Business Is Boring: Recent Episodes
The Spinoff
Think business is boring? This podcast proves it's anything but. Join Simon Pound as he talks to everyone from accidental entrepreneurs to industry leaders about their business journeys and what propelled them to where they are today. Made in partnership with Spark Lab.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
After helping scale Uber in the UK, Frankie founder George Fenwicke decided to tackle a bigger challenge, streamlining the process to manage commercial property. We talked her journey, systems thinking and turning property management into something fresh! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Descending from the Dharug speaking Nations of Sydney, Mikaela Jade is the founder and CEO at Indigital – Australia’s first Indigenous edutech company. In town for Future State, a Spark Lab and Semi Permanent event, she joined Simon Pound to talk accessing ancient knowledge to guide tomorrow’s AI thinking and her mission to close the digital divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
OnBoard is on a mission to improve diversity of thought for startup and growth company boards. Founder Cassie McAdams and Program Director Sophie McLernon join Simon Pound to talk about the work they do to get more perspectives onto boards and to help more companies engage with a wider pool of directors. With day jobs at Movac and Snowball Effect, they share their experience in the growth ecosystem and how they believe things can improve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For Kate Sylvester, 2023 marks 30 years of design, helping make New Zealand’s reputation in the fashion industry across the globe. Kate joins Simon Pound to talk creating the brand, growing the sector, and her work as a founder of Mindful Fashion, the industry collective helping support ethical practices in local fashion production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Woolchemy is a local wool technology company with a patented approach to creating a woven, absorbent fabric layer for use in nappies and other hygiene products. Founder and CEO Derelee Potroz-Smith has pioneered the science, industry partnerships, and closed a $1.5m funding round with a plan to have her wool replace widely used petro-chemical fabrics, putting New Zealand's sheep industry back on top of the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Pac Studio are one of NZ’s top architecture studios, who work to bring fun, colour and a personal feel to every project. Last year their beautiful project, Waimataruru, won Here magazine House of the Year and National housing gong at the New Zealand Architecture Awards. Co-founders Aaron Paterson and Sarosh Mulla join us to talk what it takes to be an architect, how is it to be the steward for the biggest purchase most people will ever make, and how to maintain your own voice within your practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The pace at which generative AI is advancing is rapidly accelerating, giving rise to a sense of uncertainty among many individuals regarding its impact on society. Dr Jonnie Penn, a scholar from the University of Cambridge and Harvard, is an expert on the history of AI and an influential thought-leader, shaping the development of AI towards a positive future. During his visit to town for the SparkLab Future State: New Realities event, Dr. Penn engaged in a conversation with Simon Pound, delving into the past, present, and future of AI development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aera is a new financial institution aimed at people who earn good money but are locked out of the housing market because they cannot afford extremely high deposits. Its founder, Derek Handley, grew one of the world's first mobile-focused technology creative companies, The Hyperfactory, and then worked with Sir Richard Branson on The B Team. Listen for a chat about society, technology, finance, religion, and climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Xero has defined the SaaS ecosystem here. Although an accounting company, it stood out as a delightful experience and brand, and much of that spirit is thanks to Philip Fierlinger, co-founder and design leader for Xero. He's behind the reconciliation feature and the Do Beautiful Business idea. Today, he is co-CEO and founder at Upstock, a hospo wholesale ordering app building out another change to an industry. Philip shares the stories behind the work anyone that's used Xero knows, and his next mission at Upstock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alice Shopland is a pioneer in the dairy-free cheese space in Aotearoa. Her company, Angel Food, has been at the forefront of distributing vegan cheeses since the early 2000s. With her products stocked in 350 stores and a range that includes animal-free sour cream, cheeses, and feta, they now have their sights set on expansion into Australia. Alice joins Simon to chat about her journey and their current equity crowdfund through PledgeMe to fund the big push over the ditch. You can check out Angel Food's PledgeMe campaign here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Founder of Google's Empathy Lab and Grandmother—a nonprofit that brings diverse voices and perspectives into solving big problems—Danielle Krettek is a trailblazer in empathetic design. She has played pivotal roles as a member of the team behind the iPhone, iPad, and the Google X moonshot factory. While visiting town for the Spark Lab Future State: New Realities event, Danielle joined Simon Pound for a chat about working alongside Steve Jobs, the role of spiritual practice in her life, and using business as a tool for good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Here for the Spark Lab Festival of the Future, Sam Conniff is a British expert in uncertainty and author of the 2018 book 'Be More Pirate'. His new creation is the world’s first interactive documentary that up-skills people in dealing with uncertainty and making it their advantage. His career has included being a New York Times bestselling author, a champion for the outcasts and the founder of Livity, one of the world’s leading social enterprise and youth creative agencies. He joins Simon Pound to talk how uncertainty became his greatest power, and gives his tips on how to harness it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do New Zealanders make their businesses more sustainable? As the head of innovation at the Ellen MacArthur foundation, Ken Webster literally wrote the book on building a circular economy. He shares his insights from an overseas perspective in this special live episode.
Meet the couple bringing you Tony's Chocolate, Seedlip, McClures Pickles and now, Good Sh*t - the soda that is intriguingly all about your gut health. Becs Caughey and Nick Brown share their expertise in business, music and distributing great brands.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mānuka honey is an internationally known product, but the oil sourced from the plant's leaves can have major skin-care benefits. Stuart Cairns, founder of Mānuka Bioscience, talks to Simon about his mission - Making Mānuka oil New Zealand's next great, natural industry.
Eleven years ago, Frances Shoemack began creating contemporary smelling perfumes with all natural products. Since then, her company has gone global and challenged an industry that overwhelmingly relies on synthetic ingredients. How did she achieve this, and where to from here?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Arguably starting the first ever social network, Boyd Multerer is an Xbox live legend who was right in the crux of its inauguration. Implementing an important lesson learnt in his time at Microsoft, Multerer now leads kiwi-born company Kry10 where they're creating a new, flexible operating system for the industrial internet of things.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Having bought his first share at age 12, Sam Stubbs has always had an eye on the economic and financial world. Now co-founder and managing director of Simplicity (the only non-profit KiwiSaver fund manager) he joins the pod to speak on leading the mission of conscious investment and providing financial literacy for New Zealanders.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Over the past 20 years, Sustainable Business Network have taken sustainable business practice from the fringes to front and centre. Founder/CEO Rachel Brown talks the journey, and how all businesses can work with them to improve their impact.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Already having stamped an everlasting mark on the culture, design and creative conference company Semi Permanent have planted their roots and are here to stay. Now heading into its 20th year, director/curator Simon Velvin joins his namesake to shares a candid look on what it takes to stay at the front of things.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Since it was founded in 1992, Matta has helped divert over 60 million tonnes of PVC and rubber waste from landfill, recycling it into safety matting used in playgrounds and workplaces around the world. New managing director Brent Harris joins Business is Boring this week to talk about his unusual career path into the business and how Matta continues to lead the way in new methods and approaches to recycling.
Indian cuisine is more than just butter chicken made at the mall and Perzen Patel is on a mission to bring that to light within the diaspora. With exploration, education and (most importantly) family at the forefront, she started Dolly Mumma: A food business aiming to teach the wonders of Indian food with ease. Known to many listeners for her enlightening stories shared on The Spinoff, Patel's experimental endeavours are routed in tradition and winning over Aotearoa into the future.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Before we gear up full speed ahead towards the flying cars of the future, self driving vehicles are here now. Promising to be a big part of the future too, Nuro is the US-based/NZ-led self driving delivery company envisioning a world where everyday life is bettered through robotics. Co-founder Dave Ferguson joins the pod to chat how he went from industry beginnings working the Mars Rover, to division leadership at Google, to now with Nuro.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
You may think Seaweed is just the slimy stuff rudely interrupting your summer swims but when you dive a bit deeper, it is an inventive solution to many agricultural and horticultural issues. An industry we're only just starting to explore, one company at the front of that exploration is AgriSea: a multi-generational Paeroa-based seaweed company with 25 years of innovation in the area. Now under the leadership of CEO Clare Bradley and Chief Innovation Officer Tane Bradley, they join Simon to chat leading the fix to dirty rivers, farting and burping cows, traditional fertiliser, and more.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Most contracts made at 16 between best friends don't generally come to fruition, but that isn't the case for Baina co-founders Bailey Meredith and Anna Fahey. Seeing a gap in the market for an ethically made, organic and stylish towel, their mission was set: to build a company reflecting their values, whilst also offering a more thoughtful approach to production. To talk their growth beyond Aotearoa and the journey so far, Bailey and Anna join the pod.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
From seeing a gap in 2014 within boarding schools for an app solution to help track student absences, Kurt Meyer and Paul Organ have grown far past reading sales books to learn the ropes of business. Having built that initial idea beyond the baby steps, Orah was born - now serving as a kiwi tech company with a bigger mission to help provide a solution for student wellbeing and engagement. To talk distributed work, helping schools run better and the journey so far, co-ceos Kurt and Paul join the pod.
Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.
Living his life overcoming exterior barriers as a blind individual, Jonathan Mosen understands the importance of hope and belief despite one's disabilities. An advocate for the blind (and disabled community as a whole), making a difference in the space has always been his biggest driver. Now helming the CEO title at Workbridge, Jonathan joins Simon to talk inclusion/diversity in the workplace and how we can improve disabled representation in business.
Imagine being able to manage a herd of cows from your smartphone. That's exactly what the Halter system, founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineer Craig Piggot, allows farmers to do. Halter's solar-powered patented Cowgorithm technology allows farmers to move, manage and monitor their herds remotely and it's been such a success that Halter already boasts a 130-strong team. Craig has been named a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader and he joins Simon Pound to talk about Halter's fascinating agri-tech, the importance of building great teams and the most important thing to consider when raising capital.
Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.
In a bid to increase financial literacy and confidence among young people, Kendall Flutey (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu) co-founded Banqer – a financial education platform used by over 300,000 students in Australasia. On our final episode of Going Global, Kendall joins Simon Pound and Brianne West to talk about how Banqer stepped beyond Aotearoa to help improve the prospects of rangatahi all over the world.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Apprenticeships are common in the trades, but how about one that helps people in companies learn how business works, all whilst developing their soft and hard skills? Rob Woolner, MD at Autex, saw this gap and has created the Business Apprenticeship. Hear about the journey, the need, and how it works as he joins Simon on the pod.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
After conquering the far North's cafe scene in ownership, Debbie and Nigel Stowe started to notice a vital gap in local plant-based options. From that gap, Vince was born. Becoming Northland’s finest multi award winning alternative mince makers, hear their business, health, family and product journey to creating unique veg-packed meat alternatives people (including Simon) are loving!
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
As the co-founder and COO of Kami, Alliv Samson is helping build the future of online education. She joins Brianne and Simon to talk about creating one of the fastest-growing EdTech companies in the world, and taking it global.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
While many high end brands pride themselves on sole exclusivity, luxury leather goods company Yu Mei is more interested in establishing a welcoming community. Yu Mei founder, Jessie Wong, joins Simon Pound to talk about building a premium brand that values function equally with form to ensure its products are always on trend (and therefore a more accessible fashion investment).
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Female pleasure has always been a taboo topic, but Girls Get Off are on a mission to change that. Co-founder Viv Conway joins Simon to chat GGO's place within the wellness world, building a feedback loop between business and culture and what's coming next.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Lucy Blakiston is an unlikely exporter – she’s not sending physical products overseas, but her brand is undeniably international. As the co-founder and CEO of Shit You Should Care About (SYSCA), which has amassed 3.6 million social media followers, Lucy brings new meaning to the term global news, digesting the biggest stories in the world and giving them context relevant to their young audience. She joins Simon and Brianne to talk how it all came to be.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The Ironclad Pan Company's mission is simple: to keep things sustainable like they used to be. And to put their money where their mouth is, the New Zealand and Australian-based cookware company offers a 100-year guarantee on their products. Co-founder Joe Carter joins the pod to explain how you do that, caring for their pans to guarantee important longevity, and what’s next for the business.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
An ingenious space satellite solar tech started by three 21-year-old Auckland Uni students, Astrix Astronautics has launched from lessons in the classroom to solar panels in space. Co-founder and CEO Fia Jones joined Business is Boring to talk physics, the science of business, making ideas into reality for the hardest conditions on and off the planet, and what’s next.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Rachel Taulelei is strong advocate for the Māori economy and sustainability, and her connection to her Māoritanga has been vital in her career – from founding sustainable fishery Yellow Brick Road, to being CEO of food and beverage company Kono. Now at the helm of Oho, an Aotearoa business design and brand strategy firm, Rachel joins Simon and Brianne to spill her secrets to global success.
Growing up in poverty, losing his mum at age eight, and leaving school at 14, Saia Finau Latu had the odds stacked against him. In 2016 further family tragedy left Latu at a crossroads, and the path he chose led to founding a leading construction recycling business with a passion for sustainability and a heart for the community. Join Simon Pound for this very special kōrero with a truly remarkable entrepreneur.
Content warning this episode contains details of a serious car accident that some may find distressing. Please take care while listening.
Since Marisa Fong co-founded Madison Recruitment, she has been a leader supporting other leaders. Passionate about connections in correlation with sales and now having gained industry growth to investor and director status, she joins the pod to chat her journey and how she is building the next generation of leaders.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
From Runaway Girl to runway success, for more than 30 years powerhouse designer Karen Walker has built her brand and business globally. Known for clever designs, adventurous collaborations, imaginative storytelling and constantly redefining her approach to retail, Karen shares her world class journey with Brianne and Simon.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
What do you get if you cross a pie with a curry? That's the question that led Ollie Morrison and Logan Stevens to found Roti Bros. The pair join the pod to talk starting a new business mid-pandemic, opening their flagship store in Auckland's Commercial Bay and what they've got planned next.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Production company Augusto have pioneered a hit model. Harnessing the tagline "Blurring the lines between advertising, entertainment and production", their breadth of work truly surpasses all boundaries beyond being just an agency. Working with the likes of Tourism NZ and Netflix, to (most recently) royalty, we’re joined by Michelle Walshe (co-founder and global CEO) to hear their story - how they made it in the big apple, and how COVID brought them back home to rebuild with a focus on impact.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
How do you take your business beyond Aotearoa to the world stage? Welcome to Going Global, a six part pop-up series where we find out. For its inaugural episode, Laura Bell, founder and CEO of SafeStack Academy, joins hosts Brianne West (CEO and founder of Ethique) and Simon Pound (Business is Boring) for a kōrero about everything from the export market for digital products, to how SafeStack Academy found itself helping world-class companies with their cybersecurity training.
Going Global is brought to you in partnership with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. NZTE wants to help more Kiwi businesses reach their global potential. Visit www.getthere.nz to find out more
Even if you've never heard of Canva, you've definitely seen social media posts using its graphic design templates. Mahesh Muralidhar played a part in making the Australian company a global success story, and now back in New Zealand he's leading Phase One Ventures, a start-up incubator with big ambitions for Aotearoa business. He joins the pod this week to talk about his dreams for the incubator, the importance of making business more accessible to youth and his plan to make six unicorns.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
With Girls That Invest, Simran Kaur is dismantling the patriarchy through financial independence and making more women welcome in the world of investing. Now with over 150 thousand Instagram followers and more than a million downloads, hear how she grew Girls That Invest, and why investing should and can be for women/marginalised groups.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
With his workplace mental health platform Groov, Sir John Kirwan is continuing a journey to change the conversation around mental health. An open and prominent figure advocating for awareness in Aotearoa (and beyond), he joins us this week for a chat about the all-important intersection of mental health and business.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
A self-proclaimed "high school drop out", Janine Grainger now works in the blockchain and cryptocurrency tech fields as the CEO and co-founder of New Zealand-based cryptocurrency purchasing platform Easy Crypto. She joins the pod to chat about the company's build to a billion in sales, and where they – and crypto – are headed next.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Coming from humble beginnings in an ambitious yet small market, Special Group has built itself up big from day dot. With a driven mindset of being the biggest and best agency in the world, they have now found huge success as one of NZ's most awarded agencies. Co-founder and CEO, Tony Bradbourne, joins us to talk opening offices around the world, their work (including Gwyneth Paltrow eating her infamous candle), and growing in an industry that’s seen a fair few struggles.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
NewFish is a startup aiming to change the fishing industry for the better. Using fish that might otherwise be waste, they are looking to massively increase our use of macro and micro algae, instigating further progressions of sustainability within NZ's food production systems. To talk the journey, the goals and what’s next, co-founder and GM Hamish Howard joins the pod.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
We first spoke to NZ company, Dotterel in 2019 as they were just coming together with a cool concept for making recording from drones less noisy. Now, over the last three years, they have become the global leaders in capturing sound in noisy environments. Having just announced a new raise of $3m to take a recording breakthrough they’ve made out of the drone industry, CEO and co-founder Shaun Edlin joins us to talk the journey, the biggest change in sound in decades, and taking NZ IP to the world.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Michele Wilson, founder of AWWA period care, was once a corporate lawyer whose side hustle turned into her full time mahi. Now leading conversations around understanding the period cycle through her business, hear her journey of how she built AWWA from a standing start to half a million dollars in sales a month, and the mahi she does to share the sacred kaupapa of the business. Rawe.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week we’re talking tech companies and seeing it, to be it.
Greg Denton excelled in his studies and afterwards, found himself in a big bank. Not loving life in a suit (and saying he was a banker), when he discovered the tech world, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t known it was open to him. If it was hard for him with his background, he wondered how hard it must be for others without his advantages. So, he set up Matchstiq; a way to create more visibility, pathways, and connections into the tech industry.
To talk his journey, how people can get access to this world, and opening up more pathways, Greg Denton joins the pod.
We’ve all heard a lot about the metaverse lately; the virtual worlds we soon might be spending a lot more time in. However, for Sam Ramlu (co-founder of pioneering studio, Method), it’s already beginning. Having built the super successful Wanderer VR game in the unreal engine (one of the leading virtual world builders), how did they pull this off? What is the story behind her success at Method? We find out, as well as how we can make sure the metaverse future is better than our tech present.
Business is Boring is back! With the support of Spark Lab, we’ll be talking with some of Aotearoa’s most successful business people and checking back in with some of the 250+ guests we’ve had on the podcast over the last five years. We last spoke with Sharesies 3EO Brooke Roberts in 2017, when the site had been live for a month and had just ticked over 2000 users. Today the platform has half a million Kiwi on board, with $2 billion invested, and has recently expanded into Australia. Brooke returns this week to talk about all that’s happened in the last five years and what being a 3EO actually involves.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Supply shortages earlier this year brought attention to the fact that although we grow plenty of oats here in New Zealand – and know a thing or two about milk – we have been importing all commercial oat milk. Boring Oat Milk founder Morgan Maw was in a place to do something about that, knowing oats through her first oat biscuit venture. To talk about the three-year journey she had to go on to get onto shelves, the state of the oat and alternative milk industry here, how she’s using brand and storytelling and what’s next, she joined Business is Boring via Zoom this week.
-
This is the last episode of Business is Boring. Thank you so much to everyone who has listened, shared the podcast, got in touch, talked to me about it and been a supporter. It’s been an enormous privilege to have been able to talk to an interesting person doing cool things every week for five years.
We’re going to take a little bit of time off and come back with a new concept. I’m really looking forward to changing things up a little to keep hopefully providing value to you all, and to keep trying to do our bit to share some of the great stories of tomorrow in Aotearoa.
I hope that now after five years, more than 200 episodes, and more than half a million downloads, we’ve proven that business is not boring.
-
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Luke Nutting is an electrician who eight or so years ago saw that solar would be the future. He went from being a man in a van to now leading Lightforce, a company that does 20% of New Zealand’s solar installs, with more than 80 staff around the country. Now he has big plans to help create alternative energy choices by helping people sell their excess power back to the grid.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Vignesh Kumar is a partner in Global from Day 1, or Gd1, a local venture capital fund which recently announced the first close of its third fund -- a $130m infusion of capital to invest in New Zealand companies wanting to scale to be worldwide successes. The company has partnered with a bunch of global experience across finance, marketing, venture, operations and hardware – including Vignesh, who was previously a hardware scaling leader at Apple. To talk about the VC world, his personal purpose and what Apple was like, he joined Business is Boring by Zoom this week.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ockham Residential co-founder Mark Todd is not your usual property developer. Over the years Ockham has helped make Auckland a more compact and liveable city by building the kind of apartments people actually want to live in and have as neighbours. The company is pioneering build to rent, Iwi partnerships, offering more Kiwibuild options than a bank manager might recommend and giving back through their foundation, the Ockham Collective. But it might be the example they are setting, and the uncomfortable conversations they are starting, that will have the most impact. To talk about his journey, Ockham’s mission and how they’re changing the conversation, Mark joined Business is Boring via Zoom.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Batteries are an ethical minefield, and it’s an issue that often gets overlooked in the important move to green tech. Now a New Zealand startup is helping solve the problem. Dr Shalini Divya is the co-founder of TasmanIon, who are commercialising her research into using the earth-abundant aluminium to make a new generation of more recyclable, sustainable and equitable batteries. To talk about the mission, the science and the journey, Dr Divya joined Business is Boring this week.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
A couple of years ago Maggie Marilyn designer and founder Maggie Hewitt debuted her first collection straight onto Net-a-Porter, one of the most desirable doors in the world. Maggie Marilyn has since become a pioneer in sustainable luxury, being made in New Zealand and pioneering better production practices. Recently the brand has started moves to become carbon positive, and released lines that are more affordable and that run to larger sizes, two accessibility issues the industry struggles with. To talk about that journey, making it work internationally from New Zealand and what’s next, Maggie joined Business is Boring via Zoom.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Samantha Gadd founded Humankind about ten years ago as a new kind of HR, people and culture company. Over time, Humankind has specialised to focus on the growing area of employee experience, helping some of our biggest, best and most successful organisations – from growth companies like Sharesies or Supreme Coffee through to government departments – design better culture to get better results. Samantha joined Business is Boring this week to talk about her journey, EX design and how HR is changing.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
When Theresa Gattung became CEO of Telecom at 37, she became the first woman to run an NZX top 50 company. It was a glass ceiling shattering moment, but over 20 years later there still remain huge gender opportunity and achievement gaps in business. So to do more at the structural level, Theresa has just announced she will work with Auckland University to create a new hub to help increase participation and excellence in entrepreneurship for women by funding the Theresa Gattung Chair of Women in Entrepreneurship. To talk about that, launching Tend and why we need to start taking burnout more seriously, Theresa returned to Business is Boring.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Jodie Imam and Lance Hodges are the COO and general partner of Tractor Ventures, a group offering debt financing to Australian and New Zealand startups. Both startup legends in their own right, they tell Simon Pound why they wanted to be part of this new model and how it all works.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Melanie Spencer is the co-CEO of Socialites, a company that’s helping businesses big and small succeed on social media. She joins Simon Pound on Business is Boring this week to talk about her journey, agency culture and staying on top of the rapidly changing social media landscape.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ten years ago, if you said New Zealand would soon be one of the handful of countries in the space club, regularly sending satellites to space and famous for its space industry, you’d probably have been laughed out of the room. But that’s exactly what has happened, and the driving force behind this change has been Peter Beck at Rocket Lab.
