Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Dr Michelle Perugini on risking it all to build a life changing Artificial Intelligence company

Episode Date: February 9, 2019

Dr Michelle Perugini and her husband Dr Don Perugini are 'Life Whisperers' – their ground breaking artificial intelligence business, Life Whisperer, has already had a massive impact on improving IVF outcomes for couples wanting to have children. And their other parallel business, Presagen, is also using AI to make massive inroads into medical diagnostics. All this on top of their award winning human population behaviour predictive analytics software product that was acquired by Ernst & Young and became one of their global suite of analytic products. And they have achieved all of this global impact from little old Adelaide, South Australia  - they say if you can survive in Adelaide then you will thrive everywhere else and that is exactly what they have achieved. But it wasn’t always this way. They have had to sacrifice everything and put it all on the line early on and then work relentlessly against the odds for many years before they even started to see the fruits of their labour. So to learn what the road to success is really all about, please enjoy this great conversation with Dr Michelle Perugini. Michelle’s book recommendations How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie Get Invested is the podcast dedicated to time poor professionals who want to work less and live more. Join Bushy Martin, one of Australia’s top 10 property specialists, as he and his influential guests share know-how on the ways investing in property can unlock the life you always dreamed about and secure your financial future. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I guess my driver is always professional development, personal development, making myself the best at what I want to do. So that's been a very conscious effort and there's a lot of investment that goes into that in terms of education, in terms of funding businesses to be able to tackle those sort of problems and then really kind of setting out to solve those problems in a really fearless way. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how on where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day,

we're investing our time, our skills, our energy, and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously some unconsciously sometimes for good sometimes for bad sometimes for no impact get invested will help you to start living by design not by default i'm going to help you to make it happen not let it happen you'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more work less and leave a living legacy by investing now listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bussymartin.com.au forward slash get invested. Thanks for listening and now let's get

invested. Hi Freedom Fighters. Investing in anything is all about measuring the reward of doing it against the risks of achieving it. But risk is always relative because what might keep you up at night worrying yourself sick may not even raise the pulse for someone else. Now, why is this the case? Well, let's use an example. Let's assume that you and your partner are in great, solid and stable jobs with really strong career paths. And you've secured those after spending years at university burning the midnight oil and working tirelessly to obtain PhDs in your field. Then, out of the blue, I come along and I offer you an opportunity to invest your heart, your soul, your blood, sweat and tears, your time and

your money in something that has the potential to change the world and improve the lives of thousands, maybe millions of people. But to achieve that, it's going to take you years. You won't get paid unless it's achieved. You're going to have to mortgage your home to the hilt and borrow to the eyeballs to survive. And you're going to be up against fierce competition. You'll have to jump over a myriad of hurdles in terms of multi-country laws and regulations, differing costly requirements, research restrictions, and countless other challenges. And even then, you may be pipped at the post by a competitor. The chances of success are slim to say the least.

So are you up for it? Now be honest with yourself. Are you up for the challenge and have the courage and personal belief to back yourself and take a massive leap of faith and jump off the cliff without a parachute and then build your wings on the way down in the hope that you'll fly before you hit the bottom? Well, most wouldn't.

But my study of real sustainable success in any endeavour repeatedly demonstrates that the 5% who achieve it in all fields do exactly that. so what are the beliefs the attitudes the approaches the qualities and the habits that they invest in that distinguish this rare breed of achievers are they born that way brought up that way or is it something else well today we're going to find out as our guest is a shining example. Dr. Michelle Perugini and her husband are life whisperers. Their groundbreaking artificial intelligence business has already had a massive impact on improving IVF outcomes

for couples wanting to have children. And their other parallel business, Presagen, is also using AI to make massive inroads into medical diagnostics. All of this on top of their award-winning human population behavior predictive analytics software product wow that was a mouthful that was acquired by ernst and young and became one of the global suite of analytic products and they've achieved all of this global impact from little old adelaide town now they say if you can survive in adelaide then you'll thrive everywhere else and that's exactly what they've achieved. But it wasn't always this way. They've had to sacrifice everything and put everything on the line early and then work relentlessly against the odds for many years before they even started

to see the fruits of their labour. So to learn what the road to success is really all about, please enjoy this great conversation with Michelle Perugini. Hi Friend Fighters, today we're going to enjoy a really great conversation with a fellow South Australian and a highly acclaimed operator who refers to herself and her business as the Life Whisperer, which is a, the mind boggles there Michelle, welcome aboard, looking forward to having a great chat. Thanks Bushy, great to be here. Now, Michelle, as another great fellow South Aussie, for those that don't know you, can

you start by just giving us a bit of a rundown on who you are, what you do, and most importantly, why you do what you do? Sure, sure. So, I am what you would call an entrepreneur now. I'm on to my third business in the artificial intelligence space, and I guess starting from from the beginning of my career I really started as a biomedical scientist I did a PhD in medicine and spent 10 years in the fields of stem cell biology and cancer research which I loved dearly and I had my first kind of opportunity to get into the business world when my husband left

