 So, we're about to kick off and just wanted to say welcome to y'all, thank you so much for coming down today. My name is Stefan, I'm the CEO of Creative HQ, for those of you who don't know me. Hello, thanks. We've got a absolutely stunner of a lineup tonight and I'm super stoked for all of you to help us warm up our new space. The startup base here in Wellington, our new offices. As you can tell, brand new. Some of the paint is probably still wet, so don't touch the walls. But yeah, I think we can make it work tonight and we're super stoked to have this event help us warm it up. So let's get on with the event and let's have our panel members up on stage, please. Fantastic. Thank you very much. So just want to say this is a startup technique up tonight, which we're organizing as part of our startup garage series, which we've run over the year. And this is sort of like a nice highlight at the end of the year. And if you're interested in these kind of events, definitely get yourself signed up to the meetup for the startup garage, which Laura runs, and it's absolutely fantastic. I also wanted to just quickly say thank you so much to Grow Wellington, who's basically organized food and drinks tonight. So thank you very much Grow Wellington for this partnership. And for KiwiConnect, who are doing the video filming tonight and have kindly offered to share the video with us, which is fantastic. Thank you so much. And so yeah, we've got a fantastic lineup tonight. I'm sure many of you will know that the face is here. I won't talk too much about each of them because they can do much better job themselves. But basically, we've got Brian and Matthew Monaghan, who have got an ID management company and are also co-creators of KiwiConnect. So welcome to the creative surface. And we've got Scott Nolan from Founders Fund over from the States. So thank you very much for coming over. Scott, and we've got Sam Altman from Y Combinator. Thank you very much for coming over from Y Combinator. And I'll let you guys talk a little bit more about your background. And of course, you'll all know that this guy here, Rod, from ZERO, I see I was a ZERO. Thank you so much for coming down and being part of the panel. So without much further ado, because I'm sure you'd much rather hear these guys talk to me, I'd like to hand you over to your MC for the night, Laura Rytale from Crate of HQ. And I'll take you through the rest of the night. Hi. Hope you all can hear us half-decently. I will now hand it just over to Mike, to all of you. So you can do your two sentences on introducing yourself and why you think you're so amazing. I'm Sam Altman. I'm the president of Y Combinator. We're based in SIDS, and we fund startups. We've funded more than 800 now. So quite a lot. Some of them have been Reddit and Dropbox and Airbnb and Stripe and a lot of others. And we also try to build up the most sort of helpful network for founders that we can. We hope that by doing that, we can make it much easier to start companies and then help develop technology into really big companies that we all use on whatever you do. That's my two sentences. Cool. Great to have you in town, Sam. Sorry, what have you done about ZERO? So what seems to be at us, we're at US 100 million annualized of revenue and an 80-plus percent growth rate. So we're the, of all the public-access companies, the fastest-growing one at our size. So, you know, it's pretty cool. And why it's cool is we've done it largely out of the US, and we've done it in the small business space, which isn't just a bunch of deals, it's actually building a scalable sales system. So, you know, we think we're doing some more class stuff. Hi, I'm Scott from Founders Fund. We're an venture capital firm in San Francisco, and we invest across pretty much every sector, every stage. So some of our companies include Facebook, SpaceX, Spotify, Palantir, everything, a whole bunch of others. So we try and back things that we think are going to be the really important technologies and change the industries that are really going to matter in the coming years. And, yeah, I'd say that's kind of what we do. So it's going to be fun to talk about. I'm Matthew Bonahan. And we started a company called Inflection eight years ago, which was really seeking to organize public records online, which brought us deep into the genealogy space and family history space. And in 2012, we sold that business to ancestry.com and had a really nice exit. And since then, we've been really focused on the identity management space with a suite of tools, especially as it relates to the sharing economy. TV Connect is really a venture designed to build bridges between Silicon Valley and the New Zealand start-up ecosystem. So we're just very privileged and excited to be here with you all tonight. And our journey to New Zealand started in 2010. We just really fell in love with the country when we came out and visited. And frankly, we were a bit surprised. And speaking of surprises, FEMA. Yo, yo, I hope y'all are ready to go because I'm ready to flow. And blow like a volcano, y'all ain't even ready to know. There's so much excitement and so many good feelings as we're here today to celebrate and create a HQ of New Zealand. When you come from overseas, the first thing you see is just trees and honeybees. Clean mountains, springs and endless fields of green. From the jungle valley to the mountain peaks, we listen to Mother Nature and hear loudly she speaks. Got world champion rugby and board of the rings. Awesome manuka honey and earth's happiest sheep. It's literally in tomorrow. 21 hours ahead means three hours behind. Southern hemisphere, different stars, a whole different sense of time. But then you look closer and more is perceived. Because like a tree, New Zealand's roots run strong and deep. With a culture not based on commerce, but on kindness. One that values the importance of wisdom, balance and silence. Kiwi's value fairness, compassion and honesty. Witty and reflective with self-effacing modesty. Balancing individual responsibility with deep civic connections. Leaders elected fairly in honest open elections. Now I'm not saying that it ain't got problems. Like any place it's got its due. What I'm saying is let's solve those problems in New Zealand first as we solve them for the rest of the world too. And let me speak it quite clearly so you all can hear me. You ain't got to live in New Zealand to live Kiwi. The state of mind shift is a different way of being. It's a different way of taking action than a different way of dreaming. Of an information economy based in a regenerative ecology. Spreading philosophy through technology about how it is that we've got to be. Living on this planet, fairness, standard, none abandoned. Grounded skillfully into being, seeing this life that we've been handed. So if you resonate with that and after the rap, we'll connect and we'll talk to each other. Because the world ain't flat. So the edge of one map always begins another piece. We do learn. Little more than two sentences here. I think that just made it the most passionate Kiwi I have ever met. Cool. So the format for the evening, by the way, I'm going to ask these guys a bunch of questions. Then you can ask them a bunch of questions. So I'm going to put my mic after this over to the stand in the corner there. And you can line up if you have a question. So be prepared in about half an hour. Hope you're not too bored until then. Cool. Let's take it out. So by the way, by the show of hands, how many in the house are entrepreneurs? Hands up. Nice. We're start talking about startups are in right place. So maybe just the first question. How do you know that you're supposed to do a startup that you want to start a company? Like, how