To get the company off the ground he’s had to pull together some of the world’s biggest investors, have international laws changed and successfully pioneer innovations in making and sending rockets that are now industry standards. It was wildly unlikely at most every step, but today Rocket Lab is on the verge of a massive listing on the US stock exchange, and a big shift to larger rockets.
To talk about the journey, his perseverance and New Zealand becoming a member of the space club, Simon Pound met Peter Beck at the Rocket Lab’s Mount Wellington HQ.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Lauren Peate is the founder and CEO of Multitudes, a New Zealand software company that helps measure and improve companies’ culture and performance. She came up with the idea while running Ally Skills NZ, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy for tech companies. She’s worked in and with startups in the Middle East and as a management consultant with Bain & Co in San Francisco, and received a degree in economics from Stanford. To talk about that journey and what Multitudes is here to do, Lauren joined Simon Pound for a chat.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Shotgun co-founder Dan Necklen joins Simon Pound to talk about designing a new type of kids’ bike seat and taking it to the world. From a couple of mountain biking mates turning over an idea – what if a child could sit between the arms of the rider and have their own set of handlebars – the idea has grown to now be sold all over the world. With new products in the works, the company now has a bigger goal of helping get kids off screens and ultimately raise the next generation of mountain bikers.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Jane Ormsby is an online ad industry innovator. She built online advertising inventory network Response Directive into an Australasian market leader before using her online publishing expertise to work with APN (now NZME) as it tackled digital, leading the paywall at The Listener and launching Bite. Her current company is Scroll Media, a network of trusted publishers and advertisers. To talk about the journey, the future of advertising and share tips for selling a business, Jane joined Business is Boring this week for a chat.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Thomas Dietz is the founder and CEO of Woop – short for world on our plate – a company whose inventive offering has found a strong foothold in the hyper-competitive food box space. He joined Business is Boring this week to talk about his journey from France to New Zealand, and from makeup marketing to food boxes.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
New Zealander Georgia Robertson is the CEO of Humanitix, an Australian ticketing app with a difference. The company was started by two friends in Sydney, who pooled their resources to make a ticket booking platform that would donate 100% of profits to charity, using the power of better tech to deliver lower costs to customers and clients. Georgia joined Business is Boring this week to tell Simon Pound about working at the intersection of tech and social good.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
New Zealand company Myovolt has been at the cutting edge of innovation in wearable technology the last 20 years, with founders Dianne Jones and Steve Leftly working on wearable tech with Nasa, Apple, Adidas and Nike. Now they’re launching their first major consumer products, a series of devices to help with muscle recovery.
To talk about Myovolt’s journey, their new range and ongoing innovation, Steve Leftly joined Business is Boring this week.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Isabel Pasch is the majority owner of Bread and Butter, bakeries and cafes that focus on traditional sourdough fermentation and using as many locally sourced and organic ingredients as possible. Unlike most supermarket white bread, which she believes is about as nutritional as a fizzy drink, Isabel’s Bread and Butter aims to make bread that’s good for you, your gut, and the planet. To talk about the journey, a mission for sustainable food, the politics of bread and what’s next, Isabel joined Business is Boring this week for a chat.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you’re listening to this podcast on a smartphone in New Zealand, chances are you have an app today’s guest helped create – and hopefully you use it every day. Pavan Vyas is the CEO of Rush, makers of NZ COVID Tracer, an app which was brought to market in crisis response speed in 2020 and since improved on to the point it’s been adopted by the NHS in the UK.
To talk about how they made the app, and about growing the company to count Google, Disney Plus and Microsoft among its international customers, Rush CEO Pavan Vyas joined Business is Boring for a chat.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
New Zealand has an addiction to using plastic cling wrap – and it goes without saying that’s no good for the environment. Jon Reed’s startup Compostic is out to change that with a range of home compostable cling wrap and other kitchen products. In the last few years the company has grown from a product only available in specialty stores to now be available in most New Zealand supermarkets, along with hundreds in Australia, and now it’s launching into the US market too. Founder and CEO Jon Reed joined Business is Boring this week to talk about the journey.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If flowers are so often bought by men, how come florists aren't designed to appeal to them more? That’s the (extremely paraphrased) gist of the Jerry Seinfeld routine that helped inspire Vanisha Narsey to start Bouqo, an online platform that helps people select the right floral solution, see examples of bouquets at their price point and get them delivered. With 15 florists onboard across Auckland and plans for expansion, Vanisha joined Business is Boring this week to talk about the idea and its development, how it's going and what’s next.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this week’s episode, Simon Pound talks to Dr Robert Feldman, CEO of Covid-19 Vaccine Corporation, about the fascinating science behind developing a vaccine.
Covid-19 Vaccine Corporation (CVC), brings together some of the top figures in local pharmaceutical, deep tech and life science commercial enterprise. The chair is the managing director of Douglas Pharmaceuticals, and the CEO is Dr Robert Feldman, who has had a career working at Harvard Medical School and Imperial College, London, founding the UK vaccine company Microscience among other enterprises, before moving to New Zealand as Executive Director of Pacific Channel and after that, his own life science consulting company.
To talk about the fascinating science behind vaccine research and development, Dr Feldman joined Business is Boring this week.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Louise Aitken is the CEO of the Ākina Foundation, which for the last three years has been delivering a programme in partnership with the government, called The Impact Initiative, focussed on the future of New Zealand’s social enterprises. Ākina runs a range of programmes to help more businesses make money and positive change, to help grow companies’ capability, support them in things like finance and other nuts and bolts of doing business well, and create and demonstrate impact in what they do.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Women make up about 10% of all tradespeople in New Zealand, and only about 4% of “on the tools” workers. That's a wild statistic, and part of why this week's guest Emma Kaniuk started Tradespeople – a directory that lists companies owned and run by women and gender diverse tradies around the country. Emma joined Business is Boring this week to talk about the idea behind the directory and the need it serves.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
From humble hole-in-the-wall beginnings, Wellington-based Fix & Fogg is now one of the hottest nut butter companies in the world. Founder and CEO Roman Jewell tells Business is Boring how it all happened.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Take2 CEO and founder Cam Smith tells Simon Pound about the life-changing work his company does helping ex-prisoners reenter the job market.
The job market is tough at the best of times – but for an ex-prisoner without any recognised skills, it can be pretty much impossible. One ground-breaking new non-profit is out to help change that by helping incarcerated people learn how to code.
The goal of equipping prisoners with highly sought-after skills led this week’s guest Cam Smith from an exciting career in impact investment into the world of non-profits, dealing with big government departments and multi-generational societal challenges.
To discuss all these big problems and the big ideas needed to help solve them, the Take2 CEO and founder joined Business is Boring this week.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Mutu founder Toby Skilton joins Business is Boring to talk about his vision for a service where people could rent out and borrow things from each other – and how he made it a reality.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a service where you could either make money by lending out the stuff you own and hardly use, or save money by borrowing things from people near you instead of buying them?
That’s the thought today’s guest had a few years ago, and he decided to turn it into a business. Mutu began in Christchurch, and has grown to now help users counter waste and create new income and connections nationwide.
Mutu founder and CEO Toby Skilton joined us by Zoom from Christchurch this week to talk about the journey so far, and where he wants to take the business next.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week on Business is Boring, Bex Rempel tells Simon Pound about the need to replace petrol motors on boats.
Did you know that an hour out on a little dinghy with a petrol powered outboard motor is as damaging to the environment as having 38 new cars running the same time? This is the fact that led New Zealand business ZeroJet to change tack and use their tech to try and replace some of the hundreds of thousands of petrol powered motors on small craft.
Even if they only fit 10,000 of their electric motors, it would have the same impact as removing 1.5 million cars from the road. The company’s co-founder and CEO Bex Rempel joined Business is Boring to talk about the environmental impact, being better to our oceans and what they plan to do next.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
This week on Business is Boring, Billie Jo Hohepa-Ropiha tells Simon Pound about inventing the sewer-safe wet wipe alternative BDÉT.
There is a big problem lurking in our sewer pipes. Flushed wet wipes, even the supposedly flushable ones, are major contributors to ‘fatbergs’ – huge clumps of wipes and other stuff flushed down toilets that are blocking sewers and generally grossing people out everywhere.
What if you were able to put something onto regular toilet paper that would make it function like a wet wipe, but without all the problems? That was the brainwave Billie Jo Hohepa-Ropiha had nearly 20 years ago. After building a successful journalism career, she studied for an MBA, studying around work and family commitments, then launched not one but two bathroom products – BDÉT, the flushable toilet paper wet wipe alternative foam, as well as Kiwee, a toilet lid lifting device.
To talk entrepreneurship and finding opportunity in places not everyone wants to talk about, Bille Jo Hohepa-Ropiha joined Business is Boring for a chat.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Nearly every morning, thousands of people around New Zealand and the world start their day with a workout led by a mum of four boys from her Christchurch lounge. Lisa Fong leads these short, sharp 20 minute workouts over Facebook Live on her iPhone.
The friendly, inclusive approach to accessible workouts at only $10 a month has seen business boom. Lisa Fong’s Move it Mama is now a worldwide success, with a great community behind it – just the kind of positive realness we could all do with a bit more of.
Lisa joined Business is Boring over Zoom from Christchurch this week to talk fitness, the journey, lifting people up and the importance of keeping it real.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Duane Mutu is the founder and CEO of LetsPlay.Live. Esports are big business, with the number of people playing competitively and the number of spectators watching them play on a wild growth curve. With admission to big events, national sports associations and scholarships available for esporting phenoms to universities and colleges, esports are now recognised as sports.
The money involved is massive – with billion dollar companies being built on the periphery, the industry is already way bigger than Hollywood. One part of that industry is LetsPlay.Live (LPL). It’s the biggest esports competition and broadcast platform in Australasia, with more than 400,000 members in its community, and it’s all run production studio in the base of the Sky Tower.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Blair Turnbull, CEO of Tower Insurance.
One of the things we get asked for on this podcast is to hear from people involved in business who aren’t necessarily all-or-nothing entrepreneurs. So this year we’re sharing a few more stories of people doing interesting, big and different things in business. This week's guest is one such example – someone who recently returned home to New Zealand to take on the CEO role at one of our big listed insurance companies.
Blair Turnbull had a big role at ASB before heading overseas and working with Aviva – an insurer out of London with 30 million-plus customers. Blair led digital, retail and innovation functions, rising to be looking after 15 million customers before being shoulder-tapped to come back home to run Tower.
To learn a bit about how the insurance game works, what it takes to grow into a CEO role, and what innovation is coming our way in insurance, Blair Turnbull joined Business is Boring for a chat.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Christine Langdon, CEO of The Good Registry.
Giving gifts can be hard. And when you think about all the unwanted gifts that are given every year, you’re suddenly looking at a big waste problem. What if people were instead able to give people the ability to pick a charity of their choice to give those gift dollars to instead?
That was the thought that started The Good Registry, a social enterprise that helps people and companies give people the gift of giving. It supports a diverse roster of worthy local causes, and has so far helped channel more than half a million dollars that might have otherwise been spent on Favourites and Instant Kiwis.
Co-founder and CEO, Christine Langdon, left a successful career in corporate communications to pursue the business. She joined us via Zoom from Wellington to discuss the journey, how it is going and how a business to do good can do well.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Hongi Luo, brand director at TikTok.
In terms of cultural reach and impact, the biggest tech app in the world right now may well be TikTok. It’s where music companies are trying to break acts, it’s where memes are emerging, it’s where a lot of people find their news and information. It’s wildly varied, and it’s kind of beautiful how so many people are able to create, share and enjoy their eccentricities, enthusiasms and interests without conforming to one style or expectation.
It’s one of the world’s biggest brands right now, and as brand director, New Zealander Hongi Luo is helming some of its biggest music and cultural activations, like live-streaming the Brit Awards red carpet and partnering with huge stars. Hailing from Auckland, she was part of the small team establishing Uber in NZ and Australia, before helping launch an agency in Singapore and heading to London to work with TikTok.
To talk about being part of such massive growth companies, finding new ways for creativity to grow, and life right now in London, Hongi Luo joined us on Zoom this week for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Simon Coley, co-founder of All Good and Karma Drinks.
Bananas are one of the most popular grocery items in New Zealand – we buy enough of them to eat 18kg each per year. But for years bananas were also a symbol of the kind of capitalism that saw companies exploit workers, overthrow governments and farm mono-crops until they failed.
That’s why Simon Coley and a few old friends got together and started All Good, to start bringing in bananas that were fair trade. These bananas have been a hit, capturing 7% of the market, showing people will pay a little more for something a lot better for the world and workers. And this has led to a wave of other fair trade bananas, which has to be a good thing.
This month All Good is upping the ante by going carbon zero, offsetting emissions with permanent Amazon rainforest protected plantings. But the really amazing thing about this is that All Good bananas is only part of what the company does in the space. Along with All Good, Coley also co-founded Karma Drinks, whose work with growers of cola nuts in Sierra Leone is helping a community grow equitably, and expanding around the world. To learn about changing some of the grocery mainstays for the better, purpose led business and his entrepreneur’s journey, he joins for a chat in this week’s episode.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business Is Boring is taking a break over the summer holidays. We'll be back in the new year, but until then we're we're republishing some of our favourite interviews of 2020. This week: Simon talks with bestselling author Stacy Gregg.
First released September 3, 2020.
Stacy Gregg’s first job in media was as a secretary, a job she was fired from before being rehired as a staff writer. She went on to specialise in fashion writing, ultimately starting and selling a pioneering media title before sidestepping into a different field entirely – writing children’s books.
Her specialty in that field was stories about ponies and horses, and her books – in series like Pony Club Secrets and standalone titles like The Princess and the Foal – have now found a large audience both here and overseas.
It took a lot of time and business savvy to build and maintain that audience, in the process becoming one of New Zealand’s most successful international writers. To talk about the work that goes into being a bestselling author and the business of books, Stacy Gregg joined Simon Pound for this episode of Business is Boring.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business Is Boring is taking a break over the summer holidays. We'll be back in the new year, but until then we're we're republishing some of our favourite interviews of 2020. This week: Simon talks with Scottie Chapman from Spring Sheep Milk Co.
First released July 16, 2020.
New Zealand is famous all around the world for sheep, and for milk. But what it hasn’t been so well known for is sheep milk, but this week on the podcast we’re meeting a man out to change that.
That’s right, sheep milk. It’s an alternative milk on the rise across SE Asia. It’s easier to digest than cow’s milk and has a way lower environmental impact than dairy. And although it might sound like it would take a lot of sheep to get volume up, with some selective breeding and some kiwi smarts Spring Sheep Milk Co have found a way to make this primary product into high value exports.
And it’s not the first time that company’s CEO has pulled that off. Scottie Chapman had his first big success with Old Mout cider, the brand he started that led huge category growth, making cider a supermarket mainstay. That business was sold to DB and Heineken, and it’s gone on to be one of the biggest ciders in the world. And you know what? When he started that journey people told him cider wasn’t popular. He proved them wrong, and will he also be right about sheep milk?
To talk the journey, what sheep milk is used for and why sheep make a lot more sense for the world than ever more cows, Scottie Chapman joined us for a half hour chat.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business Is Boring is taking a break over the summer holidays. We'll be back in the new year, but until then we're we're republishing some of our favourite interviews of 2020. This week: Simon talks with Rachel Taulelei, CEO of Kono.
First released June 4, 2020.
While the full and lasting effects of Covid-19 are still to play out, and things are looking pretty fractious, there are some companies making the very best out of the current situation. One of these is Kono.
Demand for New Zealand produce overseas is currently up. Our country's careful and healthy management of the pandemic has shone a light on our products internationally as people want high quality food and beverage, made with Papatuanuku in mind.
That is exactly what Kono does. It's a whānau-owned Māori food and beverage business led by CEO Rachel Taulelei. They sell food, wine and produce brands all around the globe, from wines you know like Tohu, to Annie’s fruit bars.
Before this role, Taulelei founded Yellow Brick Road, a company selling the best seafood to top hospitality operators, and was NZ Trade Commissioner in Los Angeles. Today she is on the prime minister’s Business Advisory Council, and you might have seen her on one of the Conversations on Covid-19 that the PM was running. To talk about what being whānau owned means and her hopes for the rebuild post-Covid-19, Taulelei joined us on the podcast.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by economist Tony Alexander.
As chief economist at the BNZ for 25 years, Tony Alexander held one of the biggest jobs in New Zealand economics. He helped advise the bank and nation through a lot of economic change and disruption – until last year, when he decided to disrupt himself and left.
Since then you can still find him in the media as one of the leading commentators, and now through Tony's View, a weekly free newsletter, with a paid, more detailed, subscription offer. In a year in which a lot of commentators have come a cropper, his measured, data-driven offering has been fantastic.
Tony specialises in helping people understand the economy and making it simple and clear enough that they can make better decisions on their businesses and house purchases. It’s a big goal, but like the saying goes: any old fool can make something complex, it takes genius to make it simple.
To chat commentary, predictions, making yourself redundant, housing obsessions and what’s next for him and all of us, Tony Alexander joined us via Zoom from Wellington this week.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Pour yourself some eggnog and join the hosts of The Spinoff’s podcast network for our annual Superpod round up of the year that was.
Representing Gone By Lunchtime, Dietary Requirements, The Real Pod, Papercuts, The Fold and On The Rag our hosts dive into the key events, issues, heroes and villains of 2020.
From National’s botched election campaign to Ben Thomas’ take on TikTok, via the collapse of Bauer, the rise of oat milk, with a detour through controversial frozen grapes and Simon’s Sausage Spot, there’s something for everyone in this year’s Superpod. Featuring special guests producer T and Covid-19.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Blackbird’s Sam Wong.
Last year one of the biggest venture capital operators in Australia moved over and set up offices in New Zealand. The company, Blackbird, is famous for backing big companies like Canva, but has also been involved in supporting local successes from very early on. One of those is like Sunfed, the makers of plant protein meat alternatives, and it’s the Blackbird partner that led the Sunfed deal who has come over to set up the local office.
Sam Wong started her career at a prestigious law firm. She did well but didn’t quite love it so left, moved home, worked minimum wage jobs to pay her way and got into start-up life. She ran product for a high-growth ecommerce company, founded a company that went through the VC cycle, and got into working at Blackbird.
Blackbird VC has invested in a bunch of local companies like AskNicely, FreightFish, AO Air, Partly, Multitudes and Mint Innovation. And it’s recently announced it’s raised a lot more money, partnered with the Government to invest, and run big events for the local start-up ecosystem.
To talk moving from law to the start-up world to VC, what it takes to be a great company – and a great venture capitalist – and how Blackbird works to back local companies, Sam Wong joined Business is Boring for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by See-LEVEL founder Dudley Jackson.
Around 25% of the population experiences seasickness to an extent that makes ocean-going uncomfortable or even impossible. If you happen to be an engineer working on a sea-based wind farm and are among that 25%, you might find getting to and from work a nightmare – and you might not be much use once you get there.
It’s a problem this week’s guest knows well. Dudley Jackson loves the sea, and with dreams of bringing his kids up on the water sold the family home and moved with his wife, two kids and a dog onto a 40 foot yacht – only to find out the hard way he was one of the 25%. The dream had to be put on ice, until a new technology came along that caught his interest because it was making a lot of people sick.
Dudley looked at virtual reality headsets and had a lightbulb moment. If some people found these sets created motion sickness, could they be used to reverse that feeling and get people out of it too? It was a unique idea that with his background in IT he was able to experiment with and landed a concept.
His company See-LEVEL has now picked up funding, Callaghan Innovation R&D support and is now in use with operators like the Navy, tourism companies and overseas wind farms. To talk about it all, Dudley Jackson joined us via Zoom for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Foodprint founder and CEO Michal Garvey.
Food waste is such a massive problem that it’s hard to fully comprehend. Everyone would have heard the stats that say more than a third of food, fruit and vegetables are wasted, and one of the many causes is the struggle to accurately match supply to demand. Cafes and food sellers will fill a cabinet and hope with the best intentions, and the last thing they want to do is waste that food, but if people don’t buy those fresh items they don’t have much of a shelf life.
This week’s guest, Michal Garvey, saw the beginning of a solution to this while living and working in Sweden, and came back to New Zealand with the goal of helping to make the food industry more sustainable while at the same time giving customers access to heavily discounted food. The app, Foodprint, is an ingenious way for great cafes and food makers like &sushi, Ripe and Bluebells Cakery to list items for half price and ensure they sell everything through. It helps give people great food for less, measures carbon saved and cuts down the upsetting waste.
