 Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa. No mai hari mai, hallo everybody, and welcome to EHS Impact Springboard. It's lovely to see you all on here. So we are focusing this time on leading innovation for global impact and in this session we are looking at going global, transforming New Zealand startups into global leaders. My name is Michelle Parker and I am the Head of Fellowship Experience at the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and we will open together here with a karakia. Hō hihiri, pō rārama, pō o te fakaaro, pō o te tangata, pō o te aroha, te pō e hiri nei, ia tātou, mōri ora, kia tātou, hō mie, huie, tāi kee. So it's really nice to see you all here. EHS Impact Springboard is running over four days. We started yesterday and it is all about connecting Aotearoa and New Zealand with our EHF Fellows, our Hillary Laureates and more key leaders around critical challenges and opportunities for Aotearoa and New Zealand. In this session we have a lovely panel with us and each panelist will have a few minutes to be able to share their stories and their insights and then we will open up for Q&A from there. Well let us hand over now to Rosalie who is going to be moderating our panel conversation today. So Rosalie being our CEO of the Hillary Institute and of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. So Kia ora Rosalie. This is a session that I feel incredibly privileged to have the opportunity to facilitate. It's a very important session about how we can come together to help Kiwi founders to commercialise and go global. The 2003 Global Startup Genome report shows that New Zealand's startup ecosystem has been making huge strides in the last five years. It's grown about 46%. There's been increasing startup density. It's estimated there's about 2,500 startups and also access to early stage funding which is almost double. However, we're still defined as an emerging ecosystem. While we have increasing exits with over 50 million and there are a few unicorns with valuations of over a billion we are not still creating $100 million companies at scale. Our startup density, while it's grown, is still only half that of global peers and our startups are working often with materially less money and taking longer to raise capital from offshore peers. And one of the critical challenge is how we can help the founders to go global. With a very limited domestic market, founders need to understand early in their lifecycle the scale of their ambition, how to sharpen their value proposition to differentiate against competitors and also to raise capital often in what's a very different market and culture and also to be able to do so in a way that still reflects their poor New Zealand identity. So how do we address this commercialisation and scale gap? And that's really what we wanted to kick off today with this discussion. I feel very privileged to be joined by three innovation leaders today. What I'm going to do is begin by introducing each of them and giving them that moment to be able to speak and bring their perspectives. We would encourage you while you're listening to put any questions that you might have into chat. Once we've completed that, then we'll have the opportunity to go into the Q&A. So I'd like to kick off by introducing Marion Johnson. So Marion is the chief executive of the Ministry of Awesome, which is an organisation that seeks to transform the New Zealand economy through start-up innovation. As CE, she led the establishment of Te Aplaka, which is the Ministry of Awesome's Christchurch-based headquarters and National Start-up Hub. The founder, a catalyst start-up incubation programme, she leads Electrify Aotearoa and Electrify Accelerate, which is New Zealand's only women founders conference and venture accelerator. She's a trustee of New Zealand High-Tech Trust, who are the organisers of the New Zealand High-Tech Awards. And she was also, and I think this is critical, she was a key member of the New Zealand Start-up Council, which was a government entity that was created to bring people together and produced an upstart nation report about how we could move forward and better amplify and accelerate our innovation ecosystem. So, Maryam, we'd love to get your thoughts on the challenges and opportunities in this space. Just to note you're on mute, I'm so sorry. Note to self. Tenakota Katoa, co-Maryam Johnson, Toku Inua. Thank you so much for that introduction, Rosalie. And thanks for having me along for this session today. It's amazing to see so many faces from all over the world that's actually quite inspiring. So, as Rosalie said, I'm the Chief Executive at Ministry of Awesome. And I'll start off by giving you a little bit of context because you may not be familiar with the organisation. But Ministry of Awesome was created in 2012 right after the Christchurch earthquake. And we were, I think the best way to put it is we were created as a think tank to look at how the city was going to develop itself and reimagine itself post-earthquake. You may remember that the whole city was really decimated. There was no city centre anymore. I was there throughout. Erika Austin, who's on this call, was at Ministry of Awesome at that time and was a major player in the work that Ministry of Awesome did. I joined in 2017. So after the whole earthquake experience things had really kind of crystallised as far as the economic development strategy for the city was concerned. And what became really clear was that because the city had reimagined itself as every city in the world does at the moment as a city of innovation, unlike other cities, they actually created a real strategy that backed that achievement of that goal. And one of the key things that we had to do was we had to create a dynamic start-up ecosystem that would power this future innovation. So the city itself was looking at some very specific economic clusters where we already had a real point of difference. Aerospace, future transport, medtech, health tech, future food and fibre, and then underpinning all of that was high-tech. But at that time we did not have a dynamic start-up ecosystem because if you wanted to have a high-growth start-up, if you wanted to establish one and you wanted to get support and you wanted to be with your peers, you really had to go to Wellington, Auckland, better yet Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, New York, somewhere outside, certainly not Christchurch. So while there were pockets of innovation and while there were pockets of start-ups, there was nothing connected and there was nothing that was