 Te iti e te rahi, tiena tātou katoa. Ka mihi ki te kopapa e te wana tenei rangi. Ko Tony, toku ingo ano, te Whanganui a Tara ahau. I've lived most of my life in New Zealand and given plenty of presentations, but I've never started out one in Te Reo, so thank you so much to this audience for finally giving me the courage to do so. You know, my purpose in this talk is to get you all thinking about how we can grow a more prosperous and sustainable advantage for New Zealand through deep technology companies. And I want to do that through the lens of talking a little bit about my own experience at 8i. 8i's technology is truly groundbreaking and world-leading. What it does is it allows real people to be recorded and turned into holograms for virtual reality and also augmented reality. Virtual reality, fully immersive digital worlds where you can be in a completely other space and encounter other people and have an experience with a digital person that's much more close to the experience of real life than it is to watch a flat video. And augmented reality, technology through which we can bring digital assets, digital people here into our real world. So, what you need to know is that this is a really fricking hard problem. It's kind of been a holy grail problem of computer graphics, computer vision for many decades now. But 8i is the company that's really taken this type of technology to the next level on the world stage and we believe its time has come. It's tough because you've got to do a great job of capturing a performance from all angles and reassembling that back together. But it's also a really tough problem because you end up with great orders of magnitude of data much larger than regular video and so you have to deal with the problem of compressing that down so that it can go through our pipes and our internet and our mobile networks to actually reach people. Because what good is media if it can't reach people. This is what it looks like. We put someone on a stage, we record them, we take that data, all sorts of algorithms to it and then we can deliver that performance back up into virtual spaces or real spaces. It's a process called volumetric capture and the reason we're doing it is because we want the calming world of three-dimensional computing where digital realities are going to have many more of the dimensions of real life and not just the flat screen to be a world populated by humans just to see to creatures and be a place for human communication, storytelling and all sorts of useful applications to take place. I'm going to just share one application with you. Glad we've got some space geeks here. And this is something we made with Buzz Aldrin. Virtual reality just gives us a sense of participating, of being right there in an enlightened, involved, exciting way. That's the future that I want to see. Being able to experience Buzz's vision in virtual reality allows people to actually be on Mars and see Buzz's vision for how we're going to colonize Mars. I think what's so exciting about this project in particular is that we're creating nearly photorealistic holograms of historical icons. People can interact with him as though he's there in a way that was never possible before. Leaving an image behind for other people to see is like eternal life in a way. Buzz is a fun time. In that video you can see him kind of slapping his butt and going like this. He's saying, get your ass to Mars. So we're helping him spread that message. It's what he wants us all to do. So since we started doing this three years ago, we've captured all sorts of people doing all sorts of things. They could be acting, playing, educating, training or sharing some kind of important message. In addition to making this available through high-end virtual reality headsets, we're also making it something that can reach people through mobile devices. So a way that we can access not just one million people but hundreds of millions of people all over the world. One way we've done that is by creating, making all of this technology able to be distributed over mobile network and play back on a consumer electronic device that's light as a mobile phone. We launched our app called Holo this year which is the first kind of app of its time allowing human holograms to be played in the world using mobile phones. Holo's been downloaded by over a million people and we've placed many, many millions of holograms around the world doing that in 180 countries including more than a million Spider-Man's. Quite a few MTV Moon-Man's and really like a bunch of other stuff and people, consumers take this and enjoy it. They create their own mixed reality type of experiences and then go on to share them. But we see this mobile platform as really being a technology platform that we can offer to other people. At our core we're a deep technology company and we want to put this content into the hands of app developers, content creators and others to use. So there are lots of different applications that this can be applied to, whether it's connected with sports, it's connected with museums and education, exercise, fashion, the list sort of goes on. So that's what we're doing. It's pretty cool and pretty hard to do as well. The reason I started working for ADA when it started out is because I've been thinking a lot about what is it that we can do to transform New Zealand and the New Zealand economy in a way that's sustainable and is not going to keep taking away from our natural environment but instead really enrich the skills and intelligence of people for us to share with the world. And I really believe that deep technology companies are a key part of us doing that and I believe that networks like EHF and Kia have got a really important role to play in helping our student here in New Zealand because we are a relatively young ecosystem when it comes to start-up technology companies. We've got really a couple of generations of that and we're also a small place. So those things come with some real advantages which I want to talk about and some gaps that we need your help to fill. The first thing I want to talk about is talent or as I prefer to call it, people. You know, for any company we know that people are normally one of the most important assets that a company has and that's certainly true in a deep technology research intensive company. These people are really everything that we have, their ideas and their minds. ADI is a company of about 75 people of which more than 45 are owned in Wellington and to do what we do we really need to attract people with some quite deep specialisation, very sophisticated engineering and mathematics. So we are looking... doing this in New Zealand, we've really been able to successfully access a lot of great graduates, mostly at the undergraduate and masters level, not so much at the PhD level. Through what has been succeeded in the past in our ecosystem, we've got lots of great general software developers, great cloud computing experts, mobile developers and at least some areas of expertise. So we have all of that here to tap