To talk about the journey, the uptake and what’s next, Foodprint founder and CEO Michal Garvey joined Business is Boring for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
You’ve probably stood in a supermarket queue and thought you could be spending your short time on this earth more productively. That’s what happened to this week’s Business is Boring guest, William Chomley, who instead of shrugging off these musings started a company to solve the problem.
IMAGR is a New Zealand start-up that uses computer vision to power smart shopping carts, with the ultimate goal of removing check outs, meaning grocery store customers never have to queue again.
William Chomley was working in an investment fund and didn’t have time to wait in supermarket lines, but he did find the time to build out and validate the concept of solving the problem. His company went from side-hustle to more than full-time, raising multiple investment rounds including $14 million dollars this year in a round led by Japanese tech giant Toshiba.
IMAGR are now working on delivering the shopping experience of the future in Japan and Auckland, with a team of hardware and software experts solving a problem that Amazon and Alibaba have spent billions on.
This is episode one of Coming Home, a new five-part podcast series from The Spinoff podcast network, in partnership with Kiwibank. We're sharing it with you here because we think if you like Business is Boring you might find this interesting too. Have a listen and subscribe on your platform of choice to hear the rest of the series. New episodes arriving weekly.
Coming Home delves into the phenomenon of high achieving New Zealanders returning to Aotearoa in the era of Covid-19. Join hosts Duncan Greive and Jane Yee as they seek to find out who these returnees are, why they left New Zealand in the first place, the reasons for their homecoming and what their arrival means for all of us. Featuring Peter Gordon, Julia Arnott-Neenee, Paul Spoonley, Jarrod Kerr, Rachel Morris, Joel Kefali, Polly Fryer and Mahoney Turnbull.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Lisa King from AF Drinks.
As a society, we don’t have a particularly healthy relationship with alcohol. We work hard to ignore the fact alcohol is a serious carcinogen, and even harder to ignore the social and medical effects and costs of drinking. If we thought about that when people say they’re not drinking, we’d recognise that’s probably the better idea – but it’s not like that yet.
This week’s guest should be well known to regular listeners of the podcast, having been on before as the founder of Eat My Lunch. Lisa King decided to take a break from drinking earlier this year, and the weird reactions that prompted from people led her to reevaluate her and our general relationship with drinking.
Now she’s helping amplify the conversation about changing our relationship to drinking, and helping make it easier to take control of your choices, with her new venture AF Drinks. The first products are alcohol-free gin and tonics that actually taste good, and they’re hitting supermarkets everywhere shortly.
To talk about saving non-drinkers from horrible warm orange juice, starting an alcohol free drinks company and the reaction and reception so far, Lisa King joined Business is Boring for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Nada Piatek, co-founder and MD of Again Again.
Every year, New Zealanders throw out 300 million takeaway coffee cups. Even the ones that are compostable, most often aren’t composted – only one in 400 compostable coffee cups make it to the compost, in fact.Many people have Keep Cups, but not everyone always has their Keep Cup on them at all times. And then there aren’t many choices. But one New Zealand company is out to change that.
Again Again offers a service where users can pay $3 to borrow a reusable stainless steel cup with a lid. Bring it back, and you will get your $3 back, with the cafe washing it for future use. It saves cafes money on takeaway cups, and it reduces waste. So far it’s helped remove 840,000 cups from the waste stream each year, and it’s only just getting started.
Again Again began in Wellington, has 160 plus cafes around the country in the program, and is now looking to expand their impact and mission. They’re currently equity crowdfunding through PledgeMe – where they’re looking to raise at least $300k to help them expand to tackle other takeaway waste problems, including an exciting new project with Garage Project around their flagons.
The company co-founder and MD, Nada Piatek joined us by Zoom, for a chat about how 20 years of entrepreneurship and sustainability initiatives led to this concept, the raise and the goals of the company.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Morgan Donoghue from InMusic.
Auckland’s Karangahape Rd has long been a home of live music, but it might be news to you that it’s also an internationally recognised hotspot for music software innovation and excellence. It's where InMusic, owner of some of the world’s biggest music brands like Numark, Denon and Akai make their software, while other big brands with offices in the neighbourhood include Serato and Melodics. Today’s guest has a connection to all of them.
Morgan Donoghue was with Serato in key roles during its growth, is an investor in Melodics and is currently the MD at InMusic. On top of all that he’s also the COO for a very interesting new earphone technology company called Nura, who use software to create personalised audio experiences for listeners. Nura hit the news recently for a deal with the All Blacks, where the team took equity in the company in return for a sponsorship deal – a novel and interesting business approach.
It’s just the latest step in a long and varied career in music for Donoghue, who before these roles acted as the head of global music for Vodafone and manager of Hollie Smith along with his wife Nicky. He joined Business is Boring this week to tell a few of the many amazing yarns he’s got from his time in the music industry, and talk about the All Blacks deal, his many different roles and how to make New Zealand music tech sing.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Jo Mills, co-founder of Fuel50.
The world of work has obviously changed a lot recently, making many of the HR processes employers and employees use increasingly unfit for purpose. With the rise of the gig economy, people changing careers, new ways of working and a growing understanding of the value of people bringing their whole selves to work, the traditional approach of a strict job description, set hours and a once yearly review are quite out of date, yet still being used.
One company out to change that is Fuel50, founded by Jo Mills and Anne Fulton – two New Zealanders working to help some of the biggest US companies with their people strategy. Their AI-powered software allows for all the permutations of shifting projects, personnel and interests, matching up people to work and creating new ways to allow managers and team members to shape their careers and lives in the best way for all.
The company is at the forefront of a lot of the conversations you might have heard about agile working and work-life balance and all the other good new things. To discuss this, the future of work, making it in the US from NZ and an upcoming spot on Southern SaaS – the excellent SaaS conference for local stars – co-founder Jo Mills joined Business is Boring for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Hengjie Wang and Alliv Samson, co-founders of Kami.
If you have any school-aged kids in your life, you’ll know all about the changes and fast-adoption of technology the education sector has seen this year. During lockdown us parents had what seemed like endless repetitive problems with Google slides, things not saving, appearing or formatting properly and generally just not working.
But one New Zealand-based education tool has taken a bunch of these frustrations and made it easy to collaborate, annotate, work and see what others are doing in a shared online workspace. The app is called Kami – which means paper in Japanese – and it’s helping create a shared learning environment for millions of kids and adults around the world.
The app is now used in more than one in three schools in the US. They are closing in on 20 million users worldwide, and you might have seen them in the news as they recently made an offer for all New Zealand schools to be able to use it for free for the foreseeable future.
Kami was launched by three final year students at the University of Auckland, co-founders who picked up a chairman and a business plan through an entrepreneur challenge, and have now built the business into a global force in the highly controlled and highly contested education space.
To talk about the journey, running the business over lockdown with a new baby, and what’s next, co-founders Hengjie Wang and Alliv Samson joined Business is Boring this week for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Josh Emett, Michelin-starred chef and restaurant owner.
Josh Emett is a household name in New Zealand, famous for having worked and won Michelin stars with Gordon Ramsay over more than a decade, before coming home to open a string of successful restaurants and find fame as a judge on Masterchef.
You may have visited his restaurants Madam Woo, or Hawker and Roll, or Rata, or Ostro, or read his cookbook of collected greatest hits, The Recipe, or seen his Instagram videos with his sons helping as sous chefs in the home kitchen.
All his other restaurants to date have been partnerships, but this year he decided to take over Waiheke luxury boutique hotel and restaurant The Oyster Inn and open a new restaurant, Onslow, from scratch with his wife Helen.
What’s it been like for them to take on so much solo risk in a year where running a restaurant has hardly been plain sailing, then doubling down with a fine dining venture? To talk about his career, how he got to where he is and what he's doing next, Josh Emett joined Business is Boring for a chat just two days out from the opening of Onslow.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Simon Farrell-Green, founder of Here magazine.
This podcast has always had a special interest in the ways people have managed to keep making things happen in business while the world seems to be falling apart around them. This week’s guest did just that when he crowdfunded and launched a new magazine title during a time of supreme uncertainty, when magazines were effectively banned in New Zealand.
Simon Farrell-Green will be familiar to many listeners from his years of food reviews and feature writing for Metro, bfm, Eat Here Now, Kia Ora and as editor of Home. When Home’s publisher Bauer Media folded in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Simon wasted little time in launching a new title of his own, with the backing of a successful Boosted campaign.
The magazine, Here, is a colourful and fun celebration of the magazine format that acts as a time capsule of design and these times. With the second issue out now, Simon joined Business is Boring to talk about the journey.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week's guest is Dr Elizabeth Berryman, founder and CEO of mental health app chnnl.
Those in the medical profession have difficult jobs, and it can be especially tough for trainee and new doctors.
Today’s guest, Dr Elizabeth Berryman, was a trainee doctor herself when she started wondering how many others in her position were under the same pressures and feeling the same stress. A lot, it turned out – more than half the people she surveyed reported bullying, harassment or other unacceptable workplace conditions.
This led her to research and develop an app to track and understand the current state of frontline workers in the health sector, through daily check-ins on important measures. The app can predict depression and anxiety, with 90% accuracy, and help point people to timely help.
When Berryman started sharing news about the healthcare focused app she got requests from other corporates, and now chnnl has been extended to be for all workforces. She joined Business is Boring this week to talk about her path to entrepreneurship, the app, and the state of it all.
– Sign up to The Spinoff's newsletter Rec Room for weekly recommendations along with all our latest videos and podcasts.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Dr Ju Zhang, CEO of Formus Labs.
Hip and knee replacements are fairly common surgeries, but you’d be surprised how often they need to be revised or redone completely. That’s because every body is unique, and it’s hard for doctors to know what the perfect replacement piece looks like before they open a patient up.
Local company Formus Labs wants to help with that. They’re using AI and computer modelling to help surgeons design bespoke surgery plans for patients with their cloud-based software, taking CT scan data and building a computer model to help select the right implant and right approach.
It’s revolutionary tech that removes the guesswork about size, shape, stresses and orientation – and it’s picking up a global market. The company stemmed in large part from the research of CEO Dr Ju Zhang, who joined host Simon Pound to talk about the company’s journey, their concept and what they plan to do next.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jonathan Ring, CEO of C-Prize winning company Zincovery.
Considering how important steel is to so much of the construction and manufacturing industry, it hasn’t seen a great deal of innovation, and it isn’t particularly environmentally-friendly, either. That’s especially true of galvanised steel, where the materials used create waste problems and tonnes valuable resources like zinc and acids usually go down the drain.
But now a New Zealand company has a plan to fix this and create the first clean process, and it’s an idea that’s getting noticed. Zincovery has just won the $100,000 C-Prize – the Callaghan Innovation challenge to find environmental answers through clever business innovation.
To talk about the C-Prize and creating change in the construction and manufacturing industries, Zincovery CEO Jonathan Ring joined Simon Pound this week for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Pony Club Secrets and The Princess and the Foal author Stacy Gregg.
Stacy Gregg’s first job in media was as a secretary, a job she was fired from before being rehired as a staff writer. She went on to specialise in fashion writing, ultimately starting and selling a pioneering media title before sidestepping into a different field entirely – writing children’s books.
Her specialty in that field was stories about ponies and horses, and her books – in series like Pony Club Secrets and standalone titles like The Princess and the Foal – have now found a large audience both here and overseas.
It took a lot of time and business savvy to build and maintain that audience, in the process becoming one of New Zealand’s most successful international writers. To talk about the work that goes into being a bestselling author and the business of books, Stacy Gregg joined Simon Pound for this episode of Business is Boring.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to the founders of new fashion website Ensemble.
When Bauer Media announced the closure of its operations in the last lockdown, a lot of talented magazine and media people were put out of a job and into a state of uncertainty. While some Bauer titles have since been resurrected – and others may still be – the advertising market and the economics of running these magazines are unlikely to be the same as before. Bit with change comes the chance to have a look and see if old models still apply, and this week's guests found the standard approach to fashion media was way out of date.
Zoe Walker Ahwa was editor-in-chief at Fashion Quarterly and Simply You, the top commercial and cultural institutions in local fashion media. It was the culmination of 15 years working in the sector, on titles like Viva, Next and right back in the beginning, Runway Reporter, an online-first media outlet about 15 years ahead of its time. When her titles were suddenly closed down, Zoe connected with Rebecca Wadey, who had been a writer and contributor to Metro magazine, as well as working on the commercial side of the industry for brands including Esteé Lauder, Bobbi Brown and Kate Sylvester.
At first the pair considered relaunching one of the old established titles, but eventually decided that so much of what those titles represented was yesterday’s news. Instead, they’ve launched a new online-first, member-supported outlet called Ensemble, covering fashion, culture and life with a more diverse view and class-conscious cultural lens than traditional magazines might have allowed.
To talk about how the idea came to fruition, the relevance of fashion and beauty today, the freedom of publishing online and the whole upside down world we now live in, Ensemble’s editor Zoe Walker Ahwa and publisher and partnerships director Rebecca Wadey joined Simon for a chat over Zoom.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Sam Harrop, Master of Wine.
Wine is big business in New Zealand. The prices we command for our wine are some of the best margins in the world, and just about anywhere you go in the world there will be a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc on the menu. But this week’s guest believes the potential of our fine wine is only starting to be realised.
New Zealand has had many trail blazers on the winemaking side of things, and a few on the industry side too. Sam Harrop is a bit of both. He worked as winemaker both here and overseas, before becoming winemaker and buyer for massive UK grocer Marks & Spencer, revolutionising the way they made, bought and marketed wine. Then he became one of fewer than 400 people ever to make the grade as a Master of Wine, and spent 10 years as co-chair of the International Wine Challenge, perhaps the most influential gold sticker a bottle of wine can get.
Sam now splits his time between his winemaking business in Spain, which makes nearly six million bottles a year of some of the world’s best organic wine, and living in New Zealand, where he makes beautiful single vineyard wines with a focus on simplicity.
Sam joined us to chat about his journey, the fine wine business and how he makes such good wine.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Sarah Ramsay, CEO of United Machinists.
Not that long ago in the scheme of things New Zealand did a lot of its own manufacturing. While some of the industries we used to have wouldn’t make much sense to restart now, there’s always room for specialists, no matter how small your home market. There’s a new generation of high-tech manufacturers thriving in New Zealand right now, and this week’s guest is one of the best examples.
Sarah Ramsay’s company United Machinists recently expanded its Dunedin HQ, taking over another section of land and building a state-of-the-art temperature-controlled facility with millions of dollars of new machinery. It allowed them to make more high-tech components and assemblies for things as diverse as camera mounts and prosthetic hands.
Sarah has a background in investment and marketing and came to the family-owned business through her husband, and in moving to the CEO role has led their growth into a company set up for another few generations of business. She has also been a driving force in the local Dunedin start-up scene and created a body helping lead the renaissance of engineering in the region, now serving as director of the Southern Otago Regional Engineering Collective, SOREC.
To talk about high-tech business, manufacturing, growth and the journey, Sarah Ramsay, CEO of United Machinists joined Business is Boring for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Mitchell Pham from Augen Software Group.
If the last century was the American century, so far this has been the Asian century. The last three decades have seen amazing growth in wealth and geopolitical influence for a range of Asian countries, in large part due to new trade linkages around the world. And in the digital present, those linkages should only increase. One New Zealander working to help make this happen in both his own business and at ain international level is Mitchell Pham.
Mitchell came to New Zealand from Vietnam, but a very different Vietnam to the one that exists now. He was 12 years old when he fled the country as a refugee – outrunning machine gun fire surviving exposure to the elements and running out of food before being picked up by an Indonesian oil rig crew. The next two years were spent across four different refugee camps, before finally arriving in New Zealand. Arriving here alone in the mid 1980s, Mitchell's next challenge was to adjust to the education system – but he thrived, meeting friends at university who he set up a company with that would became the Augen Software Group.
Today, his software development company has offices across New Zealand and Vietnam, and Mitchell is a member of a number of national and international bodies helping increase the quality of our digital landscape. He’s the chair of the Digital Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, and New Zealand’s representative on the Asia Society’s Global Council, as well as chair of the the New Zealand Tech Industry Association and the Financial Technology Industry Group. He joined the podcast for a chat about his incredible journey, contributing to the industry and what’s next.
Read more about Mitchell's story on The Spinoff.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Covid-19 has changed the world for a lot of businesses, and one of the hardest hit sectors has been tourist accommodation. New Zealand is a bit lucky that we have domestic tourism as a possibility, but it’s hard out there, and this week’s guest knows all about it.
By age 28, Amelia Gain had owned, run and sold a boutique hotel before launching a successful property management software system serving customers all over the world, from bed and breakfasts in Queenstown to luxury lodges in Morocco. To talk about the state of the industry in a post-Covid world, how she built the business and the importance of incubators and the future, she joins host Simon Pound for a chat.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand.
Earlier this year news came out that local company Soul Machines, makers of artificially intelligent, emotionally responsive avatars - what some call digital humans- had raised another $40m USD to continue to take their technology to the world. You might have seen their products - they work with AirNZ and ANZ here, and so many companies overseas, from the makers of Mercedes Benz to big banks in the UK.
This success isn’t the first rodeo for the Chief Business Officer there.
Greg Cross also was a co-founder and partner in the success of Power by Proxi, another commercialisation of research play that ended up with their wireless charging company sold to Apple for reportedly more than $100m. Before that Greg Cross was Chair at the Icehouse, and had a storied career in tech, doing things such as heading up Microsoft when they launched Windows 95 in NZ. Start me up! He took out the 2019 Flying Kiwi Award and was inducted into the NZ Hi-Tech Hall of Fame at the recent Hi-Tech Awards. Not bad for a kid that left school without an idea of what he wanted to do.
To talk his journey in tech, what’s next for AI interfaces, and how NZ needs to think global, Greg Cross joined us for a good big chat you can check out below.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Scottie Chapman from Spring Sheep Milk Co.
New Zealand is famous all around the world for sheep, and for milk. But what it hasn’t been so well known for is sheep milk, but this week on the podcast we’re meeting a man out to change that.
That’s right, sheep milk. It’s an alternative milk on the rise across SE Asia. It’s easier to digest than cow’s milk and has a way lower environmental impact than dairy. And although it might sound like it would take a lot of sheep to get volume up, with some selective breeding and some kiwi smarts Spring Sheep Milk Co have found a way to make this primary product into high value exports.
And it’s not the first time that company’s CEO has pulled that off. Scottie Chapman had his first big success with Old Mout cider, the brand he started that led huge category growth, making cider a supermarket mainstay. That business was sold to DB and Heineken, and it’s gone on to be one of the biggest ciders in the world. And you know what? When he started that journey people told him cider wasn’t popular. He proved them wrong, and will he also be right about sheep milk?
To talk the journey, what sheep milk is used for and why sheep make a lot more sense for the world than ever more cows, Scottie Chapman joined us for a half hour chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Lovina McMurchy of Movac.
Living in New Zealand we are a bit insulated from just how big some of the world;’s biggest companies are. Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks are bigger financial entities than many countries, and the things the leaders in those organisations do shape how people live. And there are some kiwis very high in those companies making those decisions.
If you think about how central to life wifi in Starbucks became to so many people before mobile data was affordable, and if you’ve ever been a tourist popping in to take advantage of it for example, you have a kiwi to thank. And if you’ve ever used Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant to order a product chances are you have a kiwi to thank for that. Actually, the same kiwi for both.
Lovina McMurchy started her career here, but after an MBA from Harvard, she found success in the states, leading up important parts of Starbucks, Skype and Amazon before heading back home to Aotearoa last year to help lead a big new investment fund at Movac.
To talk the journey, what her hopes for NZ business are and how people can make it in the world’s biggest companies, Lovina joined us for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Rob Teina from Supreme Plumbing in Auckland has worked out the formula to keep people interested in his business, growing an audience of over 4,000 on the Supreme Plumbing Instagram. Sharing everything from his tradition of giving the truck a wash ahead of the working week, taking "the bossman" – one of his young children – for a pastry and a cuppa mid-morning or exposing what good and bad workmanship looks like on site, Teina has grown a huge following from his staff of 10. He hit the headlines earlier this year with a series of cash giveaways to help businesses needing a hand over lockdown, a period that he spent on the road a lot as an essential worker. To chat about building his business and brand, learning a trade from apprenticeship up, and cultivating the mindset and conditions for growth, Rob Teina joined us on Business is Boring.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Simon Cooke and Ryan Carville are the founders of brewers yeast company Froth Technologies. Until very recently, even in the booming local craft brewing scene, almost all yeast used was imported from a very small group of commercialised strains. The yeast being used didn't even scrape the surface of the astounding variety of yeasts available, and their potential use in creating new, interesting beers. Last year the two Wellington craft beer professionals set out to change the scope of yeasts available for New Zealand brewers. Their company, Froth Technologies is, after a successful crowdfund last year, working with leading-edge tech and science, and bringing local yeast to the people.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Emma Lewisham is the founder of a skincare brand selling products to address the effects of sun on skin pigment. She's also launching a new initiative to take back the brand's packaging, along with any other beauty packaging, in return for a voucher for their products.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Jacob Kohn and Dr Gaetano Dedual are the co-founders of Futurity, who are in the process of bringing a bio-refinery to Tairāwhiti Gisborne, that would use new techniques to break pine down into its building block chemicals, that then become the platform chemicals that can be used for plastics, resins and all sorts of applications today provided by oil-derivatives. It’s an awesomely ambitious project that’s aiming to create jobs, increase the value we get for timber grown here, and help keep carbon in the ground.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Rachel Taulelei is the CEO of Kono, a whānau-owned Māori food and beverage business selling food, wine and produce brands all around the globe. Before this role, Taulelei founded Yellow Brick Road, a company selling the best seafood to top hospitality operators, and was NZ Trade Commissioner in Los Angeles. Today she is on the prime minister’s Business Advisory Council, and you might have seen her on one of the Conversations on Covid-19 that the PM was running. To talk about what being whānau owned means and her hopes for the rebuild post-Covid-19, Rachel Taulelei joined us on the podcast.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
David Bell is an investor and business advisor. As a professor at US university Wharton, he taught many successful business founders and innovators. He's been an investor in pioneering companies like Diapers.com, Bonobos and Harry’s, and worked with Warby Parker, a US glasses company that's changing the world of how glasses are made, sold and priced.Its innovative direct-to-consumer model allows people to get pairs sent to their houses to try and then send back. It battles against monster incumbents that own the whole distribution chain, charge what they like - and still manage to make cool glasses affordable. It’s now a retail phenomenon, and Bell was one of the first investors and advisors to the company.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Emily Miller-Sharma is the general manager at Ruby. She's one of the driving forces behind Mindful NZ, an industry body bringing together local producers to advocate for better standards of traceability and to create locally appropriate codes of conduct to find out what the industry is facing. Emily talks about initiatives like apprentices, moving toward more sustainable choices throughout the business and the story of Ruby.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Asantha Wijeyeratne is the CEO of PaySauce. Since coming to New Zealand in 1988 as a young accountant, he has built multiple million-dollar businesses in the payroll space. Seeing that the payroll system could be done better he launched an early technology solution in 1995 called SmartBooks. Later know as SmartPayroll it grew to process a good portion of New Zealand business payrolls before eventually being sold to local tech giant Datacom in 2013. But there was still an itch to innovate in the space again with a mobile-first offering that took advantage of emerging tech. So in 2014, PaySauce was born. PaySauce has been in the news lately with its offer of a free "essentials" payroll solution, PaySimple, for New Zealand businesses affected by Covid-19. Its successful right issue brought on board its first institutional investor.
