to landing jobs: Applying for 1,000 positions at a time

16:46 - The pattern of getting fired and working two jobs at once

18:54 - Addressing the rumors: Nima’s history in modeling

23:18 - The fear of the first hire and the reality of founder responsibility

27:02 - Future plans for Kermani Capital and launching a property fund

30:35 - Renting by the room: Solving the housing shortage while boosting yield

32:29 - Steve's hardest lesson: Dealing with internal turmoil and ego

Steve sits down with Rowan McNamee, co-founder of Mary Technology, the legal AI startup that just closed a $7M funding round led by OIF Ventures to completely disrupt how litigation teams handle evidence.

Rowan’s journey started where all great business ideas do: pitching his mate on the way home from a bucks party. As a former family lawyer, Rowan intimately understood the absolute misery of taking hours of handwritten notes and spending weeks manually digging through thousands of case documents. So, he helped build a solution to eliminate the "fact chaos." Mary Technology is a Fact Management System (FMS) that can ingest thousands of pages of complex, unstructured legal documents and spit out a fully organized, actionable fact record in just 10 to 20 minutes.

We dive into the origin of the company's unique name (yes, it’s named after his actual Aunt Mary), and how they hit 10x ARR growth in 2025 with over 2,000 lawyers globally—including heavyweights like Shine Lawyers and Maurice Blackburn—now using the platform. Rowan also opens up about the "delusional optimism" it takes to get an AI startup off the ground, opening their new San Francisco office, and launching a self-serve model so small-to-mid-sized firms can get the exact same fact management power as the global giants.

Hit play and get the inside scoop on one of Australia’s fastest-growing legal tech startups.

What We Cover:

00:00 - Intro and the elevator pitch for Mary Technology

02:50 - Founding the company and pitching the idea at a bucks party

03:32 - Why they named a highly advanced AI after his Aunt Mary

07:24 - The original product idea and the misery of manual legal work

11:49 - Eliminating "fact chaos" and turning weeks of document review into 20 minutes

13:42 - Raising $7M with OIF Ventures, launching in SF, and scaling the team

21:50 - Navigating the exploded Legal Tech market and standing out

23:56 - Co-founder dynamics and the heavy weight of founder responsibility

30:19 - How the platform handles everything from foreign languages to GIFs

35:00 - The 59% time-saving pitch and their new self-serve model for smaller firms

37:45 - Team offsites, guest speakers, and getting way too competitive at lawn bowls

In this episode of Give It A Nudge, Steve sits down with Dain Walker, CEO of the branding agency Rivyl. Dain has built a global agency from the ground up, and brings a very direct, no-nonsense approach to building businesses and brands.

Dain shares his journey, starting with his childhood in and out of foster care, and explains how a mentor's "rubber band" analogy helped him reframe those early challenges as a foundation for his resilience.

We also get into the difficult realities of running an agency. Dain opens up about a cash flow crisis in early 2024 that brought his company within days of missing payroll. He walks Steve through the "ego death" required to take full ownership of the situation, and his contrarian strategy to expand and spend more while competitors were shrinking.

With Steve and the team currently in the middle of a 90-day content sprint, they spend some time diving into practical content strategy. Dain breaks down his 3-Circle Framework to help founders find a genuinely interesting niche, explaining why creating content just to "get leads" is a losing battle.

They also discuss the impact of AI on content creation, why raw human experience is becoming more valuable, and Dain’s subtle "sneaky love" approach to team leadership.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Dain’s origin story

04:18 - Hustling Pokémon cards at age 7 & lessons from foster care

08:41 - The "Rubber Band" mindset: Reframing childhood trauma into resilience

14:28 - Navigating a cash flow crisis and the reality of founder ego

18:46 - The contrarian playbook: Expanding when the market is shrinking

29:33 - The 90-Day Content sprint: Moving past the "get leads" mentality

36:47 - The 3-Circle Framework: Finding a content niche that actually works

44:21 - How AI is making genuine human connection the ultimate premium

51:15 - "Sneaky Love": Dain’s approach to nudging his team toward their potential

58:41 - The float pod vision and writing a business book in 3 weeks

Links:

Connect with Dain Walker → https://www.linkedin.com/in/dainwalker/

Rivyl → https://www.rivyl.com/

Agency Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@agencypodcast/

Connect with Steve → https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegrace/

The Nudge Group → https://thenudgegroup.com/

Give It A Nudge Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@giveitanudge/

The Trouble With People → https://thetroublewithpeople.substack.com/