department of defense and he had completed a PhD in artificial intelligence and had these bold ambitions on kind of leveraging that technology to really create something of commercial value and something that could be applied practical and in the real world and that was when we started our first company ISD analytics around 10 years ago so we we had a great exit which we can talk about a little bit later on the show but we were bought out by Ernst & Young in 2015 with that company. And that really allowed us to kind of springboard our interests, our broader interest in other AI applications and really prompted us to build our next company, which was called Presagen, which is actually combined with Life Whisperer now. So Presagen is broadly

applying AI to medical diagnostics and Life Whisperer is helping people going through the IVF process to get pregnant by using AI to help select the best embryo to transfer back to the female. So that's kind of a brief history in time and how I've come to be. And the why is a really challenging question to answer, to be honest, because I have no idea why. I think it's a combination of inherent ambition within myself, the opportunity being available through my partner wanting to go into commercial and industry businesses in the AI space, and a whole lot of persistence, which is more inherent to my personality than anything else. Yeah, okay.

Well, let me throw something at you then, given the little bit of Google stalking and research that I've done in preparation for our chat today. You strike me as someone who's big on solving big problems better, if I was to try and sum that up. And clearly that sort of problem-solving exercise is buried deep within you there somewhere because your ability to tackle a whole number of quite different fields that are going to have potentially major impacts in improving people's lives is pretty significant. So would I be close to the mark in saying that, do you think, Michelle, or not? I think you've hit the nail on the head. That's exactly what drives me. It's about having that kind of that big problem or big goal or big challenge and then sort of paving a way using whatever resources are available by way of technology, you know, expertise, bringing together strong teams and then really solving that problem. But solving it in a very practical way.

So I think one of the challenges that I had being in a research career was I had that challenge of solving big problems and very deep and technical problems, which I really loved. But I rarely saw a practical application for the solving of those problems. And I really like when it actually changes an industry or solves that problem for people. And that's what I've been fortunate enough to be able to do in my business career. Yeah, I love that. And I'm very keen to dig into some of that because I think the groundbreaking work that you're doing has the potential to affect most of us in a very positive way. So we'll sort of return to that shortly. But what I'd like to do is wind the clock back a little bit and get you to take us on your journey in terms of where you've invested your time,

energy and money and the motivations for doing so so because i you know most of us we go to uni and you know i went to adelaide uni as well and i'd spent five years becoming an architect and you sort of go down this quite structured pathway and there's almost an expectation at the end of that that you'll become part of that profession which is a nice comfortable zone but I'd love you to take us on the journey as to you've taken some very different directions and taken some pretty big risks and backed yourself pretty substantially in what you're doing.

So I'd love you to take us on the journey, the ups and downs of all that and the learnings that you've taken from it. Can you take us through that for us for a minute, please, Michelle? Yeah, sure. So very challenging, very challenging making those decisions and going from a very structured career type role where whereby you do well you move up the ranks you have a job for life I think there's a couple

of reasons why that doesn't kind of suit me as a person one I value my personal development over a career per se so I think the way that I've always chosen my investments and it's always been personal investments um is really in developing out my own personal and professional development um and that of the people in the companies that I'm working in so you know when you when you do a PhD you're kind of a lot of people do these things to become expert in a very specific and particular area I did not do it for that I did my PhD so that I would have that ability to problem solve that license to problem solve and the credibility within the market that I am a person who can can do that solve complex problems and I actually think that's the whole purpose of a PhD

but a lot of people do it because it's the next logical step after you do your science or honours degree um and the ceiling is kind of capped if you don't do a phd so i i kind of i've always had that different view of the reason um by which i would do those particular things um to extend myself i think within a business context i'm somewhat fearless i'm not really driven by the commercial outcome although commercially if you make a business successful it gives you the opportunity to do a whole bunch of other things that you've been wanting to do and you know solve new problems and be able to fund those those new avenues or or areas that you want to tackle so I guess my driver is always professional development personal development making myself

the best at what I want to do so that's been a very conscious effort and there's a lot of investment that goes into that in terms of education in terms of funding businesses to be able to tackle those sort of problems um and then really kind of setting out to to solve those problems in a really fearless way um without i guess too much concern of whether it's going to work or not but the knowledge that i've done the absolute best i possibly can and that i'm well equipped to be able to solve those problems um and i guess that's that's how i've kind of always viewed the opportunities that I've invested in and, you know, taken myself into.

Yeah, it takes a fair bit of personal courage and self-belief to go down that road and there's not a lot that are happy to slash the floaty, jump in the deep end and take that grass. Where did that sort of level of personal self-confidence come from? Is that something that you've been born with? Is that something that your parents have sort of helped you to pick up? Can you talk us a little bit around that?

Yeah, the answer to both of those questions is no and no. I don't think, I think some of it is inherent in my personality. I certainly don't think I was born with it though to that extent because when I was in my research career, I knew something was missing for me but I never considered that I would be an entrepreneur. I was not one of these people who was selling, you know, flowers by the side of the road when I was a kid or selling lemonade or I was never kind of an entrepreneurial person like that.

