Technology should serve humans during the moments that matter most in our lives. 

I co-founded Vera to help families care for their ageing parents. After building products and teams at Google and Airtasker and advising and investing in numerous startups, I am applying my experience to solve this massive, often overlooked, problem. 

As well as my work at Vera, I co-host The Startup Podcast. TSP aims to provide actionable advice to founders looking to build a Silicon Valley-style startup, wherever they are in the world.

Meet Vera: https://vera.guide

Listen to The Startup Podcast: https://tsp.show


*My connection policy (tl;dr don't sell me stuff)*

I like to use LinkedIn as a way of building a community of interesting and interested people in technology and the technology industry. If you are:

-A software developer, product manager, designer, marketer anywhere in the world
-An organisational leader or manager in engineering or at a tech company
-Otherwise heavily involved in the tech industry

I'd be happy to connect! Even if we haven't met.

Even if you're not one of those things I'm probably happy to connect, as long as you don't immediately turn around and try to sell me something. If you do, I consider that a breach of trust and will block and report you.

Yaniv Bernstein

Sunday night. I'm on a plane, making multiple nontrivial changes to my product using Claude Code Web.

Don't listen to the haters, we live in an age of miracles.

Helping people care for ageing parents | The Startup Podcast

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I had a beer with one of Australia's best founders on Friday night, running a 9-figure company that will become a unicorn in the nearish future.

He was late, and sent me a text: "I have to wait for my agents to finish."

Ten minutes later, he showed up to the pub with an open laptop. "I figured I would just bring my agents with me". Every couple of minutes he would glance over at the screen to see what they were up to.

I wasn't mad. I understood. After all, I had kicked off two changes on Claude Code Web on my phone while I had been waiting.

Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. And here is a fact:

Every one of the best CEOs, CTOs, and business leaders I know is spending more time building than they have in years. They are AI-pilled, they are obsessed, and they are LOVING IT.

I've been in this game for 20 years now, and this does feel different. The way startups work is changing, and the change is coming from the top, driven by founders who have rediscovered the joy of building.

LinkedIn took away my 🤖 emoji, so I've updated my profile picture to include my little robot friend.

There's a club that more than 10% of Australians are members of...

...yet nobody talks about it.

...most of the members don't even know they've joined.

...and like the Hotel California, members can check out any time you like, but they can never leave.

It's Club Sandwich, the club for folks in the sandwich generation: juggling, work, kids, and ageing parents.

At Vera, Melissa and I are incredibly proud to have created the Club Sandwich podcast and community, hosted by the incomparable Sarah Macdonald.

Serious topics, discussed with warmth and humour by Sarah and our wonderful group of "Clubbers". 

Episode 1 dropped today, and is SO good. Get it in your ears now!

We're back baby!

After a couple of months off, The Startup Podcast is fresh in your feeds for 2026. With AI upending everything in startups, the discussions we are having with some of the best startup folks in the world are more important than ever.

Thanks to our marvellous sponsors .TECH Domains and Vanta for making this season possible.

Still reading? Why are you still here? Go get it in your ears now!

I know a number of you are jonesing for the 2026 season of The Startup Podcast to start.

Not long now! But in the meantime, here's a fun conversation I had with the marvellous Scotty Allen 🚌 on The Bootstrap- Startups from Scratch Podcast about what I've learned so far about building a startup in the AI era.

Tomorrow's episode of The Startup Podcast is with a founder who's started 10+ companies out of Silicon Valley, went through YC, was mentored by Paul Graham and Sam Altman, and regularly sits in rooms with Fortune 500 CEOs and unicorn founders.

She told me that this is the wildest time she has ever seen in Silicon Valley.

A few things we talked about:

The private anxiety among successful people in SF is the highest she's ever seen. 

She has a single interview question that she says now matters more than anything else on a candidate's resume.

She personally shows up at CEOs' offices and gives them three hours to build a working app. No delegating.

She told me why the era of loud, self-promoting founders raising big rounds is giving way to something much quieter.

Drops tomorrow. You do not want to miss it (trust me).

Commonwealth Bank

Hired to create an example of how engineering should be done at the bank. It required a cultural shift, upskilling the team, process changes, building tools, and infrastructure, not just in testing, but development as well. I both learned and taught TypeScript, SST.dev, Micronaut, AWS Lambdas, etc.

That while under constant pressure to conform to the status quo to comply with corporate standards.
* Shifted the team from working in functional silos to a team of T-shaped engineers. Software engineers now update specifications, write e2e tests, and deploy their changes.
* Successfully coached software and test engineers how to write better application and test code that is also easier to write and maintain with example PRs and via code reviews, in frameworks where engineers had far more experience.
* Created the bank’s first ephemeral test environments, isolated tests run for every PR in isolated test environments.
* Reduced average CI/CD time and cost by 50% through pipeline optimizations.
* Replaced hours of hand-capturing screenshots and logs saved in Word files per release, with an automated test suite running on GitHub Actions.
* Reduced time to find relevant logs for a failed request from 10s of minutes to seconds.

