Luke Anear began his working life as a private investigator, sitting in cars and filming people who had been injured at work. He'll tell you it was the coolest job he ever had. It was also where the problem found him. He was watching people whose lives had been altered by something preventable, paid by the system that let it happen. Once he understood he was part of the problem, he had to become part of the solution.

That was 2004, in a garage on the northern outskirts of Townsville. No software industry, no co-founder, about 30 computer science graduates a year coming out of James Cook University. Twenty-one years later, Mitti has passed a billion dollars in revenue since it began.

It took a long time to get here. Luke is unusually honest about the things they tried that didn't work: the training platform he built in 2007 that he describes as a bad version of PowerPoint, the document management system in 2010, the telemarketers ringing businesses to ask if they wanted safety paperwork. The checklist app that made the company's name didn't arrive until 2012, eight years in. "Rarely is your first idea your best idea." The simplicity everyone recognises now came out of years of unpicking every jurisdiction and every industry until there was something small enough to be useful.

In this episode, Kate Glazebrook talks with Luke about the store manager who replaced a 700 question checklist with one question asked three times a day, why an industry that hasn't changed since 1666 is the biggest thing Mitti is building, what it means to rebuild a company in six months when AI writes 90% of your code, why that led them to hire more human experts rather than fewer, and the two years since he stepped down as CEO because, in his words, he was cooked.