into. It's been growing in New Zealand but we also need a lot of very specialised computer graphics expertise, computer vision expertise. Fortunately for us at ADI, we've been able to tap into what has been attracted to New Zealand and to Wellington through the film industry which really is an absolutely world-class global hub of specialist talent that I believe we can do even more to capitalise on in New Zealand and it's been a real point of leverage for us. But in addition to that, we've needed to attract people here from overseas and New Zealand has got some absolutely wonderful strengths when it comes to doing that if you're building a business here. One of those is that people love to live in New Zealand and they love to live here because of our environment, because of our free and open society, because of our culture, because of the kind of lifestyle that we enable. So it's important to recognise that and it's just one more really important reason that we protect all of that. Other great things about bringing people here is that we have got the support of the Government to do so if you're bringing people to work on innovation you can help access funds through Callaghan Innovation. Immigration has been fantastically flexible in working with us to make us an accredited employer to help bring highly skilled people here in quite a seamless way. So those things are all real strengths but we really have had to look abroad to get people. We've had a lot more success as well, I would say, in attracting subject matter expert individual contributors than we have in attracting leaders, like organisational leaders and that kind of management capability is a known gap in the New Zealand economy. So again, it's wonderful to have the EHF community hear people who have experienced what it is like to grow these fast growing organisations or work in bigger organisations. We really need you to help bring and build that muscle here into New Zealand. Another advantage I would mention is retention is great. Once you come up with a really cool thing to work on and you kind of bring the people to the island paradise and they really start enjoying it and your company is one of the coolest ones to work at and Google and Apple aren't next door to sort of poach them off you within 18 months. That's a really, really amazing thing and especially again important for a deep technology company where you've got to keep building and keep that knowledge that resides in people. So let's have more of that. Oh yeah, and these are the type of people we have managed to attract from ADI to some of the places that they've come to, many of them coming here to New Zealand to work on our projects. Sony, Pixar, Google, Digital Domain, Apple, AT&T, our labs to name a few. The next part that I want to talk about is access to capital. The New Zealand sort of venture capital market is evolving really quickly at the moment. I've noticed that even in sort of the four years that I've been asking them for money but it is still relatively young and relatively thin as you can see from this diagram it doesn't really warrant a dot on the map. I think someone said yesterday that the venture capital market in New Zealand is about $100 million and it would take about half of that to have funded ADI up to this stage. So we need to, for deep technology businesses like ours, you need to connect to offshore capital. Again, something that I know that the EHF group is going to be really valuable in helping us do but also I would just say that is hard. When you're building a business from New Zealand you are going to have to make those connections. You are sort of an extra step removed so it's so important to work through networks like this to really connect into the places that you need to be. And actually it's through events like New Frontiers that we, for example, met Scott Nolan several years ago and Scott has been really, really instrumental in introducing us to the American venture capital market as well as talent and skills that we can build on here. So we just need more of that and I think that just goes to show like what a small number of talented and well-connected individuals can do to really help us. But again, it is hard to be offshore, to be doing that from offshore and we've managed to connect with this really, really wonderful cast of investors and I think, unlike probably a little what was available to us here in New Zealand, this is smart capital for us too. They've got a much better idea of where our technology can go, the markets that we need to put it into and what else we can do to make it succeed. Downside of them is that of the investors on our board, Scott is the only one to have ever visited us in New Zealand and we go to LA for board meetings or to New York. So again, it's just a bit of a mixed picture and we should bring more investors down here more often. The final challenge that I want to talk about and again, it's both a strength and a challenge is that for deep technology, your market's not always in New Zealand and for us that meant having to grow our company from New Zealand into international offices had to happen really, really early. When you're building something like this from New Zealand you don't sort of have a market of 300 million people on your doorstep that you can just spend a few years working with and perfecting it with before you have to take that big leap of exporting your company to another market. It means that we're thinking global right from the start but for us, we started out in May 2014 with six people. It was only sort of six months later that we were into LA with our first three staff there. By the end of the next year, our team in New Zealand was 35. We had an office in Seattle as well. We're three and 18 in LA and we've now got 30 people in the United States all up. And what this kind of means is that when you're kind of like much younger and still trying to figure things out, you have to work a lot harder to overcome all of that communication over here. Do you have to deal with it without being able to get into a room nearly as often as you'd like, not only to talk about ideas but to build trust and to build those personal relationships. So we have to come up with all sorts of creative ways that you can do that better and be deliberate about the type of culture you're bringing and the way that you can talk about that in your company to help counterbalance that. And of course the flip side of it is that there are just great strengths in these two different markets with different people bringing to the company what it needs in the right place at the right time. I think I'll leave it there just with an invitation to talk more, I mean talk more with me or talk more with others about these kind of key issues that I've raised and how you see through your role here in New Zealand and businesses and ventures things that you can contribute to these problems. I know this group can really do a lot and it will be very exciting to see more and more deep technology companies find their home here in New Zealand. Thank you.