Episode overview

Thomas West joins Steve Grace on Give It A Nudge from London for episode 78 of the show. Tom and Steve have known each other for eight years, which makes this one of the most candid conversations on the show. The episode covers Tom’s entrepreneurial journey from a Kristen Stewart hoodie incident at twenty-one to building Hyper, the stories that come with reviewing five hundred-plus startup ideas a year, and what COVID has done to the global startup ecosystem.

The Kristen Stewart hoodie story

Tom’s first business was a fashion e-commerce store called Vague. One morning he woke up to hundreds of orders after Kristen Stewart was photographed wearing one of his hoodies at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. He had almost no stock, was operating out of his father’s warehouse in South Australia, and had no idea who she was until his twin brother identified her. What followed was a flight to China, forty pieces of KFC chicken as a welcome from a new manufacturer, and twelve days to manufacture and ship the orders globally before the fakes arrived.

Building Hyper: helping first-time founders avoid obvious mistakes

Hyper is a four-month startup incubator program that takes founders from the idea stage through to product validation and early fundraising. Tom started it after watching what Y Combinator achieved in the US and concluding there was no equivalent for first-time founders in Australia who needed both the education and the network. The most common mistake Hyper sees: founders get excited, hire a developer, and start building without understanding what a term sheet is or what customer acquisition cost means.

The wildest ideas Hyper has seen

With 400 to 500 founders through the program and up to a thousand ideas submitted per month, Tom has stories. A gamified app where you earn points for making Arnold Schwarzenegger pump iron. A slide deck that was entirely photos of waterfalls, with the pitch that since only one percent of Sydney homes have waterfalls in the garden, the market is enormous. Tom uses these examples to make a genuine point: an idea only becomes a company when the commercial viability is understood and the customer acquisition cost makes sense.

What COVID did to the startup ecosystem

Tom argues COVID lit a spark in entrepreneurship that will not fade. Talented people sent home by large corporations discovered they could be productive without their boss breathing over their shoulder, and started building things. The combination of remote work normalisation, globally available engineering talent, and VCs running cheque sizes nobody had seen before created an extraordinary window. He predicts a pullback around 2024 to 2025 as rates tighten, but the underlying structural shift toward distributed startups is permanent.