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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I had one of the best meals of my life last night at a place called Meatmaiden, in a little laneway in Melbourne. I remember eating here many years ago, then forgetting where it was or what it was called. I’m glad I stumbled upon it again, as it’s one of the greats.

It was one of those meals that sends a rush of endorphins through you with every bite, but makes you a bit sad after each swallow because you know it’s going to end. A roundabout analogy for life, in a way. Anyway, it was great. Now onto today’s piece.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Bill Kerr, Founder & CEO at Athyna

Today's interview is with me, Bill Kerr, Founder & CEO of Athyna, in a fireside chat recorded live in front of a room of founders at a recent Stone & Chalk Founders Unfiltered session. We covered how I think about business, how I grew Athyna, where this newsletter fits in, and my tips and tools for resilience, brand building, and culture.

Why did you turn down Head of Culture at Zoox?

I met Tim Kentley-Klay, the founder of Zoox, during a short stint coaching CrossFit. At the time, I was building my first startup, AdventureFit, taking people around the world on fitness holidays. We'd take a group to Mexico to see Chichen Itza and Tulum, do a cooking class, then dive the cenotes and go rock climbing between training sessions and meditation.

Tim had run a successful creative agency in South Melbourne before moving to San Francisco to start an autonomous driving company. Out of nowhere, he said he wanted to pitch me on something: Head of Culture at Zoox. $170,000, a $50,000 relocation fee, equity I can't remember the details of, and use of the company jet (I still don't know how or why they had one). I said no. I'd only just started AdventureFit, and I didn't want to be an employee.

Zoox nearly became one of Australia's great tech success stories. They built a car with no front end that drives in both directions, designed for city traffic. Waymo before Waymo. Amazon acquired them in 2020 for just over a billion dollars.

It's the ultimate sliding doors moment. Had I said yes, I'd have had early equity in a decent exit and a life in San Francisco. I've had a soft spot for Zoox ever since, even though they fired my mate Tim in the end. But I'd caught the entrepreneurial bug.

Can you take us back to the moment you decided to start Athyna?

Athyna's had a few lives. We started in nearshore tech hiring, built an EOR product to compete with Deel, Remote, and Oyster, then killed it. Now we do post-training for AI.

It all started with AdventureFit's global team. Between 2015 and 2017, well before COVID, we had people in Latin America, Asia, and Australia. I got really good at running a remote organization, which was still hard for early-stage companies back then. Around that time, I met Drew Slater, a consultant who became my co-founder. He saw what I'd built and wanted to understand it. His business was making companies more profitable, so his pitch was simple: help him build a global team inside his business, then teach his clients to do the same.

I ended up speaking at a bunch of his events. Then he asked where he should send his people to find quality talent abroad. I went away, did a load of research, and came back with an answer he wasn't ready for. I didn't trust most of the providers out there; this was where the world was heading, and we should just do it ourselves. I told him over dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Byron Bay, where he was living. We shook hands that night and went into business together.

What gave you the confidence that this was worth pursuing?

Entrepreneurs see a lot of opportunities. The skill is working out which ones are worth it, then going really hard on those. That dinner was one of those moments. We had another in 2021, when the market was frothy. Deel raised its Series A, B, and C in about nine months, EOR suited our model, and the opportunity looked enormous, so we built it. Then the market crashed, and we killed the product.

The most recent one is AI, and the insatiable demand for post-training from the big labs and application-layer players. That's what we've pivoted into. You'll get plenty of businesses you could take a swing at. Once you pick one, go all guns blazing.

You scaled to 1.2M cold emails a week. Is outbound still viable?

Everyone hates cold email, and everyone still gets it, because it works. Always has. What's dead is spray-and-pray volume. Four years ago, it wasn't.

Brett Adcock sold Vettery, a business model very similar to Athyna's, for $100M before he started Figure. When asked how he got to that scale, he said he'd had hundreds of people in the Philippines scraping data and sending cold email. That was all they did.

Back then, data was expensive. It was all ZoomInfo. Before Apollo made everything cheap, we struck a partnership with an Eastern European data supplier that gave us open access to 350 million of the world's leading decision makers.

At about 100,000 emails a week, our outbound infrastructure broke, so we rebuilt it properly and siloed off the different parts. We also worked out that being this aggressive was hurting the brand, so we started sending from storefronts instead. We ended up with 15 to 20 sub-brands named after our dogs and our team. Ziggy's Tech Talent is named after my sausage dog. Cucu's Devs exists because Cucu, our creative director, wanted a brand of her own. It was really fun.