actually beginning to bubble. So the first thing that we set out to do was to change that for the city. So Ministry of Awesome was very specific to Christchurch in those very early days and we followed a strategy which was threefold. The first one was making start-ups a thing. So telling the story of start-up, attracting people into the community and then building capability for any talent that leaned in and accelerated programs, incubator programs, capability, building sessions with mentors and so on. And then the third piece was about building community. So the program itself and Ministry of Awesome and the work that we did over the next sort of four years became really successful. We got an enormous amount of traction and in 2022 Christchurch actually became the fastest growing start-up city in the world. And it is that that I think propelled, well, that I began a conversation with a bunch of other people at MB, including Sue's Reynolds and Phil McCaw and some other people who were focusing on start-up and how to grow our start-up ecosystem in New Zealand and the start-up council was born. And I think the context of the history of the journey that took place in Christchurch from some small green shoots and then suddenly something that was absolutely humming and firing away is a really important lesson that we could bring to the country as a whole. And so that was really my contribution to the Upstart Nation report was all about that early stage, how to build that community, how to seed a dynamic start-up ecosystem. And I was joined on the Upstart Council with I think it was five other individuals. So that was Phil McCaw from MOVAX, Sue's Reynolds obviously of the Angel Association, Grant Straker who's a founder of Straker Translations, Mike Cardin, a multi-founder of multiple start-ups that have gone global. Im Shea Vega who at the time was the CEO of Outset Ventures which was more of a deep tech organization. And Carl Jones who was the chief executive, is the chief executive of WNT Ventures. So most of the people who joined me around the table at the start-up council were investors and of course the two founders. And essentially the Upstart Nation report was a report for government. So that government could understand that from the work that we did and the research that we did within the founder community and across the start-up ecosystem, from the deep dives we did at each individual ministry that formed part of government, what were the settings that needed to change, what was the work that needed to be done in order to really accelerate our growth as a start-up nation. And it really boiled down to some major recommendations when it comes to, first of all, what happens generally with government and with government-sponsored start-up activity is it only goes as long as the government is in place. And so you end up with a three-year or four-year cycle where policy is created and then it's discarded. Maybe the same party comes in again where you get six years or eight years. But in any case, creating a start-up ecosystem and making a really successful start-up ecosystem is a very long process. It doesn't take place in three or four years. So one of the key recommendations that we made was that we create a national body called Accelerate Aotearoa. It could be called absolutely anything. But the purpose of that national body was to reduce that fragmentation and coordinate the implementation of the strategy. So we were not envisioning another ministry or anything too unwieldy. We're talking about a small group that would essentially hold the reins, be separate from government, not staffed by government, but staffed by people who are start-up operators, who are founders, who are investors, who are involved in the start-up ecosystem and could hold the reins and guide through a whole series of activities that would propagate this dynamic start-up ecosystem. And it was actually critical that it not be a government group. The other part of the recommendation is that there is a great deal of inefficiency around government, around start-up and innovation in New Zealand because there are so many pieces of activity that are held by disparate portfolios where one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing and so on and so on. So by creating Accelerate Aotearoa, there was an opportunity to create total efficiency in the space, work to goals and objectives. And the model we sort of used there was Launchvic. So Melbourne has been incredibly successful in building their start-up ecosystem and Accelerate Aotearoa was meant to be a sort of quasi-Launchvic. The second recommendation was around pipeline. So we have a great talent pipeline in New Zealand but as far as founders are concerned, it's still not particularly full of highly capable people. So we need to tell the story of start-up. We need to create a culture of start-up ambition. And we need to make start-ups a thing. So this is all about story telling. This is all about role modeling. This is all about elevating the story of start-up and the opportunity of start-up for the entire country. And then the third recommendation was around capability building. So yes, it's about building specific skills for founders at the early stage, but it's also around scale-up because we don't have a lot of exited start-up founders. We don't have a lot of experience start-up operators. So how do we get more experience start-up operators to help current start-up scale? And then finally, well, not most importantly, but as important as everything else, we need to revisit our capital ecosystem so in order to hit 5,000 start-ups, which is where we need to be in order to be firing it around the level that we want to in order to transform the New Zealand economy. We'd need an additional approximately $2 billion of investment capital. And so what that means is we would really need to update our tax settings, which are currently fit for purpose for a simplified economy and woefully inadequate for a knowledge economy that the knowledge economy that we're trying to build. So it's offering incentives for people to invest into the start-up ecosystem, removing barriers for things like Kiwi Saver, et cetera. So the capital piece needs to grow alongside the talent piece, alongside the founder piece, in order for both to keep up with each other and continue to hit their strides. So those were the key themes that the start-up council created is the Upstart Nation Report, which is available online. And I would really encourage you to have a read of it. An open discussion around it would be fantastic. Of course, we've