 Hello everyone, it's Alina here with Kiwi Connect. I am out at New Frontiers 2016 with Dave Moskovitz. Dave, you've been around the New Zealand startup community for a number of years. Do you want to tell us how you got into New Zealand startups? Well, in 1995, I managed to convince my wife Kate Frickberg to start up a company with me doing web development. We were domain number 302 in the .co.nz namespace and, of course, now there are over half a million names in that space. 1995 was pretty early in New Zealand. I think we were one of two web development agencies at the time. Anyway, we recruited that company to 40 people in Wellington in Auckland and then exited to a multinational. And since then, I've been working helping startups get off the ground and investing in a few of them and generally trying to build the future that I want to live in and in Wellington in New Zealand. That's a very vibrant economy with lots of exciting companies trying stuff out, exporting to the world, trading people and ideas with the rest of the world and generally upping the level of our game. Right, so since 1995, that's a good amount of time in New Zealand. What trends have you seen changing over the last two decades? So, against the backdrop of the rise of the Internet, which I think has really been central to a lot of the startup scene, because it lowers the barrier of entry for people to do really cool stuff because it means that ideas become a fungible commodity and the implementation of those ideas becomes a lot less difficult. I think New Zealand has become much more outward-focused than it used to be. That said, I think a lot of the startups that we see in New Zealand have some sort of level of immigrant involvement. I mean, you look around today, it's at the people here at KiwiConnect and even the nominal Kiwis like myself, you know, there are a lot of people who've either been overseas a lot or originally come from overseas. So, I guess that's one trend. There's been a much higher interconnectedness with the rest of the world. I think Kiwis are becoming more confident in terms of executing on their own ideas and less reticent in terms of being shy about their own ideas. People are more realistic about what they can accomplish. Sources of capital have grown hugely, particularly since 2007-2008 when we started Angel HQ, the local Angel Club. It's become much, much easier to find Angel investment for your venture. And there are a lot more people who are willing to invest in these sorts of ventures. Trade Me Zero, these sort of startups who are no longer startups who have increased in value immensely. The wealth that they've generated amongst their investors means that there's now money that those investors have to invest in other things. And there have been some other significant exits along the way. And so, we're starting to gain critical mass in terms of the various elements that we need in the investment ecosystem of great people who can draw on great teams, so producing some fantastic developers and designers, as well as entrepreneurs in Wellington and New Zealand, and sources of capital and connections to places overseas. So much so that, I mean, there was a time about three years ago when I thought I knew everything that was going on in Wellington in terms of startups. And now it's just like I probably only know about 10% of what's happening in Wellington, which is really, really exciting for me because every day I'm discovering new stuff. So I started a blog last year called New Zealand Startup of the Week, SOTW.NZ. And when I started that blog, people said, are you sure you're going to have enough startups to write about? You can really do one a week? I said, sure, no worries. And of course, it's been no issue at all filling up my pipe. I've got five or six out at its time now. So there is really a tremendous amount going on. Another really interesting statistic is at the end of 2015, Angel HQ, the local Angel Club, had, I think it was 12 open deals for Angel Invest, but there are 12 companies that had partially received the funding that they were after that they were trying to close out before Christmas. In addition to, there were six deals from Lightning Lab accelerator companies as well. So there were 20 deals open for this Angel Club, which has 50 people in it in Wellington. So that is really the sign of a vibrant startup ecosystem that there's so much going on at any one given point in time. And so I've waited for this day to arrive and we're here now. And unfortunately, what it means is that there's so many investment opportunities that not all these companies are going to get the investment that they need from local investment sources, which means that it's really, really important. It's always been important, but it's even more important now than more than ever to continue developing our investment relationships with other overseas sources, potential sources of investment in market investment for New Zealand companies wanting to make the jump overseas and to try to attract more investors to come here to New Zealand to come and see what we've got. And it's a great place for investing because people are highly educated. They're really open, honest. It's the easiest place in the world to do business. According to Transparency International, we've got no corruption. The business environment here is great. And the valuations of companies in New Zealand are significantly lower than what they might be in other overseas places because of basically the risk of taking a team from New Zealand and trying to get it executed in some place overseas. But it can be done, especially with the right guidance and mentorship and overseas connections. So it's an incredibly exciting time to be involved in startups in New Zealand at the moment. And every day I wake up and I go, I'm like a kidney candy shop. Are there particular industries or opportunities that you are excited about? So I'm really excited by mission-driven companies. So one of the companies I'm an investor in, I'm chairman of the board, is Publons, which is a company whose mission is to speed up science through the power of peer review. And everything we consider doing, we always look at the mission and say, is this going to speed up science? And how is that going to contribute to what we're doing? So I love those mission-driven companies because they really separate out people who are serious about it from the people who aren't. And these guys will do anything, that is what they want to do, is speed up science. And that's what we're trying to achieve. And this will have a long-lasting impact on the world that we live in. So that's really exciting. But I just love general internet startups in general. What I've seen over the last year, which has been missing from the scene, which is really exciting to me, is agritech startups, agricultural businesses that are doing some really cool stuff. So there's a company in Palmerston North, BioLumic, who are producing lighting systems for plants to help plants grow more quickly, even where there's sunlight. We've seen stuff in irrigation. There are a number of drone startups. And all of a sudden, there's this real blossoming of agritech startups where I think people were doing this sort of stuff five years ago, but they weren't turning them into startups. These are just little side projects. But now people are trying to turn these into proper businesses and export not only the products of these businesses, but the businesses themselves and trying to set them up overseas and service the world. And that's got to be good for New Zealand. The more interconnected we are as a world, I think the more peaceful a place we can be. And the more we understand each other through trade and commerce, that gives us a chance to form much more deep relationships with people from all over the world. It sounds like what you're describing is a real maturing of the ecosystem here. Is now the time for New Zealand, do you think? I think we're always playing catch up. And I think we've gone from being babies to being toddlers. And I don't know whether we're approaching adolescence or what our life cycle development stage is at the moment. I look at other economies. Silicon Valley is always held up as the star economy. Are we as mature as them? Will we ever be as mature as them? I don't know. And people say, well, how are we going to turn Wellington into the next Silicon Valley? And I say, look, we don't want to be the next Silicon Valley. We want to be the next Wellington. We want to be the next New Zealand. Let's design that and figure out what are the really cool things about where we are and what we're doing? And how do we double down on those and make those even more awesome than they already are rather than trying to emulate other places which have their own problems and their own contexts? Yeah, gotcha. Wonderful. Thanks so much for chatting with me.