do you know it's the right thing and when to start? Maybe Sam, Scott, whoever wants to? Sure. Yeah, I would say only do a company if you feel like it's the only thing you can do. There's nothing you must do if without you doing this, this company won't exist and it has to exist. If you don't feel that strongly about it, then the hard times of starting a company are just so hard that you're probably better off joining another company that you're really passionate about and help them achieve their mission. So I think that's my basic guideline for that. Our version of this is that you should only start a company if you're in love with that particular idea. You shouldn't start a startup for the sake of having a startup. You should have an idea. You really believe this is something that you want to do and the people you want to do it with. Starting a startup is sort of extremely hard, unimaginably hard, but just barely doable. But it's so hard that if you don't believe in this and if you don't want to do it for 10 years, there are sort of better things to do and it's better to join a great company than to start from the other one. But all of that said, it's doable and I think we found that startups are much more doable, I think, than people think. It looks like now we have enough data to say this confidently. More than 1% of the startups that we fund go on to be worth more than $1 billion and they go on to change industries that they're in and they change. And this is not just in South Africa, everywhere. And I think New Zealand is sort of one of the top up-and-coming areas that we see for startups that we're funding and startups are staying here, they're coming to the US, they're not wherever, but there's clearly environment here to support it. So if it's something you really want to do, you should do it, but if it's not something you really want to do, then it is way more pain than it's worth. So, short answer. You need to be obsessed. Talking about startup teams, the amount of people that you have to be around you, coming out of Accelerators, YC, Techstars, our own lighting lab, we tend to take in only teams and not individuals because startups are hard. So what are you looking for in a team as a very young company, starting off the ground? What are the important traits to have? Well, here's just one good point from what we have. No company that we've ever funded that has been founded by one person is in our top 30 most successful companies, even though we've found a fair number of single founder companies. It is possible for sure and there's many great examples around the world, but these things again are so hard to do and the psychology ups and downs are so intense that if you have a co-founder or two, hopefully you're not all at the crash at the same time and you support each other. One thing that we say is that startups usually, the expected value dips below the X-axis at some point. Things are really wrong and if you're by yourself and you're just going to stop, and if you have a co-founder you will out of obligation to each other keep going and you can cheat this law of thermodynamics somehow and go through a discipline with the other person. On the other side, we've never had a startup with four or more founders be really successful. It's one of these things where there's like exponential or less factorial communication overhead and it just gets way, way harder. So in our experience, two or three co-founders works the best, but I'm sure others. I had that training off of what he said. The ups and downs of emotional volatility and the need to have partners there to really balance you out. So balance in terms of the mood and the tempo and the energy but also balance in terms of skill sets and aptitudes. Trying to find people who complement your unique gifts to create a social unit. I was fortunate to work on inflection with my brother Matthew and so there was a really, really deep pre-existing relationship which transcended the financial matters of the business and I think that was really powerful. So in terms of thinking about teams and co-workers having really strong values alignment, that sort of deep connection and ideally that value alignment around your product to see you through the tough times and to draw people in towards the collective mission. Rob, maybe you can share some thoughts on how to recruit. So once you are in the stage where your company takes up and scaling so how do you actually build a great team around the good product? Yeah, so I'm kind of sad with myself that there's so many new people I haven't met yet. I thought we hired everybody but I'm excited that I haven't hired everybody and there's a whole room full of people. So I think what's sort of different in Wellington and New Zealand from ten years ago is the choices sort of two years ago were kind of work for a boring traditional company or going to a start-up and what's happened in the New Zealand tech scene in the last five years especially is you've now seen some companies have scaled. So start-ups are great and there's lots of people that have peeled out of us to do their own thing and it's interesting though that actually a few people come back because start-ups are also really hard all of those things but actually what we're seeing now is these new types of larger companies that give people fantastic experience doing things that we haven't been able to do before and out of that those people will mode out going to start their own businesses in time but now we have the sort of in the middle career option which is being internal entrepreneurs inside fast moving companies we can grab as much responsibility as you like but you have resources to go, experience scale and experience the new skills that are going to be really relevant when you choose to do your own thing. I think also what we're seeing is especially in the cloud the model we used to see was with most of the tech happening in the US there was a natural concentration of technology in the US market so you build things in small countries and the model would be a flogged off to a US public company but with the internet now with distributions global we're actually seeing businesses of scale happening from outside of the US and what's cool is I think countries like New Zealand and other countries are actually great places to live and you can have this hybrid of doing big things outside of the US but still connect into these awesome networks where people just think bigger and have more experience and really understand scale I don't know if I answered your question but it's fun saying all that. Having something like a zero get built in a city is this unbelievable thing it's very very hard to do the first time but having such a successful technology company creates this entire ecosystem of people that work there and then go on and do new things and invest in startups and I think that's such an incredible asset for the city to have and the startup scene that is almost guaranteed to develop out of that success is awesome. I think the original question was about what's the best way to network or recruit and in our experience the best way to recruit is through your network through people that you know really well first degree, secondary connections people you've worked with before those are the long relationships where you just can know ahead of time are these going to be great to work with them or not as opposed to just trying to kind of go through the standard channels and so in Silicon Valley almost all recruiting is done through friends, friends of friends that's just how it gets done and in our experience it works the best so that's what we'd recommend. Maybe follow on to that, building company culture a lot of people talk about that