changed governments now. The Upstart Nation Report landed approximately two weeks before the election cycle began. So we are now pressing hard to try to get that reviewed by the new government. It's encouraging so far, but we have not yet had traction. So that summarises my point of view. Marion, thank you so much. And that gives so much insight into what we need to do to really secede and accelerate the New Zealand innovation ecosystem. What I'd like to do is now pass the baton to Guy Tekenewe-Royle, because what Guy can bring is also that globalisation perspective and where are some of the missing gaps and how do we help the founders to go global? So Guy is an experienced commercial and investment advisor. He has over 30 years' experience in management and governance roles in energy, investment, transport, agritik, and also particularly the indigenous development sectors. He's been CEO for a professional advisory firm, tribal authority and waste technology businesses. He's a former director of Kiwiwale, New Zealand Growth Capital Partners, which is a fund of funds here in New Zealand, the New Zealand Fast Forward Fund. He's currently a director of CH4 Global, which he helped to found, and that's a US clean tech methane inhibitor business with operations in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. And in addition to all of this, he is the chair of the commercial arm of his tribe, Rokawa Asset Holding Company. So Guy, we'd really love to get your perspectives on this challenge, particularly given your global investment background. Kia ora, Rosalie. Kia kutuhuki no tawahi. Nami kia kutuhutua. Kia ora, everyone. Thank you. Those are very glowing introductions. Thank you, Rosalie. Someone run a timer on me. I can go forever on this stuff, say five minutes I've got. And I'm just trying to think, I'm looking at the audience and some familiar faces in this audience. What would be really useful? I think there's a number of people from offshore. I think just putting some context around New Zealand might be really helpful. So first of all, the last Polynesian Island to be populated, we are the largest Polynesian Island. We're at the bottom of the Pacific. And we have always felt keenly in our culture the isolation of being at the bottom of the Pacific. And I have to say that I think the reality of that is still flowed through today even to driving a technology knowledge-based industry where I've seen firsthand in the States the difference between having a few corporates to go in New Zealand to go and talk to and test your product and come back and reiterate and rethink versus having thousands and thousands of corporate customers around you to go and visit who are a drive, whether they're a day or two drive, or go across the country if you're in the States and hit the other coast and turn around and drive back to them over three days. But you can do it. In New Zealand, it's to hit customer demand is really, really tricky, particularly if you want to be a globally focused business. We have a higher level context. In 2022, there was a review done of all of the countries in the world, generally, particularly the UN countries around the export receipts. How much money do you get into your country from someone else's pocket offshore? In New Zealand, it was about 47, it's probably a bit more than that, it's about 70 billion in this country. If you have a look at some equivalents of who we are, we're about 5.2 million, 5.5 million population. If you have a look at Denmark, they're about 6 million, they're 131 billion. They are getting double what we get. Ireland, they're almost 200 billion. They're a population of about 5.5 as well. Singapore, 5.5 million people. Export receipts is 500, I've written down here, $515 billion. So they are an order of factor of multitudes about what we receive as an income from our businesses. Everyone here, and most of you people who are offshore, probably know New Zealand is a very primary sector focused economy, and we fundamentally sell protein. Now, having said that, our second largest export earner is technology, and it's growing dramatically. And I think everyone's kind of seen that where the global signals are that we have, that sector's probably going to grow and probably cross over our primary sector at some point in the next few years, 5 to 10 years. The imperative for growing startups in New Zealand is fundamentally, in New Zealand, we have just had our elections. A lot of the debate is around how we're going to pay for our infrastructure, who's paying for the teachers and the education in the schools and who's paying for the hospital and the health sector. If you are receiving that level of tax take from export receipts coming into New Zealand companies, a lot of that debate gets reduced, or it isn't the least intense. Of course, everybody knows you've just been a little more and more things, but the reality is there's a saviour to the New Zealand economy, and that's about growing startups and growing and becoming global economies, because this reduces a whole lot of social tension and a whole lot of other silly things that go inside a country when you're sitting with a really reduced tax take and then people having to make really short-term thinking, which is what Marian mentioned. I'm just thinking, Marian, you made this comment around, they have a really short program thinking around how we build ecosystems here. It's very much like the infrastructure conversations. It's a three-year program. The things that need 20, 30 years thinking, and then we go from one government to another government. Now, this is not just New Zealand issue. This is an issue for countries around the world. Everyone has this, but it's particularly acute in a small country like ours, where we're struggling to move from a previous primary sector-driven economy, which did well for us in the 50s and 40s and 50s in wartime, and everybody needs meat and milk and clothing and wool and stuff like that into a modern, the last 50, 60 years we've struggled. I think that's kind of the high-level comments I wanted to talk about that. I particularly focus in the Indigenous sector. The Māori economy is like an economy inside an economy. It's an emerging economy inside it. It looks very much like other Indigenous economies, very tribally-driven land-based, the key assets. If you think the New Zealand sector is a primary sector-focused economy, the Māori sector is that on steroids. We are nothing but forest fish and farms. There's a couple of people here. There's a couple of Māori guys that see you real as a technology they're working