But I think what I am is a person that constantly wants to achieve. Achievement is my biggest goal in life. I want to, whatever I put my hand to, I want to be the best or do the best that I possibly can. And I think that's kind of inherent in an entrepreneur sort of personality. So I think some of those things have never changed. But interestingly enough, I grew up in a family of very traditional, my parents had very traditional jobs.

My mum was a nurse from literally the time that she started her working life up until the time that she retired. She never wavered from that. She never really had that much of an entrepreneurial spirit. They did have a small cafe business at one point, but it wasn't what I would call kind of a conscious, you know, entrepreneurial kind of nature. And my dad was a toolmaker engineer,

and he literally worked in that capacity for his entire working life as well. And I think they were extremely shocked and probably saddened when I told them I was going to leave my very successful research career to start a business in an area that I'd never worked in before um zero resources behind me um when what they were really hoping was that I would buy a house um stay in my career and have children so and that's no you know that's no disrespect to them and their kind of views of what they wanted for us but that's just what they knew um and it was that stability that they really

wanted for us but I think they've got the idea now that that's not going to happen I've kind of I've slowly weeded them out of that thought process for me yeah well let me put a slightly different slant on them because what I'm reading between the lines here is that perhaps the the additional courage and support you've needed to take the quite big leaps that you have may well have something to do with your partner who i know you work very closely with love you to talk about that and whether that that is a factor and also just to expand on that in the context of you know how good bad or otherwise it is working with your life partner because you know and i ask that because my good wife and i are yin and yangs who uh the the completion of

the whole is much better than the individual parts uh love to hear your thoughts around that subject yeah absolutely um and yes he's a huge driver um in kind of setting me on a different trajectory um sometimes i sometimes i blame him for that rightfully so no but um really i guess he was he was the driver that made me jump So it was his kind of discontent in a standard job that he had in the Department of Defence where he felt like his ambitions were just not being served. He wasn't able to do the bold things that he really wanted to do within the area. And I sort of said to him one day, it was actually my idea, I said to him, you need to stop and you need to get out of that situation because it's making you bitterly unhappy. is not serving your you know your ambition and you need to work out something you know something

else to do because this is not working and at that time he he sort of he thought about that for quite a long time I think it was probably it's probably over a year um and then decided that he was really keen to go out on his own and as a supportive partner and you know we're we're in a partnership we thought well now's a great time to do that because we didn't have children we didn't have a lot of kind of liabilities or anything like that and we decided to kind of embark on that together and I think it was sort of a trial by fire very difficult doing that as inexperienced business people neither of us had a business degree we were both from research strong research scientific background never run a company let alone you know you understand how to

how to kind of get new customers or do that consulting product development type work we we really went out completely blind and that was really scary but I think both of us knew that if we set really clear milestones and targets and at each point we do an assessment and take a take a checkpoint as to where we're at and if we're progressing or if we're not or you know how the business was was going forward then we had a level of comfort that we would never make a bad decision that would put us in a in a terrible situation um and it would give us this amazing opportunity to try a hand at something new and develop new skills that we didn't have before so definitely massive influence in kind of getting me to make that first jump um in terms of how it is working

with your partner I think it's an incredible advantage for any business if it works so some people um you know I talk to many people that say oh I could never work with my husband we'd kill each other um I think that's fair for some personalities and obviously depends on your relevant you know disciplines and and how you've come to be working together but for us we've got this amazing complementarity in our experiences and in our expertise and I think that's been a huge advantage because it does mean that the combined you know nature of both of us together is far more valuable than either of us could ever achieve individually and I think the other big thing is having that support network when things go bad and often things do go bad in business in

fact more times than not they go bad and you know you need you need someone who understands the experiences that you're having and the situation that you're going through so that when one of you completely um loses it the other one can kind of provide that voice of reason and and try and you know get things back on track so yeah i think it's been a huge advantage for us yeah i love it yeah and exactly the same experience from myself my good wife sonia we we've just a really good complement uh where we can sort of uh prop each other up when they be uh we we understand each other how do you go with turning off though it's i mean we've this has been a work in progress for us and uh you know there's a tendency to work 24 7 and i'm a bit uh perfectionist come obsessive

around what we do so the bright the brain's constantly crunching over uh how have you manage to negotiate that uh to make sure that it's not all about work i don't think you can good on you i think that's a fallacy i think when you're when you're ambitious and you're driving a business forward it's very difficult to switch off from that of course there's you know there's breaks and there's things that we do outside we have we have a young family so we have two children six and five we work our hours around their school hours so that we can make sure that we're there for them for you know part of the day that we can you know really spend quality time with them so I guess that is the time that we we switch off that you're always thinking about

what's happening in the business and what next and you know have I done the things that I needed to have done to kind of get to this point where I can take a bit of time you know I think it's just it is all consuming and that's something that not everyone can manage or handle but I think for us we just kind of it sort of ebbs and flows you know if I really need time away then I try and make sure that I take that and often that involves activities with the kids and things like that, and that gives you a little bit of a mental break. But, yeah, I think it's incredibly difficult to do that when you have your own ventures.