When you're that aggressive with outbound, you step on toes and make enemies. The storefronts kept Athyna protected. And the harder we pushed, the lower our costs went, so I wanted to know what it would take to send a million emails a week. My team laughed. I told them I was dead serious. They said everything would break, and I knew it might, but I wanted to test it. So we reverse-engineered the plan and scaled the system to 1.2M a week.

Then Google and Microsoft killed cold outbound at that scale. You couldn't just blast emails into inboxes anymore. It was a great strategy while it lasted.

At one point, outbound drove 50 to 70% of our pipeline. It still brings in most of our enterprise leads, which matters, because enterprise has gone from zero to 40% of our revenue in the last couple of years. But outbound today should be warm outbound. There are much easier ways to open doors now.

Why did you pick a newsletter as your megaphone?

I've always been a creative person, and I think a founder needs to be the megaphone for their company. There are plenty of ways to do that. The trick is finding the one with the least friction.

I used to have a podcast. I enjoyed it, but it gave me anxiety and drained my energy, and with that much friction I knew I'd never produce it week after week. Writing is different. I love it, I've always been able to do it, and showing up doesn't cost me anything.

When I started Open Source CEO, I figured the worst case was a small community, some goodwill, and a base of allies. I'd network, learn, and educate along the way.

How does Open Source CEO actually drive revenue for Athyna?

We use it strategically. Athyna has a Dream 100 of big tech, AI, and application-layer companies, the people who need post-training data. All of my guest outreach for Open Source CEO goes to people at those companies.

I have a Claude scheduled task running in the background that scans Lenny's Podcast, 20VC, and similar shows and mines the guest lists. Those guests are auto-approved for an Open Source CEO interview, so it sends the outreach and books them in. Fully automated.

That's how I booked a call with a guy building Codex at OpenAI. We promoted him hard through the newsletter, probably a little over the top, and he's since introduced us to the Codex team about buying some of the datasets we've been building. OpenAI sits at number two on our Dream 100, behind Anthropic. That door opened because I have a platform. Community is great. A platform is a direct line to revenue.

When I said I wanted a base of allies, I thought that's all it would be. That base turned into investors, future employees, pipeline, clients, and referrers. Everything is probably 5 to 15% easier with someone who's come into Athyna through Open Source CEO, because they already trust me.

Why does owning a channel matter so much?

Because it solves trust. Business is one big trust game. Everyone knows the funnel: get people to know you, like you, then trust you. Getting known is reasonably easy, being liked is harder, and trust is the final hurdle.

People who've read me talk about the industry for a while feel like they know me. It's a parasocial relationship. They've seen what I think about Athyna, my startups, and the world, and they know that if something goes pear-shaped, I'll backstop it. The trust arrives before the conversation does, which flips the funnel on its head.

Then there's negative CAC, which really only exists in media. Most companies are locked in a battle to lower CAC or extend lifetime value, and whoever has the better ratio wins. With media, you get paid to acquire customers instead.

Open Source CEO will do somewhere between $750k and $1M in revenue this year. It's its own company, with its own employees and stock plan, so Athyna doesn't own it, which makes it an imperfect example. But we're building the same thing inside Athyna: two media properties in stealth, where we run our own ads. Every week the pipeline fills up. While everyone else fights to lower CAC, we're getting paid to build pipeline and close clients.

HubSpot does this properly. The HubSpot Media Network has around 30 properties, the best known being My First Million. Some drive revenue, and all of them build pipeline. People talk about founder brand, but I think it's founder media now, and that arm will matter more and more. Look at Cheeky Pint from John Collison at Stripe. Vanta has one too. We're all being forced to be far more active than we used to be.

Was Open Source CEO always part of the Athyna strategy?

Yes. I kept it outside Athyna, so I'd have the freedom to write about whatever I liked, even though I still shoehorn Athyna into most stories. I wanted creative control, and I wanted it to be mine and come with me. If I sell Athyna in three years, I've still got Open Source CEO, and it'll probably help me into whatever I do next.

I also thought I could do both well: grow it as its own business while driving pipeline, trust, and goodwill for Athyna. That's what it's done. At one point, my ecosystem (my network, social media, and the newsletter, which is by far the most powerful of the three) drove 12 to 15% of our pipeline. We're not a small company, so that's meaningful, and it'll keep scaling as we do. I didn't expect it to work this well.

How do you deal with setbacks?

Some of what I've been through has left lasting damage, particularly AdventureFit. I had crippling depression and anxiety before and after shutting it down, because of the financial stress and my inability to see the writing on the wall.

I had a mentor back then. I went to him with all these plans laid out, and two weeks later I came back, and every one had bombed. I told him not to worry, here's what we'd do next. He shook his head and laughed. I asked what was so funny. He said I might be the most driven guy he'd ever mentored. I took it as a compliment, and he told me it isn't always one. I should have gotten out of that company a lot earlier.

