She raised $4 million just before Christmas, moved out of her marital home inside sixty days, and came back from a two-week break to find an interim CEO appointed and the doors of her own company closed to her. In Part 2 of her Perspective X conversation with Pauline Fetaui, Yas Grigaliunas tells the part founders almost never say out loud: nine months locked out of World's Biggest Garage Sale, watching the brand she built be steered somewhere she would never have taken it.

Yas walks through the pattern that ran underneath the whole journey — high highs and low lows landing on top of each other. The Lord Mayor's award the same week her mum died. The $4 million raise the same month as her divorce. And then "prove your value, Yas" — sell to customers from home, no access to the product, no hand in the brand, while a million dollars of the raise went on things she would never have signed off.

She is unsparing but never vengeful about the board and advisers who did it. Two truths can be true at once, she says: they believed they were giving her space to manage a hard year; what it actually was, was a displacement. It took a founder friend shoving a lawyer's number at her in a bar to get her back inside the company she still majority-owned.

The numbers tell the rest. A $200,000 Ignite Ideas grant ten days before liquidation. A $20-odd million large global retailer partnership ready to sign. A $6,000 bank balance the month after half a million in revenue. Yas unpacks the over-engineered structure, the siloed executives, the curated board papers, and the moment the safe-harbour report from BDO finally backed what she had been saying all along.

What she does with the ending is the lesson. She rang every investor by phone before the liquidation notice went public. She traded through so staff got their final pay. She stayed thirty days after the liquidator was appointed to hand back a spotless warehouse — because, as her liquidator put it, the best stay and the worst disappear.

There is also the human spine of it: building a team around neurodiverse people and "the cracks you can't see", the scars she is not ashamed of, and her daughters watching her lose everything and land — without, in their eyes, any effort — back at Videopro, the company she helped build twenty years ago. "I lost my company," she says, "but I didn't lose myself."

Yas Grigaliunas is the founder of World's Biggest Garage Sale and Circonomy, a pioneer of Australia's circular economy who raised $4 million and partnered with a large domestic retailer before the company went into liquidation in 2024. She is now part of the leadership team at Videopro.

Links:

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- Videopro: https://www.videopro.com.au

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Episode Summary

Part 2 of Yas Grigaliunas on Perspective X is the harder chapter: the $4 million raise, the divorce, and nine months locked out of the company she founded. She walks through the liquidation of World's Biggest Garage Sale — the large global retailer deal, the grant, the $6,000 bank balance — and how she led the ending with integrity, then landed back at Videopro. She lost the company. She did not lose herself.

Time Stamps

00:00 - The part no one tells

00:51 - Building a team around neurodiversity

08:49 - Leading the narrative into liquidation

10:43 - High highs, low lows: the pattern

12:03 - Raised $4M, then locked out

14:10 - "Prove your value": nine months outside

19:43 - When founders take the fall in silence

21:19 - Two truths about the board

28:13 - The large global retailer deal and the $6,000 call

38:29 - Closing the company with integrity

47:40 - Lessons for founders raising capital

55:21 - Landing back at Videopro

66:53 - What the world hasn't caught up on

About the host

Pauline Fetaui hosts Perspective X, drawing out the founder stories that usually stay hidden — the cost, the conviction, and the decisions made under real pressure.

About Day One Network

Perspective X is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators and investors. To learn more, join our newsletter (https://dayone.fm/newsletter) to be notified of new and upcoming shows. Day One helps founders and startup operators make better business decisions more often.

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Mentioned in this episode:

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Day One sting

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