hard, but the reality is they're outliers. People like Rio on this line and others, they're outliers. We don't have a strong technology-focused proposition. Now that was looked at and has been thought about for a little while now, and there's been a couple of programs who are examples of what we're trying to do to build the start-up economy or thinking. In various regions, I know there will be a few here, you might be seeing that in various regions, programs have been implemented for young people. Rangatahi is the Māori name for that, who are about training them to move them to STEM, moving them into technology and there's a focused area around that. The advantage of the Māori economy has is we have a large number of institutions whose sole focus is to grow their community. That's their job. They have no other job but to grow their community. That way you can pull some levers very quickly and try to get people aligned, putting money in and driving certain programs. The trouble is that's all teaching to ourselves. The obvious step is how do we build a global connectivity and reach. EHF is part of that. Kia Community is part of that for New Zealand. I can claim a little bit. I'm an OG of EHF. I was there at the very first design program with the Monahan Brothers and Yosef Aiele. We were out in Whitemans Valley and they told us they had this crazy idea of bringing a whole lot of people internationally if we can bring them into New Zealand. On whiteboards we drew up, all it might look like and that type of stuff. I've got a lot of affinity and love for the EHF program. In the Māori sector, we instituted a program when they say we, me. It feels like I claimed it. I didn't have anything to do with it. I was in the Māori business leaders and they took them into the state and started exposing them. They jumped on-site along the boot camp program that was being implemented under Peter Crisford Mb. It's called Te Hono, which means the joining. The idea was simply to take leaders out of New Zealand, business leaders, place them offshore. Yes, they can learn about innovation and new ways of thinking and product design and human-centered design models and learn all that kind of stuff. Reality was, we were just getting them all in a room together and talking about how do we do this more collectively and more quickly. There was a Māori group that went along with that and they've maintained that connection really well. In fact, they all met again. This is 20-something, 15 years post that session. They all met again. Just last week, I think. There is a new program, Finister Ventures, which is a VC based in the States, mainly Agritech. One of the founders is a New Zealander. His name is Arama Kukutai. They've decided to build a program. They have a portfolio of Agritech companies in the States, Israel, Europe, and other places. They've put a program called Te Ara Putziki. We select a number of young Māori who we think are capable would be placed into some high-growth companies while they're there. The idea is they would go over there, spend six months, whatever the period is, come back and then really go. I've got a million other things to talk about and we can get into it. If you ask questions, we can do it. Kila Tate. Thank you, Guy. I'm very reluctant to cut short because there is so much interesting that is in what you're saying. I feel very privileged to now introduce Kila Tate. Anthony is a family based in San Francisco in Burlington. He's the managing director of Altos Adventures, which is a venture capital partnership with a long-term approach to building technology companies worldwide. He is looking and is, as I understand, investing in businesses here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. He does serve on several private company boards. He's the lead independent director for Roblox Corporation. I think one of the really key things here is that he is a long-serving board member and chair emeritus of TechSoup Global which is an international network that distributes technology and capital to hundreds and thousands of nonprofits. He also founded the C100 and this was an association that was to promote Canadian entrepreneurship globally and he was also a founding member of the Bull Circle Fund. The reason that we were so keen to have Anthony join us is that many of the challenges that Canada was facing are very similar to those in New Zealand. So there is a playbook and a model for how Canada harnessed the diaspora of talent in other global ecosystems and what the benefits were of that. So we'd love to open up this space to Anthony to share his insights and experience from what he's heard. Gerora Rosalie, thank you for that introduction. That's a nice biography but I think the reason I'm actually here is because I missed my cohort 7 Welcome Experience last spring and as a result Paula and Michelle urged me to just come for a day and swipe your visa so that you can get started with New Zealand and get to know. So I came last July to Auckland for two days, one night had a whole series of terrific meetings with companies, with people in the government with venture capitalists, investors angel investors, entrepreneurs and as a result of that I've ended up investing personally in a number of New Zealand based seed funds. My daughter is going to attend Canterbury next fall for a semester. I will be back again a couple of times a year I've just joined the board of a New Zealand company and my firm is participating in a series A investment that will be announced tomorrow. It will be one of the largest series A financings for a New Zealand based software company ever I believe so that will hopefully hit the news tomorrow and you heard it here first but I won't say the name. I think the reason I'm you wanted me to participate in the session today was to share a little bit about my experience with Canada and we see 100 so I am actually a Chinese Canadian living here in Silicon Valley and you know guy you were talking about small countries that punch above their weight and you know Canada is much larger than New Zealand but compared to the United States where I sit today Canada is that small modest commonwealth country situated next to a big annoying neighbor just like you guys are and very similar in many ways to New Zealand were rooted in First Nations peoples very much influenced recently by immigration especially from Asia very well endowed with natural resources but trying hard to move away from primary and extractive industries into more of a knowledge economy and you know like Kiwis canucks travel really well so there are several