and I know that Brian and Matthew you guys have done some interesting things you know traditionally startups do crazy long hours and stay up all night and you sort of taking a different view on that so why don't you just maybe give us a little bit of understanding of why and how it's working and how does that culture help you execute? I think it relates to recruiting I mean recruiting is one of the hardest things the whole time, all the time In Flection we're now 250 people and it's still the hardest thing is recruiting and finding great talent that fits the culture and fits our needs as it relates to culture there are a lot of ideas and we're living in a time and an era where there's just an abundance of opportunities and so I think what really makes the difference in what sets apart great companies is the ability to execute on those ideas and so if you kind of work backwards from there and you say well how do you create an environment where execution is excellent or as excellent as possible a lot of that has to do with a team of people who like coming to work every day who enjoy each other's company the long hours are part of the deal you know the really hard work is part of the deal it's like a given to accomplish the goals and it comes more naturally if everyone's aligned in the moment of what the company is trying to do and the mission of the organization it doesn't come naturally to just kind of say you know we expect 12 hours a day and I think in America especially we kind of wear it as a badge of honor if we work really really long hours but it's not always the most productive hours so I think that's one thing that Kiwi Culture is really well suited for in terms of there is a good holistic sense of lifestyle balance you know as the panelists suggested I mean it's incredibly hard to do this so it's going to be really really hard work but some of the things we've done at Inflection we have a fun role that we call Happiness Engineer and it's someone that's dedicated to really just creating different events and opportunities to lift the culture up we do a lot of celebrations for each other you know milestones that happen in people's lives outside of work just recognizing that we're going to spend more time with our coworkers than our family members typically and so when there's things happening whether it's birthdays or pregnancies or you know different sorts of weddings and these types of things they should be absolutely celebrated in more of a community spirit and that really brings people together and leads to those types of referrals where people will tell their friends hey you should come work here and that ends up being like Scott said the key to recruiting as well to tell off just one aspect of what he said around the importance of having that alignment around the company's mission and I'm reflecting sort of thinking about the shoes that you'll often be in in a relatively small market where you might have to be working with a lot of international teams we deal with this at Inflection we have offices in San Francisco but also in Kiev, Ukraine and Tel Aviv, Israel and one of the interesting things is how do you create a cohesive corporate culture and good inter-company relations when you're dealing with team members who maybe speak a different language and are coming from a very different corporate or very different culture altogether and I imagine that a lot of entrepreneurs here in New Zealand will be working with international teams as well and I think the thing that's been most significant for us in this has been that establishment around the company's core mission and then the building of these personal relationships with the leadership of our offshore teams that transcends just the business dynamic it's understanding about their kids and understanding about their family and their upbringing and all these different things and that person-to-person relationship from my perspective is the bedrock of an effective corporate culture So I think that there are in addition to the interpersonal pieces there are two other things that we really think about that make a culture great One is momentum So winning teams tend to keep winning and teams that sort of take the ball off the ball and start losing time to keep losing and so one of the most important jobs as the entrepreneur is to make sure the company never stops winning because it's very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole and if you keep that going it's just this ongoing tale The other thing that we see is the missionary and mercenary divide I think most cultures end up being either a mercenary culture or a missionary culture and the great companies are always the missionary cultures If people believe in the mission if you are sufficiently ambitious if you present people we're going to make this big impact and we're going to reach these people and we're going to do this important thing that's going to be great for the world that's what motivates the best people where you do have this ambitious important thing it's easier to motivate people in many ways it is easier to start a hard company than it is to start an easy company more people will be excited you'll have a better culture if you're doing something that matters if you're doing this big thing If you have the kind of culture where you're telling people like you need to get into your desk at 9 and leave at 9 because when you work 12-hour days people might do that for a little while but that is almost never in fact that is not what I have ever seen produce great results In addition to all of this I'd say the one thing that you can do to make culture great at a company and it sounds like not all New Zealand companies do this is give equity give options to every single employee at the company this is the one thing where if you take two identical companies at one of them everybody has equity at the other only the founders do the one where everybody has equity at every single time because everybody is so aligned around just making this thing succeed and all of a sudden politics go down dramatically because the one thing that matters is let's make this thing win so that's the one piece of advice I'd give is just give equity to every employee this is what Google did early on this is what all the Silicon Valley companies do at this point Thanks for that Let's talk about products figuring out how to build a great product you guys obviously have picked some good winners and seen that very up close so maybe a few tips what to keep in mind when trying to build a really good product So you get lots of business plans coming through and I think the thing is to go and test those products with people and very early on get your idea out there and test it because most ideas are stupid and they'll be flawed in some fatal way and founders don't want to hear that but actually hearing that and making things come through but I think this sort of characteristics we see from New Zealand that are common very design centric very end user focused and very effortive because we don't have a huge amount of capital so it's getting something we want pretty quickly and then the customers will drive it in a big direction there are some places though where you would look so if I was thinking about doing things now I think if you want to do something quickly it doesn't require a huge amount of capital the enterprise SaaS space is huge and so many broken problems like directories still don't work Yammer's fucked and one of those with a Google sign on there's still so many big problems that we've got a thousand people now and everything's broken so those are things that don't require a huge sales force we've seen the Atlassians and the Yammer sales model there's some really