To talk about the journey, what this disrupted world means for business, and how his work in the community helped lead to a Queen’s Service Medal, Wijeyeratne joined us by Zoom from Sri Lanka where he was visiting family at the beginning of lockdown.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Alice Lines and Nicholas Burrowes publish Homestyle magazine, and Nicholas is also chairman of the Magazine Publishers Association. On this episode we talk about what it takes to run magazines locally, what is involved in creating something people love to spend time with and what does the new business reality of Covi-19 mean for the sustainability of the titles we love?
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Mel Lewis is the founder of Ultrella. Natural deodorant hasn’t always had the best image. Everyone probably knows someone they can smell at five paces who told them they run a crystal under their arm occasionally to help with odour. Some 'natural' mixtures have so much rosemary and coconut oil that you end up smelling like a body odour lamb roast. Mel was tackling an endurance 100km challenge, and needed something that worked but that wasn’t full of nasties. She figured there had to be a better option to what she could find, so applied for a research grant through Callaghan Innovation, got it, and partnered with a product developer expert to create a range of natural products that act like a natural botox, suppressing perspiration without the need for aluminium.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Matthew Chapman is the founder of HR search company ChapmanCG. He has grown his business to the point that it’s attracted significant investment from a listed Japanese company, and also helped build an eco-resort island in remote Indonesia as well as being part of a global team that founded one of the toughest ultra races in the world (the Snowman Race in Bhutan). To talk his journey, tips for remote work and why he chose and is optimistic for NZ, Matthew Chapman joined us by zoom from Auckland’s west coast.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Pat MacFie is one of the founders of local agency Indigo and one of the driving forces behind Manaaki.io, a platform that helps give support to local businesses trying to navigate Covid-19 by linking up experts to answer questions from the business community. It's a great service, with some of the biggest names in Aotearoa's business scene volunteering their time. His company turned Manaaki around as a concept and launched the website in just days, and now they're busy making content that's having an impact on Kiwi businesses.
Many in the tech scene will know MacFie for his role growing the Xero brand across pivotal years, running global media for the company and setting the standard in the industry. To talk stepping out of our local big blue and into Indigo, what they do there, his amazing team and how you can access Manaaki, he joined us for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business owners around the country will have been watching to see what the government is doing to help with the massive disruption caused by Covid-19. One of the things that's been offered is extra funding to support business, through the Regional Business Partners Network. This funding allows for mentoring and support so businesses can make plans to get through this. But what is the RBPN? How can you access it? Is it for you? and what help is available?
This week we are chatting to one of the Regional Business Partners in this network, Kirstin Mead, who has been working with the programme for the last three years, helping companies in the Bay of Plenty access advice, support, and matched funds to grow their businesses. Now there are special services covering current needs like continuity planning and HR – and you don't need to match funds to access up to $2000 of specialist by-the-hour advice. RBPN can also connect you to mentors and make introductions to people that could help you and your business grow.
Head along to the Regional Business Partners Network website to see what help is available for you.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Michelle Dickinson is well known as Nanogirl, her science communicating, experiment making, science cookbook authoring alter-ego. With a PhD in engineering specialising in nanotechnology, and a love for sparking interest in science, Dickinson has worked to increase the quality of our national conversation through media appearances, a Herald column and live events, events that can’t happen for the foreseeable future. Faced with this drop in income and uncertainty for her team, this spirit of invention and experimentation kicked in. The team pivoted over the course of three days to create an online learning platform that can help kids stuck at home experiment with items found around the house and learn through doing. With a lesson every weekday, for only a dollar a day, and a buy one give one model, it’s already finding a great audience.
You can find her new venture at nanogirlslab.com
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Zac De Silva is one of the top rated business coaches in the world. His background is in accountancy, and he was CFO of Flight Centre at the age of 28. He went on to lead a $100m organisation, run the turnaround of Barkers, and then became a coach in the corner of great local businesses, with 38 clients landing on the Deloitte Fast 50. I took part in one of his workshops, and working with Zac he has helped me get clearer about business than anything else I’ve done. Along with his wife, Sip, he runs Business Changing and the Nurture Change events, and with his experience in business we thought he was just the person to get on to talk about how to navigate business in 2020.
Please note: This was recorded Tuesday morning, before the Government assistance package announcement. If you are in business and looking for the first thing you can do to help your situation, do check out the help you can get here.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Chia Sisters is award winning for its nutrition and commitment to sustainability. Its founders have been lauded on the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list, named Obama Foundation Asia Pacific Leaders and have done some pretty cool stuff like put solar panels on their roof, more-than-doubling the power needed for their solar juicery and giving the excess back to the grid. To talk about how good business and sustainable practise can work together and what's next for Chia Sisters, Florence and Chloe Van Dyke joined us on Business is Boring.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
All is for All came to many people’s attention with its trailblazing fashion shoots using diverse models. It’s continued to grow into an advocacy and accessibility consultancy, helping brands like The Warehouse better understand a good section of their customers and design their stores accordingly. Founder Grace Stratton has been a powerful communicator for the issue, talking to companies, speaking on the TedX stage and being named in the InStyle magazine top 50 Badass Women. To talk about what’s involved in starting a business in an industry that is chronically underinvested, how to work this around university study, and what’s next for her, Grace joined us on Business is Boring.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Earlier this month Asia Pacific agritech conference evoke AG hosted 65 Kiwi delegates in Melbourne, and among the Kiwi companies represented was Sparrows. Their purpose is to cut food waste by using smart sensors and data to keep track of where everything is and where it’s meant to be, at what temperature and for how long. It’s leading to less product being written off, a huge problem in the food industry. Sparrows CEO and founder Andrea Watson and Simon Yarrow, who leads Callaghan Innovation’s agritech team joined us on Business is Boring this week.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Nemi Teas creates employment opportunities right across their business, with the first steps being running chai stalls at festivals and markets. They sell their tea through retail and wholesale, and are plastic free, using innovative materials and techniques to keep the nasty stuff out of their product. It’s a growing business addressing a growing problem, and helping to drive the idea that you can vote for the kind of world you want to live in with every dollar you spend. To talk about social enterprise, the Nemi Teas journey and what’s next for the brand, Founder and CEO Pranav Chopra joined us on Business is Boring.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
For a new spot, Bar Céleste has been received extremely well. It was named the best new opening of 2019 byViva, reviewed glowingly by Metro, and is now a fixture and favourite of food influencer EatLitFood. If you haven’t been yet, you might wonder what’s so different about this 'neo-bistro' idea. Inspired by a new style of dining that's grown in France, it's where the idea for Bar Céleste began. Brought together by the team behind the La Pêche pop-ups that happened first in Paris and then around Auckland, Emma Ogilvie and Nick Landsman joined Business is Boring this week to talk about what goes into creating a dining experience and how in hospitality – a notoriously fickle industry – opening a restaurant is never as easy as it seems.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Minaal's two founders landed on the idea of making travel bags as a way to continue a life lived abroad, and it’s still working, with this week’s podcast guest, co-founder Jimmy Hayes in Auckland on a trip back from Japan, one of their biggest markets and one of his home bases. Jimmy joined us on Business is Boring to talk making a dream into a life, global success, taking on an industry with massive incumbents, and the power of the crowd.
Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Morris Pita from EmergencyQ.
You might have been unlucky enough to have been sitting with a kid at an emergency department, wondering just how long it might take and if you were even in the right place. It's not a nice feeling, or a very productive one, and it turns out that a lot of people in the queue ahead of you, and maybe even you, might not be best served at that place.
This insight helped lead this week’s podcast guest to take a side-step from a successful academic and business career into software entrepreneurship. He made an app called EmergencyQ that works with DHBs and emergency and community health providers to make sure everyone gets the fastest, most appropriate care for their needs.
It's saving millions of dollars, countless hours, and meaning stretched emergency departments can better prioritise working on the highest-need cases.
The app is the idea of Morris Pita, who gained an MBA at Oxford, was involved in delivering some of the biggest clean energy generation projects in the country, and became a consultant working on significant Māori economic development projects.
To talk the journey, the goals of EmergencyQ and economic development, Pita joined Business is Boring for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Greg Brebner from Blunt Umbrellas.
This week on the podcast, a business that began with the realisation that umbrellas really sucked, that's grown into a business turning the industry inside-out. Blunt Umbrellas sell brollies for 5-10 times more than the market, are found in countries all around the world, and have now sold over a million units of their signature styles.
Through fashion collaborations, a lot of market building, and clever design they have created their own section of the market for their wind proof, strong, beautifully designed umbrellas, that won’t take your eye out or be heading straight to landfill after seeing some weather.
To talk about making an idea into reality, the importance of a clear vision, and loving bad weather, creator and inventor Greig Brebner joined the podcast.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Bridie Picot, founder of Thing Industries and Wrappy.
This week’s podcast is a chat about turning cool ideas into great businesses, around day-jobs and responsibilities, and having those products be picked up by some of the great taste arbiters in the world. Bridie Picot started out in New Zealand, and then went to London and New York, working at some of the most influential ad agencies in the world. Around the edges she always had an interest in design, thoughtful and warm characterful pieces. She turned this love into Thing Industries, a partnership with a New Zealand based designer. The brand grew, running fashion collaborations, was named the maker of the year by local title Urbis, and was featured in Wallpaper* and in the New York Times for its playful products like the Banana Pillow and a chair with no seat.
From this Bridie has launched Wrappy, a design-led gift-wrap business, and also The Shack, an artfully composed rental project in upstate New York. To talk making it in the Big Apple and turning ideas into reality we caught up with Bridie in the studio on a visit home.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Mike Taylor, founder of Pie Funds.
On this week's Business is Boring, host Simon Pound talks to a founder and chief investment officer who has taken a company from starting with a small loan to having a billion under management in just over a decade.
If you were a uni student around the year 2000 you might remember that you could draw down student loans, ostensibly for living, but we would all know stories of people who turned them into trips, parties or other forms of massive future liability. I went to a study trip in Russia on mine and resented the debt for the next twenty years. But how many people do you know who were onto-it enough to use that opportunity as the seed capital to kickstart an investment career? One that now means this week's podcast guest runs a company with $1b under management that has returned $350m to its clients.
Mike Taylor, founder of Pie Funds, turned his $3000 and some other funds into $200k, attracting investment enough to go out on his own. Then the financial crisis hit. He battled through, bought while the getting was good, and was able to build his way to some of the best returns in the business.
Today they are involved in funds management, wealth advisory and Juno KiwiSaver, which offers a low-fee model that they are now challenging the industry to match.
I got to know Mike when I did some writing for his company, and was amazed at his story, so it is a great pleasure to welcome him as a guest on Business is Boring.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Bruce Turner and Thomas Rowe from Urbanaut Brewing Co.
There are probably a few people listening that have kept up with friends from school and kicked around some business ideas. Maybe even some that have enjoyed the odd beer together and thought about making some. But how many people actually go ahead and make it happen?
That is the founding story of today's company, Urbanaut. It came about after three friends bought the worst house in Auckland, turning into one of the best, so they could fund their very own brewery in Kingsland.
The three friends came from Marton - malt growing country, so it seemed fitting that they would open their own brewery, and now their brand is blowing up.
Two of the co-founders, managing director and chief brewer Bruce Turner and sales director Thomas Rowe are on Business is Boring today to tell the story of making a dream happen, with a few global adventures along the way.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks toRobyn McLean, co-founder of The Hello Cup.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Campbell Ellison from Callaghan Innovation and Alexandra Allan, CEO of FoodBowl.
One of the coolest things about Business is Boring is when listeners, inspired by the people we talk to, share their ideas for cool products. Just the other day a friend talked about an idea for an innovative food product, and I was able to tell him about the existence of the FoodBowl - which provides support and resource for companies and innovators looking to move from small scale to the big time.
He was amazed to learn that there is a facility that is part commercialisation and export readiness lab and part mad scientist workshop where food technologists, scientists and other enthusiastic inventors tinker, explore and create new food ideas. It’s an open access service supported by Callaghan Innovation and run by the Auckland chapter of the NZ Food Innovation Network.
We’ve talked before to people like Angus Brown from Arepa who’ve been through it, so it is super cool to today be able to share a bit more about how it operates and how you could get involved.
This week on the podcast we're joined by food and beverage technologist Campbell Ellison from Callaghan Innovation, and Alexandra Allan, FoodBowl CEO, who also has a background in making things, working through outfits like Cadbury and Horleys, before she turned to management.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jodie Fox, co-founder of Shoes of Prey.
For many years this week's podcast guest executed every move from the big start-up scale-up playbook.
She and her co-founders came up with an innovative new idea, and worked out how to do something that had never been accomplished before - they created the technology and systems to allow people to customise shoes, in pretty much anyway you could imagine, and have a one of a kind shoe made and sent to you within about two weeks.
They were profitable from very early on, having found a customer that loved the ability to make their dream shoe. They then attracted top tier investors and partnered with some of the world's top retailers, like Nordstrom, to grow from a niche product to mass market.
They followed every sensible step -customer research, pilots, testing and built the infrastructure to make the leap to the mass-market, attracting $AU35m of funding, winning awards and making something completely new happen. And then...... then it didn't work as they hoped. Maybe it was too much choice to offer, but the mass market visited and didn't buy. They tried to pivot but couldn't make the economies of scale work - and decided to pull the plug. It is a different kind of chat this week - about when success is closing when the signals tell you, and sharing what is hard learnt.
To that end our guest, co-founder of Shoes of Prey, Jodie Fox, is with us at the link below to talk about her journey and new book to share her story, Reboot: Probably More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about Starting a Global Business
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jeff Xu, CEO, and Ollie McDermot, co-founder and designer of Micropod.
At over $60 for one kg, microgreens are a hot commodity. Commonly served in tiny portions on top of cafe eggs benedict, or placed delicately on a seared salmon fillet at a fancy restaurant, the teensy leaves are packed with nutrients and flavour like you wouldn't believe.
This week's guests on Business is Boring have come up with a home grow kit for microgreens, having created an environmentally sustainable seed layer innovation that helps people grow on demand quantities of the nutrient-rich microgreens on their kitchen windowsills. Catering to the huge numbers of people who don't have the space outside to plant vege gardens, this process is easy, quick, and most importantly takes up a tiny amount of space.
The company is called Micropod, and came about via a group of four friends, who got together to solve the engineering problem of reliably growing and productising the idea. They have won big at the Best Design Awards and since launching in February have serviced customers all over the country.
To talk about what it takes to turn an idea into an engineered reality, the goodness of microgreens and starting a company, CEO Jeff Xu and co-founder and designer Ollie McDermott joined Business is Boring.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Dr Brian Ward of soft-tissue repair company Aroa.
Coming from New Zealand it is so important to keep in mind that what may seem pretty niche here can translate into a massive business overseas. On the podcast this week we talk to someone making big international business out of a health solution you might not have even heard of.
Dr Paul Callaghan, who inspired Callaghan Innovation, had the idea that 100 great companies doing tightly focussed products with global ambitions could change our economy, and this week on Business is Boring we have one of those companies.
You might not have heard of soft-tissue repair, but it is big business. It’s highly focussed healthcare, where in this instance a company called Aroa uses materials from sheep stomachs that were previously a low value commodity, to help provide the scaffolding for human bodies to repair wounds.
The science is remarkable, and it's happening at great scale. More than 100 staff, patents around the world, FDA approval and a partnership with some huge healthcare players. The company is run from New Zealand by founder/CEO Dr Brian Ward.
Ward started as a vet, went into big Pharma, ran NZBio and then got the idea to use animal tissue to repair human tissue. To tell the story of turning that idea into a worldwide company, Dr Brian Ward joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jade Tang-Taylor and Anna Guenther from Cheese Cartel.
This week on the podcast we have something a bit different: our first returning guests. It's very cool to have someone come back to the podcast on a second mission, and today that's happening twice.Two people from two different previous podcasts have created a kind of entrepreneur supergroup.
Cheese Cartel was the outcome of a bunch of friends who know how make things happen coming together for a higher purpose (cheese).
A self-described slow startup, Cheese Cartel is an antidote to the kind of businesses that are out to take over the world at any and all costs. Instead, it is a cool meditation on growing a company with the best people possible to get the best results.
Two of the Cheese Cartel’s five (and a half) founders join Business is Boring today, Jade Tang-Taylor - who was on the podcast previously as a co-founder of Curative and now consults to bring design for social impact and diversity to projects large and small and Anna Guenther, founder and chief bubble blower at PledgeMe.
Listen to the chat to learn about their philosophy, how they launched a successful cheese service business and the journey of making a business with friends.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Victoria Carter, founder of car-sharing company Cityhop.
The benefits of car share in an increasingly dense and urban Auckland are clear. Why own a car and carry all of the costs when you use it so little? Why not go easier on the earth by sharing resources? Why not make more trips by public transport and only use a car when you really need one?
Today this appears obvious, but how about 12 years ago, when Auckland’s pioneering car share service, Cityhop got underway? It was 12 years before smartphones, and before a lot of the awareness for the sharing economy had been built out by services like Airbnb.
With Cityhop now in Auckland and Wellington, for way less per hour than an e-scooter you can hire a range of cars, from little runabouts to great big vans to completely electric Volkswagen e-golfs.
The founder is someone who has been at the front of a lot of change. Victoria Carter ONZM has been a lawyer, PR practitioner, board member, politician and lately, the first female chair of The Northern Club. She's also helped get more fairness for kindergarten funding and helped make the Auckland Arts Festival happen.
To talk her mission to reduce car ownership, Victoria Carter joined Business is Boring.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Valentin Ozich, the founder of I Love Ugly.
The fashion industry isn't an easy one to break into. A lot of it makes no sense and very rarely do New Zealand brands become leaders around the world, and that's exactly why I Love Ugly is special.
Worn by some of the world’s top stars – with Justin Bieber famously buying 15 pairs of their signature pant – they had a store in LA with lines around the corner on opening day, built hundreds of thousands of followers and were one of the most highly engaged-with Facebook pages in New Zealand.
I Love Ugly changed the rules to sidestep some of the silliest parts of fashion. Instead of running interest free loans to all their stockists like most small fashion labels would, they innovated their model and became pioneers in ecommerce. But then things grew a little far, stock piled up and the bank changed its appetite for risk. Rumours swirled I Love Ugly might be going under, and the reality was most people would have.
Founder Valentin Ozich brought his company back from a place most couldn’t, and has started to tell the story. His new podcast and his company’s social media presence aim to inspire, educate and be honest about what it takes to succeed.
To talk good (and not-so-good) decisions, personal growth and where Tony Robbins fits into it all, Valentin joined Business is Boring.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to James Bartle, founder of ethical clothing brand Outland Denim.
This week on the podcast we talk to a man inspired to take on trafficking after watching the Liam Neeson film Taken. His journey led him to Cambodia to set up a factory, train staff, pioneer environmental production techniques and to today run one of the world’s fastest growing premium sustainability fashion brands.
Right now, more likely than not, you are wearing something that you're not super proud of. All of us know that if we are in a piece that was a bargain at a fast fashion store or from a mass market brand that, chances are, the labour, fabric or environmental footprint is probably not up to scratch. Clothing production is one of the biggest industries in the world and it has a hugely harmful social and economic impact. Most people know more about the living standards of the chickens that make their eggs than the workers that make their clothes.
But what happens when one person starts trying to do something about it?
Today's guest's journey of learning about trafficking, labour exploitation and environmental impact led him to set up a factory in Cambodia, get B Corp status and change expectations around how denim can be produced with his company, is Outland Denim.
It had a huge wave of publicity last year after the Duchess of Sussex wore a pair of the brand's jeans, leading to more than 40 new workers being added to the company.
Founder James Bartle was in Auckland launching a new line this week with Karen Walker - a collaboration including t-shirts, jackets, jeans and skirts made with signature Karen Walker elements, by Outland’s own team in Cambodia, using organic cotton and dyes.
Bartle joined Business is Boring to chat the journey, the mission and what we don't really know about the clothes we wear.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Campbell Brown, CEO of the company making sure Domino's has enough dough.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Kiri Nathan, the co-founder of a Māori-inspired fashion brand that's been gifted to some of the world's biggest names.