hundred of thousand of us here in the United States and as we like to say we're not the lazy one percent of Canadians but very highly motivated financiers and technologists and entertainers who have come to the United States to work in those kind of industries but all of us have very high affinity back to our home country and that's where the story of C100 starts so we were all sitting here in Silicon Valley twelve years ago and you know we're used to being called brain drain right we had left our home country to go somewhere else and working here in Silicon Valley was certainly like the center of this brain drain and a number of us went up to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and saw that the country had put together this very ambitious program called own the podium where the ambition was to win the most gold medals at the Winter Games a very un-Canadian immodest thing to try to shoot for but they succeeded on the very last night the Isochi team won in overtime and the country walked away with most gold medals ever after having never won a single gold medal on home soil in two tries so we saw that this sort of small group of people in a modest country could have a big ambition and do something transformative and we said why don't we do that for technology and at the time in 2010 the Canadian tech industry was really suffering Nortel was our Nortel networks was our biggest company had gone bankrupt research in motion which made the Blackberry was just starting to get assaulted by Apple and would soon crumble so our two largest tech companies were under assault and the start-up economy was in bad shape Venture Capitalists had not really succeeded domestically and all of our friends back home were asking for help so a number of us got together here in Silicon Valley and started a non-profit association called the C100 if you want to look it up online it's the C100.org and our job was really to harness a number of successful entrepreneurs, operators investors here in Silicon Valley all Canadian expats to help Canadian companies back home get bigger faster Mary Ann you talked about ambition and I believe in New Zealand you have something called 3Bs in Canada we had a lack of ambition in a sense that companies and entrepreneurs would sell out too soon and take those dollars and retire we called it B2C and B2B back to cottage and back to bicycling and so we thought we could do better than this and inspire entrepreneurs to think bigger move faster, access capital talent networks and build multi-billion dollar companies and that sort of happened so in the last dozen years or so the Canadian ecosystem has gone from about a billion less than a billion in annual venture capital to more than 15 billion at the peak in 2021 it's settled around 6 or 7 billion Canadian dollars today produced a number of very large public companies light speed, point click clear is a great private company Shopify is one you probably know that have come through C100 programs and grown up in Canada and become very instrumental in world technology so that's sort of the template that I wanted to share with you all as one smaller country doing something big and really tapping into the expertise here in Silicon Valley the networks here in Silicon Valley to turbo charge the economy back home and the idea again is to really raise that ambition and exposure level to connect through the networks and to do it over a long period of time because we have to engage the government in this, we have to engage private sector we've influenced government policy both on tax and on immigration so we have a number of programs in Canada that make it very easy for institutions like mine to invest in Canada make it very easy for immigrants to go work in Canada take advantage of the fact that it's actually quite difficult for entrepreneurs and immigrants to come work in the United States in some ways Donald Trump was the best thing that ever happened to the Canadian ecosystem so we're just trying to be very nimble, very quick but do it over a long period of time so it's really a decades long commitment that the government and the private sector have to make together Anthony thank you so much you're describing something that's effectively multi-year multi-generational what's the critical starting point you talked about culture and ambition is that the starting point that we need to be looking at here Yes and organizationally for us it was really finding role models right it's really important one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so unique is that there's this mythology of founders and we really celebrate these crazy outlier founders and that's not really done in the Canadian culture I don't think it's really done in the Kiwi culture as much we have a little bit more of a modest Commonwealth approach to things so one of the things to do is we can be nice but really embrace those big ambitious role models and then tactically when we started the T100 organization we did it in cooperation with government but we said look this has to be private sector run it has to be small we've got to move fast we need your support but you cannot run it and that was the agreement we had back in 2010 when we started and that's what allowed us to get it off the ground Can I go back to this issue of ambition because I know that it's been raised a number of times Guy are our founders ambitious enough in terms of what they can do is that a starting point? Yeah I'm quite happy to put my stand in the ground and I think that's across both all of New Zealand culture it's also in our Māori Polynesian Island cultures as well I think it's a function of a number of factors and it really is just thinking about it can any experience you really do need a couple of people just to front it and to give everybody so we've had a couple of people here Rod, Jerry and Aaron there's a few in the Māori space who are doing the technology but we really do need people to be people can aspire to be something that they can see themselves I have to say amazing to measure the impact that someone like Taika Waititi will have to move into the creative industries I think you'll have a complete just proportionate impact so I don't think we're ambitious when you go to some of the start up and incubator programs I have to say I feel a little bit it's concerning that there's not enough desire to grow a business and get offshore and grow it and contribute to the New Zealand economy that way I don't know where it may be since Commonwealth maybe we've inherited this and glow sex and keep your head down I'm not quite