In 2022, we nearly raised $5M at a $25M valuation from a fund in Austin. It fell through in the final stages because of a conflict with one of their portfolio companies. That one didn't knock me about too much, because the market was already turning. We'd also had four calls with Insight and got deep on raising $10M at $45M. On about $2M in revenue, that's insane. We had no business raising at that valuation, and in hindsight it probably would have killed the company.

Then the market properly crashed, and the pressure hit. The layoffs were planned, and they were going to be catastrophically large. We told the leadership team on a Friday night to prepare for mass layoffs on Monday. I sat in front of a computer all weekend crunching numbers and realized we might have another week or two to try something. So we cut EOR, our newest product and the one we'd been raising on, went back to basics, and decided to grow our way out. Two more weeks, and we took off.

As a founder, you need a good mental health toolkit. My grandfather took his own life, and a number of people in my family are medicated, depressed, or anxious. I've been through all of that too. So I'm hyper-vigilant about showing up as my best self. Even when things are going well, founders live incredibly stressful lives. You need an outlet. Some people will disagree, and that's fine, but most of us need something outside work.

When I founded Athyna, and then through COVID, the layoffs, and the rebound, I believed anything under 60 or 70 hours a week was the wrong answer. We had to get strong enough that we'd never have to lay people off again, so I pushed everything else aside. About three years ago, I decided to get back into Olympic weightlifting, the sport with the spandex suits you see at the Olympics. I had no idea how I'd fit it in, so I blocked out 12 till 2pm in my calendar. I train, and I don't care if the house is on fire. I haven't competed in 12 years, but I'm still training to.

Founders need a third space. For me, it's the gym. For others, it's a dog-walking group, an art club, a jiu-jitsu gym, or a yoga studio. Hobbies pull you out of the hustle, because otherwise it's too much for any of us to handle.

What's the one piece of advice you'd give a founder?

Over-index on brand and culture. By no means are we the most successful people who'd sit in this seat, but we're alive, and we're growing 50% this year off a decent base. A big reason is that we've over-indexed on brand and culture since day one.

When most early-stage companies start hiring, they take on generalists who can do sales, marketing, and a bit of graphic design. The first head of anything we hired was a Head of Culture. I've always had an affinity for brand, but we did it strategically, and it's paid off. With a strong brand, quality people come knocking and ask to work with you.

I'm not just talking about logos, type, and color palettes. They matter, but the real thing is your employer brand: what people say about you, how they feel, and what the industry thinks. A strong brand lets you hire A players. A strong culture means they arrive motivated to do their best work, then fight tooth and nail to protect that culture.

We've run quarterly engagement surveys through Culture Amp, then Lattice, and now Deel. Across the last four years, with a team of about 70, engagement has averaged 93%. For context, 80% is considered excellent, so we sit somewhere between excellent and perfect.

Everyone's had the other experience, waking up on a Monday and thinking, ‘oh fuck, I've got to go into work today.’ That's criminal. At Athyna, people open their laptop or walk into the co-working space thinking, ‘I get to see my team today and work on a cool problem with great people.’ That's priceless. And if you get it wrong at the start, it's very hard to recover. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Audience question: How do you maximize marketing and branding while bootstrapping?

Build in public. Tell your story, the ups and the downs. It's cheap, and it works. LinkedIn has never cared about company posts. People drive it, and people care about people.

It depends on your strengths. If you're not comfortable writing, or filming a TikTok while walking down the street talking about your week, this isn't the advice for you. But if you can tell the story, everyone connects with it. I've seen plenty of founders do it exceptionally well, and it builds allies, community, and goodwill.

At that stage, you want people to know you exist and to trust you. You can't buy that with big budgets and complicated funnels. You earn it by talking to your ICP through personal stories. Then get your own channel, whether that's a newsletter, a podcast, or anywhere else you can tell stories. Social media is table stakes. A channel opens up networking, access to your ICP, and amplification for everything else you do. The earlier you start, the sooner it's big enough to add real pipeline and revenue.

Audience question: What are some practical cultural things you've done at Athyna?

One big thing and a few small ones. The big one is that we were open-handed with our equity. That was easier because I'm effectively a solo founder. My co-founders left with no equity, so I owned 80% from day one, and we carved out a 20% plan from the start. Most companies set aside 10 to 15%, usually as an option pool. Ours isn't.

Options give people the right to buy into the company later. But if you actually want people to build wealth, options mean that when their equity vests, they're putting a big chunk of their own money into an illiquid asset with a high chance of dying. Most companies die, or never reach a good exit. We used RSUs instead, where you're simply given the stock. Everyone at Athyna has equity, from intern to executive.