great easy products that are just crying out to be built we've got 10 of them, they're not seeing me afterwards there you go the best companies do a few things across the board everyone's successful in a different way but the commonalities are they talk to users very early they don't try to keep the idea secret, they're open they actually listen a common finding mistake is to talk to users because someone told them they're supposed to but they're so convinced they know the right answer to not actually listen to what their users are saying you have to build something that's so good that users find pain when they talk about how much they love it that is the test and that is eventually how you keep growing the second thing that correlates really well is like obsessive customer service so you know where the founders themselves are constantly talking this secret is part of talking to users and then the third thing is a very short cycle time so the way to make a great product is to make it better every day and if you make it say 2% better every day that compounds exponentially over time and the best companies get this very tight feedback loop they have an idea, they test it they change it, they keep going and this over time produces incredible results and then the last thing I'll say on this point is an obsession with the details of the product quality to a level where they almost where it's almost like stupid or does tend to correlate with success so founders that like spend a lot of time on their documentation pages and their jobs pages if there's this famous YC lore story where Drew was supposed to be speaking Drew has been the founder of Dropbox so he'll be speaking in the YC event a new version of Windows in Sweden service pack 2, something like that went out the broke Dropbox for like 7 users and he just can't speak in the event to go fix it because it was bothering him that much that it was broken for this tiny number of users so there's this obsession with the quality of the product which is what makes users love it that turns out to be really important I'd say in addition to creating a great product, you don't want to make something that someone else can just go copy tomorrow so you do all this hard work of wow we finally found product market fit people love our product, they're talking about it but somebody just literally copied us and raised a bunch of money to go distribute this so what you also want to build into the product in addition to product market fit as you grow, no one can catch up where you get further and further ahead of the competition so people talk about network effects or like data scale building these things in from the very beginning is a key way to make sure that once you go to all the hard work of building that great product you actually get something out of it at the end of the day and you're going to be a standalone company for a very long time so as investors we talked a little bit about having a vision for the company and as investors you look obviously for companies that are valued high down the line somewhere in the future so how important is having a vision and a mission when an entrepreneur comes and pitches to you for getting it to IC or getting funding from Founders Fund so yeah, the importance of having a vision here is one really important point which is that people get more ambitious over time and when the founders of Airbnb first came to us they were delighted that they had three users and if we told them that someday they were going to be running a 50 billion dollar company whatever it's going to be with more knights in any hotel chain in the world they would have looked at us and said you're crazy, we don't want to work with you because you don't know what you're talking about so I think there's this pressure in the last couple of years to have an immediate vision of how you're going to have this 100 billion dollar company and no one honestly has that in their first days Google almost sold the company for a million dollars they would have if the offer came through you know like the Zuckerberg very, very nearly sold Facebook they had for a billion dollars so it's okay to like become more ambitious as you go in fact that's what should happen so what we look for is people that have a kernel of an idea that we believe can develop into something huge but you can't focus on that right away you have to focus on delivering something great for a small number of users first the way we talk about this is that you know there's like you can either create an initial product that a lot of users really like or that a small number of users really love obviously you'd like to make something that a lot of users really love but those ideas get taken by big companies and you can't compete with them so you don't have to have a take over the world plan on day one in fact very few of the companies that we've been involved with that have gone on to do it thought they were going to initially the founder had something that was really passionate about they had a plan as Scott was saying about how they had some defensibility and it just grows and grows and grows from there but at the same time you can be extremely ambitious from day one so but maybe over time right so here's an example SpaceX Elon had already done a couple of companies so maybe he had the right to be really really huge vision but from day one it was we're going to Mars and that's where this company like that's the success case in short of that Mars is not success but product one so yeah you kind of vision like that but product one was not like let's build a Mars Cornel transport no you don't start with that you can't that's the thing right that's a bad idea so like in fact they just funded a rocket company in XYZ batch and they would like to go to Mars too someday but their initial project is to launch the one in Kila Satellites and that's sort of what I meant you can start with something less ambitious as a startup so you have your first product you hopefully have your first small number of users who love that product when do you actually know that you're ready for your first financing rounds but what needs to happen I'm going to public yeah yeah so for me I think sort of entrepreneurship is a series of baby steps so what you normally hear about is the deal like I've smacked out of the part and over on the start but actually a much more repeatable processes you know starting small and going through the process actually being in the game so you know with each deal you're going to get better networks more experience or ideas more of your own capital more of the light tone more of the next one so my thing zero is the fourth or fifth one I've done and what you know so I think when you're starting out if you think of it as a series of steps like getting funded is more important than the amount you get funded or the amount that you dilute in the first deal you want to get in and get that experience and hopefully turn it around quickly get to a good exit or at least be graceful on the way through so that when the time you get the next one which will be even bigger and then you go what's interesting though now is there are still lots of small things you can do but the industry's moved along quite a bit and with this technology shift we're seeing you know especially clouds off where where the economics of getting out to mass markets are have just fundamentally changed and you've got a bunch of incumbents in there which find it really hard to move there are businesses that will be successful just by raising the most money and having the right then to hire the team to go so our strategy was zero like after a mile we sold that we had 23 staff and everyone was doing five jobs so when we did zero