Good insight. And I guess our experience is very similar. The concept of work-life balance we think is a fallacy. Both Sonia and I actually love what we do, so we don't feel like we're sacrificing anything when we're thinking about it. I totally agree, and that's one thing that I didn't say. I think if you really love what you're doing, it's not about stopping work and starting

something that you enjoy. It's actually working is what you enjoy. It's kind of you're, you know, you're doing something that you truly love and you're passionate about, then it's not really an issue about how much time you get to do the things that you love because you're constantly kind of in that state. And I think that's one of the advantages about being able to choose your own adventure, if like yeah absolutely yeah no that's that's that's awesome now just uh again i just would like to dig in a little bit deeper to probably some of the biggest challenges that uh you and your partner

have experienced over the journey so far just just to share uh the ups and downs a little bit and what have those challenges been uh what was the impact and what has been the learnings that have helped you uh as you've gravitated towards you and where you are now oh my god so many so many i'm not sure i can consolidate them on this podcast time so many challenges one of the biggest thing is i guess initially if i if i do it in chronological order uh one of the biggest challenges was really understanding the critical things that you need to run a business, understanding or trying to learn how to be everyone within a business was really challenging

and you fail miserably at a lot of those things. You know, we kind of, in our first experience, our first business, we probably spent eight years doing something or getting to the point of exit where we could, I believe, do that in about two or three years now, given our additional knowledge. but those learnings are necessary learnings and they're not things that you can get out of a book you have to actually experience them you have to experience the impact of doing things wrong

you have to experience the impact of of not being responsive to your customers and then walking away you have to experience the impact of not having enough money to hire the right people to be able to deliver the best possible product or service that you would like to you have to understand the impact of having an employee who doesn't pull their weight or is not the right fit for your business and having to let them go. I mean, there's so many things that happen within a business that kind of teach you resilience and teach you how

to move forward. I think one of the biggest things is, you know, and I often say this to my children, if you don't experience those challenges, you have no appreciation of of the good things that the good outcomes that that you get in life if you're just given everything um on a silver platter and and it's all easy and and sweet you really you're missing out um you're missing out because you have a very low level appreciation of what it's like to actually overcome something and achieve happiness by overcoming that challenge

And I think that's something that I kind of live by. The biggest challenges that we've got in our current ventures really, I mean, capital is king in the medical, you know, med tech space. It's very difficult to take a product to market without having it properly clinically tested, without having regulatory approvals for that product. and that's a long process and it costs a lot of money and it takes a huge amount of effort and it is extremely high risk. At any point during that process, there can be a hurdle that prevents you getting that product to market. Maybe it doesn't work as well as you thought.

Maybe there's issues getting it through regulatory approvals. Maybe you can't get customers onto clinical trials. And we've experienced all of those hurdles and we've had to fund this ourselves because in the Australian market, but very difficult to get funding for high-risk ventures. And particularly when you're talking about two high-risk areas, one being medical and one being AI, and we've made the smart decision to combine both of them.

So I think, you know, I think there's, you know, there's always so many challenges, but definitely that's the biggest one. And if you can create, I guess that's where my point came in before, if you can create enough wealth that enables you to be able to fund those things yourself, then, you know, you're kind of mitigating that risk. you're allowing yourself to do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do

and that's a really great position to be in. Yeah, I'd love that. And I think one of the reasons I was keen to have a chat to you, Michelle, is I think if there's ever a penultimate example of focusing on the long term, having the clarity and the vision of what the long term looks like and then backing yourself and having the fortitude, resilience, patience and persistence to weave through that myriad of dynamic and changing conditions to get an end result. There's no better example than what you're doing.

And it parallels very similarly to what happens in the property investment arena, which is something that's obviously near and dear to us. because I always say to people, start with the end in mind. This is a 10 or 15-year journey. It's not an overnight thing. It won't happen. You need to go in with the mindset of knowing there's going to be challenges but knowing that you've got the contingency

and thought about the worst case and have plans for them so that you can respond to it and be funded in a way that you can ride the speed humps to make sure that you're there to enjoy the rewards at the end. So very similar, but magnified. And I think for those that probably haven't really been exposed to the area that you're working in, it's a very competitive space. You know, it's starved of funding.

I'm guessing it's probably controlled a lot by the major pharmaceutical companies companies who like to a bit like the oil companies like to control the industry you've got the regulatory environment that has a political flavor to it so that that makes it pretty interesting and then on on top of that you've got to have as you've said either be able to self-fund or be able to secure the confidence with capital from elsewhere that's going to allow to even get to the finish line. So a pretty challenging environment.