We also built in a double trigger, where the second trigger is a change-of-control event. Everyone vests, but nobody actually owns the stock until there's a liquidity event. That protects the team from a tax bill, because you don't want to hand someone equity and have them discover they owe the taxman $50,000. Jason from Cake told me on his podcast he'd never seen a plan like it. The best global equity law firm in the US built it for us.

Some of our earliest employees are still with us and have vested most of their stock. I'm looking forward to the day we sell Athyna or go public, and they can all go and buy houses. That'll make me feel like a real winner. It works culturally because people genuinely feel like owners. They are owners. We've put real effort into teaching them how equity works, because most people don't arrive understanding it. And they believe me when I say I want everyone to win.

Now the small things. We have heaps of these, rituals that help people settle in. The first is that we love-bomb people when they sign. The moment someone signs, we drop their LinkedIn, email, and a bit about them into a Slack channel everyone's in, and tell the team to go make them feel welcome. People changing jobs get buyer's remorse. You sign on the dotted line and immediately wonder whether the place you're leaving is better than the unknown one you just committed to. You don't know anyone, and you feel like an outsider before you've even started.

I try to be the first to say hello, since I know they've signed before the announcement goes out. Then they get hit with about 50 messages from across the company. People write to me afterward saying they can't believe 30 people just welcomed them. It sets the expectation from day one that this is a friendly place and they're welcome here.

We also have a praise dump channel, where people tag colleagues to say thanks. Something like, ‘Mary was awesome this week. She fixed a design problem nobody could crack, at 7pm on a Friday.’ I get in there too. There's only one founder and CEO, so my praise carries a lot of weight, and I have a reminder to make sure I'm giving it. I even keep a praise tracker: a database of every employee, how many times I've praised them, and when I last did. I never hand it out if it isn't deserved, but I check who I've missed and spread the love, publicly and privately.

The last one is employee profiles in Notion, with a photo of each person traveling or doing their favorite thing, plus their favorite song and movie. We also have a memories bank channel in Slack. Any time Athyna people do something fun together, online or in person, they post a photo. Our HR team feeds those into each profile under a section called ‘Your Life at Athyna’, so everyone can look back on every fun thing they've been part of. It doesn't drive revenue, and nobody checks it weekly, but it's a small signal that we're a fun, welcoming place and we should enjoy our time together. We have many things like that, and they all add up.

Audience question: How do you actually distill company values?

Neither my original co-founder nor I had values we actually wanted to live by at our previous companies, and that was part of what drew us together. So on day one, we sat down to build our set, and I designed the exercise.

Google 'brand values list' and I guarantee the top result is a blog by Lisa Furze with 200 brand values. We took those 200, set a ten-minute timer, and worked separately, marking every value we felt any pull towards. He came out with 25; I came out with 22. Then we ranked each one from one to five on how much we wanted to stand for it, again separately so we didn't bias each other, and added the scores together. That left about eight strong values. Too many. You won't remember eight, let alone live by them, so we cut it to four.

The exercise covered both aspirational values and principles for how we operate. Inclusivity is one of ours. We want everybody to feel welcome, which is exactly why the love-bomb ritual exists. We landed on four single-word values, then wrote a phrase for each to bring them to life. And yes, to the other part of your question, they're definitely an extension of how I think, and how my co-founder thought at the time.

But doing it at the start wasn't the most impactful part. Everybody knowing them was. The first call anyone has when they join Athyna is a brand values call with me. I tell them our story, how we arrived at the values, and how we operate. Then they move on to HR, sales, marketing, and everything else, already understanding who we are.

After about three and a half years, we reset the values, running the same exercise with the whole team, around 30 people by then. Everyone ranked them, we clustered the results, and since my co-founder had left, I took it away and whittled it back down to four values, each with a phrase. It was worth doing because a company isn't just what the founder thinks it is. It's what the founder, the employees, the customers, and the market think it is. My input carries the most weight, but I don't get to decide what Athyna is on my own.

We made it a real event. A guest speaker came in to talk about values, and the team researched their favorite companies and why those companies care so much about theirs. Ben & Jerry's, Patagonia, and Allbirds were popular picks. Afterward, the team felt like these really were their values. The good news is that the core doesn't move. Our new set came out about 78% similar to the first. A few things dropped off, and a few came back, but the company underneath was the same. It's a great way to give people emotional ownership.

Extra reading

• Getting To Know Me: Sliding Doors - January, 2026

• One Million Outbound Emails Per Day - May, 2026

• The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack - April, 2026

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and don't forget to check out Athyna to keep up with what we're building.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Mochary Method, an executive coaching firm that specialises in helping growing startups.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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