we needed 50 people from day one so that was half a million a month you needed three years it was 15 million bucks so we had to do an IPO because at that time we couldn't raise that sort of money here so that forced us to do that but we won when we did that because now we've had seven or eight years we've raised like 250 US we've deployed at least a couple hundred million of capital so part of our business model is having this massive moat so no one else has been funded in our space to any scale and if they did they'd see them coming for three to four years so I think a few years ago there were still lots of cool things you could do on a shoestring but now to do these really big things I think everyone's aspiration everyone wants to now build a multi-billion dollar company it actually requires massive amounts of capital and that's part of the strategy but you might have to do a couple of lean things to get going before you can really guess up a tank I was just going to say it depends on the company and the strategy and the sector and a lot of different parameters we were able to bootstrap our company for the first three and a half to four years and therefore retain a good chunk of equity and control and I think for a lot of software companies that might apply but there are a lot of businesses that as Rob says are just really capital intensive if you're going into energy or agriculture or manufacturing the likelihood that you can finance that sort of bootstraps or from your shadings or friends and family rounds is just a lot less and it's really important to think about raising capital is not the finish line it's an enabler and there's a lot of press and attention in these capital rounds but that's not success in and of itself that just means you have a chance to play and it's a really big commitment who you bring on as your finance partner especially at the early stages because you're going to be deeply deeply connected to that individual to that firm for the duration of their shareholding and it's just crucial that you're working with someone who can help you to be successful with other groups like Y Combinator so exciting is it's so much more than just the seed capital or commission for that matter that these firms are crucial in creating success of the companies that they invest in and I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about capital raising Rob maybe back to you when's the right time for a Kiwi company to open an office of Rob yeah so what we did we when other proposals are done we've been to Australia quite quickly and Australia is hate buying things of New Zealanders so with zero what we did was we went to the UK first and the reason we went to the UK is even though it's expensive it's a small dense country so it's a mass market and you can kind of use the New Zealand mafia quickly and so the UK is an ideal first market it's hard work as the days don't connect that well so you're always working late or starting really early to work with the UK team but that's a good first market and also in our industry the UK tax is very close to what happens here and then we came back to Australia being a global company not a New Zealand company going to Australia so that really helped for us we could, in hindsight we should have even delayed the US for another year but we had a lot of pressure to get there because that's the big market but when we first started we were thinking that oh man we're so unlucky we've got this little market of 4 million people if you're based in Boston and you want to go to 4 million people you can drive for an hour if you want to go to 5 million you can drive for an hour and 10 minutes whereas for us to get 5 million customers you have to be an exporter and do all that sort of stuff and actually what turned out is starting in a small market was really good for us so we could get the product up to about version 12 by the time we really presented overseas so when we presented we were a pretty fit company with some really good product and I mean it's different for each company but I think a lot of New Zealand companies especially following us are going too fast too far and quickly we've got massive markets really close to us and having these businesses having 4 fronts is huge so I'd be focused on getting a few countries really locked in you know you want to do New Zealand get your first export market go hard on that that's so much bigger than here and then but it's so hard because everyone's telling you you've got to go go quick one of the big things we learned is you don't bank on this but you'll always be surprised at the slowness of the speed of your competitors and that's what we've found just another question so you, Scott and Sam you've both invested into some Kiwi companies as well so what would you say are the main differences between the teams or entrepreneurs or companies coming from New Zealand versus the ones that you invested in in the US like are there are there any things that we should be conscious of do better just any tips any thoughts on that I mean generally I don't think I think it's like difficult to classify companies by a particular country the one thing I tell founders anywhere outside of the US is a general statement is that it's okay in the US to be sort of arrogant is the wrong word but it's okay to be ambitious I would say I think it is more forgivable to stand up as a complete unknown and say you know I'm going to try and start a search engine in the world I'm going to try and start a rocket company that's going to take me to Mars so I can die there or I'm going to start a you know social network and I know you think I'm crazy because it's just our college students but someday everyone in the world is going to use it and and people aren't afraid to fail because you failed something big like I think Silicon Valley is even a little bit too forgiving of that but it is one thing that has worked for US based companies so we didn't take that too far because in the US we take all that stuff a little bit too far but I would just sort of that's my general advice anytime I'm out of the States yeah and I think part of that though is you don't want to be saying stuff that's actually crazy and wrong right so I think another thing that goes into this and you were asking early on what do we look for in great founding teams and I think one thing is both you have that crazy idea they've also actually thought it through so completely that you don't even mind if people criticize it and ask you all tons of questions about it, you have all the answers and so no matter what question they ask you've already thought about it, you've already researched it so you need to have real conviction in what you're saying you're going to do and not just boasting about it or just making ridiculous claims so I think that's the other the other part is just this really well-constructed realistic model of the world and how your company fits into that in a real way I'm going to ask my last question now so if you guys have any questions then feel free to sort of move around, line yourselves up I'm going to put the mic right there so you can come and ask your questions please do have some questions so just Christmas around the corner, wishful thinking so in the next couple of years what would you love to see out of New Zealand coming from here Wellington or Plains, anywhere in New Zealand what do you think our competitive advantages in front of the rest of the world anything? yeah so there's probably a bunch of sectors that New Zealand knows better than anybody else AG is one so I'd expect there's probably a bunch of great AG tech that can come out and be used across the world another unique aspect is New Zealand is smaller and I think there's