The 25-Year-Old Who Raised $6M From Early Facebook Investors

How Finnlay Morcombe did it: The 25-Year-Old Who Raised $6M From Early Facebook Investors

Most 25-year-olds are figuring out their first job. Finnlay Morcombe built Fluency, a platform that maps how work actually happens in Fortune 500 organizations. He and his co-founder Ollie are self-taught devs from Melbourne, and by the time of this conversation Fluency had 15 million in pipeline and Fortune 100 partners.

The raise almost didn't happen on purpose. Finnlay says they "weren't really sure we were going to raise at the beginning" — they had enough traction that a raise "wasn't imperative." So they wrote "a literal two pager," with "no deck no data room," sent it to about 10 funds, and ended up speaking to "18 funds or less total for the whole thing." What worked, in his telling: he had already moved to the US regardless of the outcome, the attitude that "we have enough capital in the bank anyway and we're going to get it done," real traction on the new product, and the fact that what they were building "perfectly hit a thesis" Accel had internally. Diligence was "12 background calls pretty much just on myself" — they even called his brother, a chippy, while he was on site with "hammers and stuff going in the background."

Fluency itself gets deployed onto everyone's laptop inside an organization. It takes screenshots, scrapes system logs, captures network logs, and from all of it builds what Finnlay calls a "work ontology" — a queryable graph of nodes and edges that is "non-monotonic," meaning "the present can affect the past." There are three use cases today: tell businesses what their processes actually are, tell them how to improve them (usually through automation), and measure the ROI on change itself. He stresses it is all done "in aggregate" and that "we don't allow individual employee monitoring or productivity indexing." Where it's heading is foundational models — not large language models but "world models" that predict "the next most likely event," with a "sovereign world model per customer." One of their investors "heads up AI at Princeton." His timeline: 1.5 in "8 to 12 weeks," act two in "9 months."

This is a company built on pivots. Before Fluency's current form, they were doing SOP creation — and "didn't feel the product market fit." Selling it was "like Copus pushing the ball up the hill." When they finally went to market with the work-mapping version, the read came in fast: "within one week we're like okay we're hard pivoting because the reception was completely different." The old documentation product is now, by his estimate, "10 basis points like .1% of the new product."

The conviction underneath it all is that they'd "rather company die trying" than "be a $50 million company" — they'd "rather spend all of our money and die at 100 million" than play it safe. Finnlay misses his family, his brother, his family's pets, his girlfriend, and his friends back home; the number-one cost of building Fluency, he says, is "time with family." But work, for him and the team, "is one of our hobbies." Asked what he'd do differently going back to the 2023 Swinber accelerator days, he lands on one word: "agency is so powerful." Just try and do — "what's going to happen?"

What you'll hear

• The accidental raise — how a "literal two pager" sent to about 10 funds became a 6 million round from Accel before he was even fully moved in
• What Fluency actually does — laptops, screenshots, system and network logs, and a three-layer "work ontology" of how work gets done
• World models, not LLMs — why the next act is a "sovereign world model per customer" that predicts "what's going to happen next"
• The one-week hard pivot — going to market with SOP creation, feeling no product-market fit, and switching within a week
• Tall poppy syndrome — the three places Finnlay actually sees it in Australia, and why he doesn't really care
• Die trying — why they'd rather spend all their money and die at 100 million than be a 50 million company
• The cost of building — skateboarding, mountain biking, a wider friend circle, and most of all time with family

Key claims from this episode

Chapters

Quotes from this episode

Themes Finnlay returns to

• Die trying over a safe exit — they'd "rather company die trying" and "spend all of our money and die at 100 million" than be a "$50 million company"
• Agency — the through-line he keeps returning to: "agency is so powerful," you can "be super ambitious from day one and you can just do things"
• Pivot on the signal — feeling no product-market fit on SOP creation, then hard pivoting "within one week" when the reception flipped
• Work as a hobby — "we're lucky that I guess like work is one of our hobbies," even at "14 hour days you know six days a week"
• Mapping reality, not surveilling people — a "work ontology" built "in aggregate," with no "individual employee monitoring or productivity indexing"