sure I don't know if it comes from a Polynesian thing I don't know where it comes from Marianne, you spoke about the fragmentation and the disconnection that exists both within the ecosystem how do we better connect founders into global ecosystems and to those that can bring both market access skills as well as resources I mean there are a lot of different agencies that are working on that piece right now the most successful of which is probably NZTE who do a lot of great work in terms of connecting local start up founders with the international the international sector and we'll take them on things like country tours and so on and that has a really strong impact but I think there's also so many organizations that are working in and around the start up space who are duplicating their work there are so many different versions of local start up hubs and each of them is looking for funding mostly from government there's a complete absence of corporate New Zealand in the start up ecosystem everybody sort of looks to government to support all of this without having a real strategy in place and without having very specific swim lanes so that each organization understands exactly what their contribution needs to be and what success looks like so from my perspective it really has to do with things really started to fire on all cylinders in Christchurch and Canterbury when the swim lanes were created when a strategy was created when there was a goal in place that we had to hit when there were numbers and metrics to go back and measure by and that's exactly what we need on a national level so yes a lot of that is about defragmenting the ecosystem but I think first and foremost it's about creating a strategy and then working out exactly what types of organizations there need to be in order to implement that strategy and I believe that that has to be as Anthony's experience with C100 it has to be separate from government but it has to have support from government Can I ask what the nature of that support needs to be we tend to default to look to government for funding and given the gap of corporates that you've identified often we put a lot of weighting on expectations from government but what is the real role that we should be asking for government particularly by helping this portion of commercialization and going global and I open that up to everybody but I would be keen to get Anthony's thoughts on the way that you built the C100 well in Canada and I'm sure it's not the similar in New Zealand Canadians tend to ask why isn't government doing this and in the United States people ask why is the government doing this so we think it's important to have the support government capital can help but ultimately it's private capital that makes the biggest difference and what we were able to do with C100 was really open the eyes of Silicon Valley to the possibility and the fact that there were great companies being built in Canada and greed takes over very quickly people figure it out and they find opportunities and I think that is starting to happen with what I can see in New Zealand it feels like the ecosystem is at an inflection point there are companies and founders coming out that have a sophistication and ambition to build something just as good as what we see here in Silicon Valley and in fact a company we're backing in New Zealand we're backing not because they're in New Zealand but because they're as good as anything we can find here so I think it's a really great moment where we just have to as a community here keep bringing those people back and forth so get them on the planes get them out there open their eyes and they'll find it they'll figure it out Rosalie can I have a shot I'll try and get some controversy into this and so my good comments around where culturally I have no idea so however it is I don't know why we lack of ambition sometimes it's because you're just so busy trying to keep your pay the bills and keep the kids fed that maybe it's too tricky to go off and build local businesses I have a shot at ambitions around our government I think NZT has done a great job but I have to be careful because my mate Bill Lawrence heads the investment team there and Peter they're doing a great job but observing our government agencies we're a small country and I just don't think you can do it without a some sort of centralised support model it's just when you're a small economy your government is always going to be a really useful lever but watching sometimes government officials involved in transactions activity offshore when they go off and introduce and say there's a contract with DARPA and there's a negotiation or something that a New Zealand official has got and they walked to this to the meeting by a New Zealand official and then when you hear them say oh it sounds like you guys are talking commercial arrangements now I better step away from all of this because when New Zealand has a very you know and I can understandably a very purest approach to this but when you compare it to how watching Singaporean or Israeli officials their equivalents deal with trying to get their businesses their families over the line there's quite a stark difference and I wonder sometimes we're a bit reticent and really reaching out and doing the best we can for New Zealand businesses your own university apologies this was my fault I hadn't I mean to myself we have got a comment here from actually from Claire Gallagher and also from Helen and clear I'm just wondering if you could share that and you know perhaps frame it as a question which is around the way that your aspirations have often been framed within New Zealand sure thank you our business has working with some like very big tier companies as our clients and we recently launched in August and our trajectory has kind of been like this and we've been really well supported by Moa and by some other private impacts accelerator funds but we are basically we're doing it alone and we're currently undertaking venture capital investment and like on that journey and every single advisor we talk to like they're right they're like is this the right decision for you is this the right stage this is the pros these are the cons but we're like we want well domination we want to achieve these things we've got this five year goal and they're like you know maybe just take it easy you know don't go after this big goal that's okay and it makes you feel like am I wrong for having these big goals and can I not achieve them as my support network not doubting me but there's such a small percentage of people who actually do