less regulatory overhead than there is in other countries so you know in the US for example we've been waiting for years for the FAA the Federal Aviation Administration to say what are the rules around drones and so US companies are going elsewhere to work on that stuff I think New Zealand could be one of those great places for that so I think hopefully we see things in the specific sectors that New Zealand knows better than anybody else and that's probably a unique aspect about New Zealand also yeah so two answers so the stuff we're working on at the moment which is really cool which we have a competitive advantage on is what we're doing in banking so we have a real good banking blueprint now what we call Banking 2.0 we're rolling out and getting the four banks to do them, four small banks here so we can get stuff done that's working really well and that's already rolling out in the UK and we have Silicon Valley Bank, City First National and the first other one so they're learning from what we're doing here the other thing that's really interesting is what's happening on the business the government side and really the lessons we've been learning around getting web services into government we're able to play those out, we just acquire an employee state payroll tax company and that allows us to actually have a really good conversation with the US Federal Government and take some of the case studies we have here and sort of export those so New Zealand's a great lab for that the thing we're not doing which you guys should be asking about is we don't have a technology plan for New Zealand and our competitive advantage is as the guys are saying that you can't actually get stuff done here there's small enough that everybody's blood relatives or at least exchange fluids at some point so we can actually get stuff done and it's a really good test lab for the rest of the world so we should be aggressively getting things like Apple Pay working down here we're talking really hard to Elon at the moment to get some Teslas because we have the highest renewable energy in a long skinny country they should when the government contracts there's a whole lot of cool test lab things that we can do here and with the connections we have to Silicon Valley now we should be actively pushing that but that requires a New Zealand technology strategy I think philosophically one thing I've heard mentioned in the New Zealand ecosystem is this notion of moving away from primary industries into technology and I think one of the themes that we're all echoing here is just thinking more about it as where technology intersects with the strengths of New Zealand already the things that Brian and I have been really attracted to this country for along with our other co-workers and so forth is one of the themes is around the environment I think that the planet needs us to have a more responsible relationship to the environment globally and New Zealand is far from perfect in this area but it has such a better canvas for innovation and opportunity than I think a lot of places do so whether that's an act tech or whether it's around water management or whether it's around renewables and so forth I think there's just a tremendous amount of work to be done and if we can solve it here and support that IP it can create incredible economic opportunity for New Zealanders and jobs and so forth it would also be really important for the world and then the other area I'll just mention briefly is digital media and education there's so much talent here in Wellington around film and media and I think what we're seeing in terms of the connectivity of going from two to three billion people online to the entire world being connected within the next decade forms are disrupting how we access information, how we receive media and content and so the great content creators of our times in the next couple decades will get a chance to influence the education systems, we'll get a chance to tell stories we'll get a chance to really inspire people globally and that doesn't need to just be Hollywood and obviously Hollywood has pervaded consciousness and culture for many years and I think Wellington is really terrifically positioned in this respect and that's something we're really excited about as well one thing I believe very deeply is you should never start a company in a particular area because someone on a panel told you that it's just a recipe to disaster so I will try to not name specific areas because I think anyone in the world can now compete in any area they want like one of the really amazing things about the level of globalization that we've had and the depth that the internet has reached is that anything you can do in the US you ought to be able to do in New Zealand that said, I really want to echo the point about the advantage of being in a small country I think that it's so much easier to do something disruptive in a lot of different spaces here a really ambitious start in New Zealand could probably get a government regulation change which in the US is just like possibly impossible you know having a small but concentrated customer base that you can test with you can iterate on it, you can get to this point where you build a product that people love before you unleash it on the world is incredibly valuable so I do think that no matter what you decide to do you should use the advantages of being in a smaller contained ecosystem which are huge as much as you can audience questions that's good if you have a question please do not be afraid, the mic won't bite I'm from a start up that is building a dev tool and we're finding, as you say the New Zealand market is really great for testing and getting to know people but our market really is in the States dealing with companies over emails is fantastic but dealing with investors seems to be impossible they don't seem to want to invest outside of their own suburb their own country is that something you've seen changing or progressing or is that something that really does require you to move to the US it is changing for sure and it is easier to raise money now online or without in person but I think the correct way to think of fundraising is like really high value sales and just like any other sort of sales the human connection really matters and doing it in person is so much better so one thing that happens why a commonator a lot is that companies will come to the valley for a period of time raise money because it's like 100 times, literally 100 times easier to do it in person and then go back to whatever country they're from and it used to be that most investors wouldn't do that they would say like I only want to invest in companies that are going to stay within 20 miles but that has totally changed that is like long over now and but I still think it is for sure a lot harder to raise money via email in fact so hard but other than something like Angelist I don't recommend trying it and I think it's just worth it if you can't raise money from investors here which hopefully you can then I would just be willing to fly a lot Do you have children? Don't get pussying me on the plan Just one point I would add is if you look at a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs and companies out there they got told no a lot of times and so just remember to be persistent and determined and continuing to check in whether you're just being insane or not but I think that persistence is really incredibly important My question is about open source and startups so companies like Wood Press or Firefox but open source or Silverstrike and Wellington do you guys have thoughts about that do companies succeed doing that or is it harder? One company that famously open source all its IP was Tesla recently