Today we talk to Kiri Nathan, leader of a brand and company by her own name that fuses millennia of Māori tradition with an industry so often focused on the future.
Kiri Nathan's pounamu, carved by her husband and business partner Jason, and her woven kākahu cloaks have been gifted to visitors from Barack Obama to the Duchess of Sussex. Both are part of their unique offering, contemporary pieces that represent the modern fashion world but with their roots in te ao Māori.
It is a concept that she's had to forge room for, but she's succeeded through determination, talent and dedication. And she's not forgotten to carve the path out for those who wish to follow her journey. Kiri has created the Kāhui Collective – a group fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing to create a uniquely Māori fashion industry.
The group has had scores of designers involved, they’ve taken trips to China as part of their development programme, and in the latest in a long line of awards and recognition for her pioneering work Kiri is a recent recipient of a Blake Leadership Award.
To talk her journey, how she's making fashion work in positive ways, and what’s next, Kiri Nathan joined Business is Boring for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Brianne West, founder of Ethique.
On the podcast this week we have an amazing guest, one of the most successful companies to come out of the local high-growth ecosystem, now exporting their idea all around the world.
Ethique are one of the best investments local venture experts the Icehouse has made, and they aren't even a traditional tech or widget maker. They sell soaps and shampoos and things that would come in wet form in plastic, except in dry form in cardboard. Ethique founder Brianne West joined us to discuss the novel approach to a problem right in front of everyone every day, but one that took her fresh approach to see.
Because we are pretty funny animals, us humans. Some people see problems and do things about them, and others do weird things.
Take supermarket plastic bags. The problem with plastic bags is that plastic lasts for generations, degrades into micro plastics, and poisons the food chain and soil. So the answer we found to that problem? Ban thin plastic bags and make an absolute shit-tone more, thicker plastic bags, that have all the same problems as thin plastic bags, except more so. Good work humans. And then, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, you get your shopping home and every product has five layers of rarely recyclable plastic.
One person who looked at the problem of plastic and packaging and did something wildly clever about it is our guest this week. In 2012 Brianne West, a scientist, became a kitchen chemist when she had a eureka moment in the shower that selling liquid soap packaged in thick plastic was probably not the best way to do things. She created hard soaps in paper and compostable packaging. Her shampoo bars, soaps and conditioners have become fan favourites. Through a couple of wildly successful crowd-funds, product development, opening up large retail channels in the US, Australia and further afield, Brianne and Ethique have created millions of fans and stopped millions of plastic bottles going to landfill.
It is a great pleasure to have someone who’s mission and execution are an inspiration to me join the show. To talk the insight, making it happen and what’s next, Brianne West of Ethique joined us for a half hour chat you can hear below.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Shaun Edlin, CEO of Dotterel, and Richard Quin, Callaghan Innovation Group Manager.
This week’s podcast is a bit different, we’re going to be hearing from an entrepreneur about their company and journey - and also from the people behind the C-Prize, a competition that our entrepreneur’s company Dotterel took part in that’s helped take their innovations to the world.
Dotterel are a drone noise reduction company, they make technology that means drones don’t drone so much - allowing for things like stealth defence work and screen industry audio recording. CEO Shaun Edlin joined us to talk about how the C-Prize helped spur them on, and open up new markets.
The C-Prize challenges New Zealand innovators to use new technologies to tackle complex global problems with creativity and inventiveness, is open to New Zealand innovators and comes with a great big cash reward and support component.
And this year the prize is now open to anyone with an idea that could make a difference in solving environmental challenges. Ten finalists are picked and mentored through a programme, with one taking out the award. To learn more about how it works and how you can enter, Richard Quin, Callaghan Innovation Group Manager joined us with the full story with Sean from Dotterel. Listen below and find out more about the C-Prize here.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Ian Taylor, founder of of Animation Research Ltd.
This week on Business is Boring we have Ian Taylor - a man who has used science and technology to tell new stories in sport, movies and culture. His company Animation Research Limited has pioneered graphics that became world famous with the America’s Cup, and he has now set out to tell one of the great, barely-told stories of New Zealand. New Zealand Aotearoa has one of the world’s most amazing stories of navigation and exploration, yet for years when it was taught it was only Cook and Tasman named as our discoverers. Kupe has long been written off as a story, a Maori 'legend', and the seafaring feats of journeying across the ocean of the first people of New Zealand were labelled an accident.
Everyone has heard of Cook. How many know that great navigator only got his way in and out of trouble across the Pacific with the aid of Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator who he picked up along the way to help the Endeavour find its way here, and help with translating the Maori language to Cook and his men? Who really knew how murderous Cook’s first visit was, his crew killing people all around the country?
We’ve failed to tell the stories that didn’t make the Pākehā expedition look good. But the tide is now turning.
Recently the government announced the history of Aotearoa's colonisation and the Land Wars will now be widely taught in schools, and Ian Taylor has been working to bring information about New Zealand's true discovery, by the Polynesian navigators, to life.Taylor's company Animation Research Limited, from Dunedin, has grown to become the world leader in sports graphics. If you’ve seen an America’s Cup race, watched a game of golf or cricket, you'd have seen his tech. As pioneers in computer graphics, Animation Research Limited were responsible for everything from the dancing Bluebird Penguin ad to Hollywood scenes and everything in-between. Ian Taylor is leading the team, and winning gongs for innovating, but has now also turned his eye to making sure we all know our history so we can build from it, with his project the voyage.co.nz.
To talk the journey, our stories and what’s next, Ian joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Tim Brown, Co-founder of AllBirds.
This weeks’ podcast has an extra special guest that has recently been on the minds, and feet, of people all around the world.
It was a great chance to talk about a journey from New Zealand to the very top of the fashion industry, and Allbirds co-CEO Tim Brown turned up for an honest, engaging and helpful chat about what it takes to build something different, and what it takes personally and professionally to keep stepping up in terms of scale and expectations.
It’s a story now famous in Aotearoa. A few short years ago a New Zealand professional footballer has a dream for a shoe made out of wool, and lots of our podcast listeners will have followed every step along the way.For many that first moment might have been seeing a Former All White fronting a Kickstarter project with the great overview video for a new merino wool shoe you could wear without socks. From there this Allbirds idea has grown and grown through the first signs that this little concept from New Zealand was getting worldwide notice, through to investment, great media notices, huge sales, and AllBirds stores opening up in the world’s great retail areas, and now, a store in Auckland.
Although success can make things seem like it was a sure bet, it was, in the words of the founder and today’s guest, ‘a bad idea for a long time before it was a good one’. To find out how bad idea can turn into something quite wonderful, to chat the journey to here, and to hear what’s next, Allbirds founder Tim Brown joined the podcast you can find just below.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Erik Zydervelt, Founding Director and CEO of Mevo.
This week the Business is Boring Podcast chats to the founder of a revolutionary new ride share program, prominent in Wellington and with big plans. It’s the future, it’s electric, it’s the vibe, it’s Mevo. This is an interesting one. In a few years people will probably be looking back and thinking it was absolutely bananas how many people had cars, and how little they used them.
If you think about it, having an asset that you use less than an hour a day, yet where you are responsible for every bit of depreciation, servicing, insurance, risk and upkeep, well it doesn’t seem the brightest model. And as cities begin to price in all the free space they are given in the form of road parking; as automation advances; and as urban density increases; the days of every family having 2 cars are looking pretty much numbered. But the thing is, cars can be really handy, and although you may not be best to own one, having access to them can be a real win. So around the world car-share services, and car on-demand services are springing up, and in Wellington, New Zealand, a particularly interesting home-grown one is in operation.
Mevo allows users to open an app, find a near-by plug-in hybrid Audi, unlock it with their phone, hire it by the hour, and then when finished, park it in any metered park in most of Wellington central so long as it is run by the council. And then you just walk away. It’s the convenience of a Lime scooter, except sanctioned by councils and cutting down road clutter instead of adding to it. The idea has launched with some impressive backers on the board, and with investment from Z and Audi NZ and with a novel carbon positive approach to offsetting emissions - they sequester 120% of what you make, and into rainforests that will actually retain the carbon. It’s a cool idea, with thousands of users, many ditching their cars, and it is becoming part of the transport mix in Wellington. To talk the journey, where it could go from here, and what transport might look like into the future, Erik Zydervelt joined the podcast, that you can find below.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Hamish Pinkham, founder and creative director of R & V
This week’s podcast tells the story of how a few mates turned a party for friends into one of the biggest events in New Zealand. There is a lot that is unlikely about the story: the people, the place, the success…. and it was never assured. It’s taken a lot of risk, determination, wrong turns and hard times to make R & V such an event that for you to know it all we have to say is its initials.
In 2003 a group of mates threw a party for 400 people in a vineyard in Gisborne. 2000 people came and it began what has become a festival that is famous on the world stage and a rite of passage for kiwi youth. Rhythm and Vines grew and grew. From small beginnings they added days to the event, Internationals, camping, comedy and a whole roster of other ticketed events they promoted. But they grew a bit far a bit fast and some of the things that made the festival feel special were lost. After what was called a riot in their secondary campground they went back to basics, and have rebuilt the festival into a safer, friendlier, smaller and more curated affair. There have been highs and lows, big wins and financial losses, and last year news came that our guest this week on the podcast. Hamish Pinkham, founder and creative director of the festival had sold half the business to one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, Live Nation.
He is still guiding the ship, but has the help of a much bigger network to land acts, run and fund the event. He is still booking the acts and curating the festival, but is now also able to step into some new ventures like The Phoenix Summit, an entertainment industry event in September.
To talk the journey to here and what is next, Hamish Pinkham joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Paris Georgia's Paris Mitchell Temple and Georgia Cherrie.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you take a step back and look at it, it is kind of bananas that New Zealand went from no real cafe culture, to having a coffee so associated with down-under - the flat white -now ubiquitous around the world.
This episode of Business is Boring talks to a man who has as much to do with bringing great coffee here, and then taking that back to the world, as anyone else in the country.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to R&D programme leader Dr Peter Surman and Simone Hollier.
Did you know that there is a local pharmaceutical company in the second stage of trials to use ketamine to treat depression - and that they're looking for people to participate in the trial? Well, here's a podcast for you dear listener. For this week's Business is Boring we meet two of the 800 workers at a very under-the-radar local drug maker. You might be surprised to know New Zealand has a big Pharma company, and you could also be forgiven for not knowing at all that it was almost sold off, but in this half hour chat we learn about the history, current work and future plans of Douglas Pharmaceuticals.
Douglas is a family-owned drug giant, that since 1967 has grown from a company making generic drugs once they fell out of patent- which is more of a difficult process than that makes that sound - to now be researching new uses for previously proven safe drugs. The company does upwards of $250m a year, with the bulk of that as exports, and was almost sold a few years ago before deciding there was a future, here.
Part of that future is bringing new talent on board, and a strong R&D programme, led by Dr Peter Surman, the Chief Scientific Officer and 23 year member of the company. This podcast chats to him and Simone Hollier, a New Product Portfolio Analyst, who Douglas took on through an R&D experience grant that is available through Callaghan Innovation (a grant that many companies are able to access). To find out more about getting students into your research, the growth of the company, and making drugs, here, please enjoy this chat with Dr Peter Surman and Simone Hollier.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Flamingo Scooters CEO and co-founder's Nick Hyland and Jacksen Love.
Around Auckland lately, and Wellington for a little longer, you might have noticed a bunch of bright pink scooters popping up, and this week’s Business is Boring podcast meets the two twenty-something kiwi guys behind this company. It’s no trivial feat to launch such an enterprise, especially when you are taking on some of the world’s biggest and best funded companies. How do they do it?
Co-Founders Nick Hyland and Jacksen Love of Flamingo Scooters first got properly started in Wellington, where, after a long process, Wellington Council approved two scooter companies to take part in an 18 month trial to see how last-mile mobility could work for the Capital. One was Jump, a division of mega transport company Uber, one of the biggest companies in the world, and one was Flamingo, New Zealand owned, and run by two blokes in their 20s. Their brand is a vibrant pink, it uses the same high quality Segway scooters as Jump (better than the Lime ones many might be familiar with) and they do some cool things like offering free helmets for users, and some rigorous rules around safety and parking.
They launched in Wellington in the middle of June, and at the end of July launched their full fleet of 500 odd scooters on the streets of Auckland.
The chat this week covers how it was that two chaps came to be taking on the big players, what it takes to get something like this going, and what is next for Flamingo Scooters.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Vaka Interactiv CEO and co-founder Jesse Armstrong.
This week’s Business is Boring podcast talks with an entrepreneur who is changing the way that stories, especially Māori and Pasifika stories, are told in museums, art and business. In a half hour chat with CEO Jesse Armstrong we hear about how they founded their company, Vaka Interactive, landed their idea for pictures that talk to you, got into Te Papa’s cultural idea accelerator and ended up making a piece of technology that would fit right into a Harry Potter movie.
Their idea traces back to a visit to a museum, and a realisation they had, that although museums have come a long way in some ways, a lot of what goes on is still quite passive. There’ll be an exhibit and maybe a little bit of text to explain it. And the bits of text, to contextualise all these items with so many stories, are so often dry and lifeless. They thought, ‘Imagine if these things could tell you, really tell you, all their stories, and what if you could ask them questions?’ And then they found a way to make it happen.
Vaka Interactiv create the technology and visual storytelling for talking pictures that you might find in museums, and other places or businesses with stories to tell. Their product looks like a normal photo, and then, Harry Potter like, they notice you watching and start telling you the story. There are first steps at being able to prompt them and ask questions, and the technology is being used by artists and museums to bring exhibits to life.
The company call this technology Culture Lens, and it is the stories of Māori and Pasifika culture that the founders are particularly excited to capture and share. CEO and co-founder Jesse Armstrong joined the podcast to talk the journey through founding, their time at Mahuki, the Te Papa innovation accelerator, how the whole team moved to Wellington, how access to funding and support (thanks Callaghan Innovation) helped them create this mix of art and science, and the growth to today, including great advice for people wanting to make their own impact around capturing and sharing the stories that make this country special. Ka rawe!
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Helen Dorresteyn , co-founder of Clevedon Buffalo.
40 minutes south of Auckland you’ll find the Clevedon Farmers Markets on every Sunday, with a bustling collection of local growers, farmers and artisan food suppliers, and while all this is a firm favourite now it wasn’t that long ago it was nothing but an inkling in the mind of today’s guest.
Helen Dorresteyn had seen the trend towards farmers markets overseas and thought we should be able to do that here, too. She went around the neighbourhood, got support from the locals and set up the Clevedon Farmers Markets, however there was one thing she couldn’t find, and that was a great local cheesemaker.
So her husband, an industrial electrician, decided to put his hand up to fill the gap, and they thought they’d try to make that lovely buffalo cheese that they’d so enjoyed in Italy.
How hard could it be? Well, quite hard as it turned out, but very rewarding.
Since creating the Clevedon Buffalo Company they’ve gone on to win multiple awards, become a mainstay in our best kitchens and be one of the anchors of the still thriving Clevedon Markets today.
To talk making things happen, the journey and cheese, co-founder Helen Dorresteyn joined the podcast
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Dr Shaun Holt, creator of Honevo.
New Zealand honey is some pretty wondrous stuff, many will be familiar with manuka honey's clinically proven qualities, but it doesn't stop there. Today's story is about a serial entrepreneur who turned a medical and research background into a clinically proven kānuka honey product. When you hear that a product is all natural, yet as effective as a synthesised pharmaceutical product, you might find your skepticism rising, which is why today's guest went out and created a groundbreaking study, recently reported in the British Medical Journal Open, to prove his product's case.
Utilising a network of pharmacies, Dr Shaun Holt got his Honevo cold sore gel, made from 90% kānuka honey, into the hands of hundreds of cold sore sufferers. In a huge trial they proved that their product was as effective as the market leader gold standard incumbent, and tasted a lot nicer too! This success traces back quite a long way, Dr Shaun Holt is a trained pharmacist, doctor; successful author and a serial entrepreneur who started and exited a clinical research company and a research overview service before setting his sights on the pharmaceutical industry, where the spoils are large, but the cost of entry can be mindboggling. To talk the journey, the many steps leading to today, and what's next, Dr Shaun Holt of HoneyLab joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Ben Nathan, CEO and Founder of Container Door.
You might have, like I have, got an email out-of-the-blue from a friend asking you if you'd be keen to grab a piece of outdoor furniture, or a scooter, or a mattress comfort overlay thingy, or pretty much anything you can think of, in order to help them fill up a container and get theirs and yours sent to you for a price way under what you'd normally pay.
And then, like me, you've probably gone to the website to find out what on earth they are on about and found a lot of things you weren't previously aware you were in the market for, but look pretty good and very well priced.
And then you've probably fired off one of those emails off yourself to another friend. If you're still with me and don't know what I'm on about... the website is called Container Door, and it is an ingenious idea from a long-time entrepreneur with an eye for: what people like, value for money and the power of a brand at a good price. Ben Nathan is the CEO and Founder of Container Door, and prior to that has taken many of the best known brands in New Zealand apparel and found new homes, wider markets and new opportunities for them. If you've been keeping an eye on fashions for a while you'd know the brands Norsewear and Hero, Principals and Barkers Men's clothing, all having found new leases of life with Ben.
To talk the journey, the power of a brand and sourcing things people just need to have, Ben joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Angela Lim, co-founder and CEO of a free, online mental health platform called Clearhead.
Mental Health is a crisis in this country, and there is welcome news of 1.9 billion of new funding in the latest budget, but right now, services are stretched. Finding the right care, at the right time, is a challenge. Knowing how to navigate the system is a challenge. Even knowing when to reach out for help, and where to do that is hard. The whole system itself is set up on a reactive model, but as with all health and fitness, preventative and proactive is better than reactive. So how do we do this with mental health care?
Well, questions like these, and more, have led to today’s guest starting a new venture, creating an AI chatbot that helps to mimic a GP consult, but creating an atmosphere and feeling of a chat with a knowledgable friend. It helps to increase people’s comfort in sharing information, and sends people to the right places for the assistance they need next. It’s called Clearhead, it’s in market now, and making a difference from the get go. To chat the journey, the need and what’s next, co-founder, CEO and Dr, Angela Lim joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to John Henderson, partner at Airtree.
One thing that we talk about a lot on this show is what it takes to make an idea successful, but one part that doesn't always get raised, but that is perhaps one of the top factors, is getting the access to the right capital at the right time. Not getting access to the funds at the right time to grow equals failure. Getting capital that demands you do the wrong things spells trouble. Getting capital and not spending it well spells trouble.
It is an industry where one win can carry ten losses, and changes in markets, technology and personnel can turn a sure fire bet into a tanker, and vice versa.
It's an area that fascinates. People like the team from A16Z have done a great job in popularizing the founder centric VC and approach, and the way some of their influences have been portrayed on shows like Silicon Valley mean that the VC process in pop culture is seen as a big exciting chase. But what's it really like? What kind of people can do it? And if you are a company with a big dream how do you get a top VC behind you?
Well this Business is Boring guest is here to help. John Henderson is a partner at one of Australasia's leading VC firms, Airtree. They have investments in great companies like 90 Seconds Canva, Prospa and Joyous. John came back to Australia after being a founding Principal at transatlantic venture firm White Star Capital where they invested in well known companies like Dollar Shave Club, and he got into VC through being part of successful companies like Summly and Facebook, and early in his career, management consulting. T o talk what it's like and how it works, John joined the podcast. Listen below for the full interview, and see below for a short transcribed excerpt.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Kate Gwilliam, CEO of feedstock solution, Zeddy.
We all know we can't simply put more animals onto land to grow the economy, the country needs clever ways to maximise the returns from dairy and other animal farming practices. One person who knows this better than most of us, and is doing a lot more to help, is today's guest, Kate Gwilliam.
Kate moved from a job as project manager in, Auckland to the Manawatu, making a big life change taking on a 450 strong cattle herd. Together with her husband Tom, neither with a background in farming, they made their farm a tech-first endeavour, including full automation in the calf shed, farm sensors and computer-based reporting systems. And with this experience, Kate got involved with an automated feedstock solution, Zeddy, that uses RFID to deliver just the right amount of feed to every animal on the farm.
It's award-winning tech, and with her as CEO they have a model ready to sell to the world, that they'll be sharing at Fielddays happening the week this episode comes out. To talk the journey, what life is like on the farm, and using tech to make thing better, Kate joined the podcast
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Sue Dunmore, co-founder of Rose & Thorne.
A couple of decades ago there was a big lingerie industry here in NZ, but in 2010 Bendon made the call to pull the last of their NZ operations out , and the design jobs left New Zealand.
This moment left the head of design and a past CEO wondering if there might be a way to make a different kind of bra company, designed here, and based more on fit than trends, where they could match affordability with comfort.
These weren’t the first time that these thoughts were had in the industry, but when these people went for affordable, they meant it. Bras that can be bewilderingly expensive, but their first big customer was the Warehouse, where they sold for $25. Since their start they’ve expanded to retail, international sales and have sold something in the region of a million bras.
To talk the journey, turning a lost job into a multimillion dollar opportunity and what’s next, Rose & Thorne co-founder and Managing Director Sue Dunmore joins me now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Andrew Childs, founder of Behemoth Brewing.
You will know the beer that is made by our guest today. You would have seen the cans with Churly, the mascot, with his big underbite pointy teeth and friendly colours and the fun names, that sometimes riff on US politics, but always have a little something interesting going on. Like the shower beer, with a holder for the wall of the shower as one example. But it all almost wasn't. Founder Andrew Childs was a lawyer in Wellington, and changed career, navigated setbacks and injury, and grew and grew his brand and business to today. Where now, Behemoth Brewing is running a Pledge Me equity crowdfund to build a brewery large enough for demand, and a 140 person restaurant with a real nose to tail approach. Depending on what day you arrive you will get where they are up to on the animal, with the restaurant and on-site butchery b run by Andrew's national champion butcher wife and co-force in the business, Hannah Miller. To chat the journey, the crowdfund and beer, a favourite topic, Andrew joined the podcast.....
