Behind the Scenes

Poker Tracker

One of our engineers built the most intricate internal tool we have this month and it is only for poker. It tracks every game and every player, and within a day the leaderboard was the main topic of conversation, with someone pointing out that the top five players were already in the red. The obvious next step was a new casino arm called Lyra Underground, and a few people immediately asked to be signed up as pit boss with one engineer getting caught watching a game without buying in, which he explained was to learn everyone's ranges. Trivia night is coming back in November with powerups and a buzzer, and the office has been asking when since the last one. Somewhere in the middle of all this an engineer asked Claude if an adult at 1200 elo could realistically make chess grandmaster, and the answer was that you would have needed to start around age 12. Nobody plans any of this. It just keeps happening.

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Lyra Studio Is Live

Lyra Studio is our new media arm where we film early stage Silicon Valley founders and their customers, cut the story for every channel, and hand over the edit, the shorts and the raw footage so they can post it anywhere. Every shoot starts with a prep call to find the hook, then we turn up on site for the interview and b roll, and the finished film goes out through the Lyra network of 2,000+ founders, investors and operators as well. The list of companies we have filmed with is already long, and includes Forward, Hebbian Robotics, 83 Sciences, IMPACT Drones, Andco, Shepherd Robotics, Mira, Inyo and Spaceflow. It all started with one trip to San Francisco in September and a lot of camera gear.

LyraLink Took the Hackathon

Our first internal hackathon had its demo night in the Sydney office with Melbourne dialling in, and every team got up and showed what they built. Two of our engineers won it with LyraLink, a tool for engineers using Claude Code and Codex that captures what the agents learn in each session and shares it across the team and our client engagements. They took home the $1,000, and the judges were specific about why. One said it solves one of the main problems newer engineers have, which is finding help without pulling someone else away from their work, and another said the presentation was tonnes of fun and kept the attention up the whole way through. The best internal tools are the ones built by the people who actually need them.

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Welcome!!

Alfonso Kim shipped cronk, a voice driven iOS planner on the App Store, and trained YOLO models to spot people from drone altitude for disaster response.

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Bhandari spent two years at ANZ building the authorisation service for 8M+ retail customers and a C++ risk engine for real time trader pricing, and led a CLIP training team at Monash DeepNeuron.

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Wilson joined in Brisbane from Pangea Chat, where he built an AI assistant handling 1,000+ requests per second and lifted first time user engagement by 50%. He also cofounded DeerX with a team of 7.

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Jackson won gold at the International Biology Olympiad, then took one compsci course and switched to building. He ported NYT Connections into a multiplayer Discord activity now running across 600+ servers.