Yeah, I wish I'd spoken to you two years ago, Bushy. Might have chosen a different path. No, just kidding. The medical space. And to be honest, even though I come from a medical background, I think even I completely underestimated how challenging that would be and the amount of rigour and kind of, you know, structure and restraint there is in this area.

But having said that, the flip side of that is that you're doing something that can directly impact people's health and wellbeing and I think that's an amazing kind of place to play and it's the perfect fit for kind of my background and skill set and my passion in the medical space as well as bringing together that kind of deep technology and AI, which is kind of a burgeoning field. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you've touched on a couple of the enduring qualities

because a big focus for me is the study of sustainable success because there are sort of fundamentals that apply. It doesn't matter what you're doing. If you apply those fundamentals, then you're going to end up getting the result. You've mentioned resilience. What are the other qualities, given the road that you've been down so far, what do you think are the enduring qualities that are fundamental to achieving the sort of success

that you are now enjoying? Well, I think one of them is being genuine to your expertise and your background. I think often when ventures fail is because it's kind of someone who's thought up a good idea but really has not experienced that field of interest or, you know, or is doing it for the wrong reason. I think there needs to be kind of that genuine nature around the why you're pursuing a particular thing because

if you don't have that connection or that passion, there's just no way that you can overcome all the challenges that you're going to face. And I think that's the failing of a lot of entrepreneurs. You kind of jump into something thinking that it's going to be kind of a win. And I guess that does come back to resilience. But I think that resilience kind of stems from their true passion around a particular area or problem that they're trying to solve.

So that's one thing. I think the other big one is risk taking. You need to be a little bit of an inherent risk taker to drive your own business forward and that's the case for any business. It's not just the kind of technology space that we're in. But even if you're in property development, you kind of need to be able to understand the risks very well,

accept those risks to a certain level and then carve out what you're comfortable with in terms of, you know, overcoming those risks or, you know, sort of carve out that risk profile at which point if you step outside the bounds of what you thought were reasonable, you need to know when to kind of call it because otherwise you end up bitterly unhappy, kind of, you know, losing your entire life investment and sometimes it's better

to cut your losses than kind of persist through things. So I think persistence and resilience is really important, but you do need to know when it's not going to happen or when there's something so substantive that it's going to significantly impact your ability to make that thing a success. And it's kind of just having that foresight and, like you said, having that end goal in mind, understanding what the milestones are to get there and understanding when it's not going to be possible

and when you need to move on. um i think that's really important yeah really good insights there um now sort of sort of transitioning along similar lines uh in my sort of study of success over the last 35 odd years a lot of australians are what i'd class as rich but very few are wealthy and what what i see happening and the difference between the two is that the most of us have access and enjoy pretty solid incomes when you look at the rest of the world but the ones that end up enjoying freedom are those who not only invest in their careers but invest in assets that are going to potentially replace their income at some point in time and sustain their their lifestyle

clearly there's been a big focus and you can do that in business you can do it in property you You can do it in shares. There's a whole bunch of different avenues that you can do that in. Clearly, business is a big focus for yourselves. But are there any other investments that you make outside of the business that are about the long-term position? Yes, I do. I make a lot of investments, but it's more investments of my personal time.

and what those investments involve. And I guess the reason this is the case and that it's not cash investments is because I'm neither rich nor wealthy. I hope to be in one of those categories at some point in the future, but it's not where I'm at now. But, no, I invest my time with a lot of different companies, with students in school programs, with students going through university commercialisation programs.

I spend a lot of time mentoring amongst the community because what I find is that in order to build a successful industry, and I'm very passionate about South Australia and building a successful industry here, something a bit new and in the deep tech space, which I think we're perfectly positioned to kind of tackle, and in order to do that there needs to be an awareness at the school level around different options that students have now that they never had before you know it's not a world of traditional

jobs about getting a getting a good position and staying in that position for life it's a lot more fluid than that now and these kids coming out of school are going to need to understand that fluidity and they're going to need to be able to deal with it and part of that is around resilience part of that is around building their capabilities set across a broader range of things and part of it is helping them to understand the way of entrepreneurship and that there are different options available to themselves and they can if they back themselves and if they learn the skills that are required to to be an entrepreneur or start your own venture or even be an intrapreneur within a business and really drive your career progression then

you know i think that's really valuable for everyone um so i do spend a lot of time mentoring in those sort of programs the other thing that i invest a lot of time in is um on board positions and um you know of different startup companies in completely different spaces to where i'm currently myself and the reason i do that is because i get great insight and diversity of knowledge from those other businesses and the challenges that they're facing that directly impact how I run my own business so I think they're they're kind of the two areas that I invest a lot of my time in and I think one of the challenges in South Australia particularly in terms of capital is you're right there is a lot of rich people around there are a lot of

there's a lot of money around and I think the reason that money is not being invested is not because the rich people want to hang on to their money it's because they don't understand how to invest that in things outside of the more traditional investments like property and shares and things like that so I think there's a real education piece that needs to happen to try and open the eyes of those people within the community that do have money and do want to invest it in something a little bit different something potentially a little bit more high risk but something with the potential to create great returns um that is that education piece that needs to happen great insight and i'd love to partner you with uh that education work