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt.
This episode sees a special Business chat to mark Techweek and the Hi-Tech Awards that land at the end of the that week. Techweek is a festival of innovation, a meeting of the varied eco-systems in tech and a very good time.
We’re chatting with two of the speakers in this big week of talks, panels, meetings and connections that is happening May 20-26 across the whole country, seriously, jump on Techweek.co.nz and see if there isn’t something you can get amongst close to you, and even if not, soak it all up online!
We’re joined by Amber Taylor, CEO of Ara Journeys - a finalist for Māori Hi-tech company of the year, and she is speaking on a panel on Celebrating Maaori innovation.
And also by Jonathan Miller, Group Manager Future Insights, Callaghan Innovation, who will be on a panel looking at 2019’s biggest technology trends.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt.
Everyone will be familiar with the way that skincare companies use science to sell their products, but how many people actually trust that the science is anything more than marketing?
Well often it actually isn’t. This episode we’re talking to a person who worked out that most were just selling 'hope in a jar' and set out to change that. Soraya Hendesi came to New Zealand as a trained cosmetician with a plan to make skincare that would actually work. This led to years of new research with partners like the University of Auckland and Callaghan Innovation, and the discovery of active agents that passed the gold standard of clinical trials, leading to skincare that actually works. Soraya’s company uses natural materials and has its own plantation north of Auckland, that fosters native plants long known and used for their properties, and by matching these with rigorous R & D turned her company Snowberry into an international force, attracting the attention of Procter and Gamble one of the world’s biggest cosmetic companies who bought them last year.
Soraya and her Husband Mark still run the company, here, and to talk the journey, the sale and what’s next, Soraya joined the podcast
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Co-working spaces can be great little communities. There’s something exciting and energising about being around people making interesting things happen, always new people with exciting news, connections you can make and a lot of people working on a global level. They are also little bubbles, and can help you forget that life isn’t like that everywhere. In fact, even having co-working spaces available isn’t all that common. Even within your own city. One person who saw the power of community, and worked to make a space happen for South Auckland, is Manawa Udy. Last year she spearheaded the crowdfunding and then establishment of Ngahere Communities that runs Te Haa o Manukau - a co-working space, and intentional community for the creative, innovative, entrepreneurial people of South Auckland to help tap their vast potential.
Te Haa o Manukau is a project from the Southern Initiative, supported by ATEED through GridAKL, and is built to be a thriving heart and link to the wider innovative business space. Manawa has a background of pioneering community entrepreneurship projects such as a buy one give one model driving school and forming the PETER collective, a community of community providers to better serve the people around Mt Roskill. And as a creative director at Bob and Bob, Manawa tells these stories and others.
To chat entrepreneurship and community, Manawa joins us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt.
Connections can be the difference between ventures taking off or stalling. Having the right network, introductions, access to funding, experience, even sharing suppliers, all these things may seem to be a matter of luck or environment, but they don’t have to be. We’re a small country with limited resources, so it is vitally important we make the most of what we have, and if we look to other small advanced economies, there are actually ways to foster and grow these connections. Ireland and Israel both have programmes designed to spur more interaction, collaboration, connection and growth, both run in part by the government and both very successful. These programmes were the inspiration for Scale-Up NZ a new Callaghan Innovation backed platform to get more happening between the innovation ecosystem. What do all these words mean, how exactly does it work, and how can you get involved? Well to talk these questions over we have Rosie Spragg, project lead for Scale-Up NZ and Craig Simpson, a many times over entrepreneur, working in data science blockchain and solar energy, who share with us the benefit for the industry.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Stephanie Post and Hayley White, co-directors of the Auckland Art Fair.
In the Cloud on Auckland’s Queen’s Wharf around May the pre-eminent contemporary art event in New Zealand, the Auckland Art Fair takes place, bringing together many of the top galleries and artists in New Zealand and around the pacific, for 10 thousand odd art lovers to head in and see and buy more than 5 million dollars of contemporary art. It’s not just about sales of course, reputations are made and there is a focus on fostering new talent through the sensitively and intelligently curated Projects exhibitions, that are not necessarily as commercial as the gallery stands.
Many great cities have Art Fairs, and it’s a standout on the local calendar that under the leadership of today’s guests has grown year on year to go year on year from the biennial beginnings. To talk working at the intersection of art and commerce and what it takes to bring together so many artists and galleries in one place, co-directors Stephanie Post and Hayley White joined the pod.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Dan Mclaughlin and Mark Neal, co-founders of Scapegrace.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Grant Straker co-founder and CEO of Straker Translations.
You might have seen a great tech story pop up recently, about a globally successful kiwi company offering its staff the ability to work in Gisborne, where they were to open an office so their team could enjoy the lifestyle, cost of living advantages and a nice life. It was just the latest in a long run of cool initiatives the company Straker Translation has put out as part of growing from a family founded tech company into a global success with offices, partners and 40,000 plus translators working all over the world. Coming from the background including being a paratrooper, Grant Straker is the co-founder and CEO and joined us to talk the journey, opening up high-growth to more people and what’s next...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Jenny Morel, founder of Morgo & Co.
Today’s guest started working in the tech sector 20 years ago , before many people knew New Zealand even had one!
Coming from investment banking, first she founded Morel & Co an investment company to work with technology companies, and then No 8 Ventures, the first US style venture capital fund in New Zealand. And on the side, also founded Morgo, a high-energy retreat and recharge for CEOs building tech or high-growth companies going global from New Zealand or Australia. To chat the journey, the industry today and her experience, Jenny Morel joined the podcast.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to John Macaskill-Smith, CEO and Director of Disruption at Ventures.
People aren’t standard, yet best medical practice often has to be. Treatments for conditions, and prescriptions for ailments are most often based off studies where by design they found the average need and effective dosage. But we know people are not the average. There are distinct ways different bodies metabolise for example - which mean for some the average dose will never work because they metabolise it too fast, and others as they do so too slowly. Which is part of why now there is an emerging filed of pharmacology that uses gene sequencing to understand how an individual’s body works and then equip them and their doctors with that info and understanding to help ensure the correct prescriptions are given.
It’s just one of the exciting ways to put power in patients’ hands that have been pioneered out of the Pinnacle group of not for profit companies. They are a huge force in the midlands, Its members manage the health care of nearly half a million people enrolled with over 80 practices in Gisborne, Taranaki, Taupo-Turangi, Thames-Coromandel and the Waikato. The CEO that has driven their growth, first for the whole family of companies and very recently for their ventures arm, is John Macaskill-Smith, who is here today to talk about using business to change health, introducing this pharmacogenomics and how you can find out more about how your body is likely to react to drugs.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Imche Fouri, general manager innovation and Dr Will Barker, CEO of Mint Innovation
Tucked away in Parnell is an innovation centre that has helped propel some of the biggest names in local tech forward, although you might not have heard of the place or even some of the names. It’s a truism of the local scene that some companies are easy for the media to cover, and some, like many facets of science and technology, are a little complicated and don’t get the airtime.
This hub used to be a DSIR building, and it started to let space to projects with interesting science, and they’ve gone on to be unusually successful. Some you really have heard of, like Rocket Lab. Some you might know, like Lanzatech - one of the great undertold stories of the local scene, and some you will be hearing a lot more of in the future, like Mint Innovation who are turning e-waste into literal gold.
The importance of fostering this creativity has meant that what started as an accidental meeting of minds has become very purposeful with the space now operating as Level 2, an incubator specialising in deep technology….. What’s that? Well, to find out and talk tech, incubation and the next crop of great ideas, Imche Fouri, general manager innovation and Dr Will Barker, CEO of Mint Innovation join me now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Dollar Shave Club, My Food Bag, Xero….. subscription businesses pop up in many areas of life, because they make for great business.
If you work out your average revenue per customer, and your churn rate, the rate at which customers leave, and then work out what a customer costs you to acquire, and you can make those numbers right, you can project future income in the kind of way that has turned Xero and Push Pay into massively valuable companies before they even turned a profit. We’re used to them in software, but one place that they are pretty innovative is clothing. And that’s where today’s guests have brought their innovation. Asuwere is a clothing subscription for men that provides elevated wardrobe essentials for men, providing the kind of wardrobe anchors that are needed in the month they come, so tees and linen shirts and shorts in summer and jackets and cashmere cotton sweaters in colder months.
The idea has attracted big name supporters -with Dan Carter choosing to buy their wares, and it comes from brothers with the credentials. Sam and Noah Hickey hail from fashion and subscription business backgrounds. Sam was a stellar designer for Huffer straight out of uni, and Noah, an All White and business leader, who played a key role in the huge growth of Push Pay.
To talk the insight, the journey and getting men to trust them, Noah and Sam join us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Elisha Watson.
When refugees come to New Zealand they find a lot of help from religious and community groups to help get started with housing and public services, with volunteers helping at every step. One of those volunteers though, working with the Red Cross, noticed that employment was something that was hard for refugees. After 2 years, 40% of refugees aren’t in work. So to try to change this, she looked around for a business that might use their skills, and not finding the need met, decided to leave a law career at one of the top law firms to set up a company making underwear, here, with refugee workers.
Elisha Watson didn’t have a background in clothing, and some of her workers still needed a lot of training, it was a hard first year, with Elisha sharing highs and lows through crowdfunding, media and blogs. The company is called Nisa, Arabic for women, and now Nisa has just opened its first store, in Wellington, where shoppers can see the production going on around them with an open workroom. To talk the idea, the journey and what is next, Elisha joined us by phone from Wellington.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Angus Brown from Arepa.
There are a fair few functional drinks that have popped up in the fridges of interesting retail.
Drinks that claim to help you focus and recover and what have you, though many - I’m looking at you Vitamin Water - have actually been packed full of sugar and dubious science. So many in fact over the years that you might be forgiven for thinking that they were all empty claims. But not so today’s guest’s product. After seeing the impact of cognitive illnesses on family, he set out to learn more about things that help the brain, and the journey took him to launch a functional drink that is backed by patents, research and formulated with a Professor of Psychopharmacology from Melbourne. Our guest is Angus Brown, the drink is Arepa, and it’s now found across the world - he joins us to chat the entrepreneur’s journey, discovery and selling a drink with a bit more to it.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to, CEO Founder of Romer, Emily Heazlewood.
You all would have been there - being in a city and wanting to do the kind of stuff the locals love, not the places you’ll find the tourist lines. But how do you cut past the dubious wisdom of a crowd and get those personal recommendations. Well perhaps you could do it with an app that had been described as the tinder for things to do - -Romer. Although quite new this app has been accepted into Vodafone One, picked up tens of thousands of users, some impressive partnerships with the likes of AA travel, and just announced funding from some big names in NZ tech, like Ben Kepes and our past guest Hadleigh Ford. To chat the journey, the future and connecting people and experiences, CEO Founder Emily Heazlewood joins us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt.
Last year a medicinal cannabis producer called Hikurangi Cannabis Company came out of seemingly nowhere and broke the internet, crashing PledgeMe’s servers as it became the fastest local company to crowdfund into the millions - doing 2 million odd in less than ten minutes.
But as with most overnight successes it was on the back of years of work. It’s a long journey to change an illegal activity well connected with an area to a legal one. Locals from the Ruatoria area and around Ngati Porou and the East Coast, of which Hikurangi is a significant Maunga to local Iwi, were given first dibs, and invested ahead of the public raise. And the company, that inked deals overseas that could stretch into the hundreds of millions has gained first low THC and very recently higher THC trial and growth rights.
And this is while not compromising on trying to create access and jobs for people that have fallen foul of the prohibition laws. While other companies have gone out with a very medical company type branded approach, Hikurangi proudly showed their dreadlocked and rasta hatted workers. This is about honesty, integrity and most importantly actually following through, the 20 plus local jobs and big milestones hit have Hikurangi as a leader in the industry, a founding member of the industry council and a beacon to many companies looking to take a community-led approach to the legal cannabis industry,
To talk the journey, where we are and where we go from here, founder CEO Manu Caddie joins us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Mahmood Hikmet, research and development coordinator for Ohmio.
When you think about the companies bringing autonomous vehicles to the roads, you probably think of some of the world’s biggest names - Apple, Google, Tesla, Uber, but what if I was to tell you there was a kiwi start up that grew from repairing computers and making intelligent signage to inking multi-million dollar international deals for its autonomous shuttles. Ohmio, is the maker of 20-person shuttle that can be extended to carry up to 40-people their breakthrough is to operate on pre-determined routes without the need for a driver. It’s kind of like a tram, but with virtual rails, guided by a range of electronic systems.
They are working with bus operators, new cities built for the autonomous future and have got manufacturing happening in their own facility in China - with a new focus on expanding the AI capabilities and research. To chat the journey, where they are and where they go next, research and development coordinator Mahmood Hikmet joins us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Mark Kneebone, Head of Promotions at Live Nation and the Co-promoter at Laneway.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Rebekah and Tamati Norman.
Business at its best can be a tool for bringing countries and peoples together - and things like fair trade and conscious consumerism hold part of the solution to helping traditional communities enter the global economy. One country that is really quite close, and big, and populated and but not widely known visited or understood is Papau New Guinea, more than 8 million people, living mainly rural and farming lives, with some of the most amazing geographical and cultural diversity and oldest cultures in the world.
Colonialism, mining exploitation, civil war and international neglect have meant that PNG faces many challenges today - with the exploitation and unrest still forces to contend with, But perhaps the biggest issue is isolation - with such a small, amount of travel, trade and understanding meaning unethical mining and practices continue. One of the coolest things about business is the way it can help lift and connect, and today’s guests are working to do just that. Tamati and Rebekah Norman turned family connections into PNG direct, a company connecting organic and naturally produced oils, spices and essential oils with international customers. Tamati is the former chair of the NZ Papau New Guinea business council, working to make more links. Traditional and respectful natural production is a big feature for the couple, who are are behind Native Rituals, a modern Aotearoa apothecary company, making balms and fragrances that incorporate ingredients traditionally used in Māori preparations across time.
To talk honouring the past and ancient knowledge and arming people for the future, Tamati and Rebekah join us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Warner Cowin.
A big theme in the world of business and economics this year, that I struggle to understand, yet is proven over and over again, is that in the middle of a construction boom companies in the sector are going bust left right and centre and no-one is said to be making any money. Which, when you look at supply and demand, and also things like the cost of materials, and the highly concentrated set-up for supply, seems a bit bananas.
Well, one figure in the industry, who is founder-CEO of procurement and bidding consultancy, Height, and so knows the business from both the pitch for and commission project sides of the fence, has a few idea that he has been sharing as to what might be off in this particular soup. His name is Warner Cowin, an ex RNZAF engineering officer, who’s taken many of the disciplines and skills from military life, a place so influential on business team structure accountability, culture, and systemisation, and used those to help build his successful 15 person consultancy.
To talk construction, things learnt in the services, and empowering Māori and pacific business through clever delivery of big projects, Warner joins the podcast
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Until very recently, if you were wanting to buy shares in American companies like Apple, Facebook, Google or Tesla it is quite amazing how hard it could be.You needed either to be buying an awful lot, so to make sense of the massive fees of using a local bank share-trading service as a broker, or you needed to navigate a confusing and bewildering process to get access to an international broking platform, and then all the tax and hassle around that. It is not recommended.
And now, an innovative new platform has started up to solve the problem, offering access to US shares and exchange traded funds with brokerage fees at an order of magnitude under the existing big bank status quo. Which may make it surprising that this start up has come from the same holding company as …a big bank! It’s called Hatch, and is from Kiwi Wealth, the sister company to Kiwi Bank, and is a product of their focus on innovation.
Because the big banking sector is ripe for disruption, and big change is coming with open banking already changing the fee and service landscape around the world. It’s very cool to see that coming from inside a bank. The general manager of Hatch, Kristen Lunman, and the head of experience Natalie Ferguson have made it their business to do just that. Working first with the Kiwibank Fintech accelerator, and then in the Kiwi Wealth Innovation Lab resulting in this game changer.A disclaimer is that I am a user, but only out of wanting and finding the service and then asking them on once seeing how interesting the background was.
To talk the service, opening up investment opportunities and innovating in a bank environment, Natalie Ferguson and Kristen Lunman join us n
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Nick Whitehouse.
How many times might a board member have asked, what are we doing to innovate? And how many times did anything happen? Well, at MinterEllisonRuddWatts that question was answered by the start of an innovation lab, that has led to a company joint venture spun out with VC backing to use AI to change how the law works.
The fantastically named McCarthy Finch are using NLP, machine learning and human inputs to help analyse mountains of legal documents in a fraction of the time, augmenting humans to make decisions faster and cut out the leg work while looking out for the fishhooks. The company has jumped onto the world stage, winning awards like Sir Richard Branson judged Global Talent Unleashed gongs, and becoming the first local company to make the finals of the TechCrunch Start-up battlefield, pitching in front of an audience of up to 6 million.
With partners and clients including some of the biggest professional services and law firms, the idea is finding amazing traction and the CEO, co-founder, and winner of Most Disruptive Leader at the Talent Unleashed Awards, Nick Whitehouse joins me now
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to John Barnett.
Outrageous Fortune, Sione’s wedding Shortland Street, Whale Rider. These enormous hits that are part of the cultural fabric of Aotearoa, can all trace back to today’s guest on the show. They came about in large part thanks to the work, organisation, connections made and championing from a man named John Barnett.
Over a career that’s taken him from having an independent production company before there was much of independent industry to speak of, through to managing Fred Dagg and creating best selling albums, to bringing us the Footrot Flats movies, then moving into South Pacific Pictures which were State owned by TVNZ where he led a management buyout. And South Pacific pictures has played an amazing role in building our creative industries. Long running hits like Shortland street, Outrageous Fortune Almighty Johnsons and Westside have created a base for the industry of professionalism, ability to gain experience, and great pay while living in the arts. John Barnett stepped back from South Pacific Pictures a few years ago but is still involved in helping bring stories to screens. To talk on his career, on telling some of New Zealand’s most important and loved stories and on the entrepreneurs journey, John Barnett joins us now
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In our regular Business Chat special, Simon Pound speaks with Fleur Francois, director at New Zealand’s national metrology institute and Karyn Scherer, senior copywriter at Callaghan Innovation.
It's been a big year in international measurement. A number of the big measures we rely on every day, and for the accurate use of more things in our lives than you might imagine, have swapped out, or are in the process of doing so. The kilo is a famous measure, kept under glass and lock and key in France,that’s changing from an actual lump of metal to being kept by quantum measurements based off fundamental laws of physics so as not to change.It turns out that up to now every now and again the kilo mass shifted and so would all measurements, kind of bananas to think of it.
It's also been a big anniversary for another standard, standard time. Did you know, and I'm not trying to catch you out if you didn't, that NZ was the first place in the world to adopt standard time, adopting Greenwich mean time as our base measure, before England even did. It's a great story of parochialism and vision all at once, and we were a staggering 15 years ahead of anywhere else. The 150th anniversary of that also passed this year. So to chat time, measure and the nature of reality, we're joined on the pod by Fleur Francois, director at New Zealand’s national metrology institute, Measurement Standards Laboratory (MSL), and Karyn Scherer of Callaghan Innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to CEO of EzyVet Hadleigh Bognuda.
The move to the cloud has been called the biggest thing to happen to business since the dawn of the internet. At its best it means little businesses can enjoy the kind of enterprise software advantages the big players used to only be able to get, for small affordable payments, and big companies get enterprise software without enterprise price tags. We’ve seen it in business software, with local hero Xero becoming one of the great SaaS, software as a service companies in the world, and in its wake an ecosystem of possibility emerged. Some of the companies that came after were an obvious move of putting a business tool into the cloud. Others have pulled together a bunch of tools to change every element of how a business can operate. And one of the beauties of the cloud is that you can serve customers everywhere. So where making specialist vet software might not have been viable in an isolated NZ market, now the world is your market.
Which is the story of local SaaS star, EzyVet, a vet practice management software solution that has been on a tear, tripling year on year and opening offices in North America, Auckland and London, and 100 plus staff around the world. With 65% of their revenue in North America, and a huge wave of change happening with vets looking for a better way, EzyVet is a fantastic kiwi success story you may not yet have heard of, unless you are in a vet clinic, and then you most definitely should have, To talk the journey, sustainable scaling and the future, CEO Hadleigh Bognuda joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
A few years after studying science, but beginning a career in cosmetics and lingerie and film, today’s guest was reading a science journal for fun. A line about the properties of native bee excreted nesting material caught her eye and made her wonder if it might make a good bioplastic.
What for some might have been a quick muse, for Veronica Harwood-Stevenson became a mission and then company. It’s taken her across New Zealand and Australia to find specimens, had her duck venomous locals and bushfires, found collaborators and funding and led her to identify and be working to commercialise under the name Humble Bee.
To chat the journey, inspiration and making that action, Veronica joined the podcast
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Did you know that every day around New Zealand more than $2 million of theft occurs that no one even bothers to report?
Petrol station drive offs, little thefts at supermarkets, things under $1000 generally don’t even get reported to the police - and if they are the police often can’t do much about them.Well a few years ago a lawyer and his co-founders saw this issue and thought there must be a better way. They set up a company that became Auror - helping to link evidence of shoplifting or small-scale crime between the retailer and the police. It’s helped lead to some pretty amazing stats: 55% fewer drive offs at the petrol station Z, and hundreds of recidivist shoplifters brought to justice. The product works by making it easy to report and connect the dots on organised retail crime, and even helps prevent crimes by integrating with license plate recognition.
