What do you do when your life story suddenly stops making sense?

In this episode of Pick My Brain, Alan Jones speaks with Clement Baissat, founder of mental wellbeing startup Hope Stage, about a journey that doesn’t follow the usual startup narrative. It begins with ambition and company building, then runs into depression, bankruptcy, and a bipolar diagnosis that arrives with clarity, but no instructions.

Clement shares growing up in France, knowing early that he wanted to build things on his own terms, and then spending years moving through startups, jobs, and burnout without understanding the patterns behind his highs and lows. A walk through a Paris park, a phone call to his mother, and two psychiatrists later, everything finally had a name. What remained unanswered was how to live with it.

That question became the foundation of Hope Stage. Not as a breakthrough moment, but as a practical attempt to understand bipolar disorder, build stability, and keep functioning. The conversation covers community, acceptance, routine, and the everyday systems that make progress possible, from sleep and structure to professional support. It also touches on why conditions like bipolar disorder and ADHD appear so often among founders.

As always, the discussion stays grounded and conversational. Alan brings curiosity and humour as they talk through business models, pricing, NGOs versus startups, and what it means to build something meaningful with limited resources.

This episode is about working with reality rather than fighting it, about replacing guesswork with systems, and about turning personal experience into something that may help others.

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Could real meat grown without animals be cheaper than traditional farming? And could Australia become one of the best places in the world to launch it?

In this episode of Pick My Brain, Alan Jones is joined by Paul Bevan, founder of cultivated meat startup Magic Valley, to explore how second-generation food tech is reshaping the economics and investability of cultivated meat. Paul pitches Magic Valley’s approach to growing real meat from animal cells, without livestock, and explains why minced products like lamb and pork are the logical first step to reaching commercial scale.

Alan and Paul unpack why earlier cultivated meat companies struggled, how advances in equipment and cell culture media have dramatically lowered costs, and what that means for investors assessing deep tech risk today. They also dig into Australia’s surprisingly strong regulatory framework for novel foods, Magic Valley’s decision to launch locally first, and how to raise deep tech capital without burning hundreds of millions of dollars.

Along the way, Alan shares practical advice on investor communication, momentum, and signalling progress, while Paul reflects on the challenge of telling one coherent story to impact investors, deep tech funds, and commercial partners at the same time.

If you are building in food tech, climate tech, deep tech, or navigating complex investor messaging, this episode is packed with hard-earned insight.

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To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new and upcoming shows. The only content we create is content that will help Australian founders.

How are you, fans of the show? You might have noticed there’ve been no new episodes for a while. Honestly, I didn’t really want to say anything earlier, but I’m starting to feel like I owe you an explanation.

Earlier this year, I got a cancer diagnosis. That sucked. But I had surgery at the end of September, and it looks like it was successful. So maybe now I update my LinkedIn profile to say “cancer survivor” — I don’t know.

With all that going on, I dropped a few things, and new episodes of Pick My Brain was one of them. And here we are in December. I feel much, much better than I did a few months ago, but that break in recording means we won’t have any new episodes for you until early January.

The good news is we’re recording again now. We’ve made some big improvements to the show, and I hope you’re going to love what we have in store for you starting January 2026.

If you need more listening in the meantime, I highly recommend First Check, Perspective X, In The Blink of AI, and our newest show Oversubscribed with angel investor Brendan Hill, which goes deep into the stories behind Australia’s best performing startups.

Anyway, I hope you have a safe, happy, and fun summer break. I hope it’s full of friendship, love, and good times. And I hope your startups are doing well too.

See you in January.