both at the at the school level because if we can educate that generation at that level and give them the skills to then go out into the real world in a position where they can start to do some positive things, that's the future. And then also an opportunity to educate those that are in that position who just don't know what they don't know and don't know where to start and don't know who to trust. So big opportunity there. So I'd love to talk to you more about that. Now, just touching on my favourite subject, property, has property been a part of your journey or will it be a part of your journey uh moving forward do you think michelle um i would say probably not moving forward it had it it provided the foundation for us to start our first company to be honest because

we had invested in a um in an investment property together myself my husband and we had a property in which we lived um but really for us where we always um we have this saying within our family that we're a family of experiences not things and that's very different to a lot of other people in terms of we don't we don't view a house ownership of a house as a something that we're particularly interested in or necessarily driven towards and but the property I guess ownership of property allowed us to then leverage those assets to be able to build the business so again it's about your conversation about rich versus wealthy if you if you've got leverage if you've got kind of sustainable assets then it gives you the freedom to be able to do things that you wouldn't

otherwise be able to do and I think it's that freedom that I always yearn for is that that ability to kind of have the freedom to do the things that I'm interested in and passionate about and unfortunately money is a huge part of that I hate that it's a huge part of that but if you don't have money or if you don't have assets it's very difficult to do anything substantive so yeah I think property plays a big role for a lot of people in that space and I think it certainly played a role for us initially but I don't see it as being a core driver for us in the future necessarily yeah no that's that's really good and the the concept of access versus ownership and and experience versus uh material things is you know 100 on board and then aligned

with you there we we own a lot of property but we a lot of our journey was rent vesting because we would rent where we wanted to live in a place that at a fraction of the cost of having a massive mortgage and the investment properties that we invested in were very cost effective they cost us nothing because they're well structured but that gave that's given us the wealth while we've still been able to enjoy the lifestyle so I think you know the the big psychological hurdle to jump for a lot of Australians is to separate this access versus ownership exercise and and break the the nexus in that you've got to own your home because if you put all your energy into a massive Taj from a hole that means you're living on the smell of an oily rag,

baked beans and dog food, trying to pay the thing off and missing out on life as a consequence of that, then that's really limiting your ability to enjoy life now. Correct. Yeah, and I love the thinking around that. Okay, now I know you're limited on time, so I'd love to jump into your passion project at the moment, which is, you know, the subject around being the life whisperer.

And to start that off, because AI is a term that gets bandied around everywhere and everyone's got a different perception of what it is and what it means, can you sort of put some colour around it from your perspective and then talk about, you know, I think the groundbreaking work that you're doing with Life Whisperer around the IVF space? Yeah, sure. I mean, like AI as a kind of term has been around for a great many decades now. It's not a new area. It's, you know, there were kind of similar experiences in the 70s where they had what was called an AI winter where there was huge expectation around AI as a technology and as a capability. and then you know when it was attempted to be applied to practical real world problems it really failed miserably and it got a very bad reputation if you like and although things have

advanced significantly since that period I think the term AI is still significantly misused and there's a lot of kind of hype and scaremongering around that the concepts around what AI is capable of and ai being able to take over our jobs and you know um and control control the world as as we know it and overtake human intelligence i mean it's completely ridiculous if you know anything about ai and if you understand where that field is that you would understand that the capability of the technology that's available now is nowhere near um being able to do those things so i think what has happened over the last 20 years is that there's this huge increase in availability of computing power through cloud and what that has enabled is techniques that have been around for

40-50 years to be able to be used practically. So outside of areas like the defence for example where they had their own big supercomputers. Now what's happening is that we can leverage very large sets of data and we can use these AI technologies which are very data hungry and very computationally intensive and we can actually derive very important insights from those data using that compute power that's now available. The other thing that's happened is that people have recognised the value of data and businesses have been collecting

that data now for a long time. So there's sort of serious data repositories now on which you can use techniques like AI to solve complex problems. But really, in its purest sense, you know, when you're talking about things like deep learning that we use in Life Whisperer, it's really, it's kind of a statistical method on steroids. It's not anything, it's not super intelligent.

It's a way of getting software to look at data in a different way, in a way that we wouldn't be able to do as humans because it's too complex and the data sources are too big and it can do that very effectively. So in the case of Life Whisperer, what we're doing is looking at images, so camera images that are taken within IVF laboratories of patients' embryos that have been in culture for five days.