achieve those you know Claire thank you and I think it just goes to the heart of some of the conversation is there any comments from the panel just of what Claire's outline I think that there's there's definitely plenty of ambition from the founders in that we come across at Ministry of Awesome and you know we're constantly going through some sort of a selection for either our incubator which runs year round or at the moment we've just closed off electrify accelerator which is the women founders accelerator and there is no shortage of ambition for those founders the thing is I believe that what we're missing is a national understanding of what startup represents and that's why we have we have a much quieter pipeline than we than we hope to have so we don't have enough people thinking I have a great idea I'm going to take this world wide I'm going to change the world I'm going to absolutely you know go to the moon with this idea we don't have enough people coming in it's not that there's no one we just don't have enough and I think the reason the moment that you have one two three really successful startup founders telling their story and being role models for others others know that they can do it we've seen it happen again and again and again and the strategy has look I'm going to point at Christchurch again in the very beginning we had gosh five people in Te Ohaka we had five founders in the space and now we are wall to wall and we're dealing with 40 founders every single year 60 if you count all of the founders that are coming on board online and not counting all of the people in the accelerators so telling the story attracts others when others hear that it is possible that you can do it from New Zealand that you don't have to be a graduate from Stanford that you don't have to you know have access to high net worth individuals that you can actually follow this through then more people will follow I think that's a critical element of what's going to lead us towards success thank you I want to pick up on something that one of our fellows Laina has raised around Singapore and this is New Zealand's point of differentiation one of the things that we often hear is this concept of Aotearoa New Zealand being a base camp for global impact a testbed for what could be done globally and that often we bring a different mindset a different approach and a different set of values that we don't want to replicate Silicon Valley we can do something that is unique here we like to say that to ourselves is there truth to it or is that just making ourselves feel better and I'm opening that to all the panel it's a great I don't know it could be a complete falsity that we're telling ourselves really this doesn't matter the aspirations that have a better life it's built inside every DNA of every human being and we just I think I think there's you've got to believe in the uniqueness that you bring and the belief in itself in genders and crepes and so I think there is juniorly contribution from New Zealand I think there is a juniorly ability to go into the market we've been talking about it for a number of years in New Zealand we're just not quite hitting our straps for various reasons there is a big issue clear at my point do you clear if you've got advice of saying you need to go get some happy to chat we'll get you some other people to help you grow there's plenty of people out there to help you one of the issues we do have in New Zealand is a gap really and Anthony will know this it's a common statement in the VC world is you don't invest in the product you invest in the team and it's the quality of the management team to drive a business and give the all your investors and give everyone confidence that this idea that you have really can you can really go and often execute on it and we don't have a New Zealand economy a truckload of middle management kind skill sets of people who've moved from one business and some corporate made their way up then they've jumped across to another industry another sector learnt that sector then moved across and then moved their ways up into the sea suites and that type of stuff we don't have a huge pool of those people because those are the sort of people that clear could go rely on go right this is my plan is what I want to do I want to achieve I just need you got experience in this can you go and build me the financial model that drives all of this stuff you know properly hedging and all that kind of stuff and through to you know product development can you help me work on these we just don't have truckloads of pool of those kind of people around and it's a troll as a the problem is it's a vicious circle and if you don't have that you carry a business if we had more businesses doing that we'd have more of those is a kind of a gap in the New Zealand sector and it but guy I think you have the start of that and the HF has done a great job injecting some of that DNA into the New Zealand ecosystem and you know in the early days of C100 we had a person on our staff whose job it was to talk to the companies figure out what they needed and connect them manually with people in the network you know it's probably harder for each fellows in the ecosystem to reach out directly sometimes in the network and they might not be aware of the skill sets and the interests but we had essentially a traffic cop that was doing that for people it was very effective I think this is a really crucial point and this is something that's come up quite a lot recently in conversations particularly around capability building and in the start of general report you'll note that Auckland is actually a little bit further along than Wellington Christchurch and the rest of New Zealand in the sense that there is a we're getting closer to the density that we need to get to in Auckland and that the challenge for Auckland now is how to scale up so it's not about the start up of the pipeline it's not having enough talent coming into the pipeline as it is in other cities still in Auckland it's more okay with the start ups that are in the pipeline how do they begin to scale and how can they scale successfully with as little wastage as possible and the first challenge that comes up the first three challenges that come up when you're scaling up are essentially people, operations, finance and it's these three areas where the founder if we can build capability or we can add capability or guidance in those three kind of critical vulnerable areas at that particular stage that will help us scale up a whole lot more successfully and that could look like any number of things