I think last year or maybe earlier this year the reason they did that in my opinion is that it creates a standard and it brings everyone onto their platform so I think there's a lot of times when it strategically makes a ton of sense so let's say you open source a portion of what you're doing because it's going to either create a standard or bring a lot of developers onto your platform you have to think through the strategy of why it makes sense for your specific business but it's been done successfully a bunch of times I'm not sure if that interests a question just again I'd say who cares? Open source is a very interesting philosophy and we use stuff and we try to contribute stuff but that wouldn't be my primary thing for building a business unless there was some really cool business about being open source but we've kind of moved on from that and especially these SaaS platforms you've got so much sitting in the cloud on your servers it's so hard to rip people off and I think it's all those benefits of sharing, creating standards and all those things which is really interesting as a movement five to ten years ago but we don't really think about it anymore it's just part of the plumbing just maybe because I have a different perspective on it with the open source I think what Scott said really resonates to me thinking through the strategy is crucially important I would say in seeing how the projects and products that we've been involved in they would have never happened if it weren't for so many amazing software developers and companies and open source tools that existed and so I think when your strategy allows it to get to the point of seeing that as a place where you can really support the mission that you're on to create those types of standards to further the industries I think the social enterprise community in Wellington has done a phenomenal job embracing open source and personally I think it's a really terrific philosophy that's doing a lot of good in the world and from that social enterprise community in Wellington and so I have a question about where do the wider impacts on society or on the planet come into your decision making process about who to support and maybe even your definition of success from my perspective it's crucial to reflect on the effect that any company or organization we build has on the full set of stakeholders not just financial shareholders and that's both a philosophy in terms of a way of just how I want to live my life but it's also I think a sound business strategy great people want to work at companies that are having a positive effect on the world investors want to invest in companies that are going to have positive ripple effects throughout the societies where they operate government regulations will be more friendly and supportive so for all these reasons I think it's critical to evaluate what are the following effects of the product of service that you're building and what externalities positive or negative does that create as central and core to the strategy for the organization that you're building so this is something we've spent a lot of time thinking and we've had a have really focused on this over the last year and one of the things that I've realized as you sort of get older is when you start off you sort of see the government up here and you're down here and it's hey please help me give me some money and stuff and then as you get sort of a bit more senior than a few more things you kind of treat the government as a peer so I think with that with web services like hey we are really the sole compliance issues but you guys need to now give us the hook so we can get our data to you and do those things and then I was at the B20 conference in Sydney earlier in the year and one of the panels came through and the number one issue I was youth employment so if you look in Australia that's the number one issue and you sort of read it everywhere you know people getting their first jobs and what we realized was as a larger company now like you know everyone does sort of internships and has grad programs and those things but actually it doesn't move the needle at scale and then we realized that you know small businesses are that's the bulk of the economy and if we can mobilize our base to get them to think about getting a third of a person and we can do a whole lot of heavy lifting educate them about about youth rates about what the minimum wage is, probation periods how you hire young people how you actually work with young people so we've done that work and what we've found is you know get to this level where you can't wait for government and actually businesses can do a huge amount of good because you have resources and I think with the sort of 20s and 30s and the people you have in these so large businesses they all have to have a strong social conscience that's that sort of mission versus mercenary thing and you know I really think businesses can do good and I think we're entering in this period especially we had massive scale and with the conscience of people that work in these businesses who want to do good things we can actually actively drive these things and they're great for business so I actually see it as a responsibility of people as they get on in business especially through your company and deal with them at scale and that's super exciting I'd say in addition to wanting to do good if you want to have a huge impact the best way to do it is often through a company so you need to make sure that that's a successful business in addition to being positive for the world it can't be one or the other we believe that a lot of companies we invest in because they're doing this huge stuff that can have a massive impact and you know do something like curing all cancer for example that's obviously doing good and if it works it's going to be an incredible business so I think you need both otherwise you're going to find that you're not going to be able to hit the scale that's going to get that positive world benefit that you're looking for we will fund nonprofits directly and we fund it a lot and some of them I think are totally awesome but I'd say generally we want to do things that have a huge positive impact and as Scott was just saying I think most of the time those are full profit entities in the world and you can argue whether or not capitalism is good I don't think it is but the best way to make a change and if you look at the big improvements that have happened in the last 100 years most of these come by a company that has a mission and builds something incredible and changes the world and they get more investors as they go Google certainly did not understand the impact that making all information instantly accessible would have on the world that's been a massive, massive change you know if we can get energy like a nuclear energy company to work I will have a massive, massive change but the converse of that is that I won't invest in a company I believe is that for the world twice I had passed on a company because I was that I thought I was going to make money on it for sure because it was bad for the world once it was so bad it sort of self imploded and the other time I would have made a bunch of money but it wouldn't have been worth it I think the biggest problem that the world the macro problem the world is going to face is that there's going less unchecked that we're on a trajectory to have massive, massive wealth and equality and slowing economic growth leading to mass unemployment and you know it turns out that economic growth I think like everyone's their life to get bigger as a year and no growth in the world it's very zero-someter and it's fighting the only way that the sort of developed world will continue to function