And what happens normally in the IVF process is that you have, you know, eggs extracted from the female, they're mixed with sperm in a culture dish those um the fertilized eggs become embryos and those embryos develop over a period of five days now at that day five time point an embryologist or a doctor needs to make a decision about which of those embryos is most likely to create a baby for the female and that's a very subjective and difficult thing for them to do down a microscope and visually assessing because they're limited to what their eyes can see but what the AI can do is look at far more complex patterns of features within those embryo images that give a high

predictability of which of those embryos are best and which have the highest chance of succeeding throughout the IVF process and that's what we're doing and we've put that into a software product that the embryologists can use when they're looking at those embryos they simply drag and drop images directly onto the software, it applies the algorithm that we've developed and tested and runs a cloud computing server and then returns an instant result to support that embryologist in their decision about which of those embryos to transfer. Yeah, it's brilliant and removing that subjectivity and I guess as soon as the human element's involved, we're going to err on the side of conservative. So what sort of

improvement in results are you achieving so far with LifeWhisper as a result of that technology? Yes, so we've done extensive clinical trials now in a whole range of different clinics with different patient demographics in Australia and New Zealand and the US and Malaysia and our results are consistently 30% accuracy improvement or greater than 30% accuracy improvement when compared to how the embryologist is scoring them visually wow so that's a huge uplift in accuracy which will

undoubtedly you know translate to improved pregnancy outcomes um so the clinical testing has been kind of the focus of our last year or year and a half within the business to make sure that you know the algorithm works in different contexts different clinical environments with different patient demographics and it's working very well in that regard. Yeah, massive because anecdotally, just in our own circle, the number of our friends over the years who've really struggled to be able to get pregnant

just seems to be on the increase. And, you know, I'm a big believer in nature and when you see other species not giving birth, it's generally an indication that the environment is not appropriate to do so and obviously there's some lifestyle, nutritional and a whole bunch of stress and a whole bunch of other factors that's impinging on people's ability to have children

but the groundbreaking work that you're doing in enabling that is fantastic and I imagine it's got that sort of approach that you're taking to IVF could also be applied to imaging around cancer and a whole bunch of other areas that have got massive opportunity as well. Michelle, would I be right in saying that? Yeah, correct. So the Prestigen, which is the other entity that I spoke about, that's actually brought it around.

So what we've developed is a platform that can streamline and automate the process of building these diagnostic tools for a whole range of different medical applications. So LifeWhisker is just the first product that we've developed. but of course we can leverage our learnings our um you know development the process automation from building that product to now look at other applications um in the medical space and we're already doing that for another couple that i can't talk about today but um but there are you know there's obviously this is a huge area and there's a you know a great ability to be able to leverage

AI to really you know the benefit that AI has in the medical space is so huge so one of it's about accuracy but it's not always about improving patient outcomes sometimes it's about creating standardization across you know diagnostics for example because you've got different levels of experienced doctors you've got doctors making decisions in very time poor environments with limited information available to them, which is not ideal. So AI can kind of assist in that regard. It can save time in a lot of cases and it can allow the ability to create lower cost and more available solutions for patients.

So that's a big one for us in the IVF space. So what we want to do at scale, we can deliver the life whisperer service at an extremely low cost for patients and then they have the potential to not have to do an additional IVF cycle which is another cost saving but we want to make sure that the AI that we produce is both affordable and accessible to anyone who's going through that particular process and I think the technology using AI makes these products so scalable that you can actually do that and it can still be commercially viable um but it can it can make this type of technology accessible to everyone and i really like that so i think you know when

people are talking about ai there's often this you know bad kind of smell about it um it's not it's not replacing jobs it's augmenting what professionals are currently doing and it's providing that ability for patients to get better um more accurate you know or more timely results at a low cost, and I think that's really important. Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's really exciting about where that's heading and really commend you on the resilience

and the commitment to taking quite complex subjects and challenges and turning it into very practical outcomes that pretty much everyone can benefit from. So, awesome. Now, mindful of your time, so I'm going to kick straight into what I call the ambush session, Michelle, which is the lightning round where I ask just five quick questions that the audience always likes to get your insights on. So kicking straight into that, what's your favourite quote and why? And it can be one of your own or one that you've heard from someone else, but love your thoughts on that. Yeah, I do have a favourite quote.

I've actually got quite a few, but they all centred around the exact same thing. So I'll pick one for this purpose. Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It's the courage to continue that counts. And I live by that. Yeah, love that. Love that.

I haven't heard that one before, actually. That's brilliant. Very good. Yeah, great ethos. Awesome. Okay, you're probably a great reader. so I would love for you to share the top book that you'd recommend people read and why and it can be on any subject it's a book that you think has impacted on you and others would get a lot

from yeah it's a bit of a weird one it's a book called um how to stop worrying and start living yeah and the reason I love that and I you know I'm not a big fan of these self-help books to be honest but I do read a lot of different types of books and they impact me in different ways but this particular one taught me something that I think about pretty much every day and that's how if you can imagine the worst possible outcome of a decision you're about to make and if you can cope with that outcome then you should do it yeah so it's about understanding again that risk profile you know managing your expectation on what could possibly happen um makes you go ahead with a fearless attitude and kind of you know tackle those things that

