About Vantage Point: Driving Success in the Australian Market
Welcome to "Vantage Point," the podcast where we engage in enlightening conversations with influential business executives who have achieved remarkable success in their respective fields. Join us as we gain unique insights and perspectives from these accomplished leaders, exploring the secrets behind their achievements and uncovering the valuable lessons they've learned along the way.
In each episode of "Vantage Point," we sit down with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who have made a significant impact in the business world. Through thought-provoking discussions.
Saluda Medical's Fight for a Slice of a Multi-Billion Dollar Pain Market
Saluda Medical Inc's (ASX: SLD) Chief Financial Officer Jim Erickson sat down with the host of Vantage Point Podcast Simon Hinsley to discuss the technology behind Evoke®, Saluda's closed-loop spinal cord stimulation system, and the commercial strategy driving the company's growth in the US$2.2 billion chronic pain device market.
Jim explains how Evoke® differs from legacy spinal cord stimulation, which delivers a fixed dose of energy that becomes inconsistent as patients move through daily life, by measuring the nerve's actual response to stimulation and adjusting the therapy fifty times a second. He details how that closed-loop approach addresses the industry's two biggest long-standing problems: durability of relief and high explant rates, pointing to Saluda's three-year randomised controlled trial, which recorded zero explants due to loss of efficacy, and real-world data from a 140-patient study that mirrored those trial results.
The conversation turns to the recent leadership transition, with Chief Commercial Officer Mark Matthias stepping up to CEO, and the sales strategy the two of them built together to scale Saluda's US commercial footprint, growing from roughly 55 fully trained reps in FY25 to 161 by the end of FY26, on the way to US$90 million in global revenue. Jim also unpacks Saluda's newly FDA-approved paddle lead, the first sensing-enabled paddle on the market, which opens up a further third of the total addressable market that was previously inaccessible to the company's existing sales force.
It's a candid look at the economics of scaling a med-tech sales organisation, the shift in focus from headcount growth to territory-level profitability, and what Saluda needs to prove next to close the gap with the market's largest incumbents.
#VantagePoint #SaludaMedical #ASX #ChronicPain #SLD
29 Sept 2026
The human layer: Appen's critical role in the AI ecosystem
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Ryan Kolln sat down with the host of Vantage Point Podcast Simon Hinsley to discuss the 30-year evolution of the business from its origins collecting Australian-accented speech data for a horse racing betting system, through to becoming a critical data supplier for the world's leading AI labs across both the US and China.
Ryan walks through taking the CEO role in early 2024 in the wake of a major customer loss and share price fall, and the hard calls made since, including bringing in more than 20 new hires from customers and competitors to rebuild the company around quality and deep researcher partnerships. He explains what Appen actually sells to frontier labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind, from finance and coding data through to humanoid robotics training, and how a distributed network of over a million contributors gets matched to highly specific, often complex tasks.
Ryan details the standout growth of Appen's China business, now running past a US$175 million annualised run rate, and the deliberate strategy of building fully standalone Chinese operations to move at local speed. The conversation also covers the shift toward generative AI revenue, a $12 million cost-out driven by internal AI automation, the risks and role of synthetic data, and Ryan's take on frontier AI safety debates, the compute bottleneck, and where the AI race between the US and China is really headed.
#VantagePoint #Appen #ASX #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #APX
14 Sept 2026
Beyond the subtitles: AI-Media's AI-native transformation
AI-Media Technologies Ltd (ASX: AIM) Co-Founder, Director and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Abrahams sat down with the host of Vantage Point Podcast Simon Hinsley to discuss the 23-year journey from a captioning start-up for Foxtel to a global, AI-native broadcast technology business.
Tony walks through the pivotal 2021 acquisition of US based EEG, the maker of captioning encoders that sit at the very last point of the broadcast signal before it goes to air and why owning that hardware turned out to be the key strategic asset behind everything that followed.
Tony details the company's 2025 shift to being fully AI-native, retiring its last human live captioner and replacing legacy revenue with a growing suite of LEXI products, including LEXI Voice, which live-dubs broadcast content into other languages. Tony shares real examples in action, including a Taiwanese broadcaster needing live Mandarin translation of Donald Trump.
It's a candid conversation about surviving early cash flow scares, scaling without returning to the market for capital, and what needs to happen next to grow the company across EMEA, APAC, government, and enterprise.
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