Staff Quality Engineer

Octopus Deploy

I’ve built a new SRE team and we've saved >500k/year while improving the performance, reliability and supportability of our shared internal tooling and infrastructure. We enable faster and safer delivery of software to our users. 

We cover CI/CD infrastructure and release management tooling. We also consult on software quality-related areas including testing and incident management.

Engineering Manager

Equal Experts

BIG W hired Equal Experts to uplift their engineering capabilities, enabling them to replace their existing legacy systems with a new event-driven microservices architecture.

Within BIG W, I coached testers, automation engineers, and their leads. Within my squad, I coached engineers on modern testing practices.
* Halved the manual testing cycle using Serenity BDD in Java using Selenium WebDriver, visual regression tests in JavaScript using Percy and TestCafe, and Lighthouse CI on Jenkins on AWS.
* Led the creation of a performance test suite using Gatling in Scala to test in minutes not days.
* Presented a series of talks for 200+ quality engineers and managers across Woolworths.

Test Architect

SiteMinder

Successfully stabilised and retained a development team of 16 that was at risk of leaving due to low morale and the departure of their engineering manager. Improved morale and engagement, I:
* Renegotiated roadmap for clear prioritization and realistic delivery dates
* Repaired relationships with PMs through better communication and delivery
* Reduced organizational risk through team cross-training and better work allocation
* Supported engineers with 1:1s (every 1-2 weeks), coaching, mentoring, career conversations, performance and promotion reviews.

Improved engineering practices company-wide:
* Led initiatives to improve the company’s organisation’s engineering culture, e.g implementing postmortem processes.
* Created and deployed company-wide test automation strategy and testing standards
* Drew together a new quality organization with 10 testers to increase cross-training, development and to work on cross-team efforts. Hired 4 quality engineers.

Successfully led testing of and helped coordinate deployment of a multiyear companywide authentication and authorization platform critical to the company’s growth plans.

Canva

* Championed an initiative to reduce the time for ideas to reach production from months to days using a change management process: identified an opportunity, created a shared vision across QA and Infrastructure, aligned goals and started projects to improve the cycle time.
* Reduced the build and test times while improving AWS costs using Terraform for BuildKite CI on EC2 and AWS CloudWatch.

Senior Engineer (Developer Efficiency)

Google

* Responsible for the delivery (coordinating feature development, testing, building, release approvals and rollout) of the Google Drive Android app (> 1 Billion stalls, >100M monthly users). 
* Supported the testing and releases of Google Slides, Sheets and Docs.
* Managed QA across Sydney and Hyderabad (6 QA testers).
* Shift right testing - monitored analytics, bugs, support issues, reviews, user feedback and other metrics to determine rollout speed and identify product priorities for the engineering team.
* Designed and implemented test and release processes, coordinated and controlled rollout of new features. Coached engineers to write better automated tests, run experiments and write test plans.

For Google Maps' transit backend - acted as a technical product manager by leading the identification, design and implementation of projects to improve product quality and developer productivity. Led and worked with two engineers to extend/deploy/create frameworks for our continuous delivery system and write debugging tools. Also performed vendor selection, writing SoW and managed a testing contractor.

Test Engineer and Release Manager

TestLogistics

Technical Test Consultant

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Senior Test Analyst

Object Trading

Manual and automated testing of pricing and trading systems
* Tested connections to most major derivative and some equity exchange (CME, CBoT, EUREX, ICE, SFE, IDEM, MEFF, ISE, XETRA, ML, HKFE, SGX, TSE, OSE, etc)
* FIX API testing
* Test automation
* Test tool development  - wrote testing tools for testing proprietary and FIX based protocols

Other:
* Technical support - Phone/email 
* Documentation writer
* Account management

Senior Test Engineer

Citect

* Identified waste in test documentation processes, created and led a project to apply lean ideas for our processes to improve productivity
*  Project/development leads for automated daily build tests and test management system/database
*  Project leads for network simulation software
*  Tested internationalisation, globalisation, web services, distributed servers, wireless Pocket PC clients, Programmable Logic Controller drivers and APIs
*  Designed, developed and verified testing tools to examine software stability, scalability, reliability and performance; including test data generators for stress and data integrity testing
*  Profiled and optimised memory and processor usage of distributed testing and production code
*  Specified, purchased and commissioned resources as required, developed testing procedures, maintained testing infrastructure and trained staff

Test Automation Engineer

I’m working to make a real difference. I’m an engineering leader passionate about helping companies work better, so they can better improve the lives of those working there and the customers they serve.
 
We owe those we work with to help them do the best work of their lives. We spend so much time there that we should all be proud of what we achieve each day.
 
My experiences cover small startups, scale-ups and enterprises, including Google, Canva and CBA. I love technology, working in the bigger picture and helping those around us.

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Yaniv Bernstein

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The Battle

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Paulo Lai

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Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Yaniv Bernstein's LinkedIn Performance

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