you wouldn't you know you would ordinarily put in the um too risky or you know i can't possibly do that basket and i i like that yeah i love that that's uh dale carnegie bought that one didn't he is that yeah it's a great book and it's we've got a really simple thing in our business michelle along similar lines and when someone says oh i've got a problem our immediate response is oh does someone die oh well no well it's not a problem then it's just something we need to overcome so uh it's a challenge yeah exactly exactly right because it completely flips your mindset uh when uh because as soon as it's a problem then that's the mind shuts down whereas if it's okay well how are we going to overcome this and learn from this then completely different

story. Now, I love that. Awesome. Now, changing gears altogether, and this is a bit left field, but a lot of Australians feel that they pay too much tax. So I'd love you to share your insights on what's the top thing that you've legally done to minimise the tax you pay. Oh, I like how you put a caveat around that one. So I'll just put it out there. I have never done any illegal tax evasion. I'm not smart enough to understand the tax laws to be able to even do that, I don't think. So, no, look, the biggest thing that we've done is we've leveraged the R&D tax incentives

that the federal government has put in place and that's been really valuable as a business in the kind of deep technology space because everything we do is experimental, it's innovative, it's high risk, the outcomes are unknown and the hypotheses are not proven. So, by nature, everything we do is kind of R&D

And so we have leveraged that R&D tax incentive to maximise our spend on R&D. And, yeah, that's been really helpful. Yeah, love it. Yeah, it's brilliant. Really helping the business at the same time. Now, changing gear again, what's both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received, Michelle? the best piece of investment oh god i don't know that i've received a worst piece of investment

advice or perhaps i've just ignored it before so i'm gonna leave that one alone but the best piece i think would be invest in the long term don't expect don't expect quick wins because they seldom them happen um and you know invest in something that you're passionate about so that you can you know see it to its fruition um and they're always going to be the best the best investments that you make are in those things that you're really truly passionate about and driven to help succeed love it yeah absolutely brilliant uh final one then uh a personal habit that contributes to your success this is a weird one um well maybe it's not weird i don't know but i love music music is literally my life if i could not have music i would not um i would not

be able to survive so i find it's really calming it's energizing it's you know so what i often do when I'm kind of in a tough spot or just when I need to zone out or hone my thoughts, I blast music, you know, whether it's in the house or on my headphones or when I'm out running or whatever. I love listening to music. That's kind of my – and if you ask my family, it drives them mad because it doesn't matter what I'm doing,

if I'm making dinner or if I'm getting dressed in the morning, I have music on so that's kind of my I don't know good or bad habit depending on how you yeah I love it well if that's weird then I'm weird too then Michelle because I'm exactly the same music really moves me it's I think it's to do with the vibrational energy to be quite honest if I want to get technical about it but it emotionally it really engages me and I mean if I'm in a downer I'll put on my favorite piece of music and dance around like an idiot and it immediately changes my outlook and the half to three quarters of an hour a day I spend on the piano

is my time. I get off the piano with a massive smile on my face, feeling really good on the inside. It's just there's something that moves you about music if you allow it to and, yeah, I don't think that's weird at all. So I love your passion with that because it's just I'm lucky enough to be exposed to music from a very early age and it's been part of me ever since it's my go-to happy place actually yeah so right and there's so much music it's spotify i don't know if you

into spotify but my god oh yeah that's what i use yeah i love it fantastic spotify on their um on their you know ipads yeah and and it's awesome i love it i've definitely handed down that love for music to my and i'm not musical at all right i've never played an instrument except for cello at school um so it's not an instrumental sort of playing music for me it's listening it's just yeah absolutely love it look um final exercise to close on uh and very quickly uh if you were to talk to someone who's and given your sort of mentoring bent if you're talking to someone who's just leaving school what advice would you give them in terms of where best to invest their time energy and money to achieve their version of freedom oh wow um i guess one of the

core pieces of advice that i give to everyone is be flexible be flexible and allow your experiences to drive what you love and how you kind of go through life um of course in a structured way because you don't want to be flippant and, you know, never achieve anything but have done a lot of things. Build networks. Build networks outside the areas that you're specifically focused in at the time. So if you do a university degree in biomedical sciences,

build networks in the computer sciences. Build networks in industry. Just start going to events. There's a lot of things that are on that, you know, for school age children or for university age students that help you to network and just get involved and broaden your experience base. And some of that, you know, costs a bit of money. Sometimes it takes time, but it will pay back in space because by virtue of you experiencing different things and meeting different people, you will be afforded different opportunities and you'll be able to pick which of those, you know, you take. Yeah, awesome. Look, very great way to bring it to a close.

you've been very very generous with your time michelle and uh i uh we following closely your ongoing success i love the work that you're doing uh you know very proud of you as a fellow south australian and uh i look forward to staying in touch and assisting you in in some of those areas particularly around the education piece which i share a passion for so thanks again for taking the time today awesome thank you so much for having me cheers well freedom fighters how good was that you get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au that's h-e-l-l-o at khgroup.com.au or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash get invested i look forward to joining you next week

for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow.