Content note: this episode discusses suicide, self-harm and family violence. Support details are at the bottom of these notes.

Before Elliot Taylor was a tech founder, he spent fifteen years sitting with people on the worst days of their lives. He ran community homes. He had kids sleeping on his couch after they’d been kicked out of their homes. His place became a safe house for people leaving violent relationships. And the longer he did it, the clearer it got that the model he was working inside couldn't reach the scale the problem was actually at.

So he went looking for a more scalable way to have impact, and to his own surprise he founded a startup.

Throughline builds the infrastructure that connects people to the right mental health or online harm support the moment they go looking for it. Someone tells ChatGPT they don't want to live anymore. Someone searches Google for a way out of a violent relationship. Throughline is the layer that gets them to a real service in their own country and their own language, one that's actually open when they call.

In this episode, Kate asks what he's learned building a company in a place most founders would never think to look. They get into why fear, rather than any shortage of services, is what stands between a person and help. How you experiment when being wrong isn't an option. What it's like building product while the laws that govern it are still being drafted around you. And how you look after a team who spend their days reading the hardest things people write.

Elliot's ambition is to build the biggest mental health intervention the world has ever seen.

If you need support: Lifeline 13 11 14 (Australia), 1737 call or text (New Zealand), 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732 (Australia, family and sexual violence).