Simon Baume: COO, Eucalyptus

Published 4th June, 2025.

Simon Baume is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Eucalyptus, a global healthtech company valued at over $500 million and backed by Investors including Blackbird and Bond. Eucalyptus builds digital preventative healthcare clinics and serves hundreds of thousands of patients across Australia, the UK, Japan and more. Simon leads their Australian business and oversees internal operations including legal, HR, risk, and systems — playing a key role in scaling the company’s complex, multi-brand platform.

This is Simon's first ever interview.

It’s time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy.

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Hosted by Vidit Agarwal, Founder of Curiosity Center and The High Flyers Podcast.

It’s now time to explore your curiosity.

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In this rare, long-form conversation, Simon Baume opens up about:

• Growing up on Sydney’s North Shore in a logic-only household, with two doctor parents and zero emotional validation
• Learning fractions from his dad at the dinner table — and why being told he was smart became both fuel and burden
• Teaching subjects he hadn’t studied, slicing cucumbers at Nando’s, and getting fired after four weeks for “inventing burgers”
• Obsessing over the HSC, crashing at uni, and how his now-wife taught him to break the rules and go to the beach
• Leaving Westpac after 11 months of gym sessions and fake meetings — and why LegalVision gave him his first taste of real leadership
• Doing the work no one wanted at Eucalyptus: building the risk team, running customer support, and plugging org-wide gaps
• The chaos of scaling ops behind the scenes — from Ozempic stockouts to building multi-tiered medical contingency plans
• How he turned operations from “in the way of marketing” to a competitive moat through consistency, culture, and speed
• His frameworks for goal-setting, reporting, and trade-offs between cost, quality and speed — and why he avoids perfectionism
• His evolving relationship with Tim Doyle, and learning to lead independently without chasing validation
• Leading through layoffs, absorbing backlash, and why sitting with hard conversations (without explaining them away) is real leadership
• How therapy, fatherhood, and brutal self-reflection reshaped his management style and unlocked his empathy
• Why he believes burnout is optional, how he sets team pace, and the tools Eucalyptus uses to stay on track
• What’s next: expanding Eucalyptus globally, building AI-powered care models, and doubling down on internal systems

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