that could look like EHF network coming to play that could be Kia, that could be both there's any number of ways that we could solve that problem but those three key things are things that founders need to be freed up on so that they can focus on growing their business and building blocks so that's my thinking around scale up but I do really want to, if I could I'd like to go back to something that Guy said in earlier question that you had Rosalie around the positioning of New Zealand and what does New Zealand represent in terms of a fresh voice in the worldwide start up ecosystem I firmly believe that's true if you look at New Zealand if you look at our nation and you look at the history of what we have brought to the world the things that have made New Zealand incredibly unique it is that we are an incredibly progressive nation and we've shown that a number of times so I'm not saying perfection has been achieved here but the progressive nature that allowed the first right to vote for women the way that we are trying to rectify and and build on the wisdom our indigenous population the way that we are trying to leave the world a better place which seems to be a theme that is really quite resonant for New Zealanders and they're not alone in that but it is very resonant here in New Zealand is something that if it's at the heart of the start up culture that could have an incredibly positive impact on the world when we meet founders all of those three themes keep coming out in terms of wanting to buck the trend that they don't want to build their companies like a Silicon Valley company that they don't want to just be consistently increasing shareholder value and not providing value to their customers or providing negative impact to the world that is a position that I think New Zealand can own that we can be proud of and we can leverage for our success thank you so much and that's such a beautiful point now I'm very conscious that we're at 11 so many of us will have to jump off however I'm conscious that Lily's had her hand up for a while so if anyone can just stay on for one last question we'd love to be able to give this face for Lily who is joining us from Tolaga Bay and is doing amazing innovation work particularly for Māori there Modena Tifano thank you so much Rosalie just very briefly so I am Lily I'm representing our Taira Fiti region that is the east coast of New Zealand the reason I became a fellow was to tip into the expertise of international reigns, investors networks we have created our own tech strategy as we say we do things slightly differently we sort of roll together so we connect our different tech companies that we have with pathways to technology, employment for our language so it's like an ecosystem if you call it is that what you guys call it anyway we've been doing this for a while we've got all sorts of initiatives and play where frustration lies is no one listens to us or they don't come to our region because we're not in Auckland or Wellington so my question to these wonderful guy or wonderful experience Anthony in terms of our region which is deep and beautiful indigenous empowerment and knowledge expertise on the drivers on the ground tech companies pathways as well how might we get our voices heard to get more support on our strategy that we've got and play this is a conversation you go Mary I just have a clarifying question who do you want your voice heard to the likes of yourselves who know how to help build these ecosystems with a team of leaders you talk about founders and have an ambition we have passion and a responsibility to make things better for our region we have to go from forestry farming fishing to technology so it's about how do we develop some of our technology companies that we already have in place how do we find more agri tech solutions to our environmental issues how do we do better data collection for our oceans and water monitoring and the climate change that's occurring so it's big it's just knowing the types of organisations that might want to walk with us I've got a list, I can see na te Lily because that is such a big question what I'm thinking we might do is take that one up offline because we're really talking about building tairawhiti a whole regional economy so big, big question but very happy to get the feedback from the team offline what I'd like to do now is just hand back to Michelle to do a closing kata kia but before I do that this has been such a fascinating conversation it's been so interesting to hear the diverse and different perspectives of course there's no easy answers and there's no silver bullets but we do hope this is the beginning of a conversation there's some things that we would like to take forward out of this as part of the HF so let's keep the dialogue going and a very big thank you to Anthony for joining us from the US to Guy Royal and to Marianne Johnson you have been completely amazing and feel very privileged to work with you in the ecosystem nama hi Gada tata Te rei, rei, rei, rei Yeah thank you Rosalie, Marianne Guy and Anthony really really nice to have your insights and to go all over global and Aotearoa New Zealand focus on that conversation challenges and opportunities a lot of them covered in there and of course this is just really an opening of that conversation and Lily we will definitely jump on another call with you but we will be here on your journey with you so a quick question to those of you on the call just to close out and have your voice again is just what opportunity do you see for Aotearoa New Zealand startup ecosystem moving forward so you know based on things that you've heard or even your experiences where do you see the opportunity into the future so put that in the chat I'll give you a minute to have a think and to share that in there and we'll also just share that this is one of many sessions that are happening this week for the impact springboard so if you're interested in these kind of conversations with global thought leaders and really thinking outside the box and stretching expanding far together then jump on to the link that will be put in the chat as well which has got the other sessions coming up for this week alright seeing a few things coming through there thank you it looks good great okay we will capture those and have a think and look into the opportunities moving forward together now let's close out our time together with Akara Kea kea hora te marino kea whakapapa po na moana te moana hei hua rahi ma tātou e te rangi nei aroha atu, aroha mai tātou e tātou katoa ki ora everybody thank you for being here thank you