is with massive economic growth business is what's going to deliver that and so I think just continuing to drive economic growth is probably the most important thing for like ongoing prosperity and peace and everything else that we can do that's actually really interesting in that perspective because that's the you know just being through a election campaign here business is not seen as great but that's what when you travel overseas the entrepreneur of the year event in Monaco this year and all of the entrepreneurs, all of them had a strong social strokes, very strong social bias to the business none of them were assholes they all wanted to grow their local communities and do something really purposeful and I think that's the great thing about entrepreneurship in these startup groups is kind of saying that business is cool and you can do very positive things I mean I wouldn't want to do it if we were just raking the planet we actually want to make things better and leave the country in a better position than when you came into it right so business is good and it's really nice to hear it one additional thought on this familiar with the Inspiral Network and a lot of the projects that you've all been working on and I think that I agree with these sentiments that has a carry on effect that can provide rising living standards improved access to healthcare and sanitation increased education etc and that sort of social mission is required for any company to truly hit breakout velocity in this new age but I also think that the small acts of individual entrepreneurs are also extremely important and it's not only through big game changing corporations that positive direction in our society can happen and so I also even though I'm always biased to think about systems level change and how do we build technologies which enable global movement in a very short period of time city beautification projects or school gardens or just elderly care there are so many small things that we all can do and maybe as a sort of initial target we can still find tremendous success in that focusing directly on the vectors of creating a more beautiful world and still seeing that the economic engine is required to help those things achieve scale but also seeing the beauty in the small steps that we take forward we're doing two last questions and then you guys chat a way afterwards just saying and let's try to keep those slightly free I'm just hoping to drive out some personal stories so obviously when you're running a stutter it's all about short term finances with a long big term vision early days in zero where it was a little bit uncertain you were always very positive obviously what kept you guys going through those moments of being only being able to plan a number of months in a certain number of years insanity being irrationally committed you can come back I'd say in my experience it's just thinking through the worst case scenario maybe you don't have a lot of clarity about where things are going but you're working on something you really believe in you think it's important, you're working with people you like hopefully you can make it work if you can't, what's the worst that's going to happen so you just keep pushing and up until the very last minute you keep trying to make it work I had a rule with myself that I would only deal with the most current crisis at a time when things got really bad where people get really dedicated is when they think about the 30 things that are going to go wrong and they're going to kill the company and that leads to paralysis and inaction and the way to get through it is to say you know what I'm pretty smart, I've gotten through a lot of bad stuff I'm going to solve other 29 problems I don't know how, I'll figure out that later but here's the thing that might kill the company today I'm only going to worry about that and if you live to fight another day then I will learn the privilege to worry about certain things and focusing yourself on this most urgent fire and giving yourself permission to ignore these other fires until tomorrow and not just sort of thrashing the context between them is really big and then the other thing is like just keep perspective like terrible things have happened in the company in the past terrible things have happened in the company in the future this probably won't be the one that does kill the company and if the company does get killed it's just a company, it's not life it's not family, there are more important things so the worst case scenario here is terrible but not like a world ending and you can probably solve it like founders are incredibly resourceful and you can almost always figure out some way through it I wanted to ask you what is most important when you're starting a company is it like a person itself is it the idea or is it technology behind it and also what do you think about 3D printing technology how it's going to change the manufacturing of things so my most important thing is the team so the idea is come and go but being able to have a really good team that you work with and it's so much more fun so I've only done one or two things where we didn't have a really good sort of family team but the thing that gives me the most pleasure in zero is working with a thousand cool people it's cool, I'm a big fan of it yeah it's said the earlier stage the company the more important the team is so if you imagine a huge company and it's already working maybe it kind of runs itself where do you have nothing all you have is a team so early stage that's the number one thing you mentioned 3D manufacturing and while I think it's maybe a second level or third level priority being in the sector where the tailwinds of technology are in your favor while not as important as having a great team that's really critical to your long-term success so being aligned with 3D printing and CNC and digital manufacturing my read on it is it's going to change everything it's not an area where I have a ton of experience but the idea that we're going to be able to print pretty much any object in remote places shipping things out from the US to get here to New Zealand was a huge lesson in the complexities of global supply chains and learning like wow I could just make this specialty component right here in New Zealand and save the shipping in the time so it's just so revolutionary I think it's a sector that's poised for a lot of growth Hi guys our product looks at demand prediction and the relationship that price has with it and we've got ML models that work and we want to look more at deep med in some of the future of AI in Victoria University here we had six people graduate who worked with AI we have one of them working for us but around the world or just even in the US are you seeing universities getting on board with courses in AI what's the uptake and what's the next five years in terms of people which is our need that understands this technology I actually studied that in school so I'm happy to answer this I think it is probably the machine learning is probably the fastest going concentration in every good CS program in the states and I expect that would just keep that growth rate will continue and I think there is such strong belief among new CS students that this is the most important thing to be working on that that's going to just keep going I mean probably AI will cause all but until then we're going to try out a lot of great students Awesome Thanks everybody so much for coming and celebrating we do have an official launch party here tomorrow some more of this do come by starting from about 5pm we'll have it carnival style there's bands, there's pools, there's drinks but right now let's just all give an awesome big applause for all of those guys