It’s a company that’s attracted top-class investment and top-class customers with most of our major retailers here and more and more in Australia and across the world using the service. To talk the journey, the decision to throw it all in as a successful lawyer and chase criminals, and the fact that so much crime would just go unreported, Auror CEO Phil Thomson joins us
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
2018 can feel quite progressive and doing pretty well, if you’re in the right bubble. But in many ways oh boy there’s a lot still to do. Like with tampons and pads. Half the population needs them, yet they are mainly made with synthetic and potentially harmful materials, and have attached to them in some places luxury taxes and in many places a stigma around them. Which is where the Organic Initiative comes in, to provide an organic alternative and foster the movement to recognise safety and health around periods. A radically sustainable and progressive company it was co-founded by today’s guest a few short years ago. Helen Robinson is a wildly accomplished founder of a start-up - having been CEO at Microsoft New Zealand in some of its most dominant days, a board member of nationally and globally significant bodies like ATEED and a winner of the Supreme award at the Women of Influence awards. To talk the journey and the mission, Helen joins us by phone from America where she is with Oi/
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Nat Cheshire, self-described 'fake architect'.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Sandy Mamoli, author of Creating Great Teams.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you look at the digital landscape there has been a lot of innovation - Netflix has changed the way we watch things, we are in a golden age of television, movies keep getting bigger and bigger, musicians have a direct relationship with fans through the internet, and books, well books have moved to the digital age in much the same way they have always been, words on a page, except these days, it’s an electronic page. It’s an odd thing, that something so loved, books, hadn’t taken advantage of the possibilities of the internet to become more interactive, engrossing or amazing. Well, one company in Aotearoa saw this opportunity and have built a company that makes exciting Digital experiential books, and who have a focus on using modern methods to give traditional languages new avenues to grow and connect today.
They have published wonderful app based titles, like Ngarimu, that brings a graphic novel to life with sound and music and texture, revitalised classics, like the Hairy McLarey books, and have just announced a partnership to help create a hub in Australia to help bring new appreciation to endangered local languages.
To talk about the mission, the work around the world and fostering te reo through new tech, CEO Steven Renata joins me now,
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In our monthly Business Chat special, Simon Pound speaks with Maria Slade, business editor at The Spinoff, and Karyn Scherer, senior copywriter at Callaghan Innovation about the business stories making the news that month.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Lisa Taouma, producer of Fresh.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he speaks to Greta Kenyon about her journey to starting a magazine, and how Together Journal has grown.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week, he's joined by Murray Bevan of Showroom 22.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Georgia McGillivray about harnessing the power of social media influencers.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In our monthly Business Chat special, Simon Pound speaks with Maria Slade of Callaghan Innovation and Duncan Greive, managing editor of The Spinoff, about the business stories making the news that month.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Aroha Armstrong about creating pathways for Māori entrepreneurship.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon is joined by Iyia Liu, a master of social media marketing.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Frances Valintine about educating society about technology and the workplace.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week Simon talks to Sam Stuchbury the only Kiwi who made this year's Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Shama Lee of Sunfed Foods about how meat-free meats shouldn't just be for vegetarians and vegans.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In our monthly Business Chat special, Simon Pound speaks with Maria Slade of Callaghan Innovation and Rebecca Stevenson, business editor of The Spinoff, about the business stories making the news that month.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon is joined by Bridget Hawkins the CEO of Regen, an app helping to drive efficiency on farms.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Tim Lightbourne about how he built a wine company – with the help of Graham Norton.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Angie Judge about how she's changing a thousands of years-old industry.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon chats with Vaughan Rowsell about turning big ideas into big realities.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In a monthly special, The Business Chat, host Simon Pound speaks with Maria Slade, from the communications team at Callaghan Innovation, and Rebecca Stevenson, business editor at The Spinoff about business stories making the news that month. The chat will be available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon speaks to Natalie Robinson of Mum's Garage about coaching people with ideas to get them market-ready.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week Simon talks to Glen Herud about his company Happy Cow Milk trying to create sustainability in the dairy industry, and why it failed.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In the pilot of a new monthly special, host Simon Pound speaks with Maria Slade, from the communications team at Callaghan Innovation, and Duncan Greive, managing editor at The Spinoff about business stories making the news that month.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
When you think about awards ceremonies for traditionally male dominated industries like tech and business, diversity is not the first thing that jumps to mind. These awards have long been the nights to celebrate the people that made it under the old rules, and so have showcase a lot of successful old blokes. But one prominent event, the NZ Hi-Tech awards, has made it its mission to fast forward the process of change by making diversity the focus of its awards for this year. It’s pushed forward a conversation many industries need to have, and got conversations and initiatives started all around the country, working with the excellent Ally Skills team to help companies learn practical steps to take, and in a step perfect for the tech industry, they even provide a toolkit. The chair of the Hi-tech trust, Jennifer Rutherford, is emblematic of and driving this change. With a career in corporate management and industry governance she took over as chair this year.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Sophie Gilmour about Bird on a Wire, a chicken shop grown from an old Ponsonby takeaways.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Vodafone Xone. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Jade Temepara about growing a family business from a seed potato.
In the wake of the Christchurch earthquake a local gardener was given a task by her koro. Her grandfather asked her to help keep a potato variety going that had been grown by the family for more than 100 years. The deep connection to growing kai, and the the way it provides and protects kicked off a renewed interest in for Jade Temepara in the power of gardens to anchor and support families.
In addition to being a acclaimed gardener who placed at Ellerslie flower show, Jade had been working with families doing it tough and thought she could bring the worlds together. She launched Hand over a Hundy, a concept where a family is given 100 bucks for supplies, seeds and seedlings and a mentor to help them grow seasonal veggies, and the idea being that they then make enough surplus that they can sell that to create another 100 of seed funding and introduce this to another family.
They’ve changed lives up and down the country, and the very shape of Christchurch after the earthquakes where gardening became radical urban reclamation. Today Jade is co-founder of Kākano Cafe and cooking school and garden with a Māori kaupapa and team that is spreading the messages of good health and nutrition and connection with the earth through the community.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In the wake of the holy what the hell disruptive force of President Trump outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times have turned around years of subscriber decline as readers vote with their wallets about the importance of news and what is fake and what isn’t.
On The Spinoff that has been through Press Patron, so you might be familiar with the model. The founder and CEO of that company, Alex Clark, saw this trend form years out, with a master’s thesis turning into a real world product, now in NZ Australia and the US and helping X outlets harness their following and supplement ads, paywalls or whatever else is needed.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
They say where there's mystery there's margin and one thing that is deep in the depths of mystery is trade credit. What's trade credit? It's the second biggest source of loans in the world after banks. It's like when a business wants to buy something from a supplier and pay them 30 days later. And so much of business operates on these trade terms, but so often not on the actual terms. People are late, people need to be trustworthy, people need to guarantee they will pay.
Well, one person who looked into this abyss of paperwork is Miriana Lowrie. After a career in banking and looking at strategy and ways to improve business for outfits like ASB, she saw an improvement that could be made here and launched 1Centre. The app has gone through incubation, setting a record funding round for an product at the Flux accelerator, was part of Vodafone xone and is helping solve the hard problems, with customer usage doubling month on month.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
We’re very excited to introduce todays guest, someone extra inspiring, even by the pretty amazing standards of the people we talk to week in week out on this show. Someone, I kid you not, that Tony Robbins looks to for motivation and inspiration.
He’s an author, entrepreneur, doctor, extreme skiing champ, former drunken backflipper and current dedicated father and inspirational business leader. He even got the modern version of the Hippocratic oath changed(!).
Let’s rewind to the end of uni study, when a drunken stunt of a backflip led to Dr Sam Hazeldine, then in his last year of medical school with a promising extreme skiing career on the cards, waking up from a coma with a poor outlook for future success at both. What could have been the worst day of his life he made one of his best, resolving to focus on what matters, then going on to out-performing the best hopes for his head injury: within a year he was a grad doctor and skiing national champion.
Entrepreneur Dr Sam Hazeldine is the founder and managing director of three companies that shook up medical orthodoxy by keeping the welfare of doctors at their heart: MedRecruit, MedWorld and MedCapital. They have been wildly successful. He’s been on the Fast 50 list multiple times, been the fastest growing services company in the country. He was the Ernst & Young – Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 and was the 2014 recipient of the Sir Peter Blake Leadership Award.
He’s written best selling books, like Unfair Fight, to help small New Zealand businesses compete in what he calls an uneven playing field. He co-founded the holistic talent management company, WeAreTenzing.
He wants to help everyone live exceptional lives, from you listening right through to the scores of orphans his foundation has helped rescue from life as child soldiers in South Sudan. Dr Sam Hazeldine joined us on a hot and muggy Friday afternoon recently for this chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Vodafone Xone. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Ben Reynolds about how his company Spalk is making sports commentary more accessible.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
As business thinker Cindy Gallop says, there is a lot of money to be made by taking women seriously. But the reason there is that opportunity is that traditionally, particularly in tech and business, women and women’s interests have not been. One person that’s been creating more space and fighting this battle over the last 20 years is local entrepreneur Jenene Crossan.
In 2018 it’s easy to take for granted the social web, paid independent female voices, and that Teen Vogue is political. But in 1999. it wasn’t this way. This was the year Jenene founded NZ Girl. It was also just after Google was founded. Jenene was already 4 years into building websites and living online, and saw where things were going with media.
NZ Girl went on to be the biggest social magazine in the country and in 2015 was named best blog. It was also a business in the time before there was a clear business model for online media. This led Jenene to found companies to solve advertising online, to found Bloggers Club - one of the first companies around to monetise influencers - and more recently, Flossie.
Flossie solves two problems at once. It helps women find curated and recommended salon services and book them efficiently and effortlessly, and put helps salons drive repeat and new custom, especially in quiet times. It was an industry ripe for such a service, that has grown into Australia and the UK, with big things on the horizon.
To talk the ups and downs, the life of an entrepreneur and the journey, Jenene joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
A flippant comment around a kitchen table in 2013 brought about a business that has gone from making one Thai Green Curry to now having a delivery or pick-up service for ready made meals, 2 cafes, a commercial kitchen, regular media appearances, 2 cookbooks, thousands of meals sold a week and a staff of 25. Jess' Underground Kitchen is now very much in the overground. To talk about the journey, Jess Daniell joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
New Zealand likes to think it’s clean, green and 100% pure, but if you look under the lid, quite a few things you would expect from such a place are not really all there.
Like recycling. Even today there is a long way to go, but we are light years on from where we were 9 years ago when Steve Rickerby spotted a massive hole in the market for a company that could pick up food waste from businesses.
Back in 2009, Steve was working at an insurance company that had moved in to Auckland's first 5 star green rated building. As part of the rating system, staff were separating waste in to rubbish, recycling and compost but none of the large waste companies offered a service to collect the food waste. So the carefully separated waste was just going to landfill.
Steve saw a big problem to solve and launched We Compost collections with one bin on the back of his ute.
They now collect over 30,000 kilograms of organic waste each week - Servicing corporate offices, food courts, schools, tertiary institutes, hotels, cafes, caterers, and coffee roasters such as Kōkako Organic coffee roasters who recently switched from plastic coffee dump bags to compostable ones, helping to lead the way and drive change in the coffee industry..
Steve was joined early on in the journey by his partner Gemma Spring and together they have built the business to the point that since March 2012 We Compost has helped save over four million kilograms of waste from ending up in landfill and this number continues to grow…
To chat about where they are, where we all are, and what's next, Steve and Gemma joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Genevieve is External Relations Manager for Lion NZ, a company that is further along than most on the journey. Last year they were champion winner of the YWCA Equal Pay Awards, and of the DiversityWorks Work/Life Balance Award. To chat that column, her career and how you can have it all so long as that all includes flexible work and some effort to address deep paternalistic bias, Genevieve joins on the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Great entrepreneurial ideas come from people, but also from environments that foster creativity, provide support and that lift people to help them to go further. This is part of why co-working spaces- places where creatives and companies can rent space by the desk or the week - have exploded around the world as hubs for people to go to, to make their dreams happen, and to keep the motivation and the energy up.
And here, the name BizDojo has been synonymous with co-working since they started on Karangahape Rd in 2009. Founded by Jonah Merchant and Nick Shewring, they grew from a few people at 12 desks to now having thousands of residents, and a string of coworking and collaborative spaces across New Zealand, with some big plans for 2018.
They were also a big part of bringing GridAKL into being - that many in Auckland tech will know, spinning up the original GridAKL prototype space, and later running coworking, networking, business support, events and activations in a new permanent building. With BizDojo spaces and events across New Zealand they’ve played a role in thousands of creative enterprises and have been keen to give back when they can, having taken leadership positions in the industry.
Like last year, when they ran a survey around mental health issues facing entrepreneurs under their initiative designed to support and help founders in New Zealand - Founders Central. They found some concerning stats. Most respondents had faced problems, and most of them had not sought help due to stigma, time or resource concerns.
This is a problem that is perhaps built into the culture of the founder that goes further than the normal to win, but it is one that needs to be talked about. Very recently the local scene lost a wonderful man that many of us worked closely with and rode the rollercoaster of this life with, and that really hits home how hard this can be, and how when what we do is not ordinary we need to have extraordinary support in place.
As part of highlighting this issue last year, BizDojo co-founder and Chief Entrepreneur Nick Shewring talked about his own experience in the context of his success and life, and how asking for help and being honest about the ups and downs is important.
If anything we talk about in the podcast today leaves you wanting to talk about your experience please do reach out to Lifeline on 0800LIFELINE.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In 2003 there wasn’t much of a computer game development industry in Aotearoa. But an entrepreneur that loved games, graphics and design set out to change that, and to make a Playstation game - not worrying they didn’t even have access to the Sony development kit. They managed to assemble a team, make a prototype and sell the idea internationally, all on their first hit-out. This pioneering approach has continued for Maru Nihoniho, whose Metia Interactive has gone on to make games that carry great messages and outcomes in amongst the fun of playing.
There was SPARX, with the University of Auckland that gamified treating depression, with great success, winning awards and getting written up in the British Medial Journal. There was The Guardian, with a wahine toa, strong Māori women lead, a damsel doing the rescuing and distressing. And an idea I love, Māori Pa Wars, a take on the traditional tower defence game, available in te reo and quietly telling stories from history. Maru has been recognised for services to gaming and mental health with a Member of the Order of Merit and has been appointed by the crown to the board of Māori Television.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Y Combinator is one of the great names in tech and start-ups. The incubator slash business bootcamp is famously hard to get into and famously hard full stop! Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe are some of the alumni and they only accept companies that have billion dollar potential. It’s also, like much of Silicon Valley, disproportionately made up of young, male, Stanford Grad founders, with not a lot of people accepted from outside the US, let alone from little old NZ.
But Dr Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic, managed to break a lot of those preconceptions. She has a PhD pioneering new work in machine learning, doing it after thirty, with her husband as a partner in the company and their two kids in tow. Their company uses machine learning to get insights from customer feedback for big companies like Stripe, Air NZ and Vodafone, and was a part of the Vodafone Xone startup accelerator. They’ve just picked up a new funding round, have traction and momentum in an exciting space and we are very lucky to have Alyona join us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
How is a country going to grow if the tangata whenua, some 15 percent of the population, are overrepresented in negative stats and under-represented in the ranks of entrepreneurs and owners? Well, that is a big question, and one that can be broken down into many parts, and the first of which might be how do we get frontline Māori workers performing better, growing and improving, and into upward progress.
That’s where Indigenous Growth comes in. They work with organisations with Indigenous workers, what they term those frontline workers, to unlock their potential and increase their contribution. It’s about bringing all of people to work, and unlocking the same positive qualities that many of these workers have in their whanau situations. A great idea and business from Michael Moka, an entrepreneur, scholar and leading voice in engagement. You might have caught him at TedX Auckland, or know him from his work with Executive Education and the Maori students association at Auckland Uni, or maybe through his love of Kapahaka. Michael Moka join us now to talk about Indigenous Growth and unlocking potential.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
What exactly could loving One Direction have to do with fixing the diversity pipeline problem in tech? Well if you hear ‘One Direction’ and go into dismissal mode, that might just be the root of the problem. A few years ago a tech industry leader in law gave a presentation at a serious Berlin tech conference about how perhaps the diversity pipeline problem could be traced back to the way that traditionally female spaces of fandom have been minimised online.
It was based around fan fiction, One Direction secret love affair conspiracies and honouring how people’s enthusiasms can lead them to learn about making things online. If you love something and build a fanpage, that is a very real way in to website building.
The talk has led to more talks, years, and time spent on One Direction than Sacha Judd had ever anticipated. Sacha, a former partner at top law firm Buddle Findlay, has been an influential figure in tech – being very early on the journey of big firms like Vend, where I know her from, and now running the family office for Rowan Simpson, a recent pod guest, at Hoku. As well as identifying and funding the next wave of great companies. Her back of a napkin service for tech founders has helped get many companies off to a great start, and she joined me to discuss what we term serious and how that seriously affects who feels welcome.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
At 16 Alexia Hilbertidou looked around and saw that she was the only girl in her IT and physics class, then the next year the only young women in advanced physics.
What was going on? How did women go from the forefront of coding to underrepresentation at a time when it is meant to be more accessible than ever? Well, to change the ratio you have to change the structure. So Alexia decided to take the message to young women while still choosing what subjects they would take, and so founded GirlBoss NZ, an organisation which encourages young women to embrace STEM, Entrepreneurship and higher leadership.
In just 18 months, GirlBoss NZ is New Zealand’s second largest network of women with nearly 8000 members. At 18-years-old, just finished high-school, Alexia has spoken to nearly 20,000 young people, teachers and business professionals about gender equity, STEM, and the future of work.
This passion for future-focussed education has seen her named a Top 30 Global Teen Leader, a Top 5 Young Leader by the Ministry of Youth Development, and the most influential New Zealand woman under the age of 25 at the 2016 Westpac Women of Influence Awards. A serial entrepreneur Alexia also was the National Winner of the Unitec Coding App Competition, at 16, receiving a $30,000 prize for KaiShare - an online food redistribution platform. …To talk changing the ratio, and her work, Alexia joins us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Rowan Simpson has made his name about ten times and he’s not done yet. He’s had a large hand in the product and growth in some of New Zealand’s greatest tech exports, he was head of product for Trademe and that worked out pretty well. He did a similar role in the early days for Xero and that has worked out amazingly, it’s a global leader in software as a service.
He was an early investor and board chair for Vend, where I first got to know him and work with him and see how much he did to help us grow.
Then there’s Timely, where he’s an investor and director, and that company just announced a seven million dollar funding round to take their profitable company in scale. And those are just some of the greatest hits - we haven’t mentioned his latest work, Ron is one of those people who could’ve stopped long ago, but uses his social and financial capital to bolster the next wave of tech companies. And through his charitable foundation is also giving back in more traditional ways. This might make him seem finished up and out of the game, but he’s not. His blog is required reading in tech, with great takes on start-up and product, and he’s active with the next big companies too, like Melodics, who we’ve had on here.
To chat the methodology of the start-up, what product is, the throughline of these companies, and what’s next, Rowan joined Simon at Spinoff Towers.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
On September 4, 2010, when just 15 years old, Jake Millar’s life changed forever. His father and four close friends died is a skydiving plane crash. Prime Minister John Key visited the scene and Jake wrote to thank him. A hand-written note reply came from the Prime Minister who wanted to meet Jake. Away from the media. And as someone who had also lost a father young, and gone on to great success, Jake credits this meeting and example as part of what’s led him to go on and do what he’s done. And what a lot of that there is, already.Always entrepreneurial, Jake became driven. He set goals and got them. Head boy of school and house, check. He landed a 40,000 scholarship and then rather than take it, he took advice from a book by Sir Richard Branson that said “Screw it, Let’s Do it” and he gave it a miss and started a company that months later he was in the works of selling to the NZ Government.His second venture, Unfiltered, sees him traveling the world, spending most of his time in North America, talking to business leaders about how they succeed, and selling it to people and great companies all over the place. It’s going great guns and backed with serious investment. He’s even interviewed Sir Richard Branson. At 22 he’s just getting started but already giving back, in New Zealand doing fundraising for Lifeline, raising 55 thousand with a charity dinner. In conversation with Simon he talked career, what it takes to succeed and giving back right from the get-go.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
A few short years ago a fellow looking for some good butter for a baguette noticed something odd. Although we were a dairy country if you went to the supermarket and wanted a fancy butter the option came in a blue pack, all the way from Denmark.
Why and what on earth? This thought led Peter Cullinane to try to make his own top-shelf butter, and to then found and grow Lewis Road Creamery, beautifully made, indulgent and to-be-savoured dairy. It’s been quite a ride - with tales of security guards protecting their Whittakers Chocolate milk collaboration, sold out ranges, copycat milks and expansions into bread, ice cream and non-dairy milks to name a few. Lewis Road Creamery is a huge success, and part of that may be that it wasn’t Peter’s first rodeo. He’s an ad man, who ran Saatchi & Saatchi in New Zealand and Australia, and then worked for them in a bog role in New York. On coming home he co-founded Assignment Group -who have always let the work talk for itself, launching Hyundai here and helping Whittakers reach their most-loved brand position. And he also co-founded Antipodes, the beautiful water in the elegant German bottle.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Last July long standing TV producer Bailey Mackey (Code, The GC) came to the Spinoff Towers to talk about the busines of making TV. Earlier that year new had hit that the production company he runs, Pango, had sold a television format to Freemantle Media, the world’s biggest tv outfit. This was a massive coup, made all the bigger by the fact it was an under-the-radar show called Sidewalk Karaoke hailing from Māori TV.
Bailey talked Simon through the bidding war that surrounded the format and talked about how a good idea with the right brain and guts behind it can make it all the way to the top, even if its from compratively small origins.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
20 years ago a bunch of young comedians, and their manager, who’d spent years making comedy nights happen across Auckland, thought it was time for a dedicated venue. On Queen St, near the Town Hall, they found a venue that was a lot perfect and a bit yuck – The Classic, infamous as an adult cinema. Over 20 years of building the business and the state of comedy in New Zealand, one founder, Scott Blanks, went from organising comedy nights through to being the owner, mentor, fosterer and friend to comedians young and old, new and established. He turned his background – first in accounting and then cinema marketing – into a role often called the Godfather of Stand-up, creating careers and also recognition for the craft. And not just with the live shows, but through telly too. Before there was 7 Days there was Pulp Comedy. Scott was part of that. And before that, Funny Business. Yep, Scott too. And how it’s all grown.
His club puts on 350 plus gigs a year for tens of thousands through the door, with space on stage for those just staring right through to some of the biggest names in world comedy. To chat the first 20 years, the explosion in comedy he helped spark and what’s next, Scott Blanks of the Classic Comedy Club joins us now.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
At the age of 37 a young women, who made her way up through a pretty sexist world, got the biggest job in the country. No, it’s not Jacinda Ardern today, it’s Theresa Gattung, in 1999.For a brief little window there a few years later most of the top jobs in this country were held by women - Dame Sian Elias was Chief Justice, Dame Silvia Cartwright was Governor-General, Margaret Wilson was Attorney-General, Theresa Gattung was Telecom’s chief executive and Helen Clark was Prime Minister.But boy how we slipped. By the time Gattung retired in 2007 it was only Dame Elias left.
How do we get back? Well, the new PM is a start, but gains got can be gains lost.
One way is for women to empower women. And it’s in that capacity Theresa Gattung joins the podcast today.
After Telecom she’s gone on to chair major boards, co-found ridiculous success My Food Bag, and get a Companion of the NZ order of Merit gong for services to business and philanthropy, with her work for the Wellington SPCA and organisations empowering women.
Like the newly lunched SheEO. A fund that has women invest in women, part of a global 1 billion dollar idea that Theresa has just helped bring here.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Today's guest is a serial entrepreneur. If you haven't heard of his latest company you've very likely seen their work on awarded and effective websites for clients like Marketo, Visa, Air Newzleand, Spark, and Les Mills. Having started just six years ago with a perfectly timed mix of design, brand marketing, and build for the market, his agency Little Giant came and got big fast. Little Giant was one of New Zealand's fastest growing companies in 2015 on the Deloitte Fast 50. One of Asia Pacific's fastest growing companies in 2015 and 2016, and Mark was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalst in 2017.
They grew big and they got bought by one of the leading players in global advertising, the $11 billion annual revenue behemoth Dentsu Aegis. It's a huge achievement in a short time but it wasn't Mark's first rodeo. He's been starting companies since he was 17 and learned some hard lessons along the way that he's turned into his exit and next launching pad. Mark Hurley joined us on the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
On the fourth of July just four years ago today’s guest started a new company in the technology space. Having come out of some of the world’s biggest ICT companies like IBM and Cisco, Mike Jenkins was keen to help use the power of this cloud technology thing to help businesses do better. And look at how it’s gone - today his brainchild The Instillery is working with some of New Zealand’s biggest companies, like Fonterra, through to helping retailers like World run better businesses. He was awarded the emerging ICT leader at the CIO Awards and got the Digital Transformation of the Year gong at the IDC Australasia Awards for their work transforming Fonterra. From starting with a team of three they’ve grown to 30 employees and are just getting started. To talk about the power of the cloud, the effect it is having on business, and how he has used it himself, Mike Jenkins joins the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
About 2 years ago the rent went up on a much loved cookie shop near the Civic in Auckland. Moustache Milk and Cookie Bar was facing a 40% hike. Owner/founder/manager Deanna Yang, a constant presence in the store and online through her energetic, revealing blog that charted the ups and down of business wasn’t going to take this.
As an entrepreneur in her early twenties, from a single parent family, young, a woman and a kiwi of Singaporean Chinese descent she had faced a lot of uphill battles so far and she wasn’t going to let this one get her down. She’d baked, invented, shared and given a lot back in her short run in business and used this community as a springboard to a successful $91,000 crowdfund. Even Lorde was keen to #savemoustache. Deanna used this to evolve the business, ditch the OTT rent, fit out a bus and tour the country taking the cookies to the people and now open three stores. All in less than 6 years in business. These goals have all been set and nailed, against the odds and against an environment that NZers like to think is pretty easy for people that aren’t pakeha, but in Deanna’s experience, it isn’t plain sailing, but there are a lot of good people out there too.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
On the first week of the job at Coca Cola in 1996, today’s guest was wheeling out coke products from Pizza Hut after they moved to Pepsi. Although just a new sales rep he vowed that one day he’d get Coke back in to the big chain and its sister KFC.
The years passed, and Craig Cotton moved up the ranks. He went from sales rep to a manager, into sales operations, marketing and eventually, all the way to General Manager from his shop floor start. And on his last day with the company, 17 years later, Craig and his team made that deal with Restaurant Brands, the biggest single one in Coke NZ’s history. How’s that for a story of growth and dedication?
Craig has gone on to be the CEO for the Better Drinks Co, makers of Charlie’s as it went from a small indie to part of the huge Asahi, and then on to Independent Liquor and now, the Innovation Council - where this year’s awards are upcoming and the sector is in good health. Craig Cotton joined Simon to talk about his career and what could be next for innovation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
What do The Evil Dead, Zena, Spartacus and an immersive 80s extravaganza live theater spectacular have in common? If you guessed Rob Tapert, you've got the chocolate fish.
It's very exciting to get a chance to talk to a person who's brought about a billion dollars of overseas investment to New Zealand; jobs, he's helped build an industry careers and inspiration for local film and TV.
Which is no mean feat, especially when you're doing it on the other side of the world from his native America. that's the kind of extra challenge that Tapert has thrived in and had a track record of pulling off and the latest of these is Pleasure Dome. To find out about what that is and about show business, Rob joined me in conversation in a secret location in West Auckland.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Today we're talking action. The debate is over, it is just fact increasing diversity of gender, background and age in the decision making parts of organisations helps businesses do better.
But still, as we've been exploring a lot lately, only one of the NZX top 50 listed companies is run by a woman. And less than twenty per cent of directors on listed boards are women. Still.
So it is past the talking and into the action stages. One person driving action is Miranda Burdon, CEO of Global Women. Her organisation has pulled together a 1 Day For Change conference happening on the 19th of September. It's a great way to celebrate Suffrage Day to talk about the how of increasing diversity in organisations with a range of business leaders and heavy hitters from CEOs of our biggest companies like Fonterra and Spark through to ex Prime Minister, Dame Jenny Shipley.
They're not mucking about.
Miranda Burdon is an award winning exporter, who's built a career in agribusiness, is chair of one of the biggest mushroom producing companies in Australasia and has been the architect of the conference. I talked to her in the Auckland CBD HQ of Global Women.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Today’s guest has been mentioned at least three times on the podcast for her leadership on some of the biggest topics facing business and society today. Cindy Gallop has become a by-word for changing the ratio in advertising, business and culture, getting diverse perspectives and experiences in terms of gender, ethnicity, background and moving past the stale pale and male. As the leader of BBH New York, Gallop helped build one of the world’s great ad agencies, and since leaving has been a pioneer in sex tech and the global conversation about the effect pornography has been having on young folk. You might have seen her amazing ted talk, you would have seen her quotes on twitter, Cindy is the person that the people I look up to look up to.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Big news this week, with Fairfax NZ, one of the largest and most influential media companies announcing a new name and CEO. Now to be known as Stuff, the company is to be led by Sinead Boucher. The move was very well received from journalists, happy that a fellow journo and someone from the news side of the news business would be in charge.
Recently under Sinead, some of the most successful and exciting multi-media work has been coming from the Stuff stable - the Bain murder podcast Black Hands, and the new series The Valley - showing that quality and innovation are working. And Stuff, the website that ate the company, was built with Sinead as Digital editor. All great signs for the bigger business and the workers at Stuff in uncertain media times. To chat about the print business in declining print times, the news biz and her career, CEO Sinead Boucher joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Every company these days has a lofty goal. App makers with silly camera filters say they exist to bring humans together. Every company says it is out to change the world and make it a better place, but often, that’s nonsense. Not so for today’s guest. Professor Steve Henry is the founder and inventor of Kode technology who has worked to make commercialisation and mass application of research in partnership between his company and AUT. His work developed a compound which is now being developed into a potential cure for solid cancers. It’s also in development for products that could be used to prevent people with surgical implants getting infections. And he’s only just getting started with the applications of his technology. He’s CEO of Kode Biotech- a biotechnology company he’s been building since 1996, taking his research into synthetic molecules and how applying them to cells and surfaces can change the way they interact with their environment. For example coating a cancer cell with a synthetic shape can make the body see it in a way that means it can fight it. Something Steve will explain better shortly.
This idea, commercialisation, patenting and market development has seen Steve Henry selected as a finalist for the 2008 New Zealand Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and the 2011 recipient of the Royal Society of New Zealand's prestigious R.J. Scott medal, in 2015 Kode Biotech won the Supreme NZ Innovator Award and this year Steve has become the first Australasian to secure a spot in the world-leading Johnson and Johnson Innovation centre, JLABS, in Houston.
To talk innovation, commercialisation and building biotech as a category, Professor Steve Henry joins us today.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
You could look at the way work is arranged and decide that it’s something designed by the patriachy to avoid looking after their kids. A more equal society would have work start after school drop off and finish in time to help with the end of day. And that’s just if you have kids. You might also have a life. It’s just one of the ways that work is not really built for the modern age. One person that has done a lot of thinking about the way we could work today, and is helping put it into practice is Kate Wright. Kate’s completed her MBA, looking at new modes of work that reward output and efficiency rather than face time and hours spent. Opening up the way we work opens work to new people, the diversity we are looking to build today. To talk all these thoughts, and the role of mentoring for business, Kate of Business Mentors NZ and business design company Intentio joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Today's guest is a trailblazer in law, business and leadership. Mai Chen, together with Sir Geoffrey Palmer, opened Australasia's first public law specialist firm in 1994, and since then has built a company and record that has resulted in more gongs and top positions than this intro could fit. Here's a few notable ones: New Zealand's Best public law firm a bunch of times, Inaugural Chair of Global Woman, a Director of BNZ, Adjunct Professor at Auckland Uni Law School, and recently the launch chair of Super Diverse Women. To talk the law business, her career and Super Diverse Women, Mai Chen joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you want to see the power of great execution, walk into any of the hospitality offerings that our guest today has brought us.
You might think a burger is a burger, but that is until you’ve been to Burger Burger. Consistently named a top option in town, their great ingredients, atmosphere, energy and engaged team have made their affordable treat a household name, with half a million plus diners served a year.
Before that Mimi Gilmour introduced the Mexico restaurants, growing fast and taking that mix of tacos, fried chicken and fun across many locations to a successful exit. To talk ideas, creativity, execution and big goals delivered, Mimi Gilmour joined the podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Today’s guest has broken new ground, confounded any stereotypes and excelled at every level of business. Leaving school in South Auckland with School Cert, going to be a bank teller, marrying her boyfriend and having a baby at 21. This could be the end of the public life story of many women 40 years ago. What happened instead has been a career leading some of New Zealand’s biggest media companies through some of the biggest landscape changes. Joan Withers has been a CEO of one of the first deregulated radio stations, the CEO of Fairfax in the last glory years of newspapers, and a professional director, with twenty years of governance experience as a board member and chair. Currently the Chair at Mercury and The Warehouse and just recently stepping down from Chair at TVNZ, Joan has a new book out, A Woman’s Place, that is a life story so far and also practical career advice, stories from the frontline and thoughts on that provocative title, A Woman’s Place.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
One of the common kind of bleats from this podcast is that as a country we invest too much in unproductive assets like houses and interest payments, and not enough into companies. One of the reasons we are like this is that it actually isn’t that easy to invest in other stuff.
In order to get into something like shares there are risks, and also you need to get a diverse range of investments to spread your risk. There are managed funds, full of fees and large sums needed to invest, there is share trading through a bank, but with 30 bucks each brokerage you need to be doing more than about 2000 at a time or else the fees are more than a 6% return. It actually just isn’t the easy. Enter Sharesies!
A cool new idea that makes it easy to invest -simply set your industry preference, risk appetite and get started with as little as 50 bucks a go.
It aims to increase financial literacy and get more people into good investment practice, and its promise, that I love, is that you don’t need to be rich to have a share portfolio anymore. Co-founder and CEO Brooke Anderson joins me to chat all things Sharesies.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Today’s guest is a pioneer in organics, sustainable business and has won awards for being the world’s fairest trader. You have definitely sampled his wares, if you’ve enjoyed a fair trade banana, a cola made with actual cola, or a few years back tasted a lemonade sweetened with honey. Chris Morrison was the co-founder of Phoenix organics, when, more than 20 years ago there was no organics industry. He built the business and the category, and then did something remarkable, he not only worked to mentor the next generation of sustainable businesses, but has gone on to reinvent some of our most ubiquitous consumer goods, the banana and the cola.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
One of the big ingredients for business success is other people’s money. Who are these other people and what motivates them? There are stereotypes in pop culture -from Silicon Valley style VCs that unseat founders and are machiavellian - through to the Dragon’s Den approach of omnipotent geniuses bidding to lend their capital and reputations for a big slice of the future pie.
Somewhere in the middle is the angel investor -a bit of a smaller scale, earlier stage kind of thing… and to find out what that actually looks like in NZ, Suse Reynolds, Executive Director of the Angel Association joins us.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Alas, Simon is away this week so we've decided to republish one of our favourite episodes from 2016: fashion Svengali Karen Walker. Their discussion is worth a listen because Karen lays our her philosophy of no compromise and how that's helped build her business into a kind of super brand.
As Simon wrote at the time "Karen Walker is not just a significant figure in New Zealand, she is a fixture on the Business of Fashion’s list of the 500 most influential figures in fashion worldwide, the brand’s sunglasses are worn by the world’s most famous stars".
To learn what it takes to create a leviathan of a business and brand, listen on.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you like to read and follow the stories of successful people some common themes emerge - never giving up, always persevering, get knocked down and get back up, never take no, feel the fear and do it anyway, fail until you succeed.
It sounds ghastly doesn’t it? And it can be; it is hard, emotionally and physically. What does it take to do this - to get the resilience to keep going, to make it. Simon's guest for this episode is Jamie Ford of Foresight Learning. He's an expert in this field, a coach and mentoring resilience to businesses, leaders and sports teams like the Crusaders and the Wallabies. He talked Simon through how resilience is learnt, trained and practiced and not innate, and how you can build your own.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you’ve enjoyed a scented candle in glass, perhaps one with a lovely gold foil on the front or with letters artfully arranged you may have been enjoying the fruits of the work of today’s guest, a kiwi that has had great success in international fragrance, an entrepreneur now based in London who has also been a champion for the new wave of kiwi companies.
Christopher Yu is the MD of United Perfumes. He went to the UK as a lawyer, fell in love with the luxury world, helped reinvent the world of the scented candle by growing Diptyque and then launching the Cire Trudon and Fornessetti candles. His company works with the world’s biggest brands, and he has also long worked to try to help make NZ a place that an international success could come from, to talk perfume, the UK, and brand New Zealand, Christopher joins us today.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Much of what we talk about in entrepreneurship in NZ comes to us from Silicon Valley. Whether its the lean, agile, the series A, the seed round - the terms and actions come out of this place. So it makes a lot of sense that AUT, for their inaugural entrepreneur in residence, have brought to NZ a 30 year veteran and key figure in the valley. You might have heard of some of the firms he has founded, been on the board for, or invested in - Pandora internet radio is one of the better known consumer brands - but there were a raft of companies that pushed forward technology. He also set up Garage Ventures with Guy Kawasaki, the best selling author of Apple Macintosh fame, who popularised their work together. Bill Reichert is in town for a series of events with AUT and we’ve been lucky enough to grab him today to talk about the Valley, VC and entrepreneurship.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Many small business people get into business to pursue their passion, yet end up spending a lot of time on the admin and accounts, and the salt in the wound is that this can also be wildly expensive black hole to throw hours, dollars and tears down. It’s a pain-point alright. And where there's pain there’s profit to be had.
Enter Beany, a company that has come in to ride the wave of disruption currently hitting accounting services. They are adding their own push by offering a service that, for a low fixed fee, connects small businesses with their accountants and to work in the cloud. They're providing great professional services efficiently and cheaply, and allowing new ways of working both for the accountants and the businesspeople. The CEO Sue De Bievre braved the Spinoff stairs to talk Simon.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
One day when working on an online marketplace entrepreneur Holly Cardew was trying to get some imagery clear-cut onto a white background. Unless you’re a bit of a photoshop whizz, that is a real mission. Holly thought that if this was a problem for her it probably was for others looking to make a professional site, and that insight has led to her successful online enterprise pixc. The demand was out there, and the business has led Holly to startup incubators, being named on the Forbes 30 under 30, and to New Zealand, where she is part of techweek and the sales and marketing jams that the Kiwi Landing Pad makes happen.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In a few years' time, once enough cars are autonomous and car ownership has collapsed and we’re turning roadside car parks into bike lanes and garages into four storey apartments, we will look back and wonder at how much space was left vacant just waiting for these cars that only ever got driven five percent of the time.
It’s bananas.
Some people didn’t have to wait until the future to see this. They looked at all that time, space and capital sitting inefficiently a bit earlier. The big names you know. Uber and Airbnb are two standard bearers for the sharing economy, taking what’s underused and sharing the usage. And locally, in the car park space, we have a very cool company called parkable.
They take your empty car parks and match them with parkers who pay a fee. They market and provide the tech, clip the ticket, and help the world squeeze some more efficiency out of the model.
Parkable is run by Brody Nelson on the technical side and Toby Littin on the commercial side. They're here today to chat through the idea, about seizing the moment, and their new app, Campable. Campable is opening up spots all over the country to mobile home and vans of travelers, providing vineyards, marae and paddocks a new income stream, and hopefully putting an end to pooping in public car parks.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
One week ago, on the second week of this podcast, we had a lovely chap in to talk about the Techweek that was going on. A week to bring in local and international experts to talk about how tech can solve today's problems and advance tomorrow's industry. It was a great success and it's now back for its second outing.
To discuss what the week has in store, we are again joined by Patrick McVeigh, general manager - business, innovation and skills at ATEED.
Not sure which events to catch? Read The Spinoff's Techweek'17 recommendations here.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Here’s a cool idea. How about taking a service every company needs, then doing it for free for them while also managing, as part of the deal, to get funds to charity. It sounds like you’ve just managed to clock life. Well, today’s company has done just this with Thank You Payroll.
It's a clever service, where they’ve turned an IRD subsidy into a force for good. Christina Bellis and Lani Evans of Thank You payroll Simon to discuss the business, a crowdfunding venture they have on, and how they make it happen.
Note: Apologies for the sound quality. This episode was conducted over the phone.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Adàn Tijerina is the director of Almighty Beverages. It's a Wellington based company producing a range of organic juices now to be found in stock around the country. It's hard graft making a boutique company work, particularly one that has a organic and community based ethos at heart. But hard work is something Adàn's well acquainted with. His background includes farm work in the States, working with the homeless, running some of Wellington's most iconic bars and restaurants, the Wellington orchestra and finally helping drive the Almighty ship. Simon caught up with Adàn while he was on a business trip to Auckland and enticed him to The Spinoff towers for a chat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
It's a remarkable success story: create a enterprise that combines both business and philanthropy and before you blink, you're knee deep in work. The idea is simple: order a lunch and the price pays for another free lunch to go to a hungry school kid. Such is the journey of Eat My Lunch, which started from a home kitchen and very quickly ended up supplying 40 schools and a similar number of businesses. The CEO Lisa King talked to Simon about how rapid the growth in the business was, how they managed it as well as the logistics of delivering 1400 lunches every day.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you're looking at companies in the last few years that have made a real impact in the local entrepreneur and general scene, you can't go past My Food Bag. Pulling an idea in from overseas and making it work here in tiny, weird New Zealand was a passion for Cecilia and James Robinson. The idea was weekly delivered food parcels that contained everything a family needed to make meals for the week. They got Nadia Lim on board as a brand ambassador and next thing you know they're making $100 million in revenue.
But it can't have been that easy. In this conversation Simon talks to Cecilia about making the move from their earlier company Au Pair Link, approaching Theresa Gattung to sit on the board, creating a well regarded customer service operation and living on Weetbix during the hard times.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Vic Crone was announced as the new CEO of Callaghan Innovation in February of this year. Crone comes with a high profile won in executive roles at Chorus and Xero and from her bid for the Auckland Mayoralty. Simon invited her in to talk about her career, her time at Xero, what she learnt from politics and what's coming next for Callaghan.
Disclosure: Simon works at Vend, who have received Callaghan grants and Callaghan Innovation are a sponsor of this podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
You might have heard of the PayPal mafia, a term given to people that came through PayPal and then went on to invest in, found, and help grow other tech companies. People like Elon Musk, Peter Theil, Reid Hoffman; companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, all trace back to PayPal. Well, in New Zealand I think we have our own version of that, the Trade Me mafia. The people who helped that company start, scale, grow and sell have gone on to use the capital they built up - both in terms of money they made and the social proof of their skill and judgement - to go on and foster a lot of the local industry. It's a theme of this podcast, and one of the key members of what I'd call that mafia is Lance Wiggs.
You can draw one of those detective show style photo boards with the lines and there'd be lines all over Business is Boring for today's guest. Lance has been a director, investor or advisor to many of our guests. Wierdly, Onceit, Vend, Populate and Timely to name a few of our guests. Lance has taken his experience and created a vehicle to help fund and propel high-growth companies forward, with Punakaiki Fund, and is a prominent commentator on local hi-tech companies.
We get him on today to find out about his career, his fund and why he keeps doing it when he has probably done well enough to go for a long bike adventure and not be busy as an active director on a number of companies.
Disclosure statement: I work at Vend, hold a tiny number of shares in the Punakaiki Fund and Lance is a semi-distant cousin. #NZ
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.