 a running the session and it's about innovation, innovation in New Zealand. So just checking that you're in here. So it's the future of Aotearoa, visions for job creation through innovation. So hopefully today we'll be able to answer a couple of questions. How can investment and deep tech innovation help create jobs in New Zealand? And what is the role of technology and innovation in New Zealand's post COVID economic rebuild? Today we've got three guests. And first up we have, we're going to sort of switch it around a little bit. We're going to have Peter Crabtree who's from one of the government departments here. Normally Peter is on the panel and he's the one getting interviewed and asked all the tricky questions. But today we're going to flip it and Peter is actually going to ask the questions of two of our EHF fellows. They are her founders and they've built global businesses. So first up Peter, just tell us a little bit about yourself, your organization and sort of your background. So people know the lens that you're going to be bringing to the discussion today. Oh, thank you, Michelle. And Kia ora koutou everybody. So yeah, my name is Peter Crabtree. I'm a general manager for Science, Innovation and International in our Ministry of Business and Innovation and Employment. So my job, my day job is to support the New Zealand government in terms of the shape that's overall innovation strategy and thinking around our science system, shaping our overall portfolio of investments in that system and thinking beyond to how we translate all of this into impact. Also, I'm the head of the New Zealand Space Agency. So that's part of my group as well. And being a small country, we've all got quite broad jobs. So I have different hats that I wear on different days as well. Yeah, my background is, so I was an academic and I did a PhD and it was about complex decision making. It was about how do you integrate different forms of reason and logic when you're dealing with, and for me, environmental issues, environmental decision making, so reconcile the different forms of logic and those processes and how can you have rational outcomes from that? So which at the time seems quite esoteric, but I'd have to say that it's probably stood me in good stead for the last 20 years since I stepped out of academia and have worked across government strategy, largely in economic innovation, energy markets, telecommunications, since that time. So yeah, that's my background in a nutshell. Nice, thanks, Peter. So also you've got a special role that you've been doing at the moment with COVID. Do you wanna tell the audience about that? Yeah, so it's, you know, we're 19th of February now and I think at 11th of February last year, I got a telephone call and I ended up going over to our Prime Minister's department to lead the New Zealand government's COVID strategy for across government. So it's been the next five months, really, building a team and then working across the whole of government in terms of that evolving picture, because at the beginning of that, we didn't really have any idea what was going to hit us and really it was a question of being, you know, agile strategy development and implementation. So we, within a very short period of time, ended up with a strategy, which was go early and go hard. It was an elimination strategy, whereby we used the ability to shut the border and to actually have very, very, very strong public health controls as one big team together. So there was very much about Unite New Zealand, Unite together, really the whole community doing this for each other. And the idea was that what was best for the health outcomes would be best for the economy and all of our modelling showed that. So, and actually, today we're still tracking along our best case scenario at this point in time. And then in the second half of the year, I led the New Zealand COVID vaccines task force. So my job was to essentially get our hands on the right vaccines in a timely fashion and safe vaccines. And so once again, a very, very exciting day for me today because first vaccine being given in New Zealand. And we've had the benefit in the sense of planning for a whole of country rollouts, which will happen over coming months as well. So we're in a pretty good position on that front, that was crossed. Yeah, great. That's also a good day for us. Great day to have the session. Thanks, Peter. So just a reminder, it's a 90 minute session. It is being recorded. The last half hour will be Q&A. So we will get you to put your questions in the Q&A box, not in the chat box, but in the Q&A box. And that'll be near the end of it. So now we're going to switch this a little. And now Peter is going to take over the session and he's going to run the discussion and get Ryan and John to introduce themselves and ask them all the tricky questions and how we can solve our job and innovation problems. Over to you, Peter. Thanks, Michelle. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask John and Ryan to again introduce themselves. And I think a little bit really understanding a little bit of your own histories and also what you're up to at the moment. And then we can kind of step into the session topic. So maybe if Ryan, you start it. Be happy to. Peter, first off, thank you for your service to the world. I mean, it's really pretty impressive and awesome for you to be able to step up. I'm sure that was really some of the most inspiring stuff that you ever got to be part of. My name is Ryan Peterson and I'm the founder and CEO of Flexport. We're a platform for enabling global tech enabled global trade services to allow our vision really is to connect any company to be able to buy or sell any product anywhere in the world, whether that's to another business or an individual, and just make that really seamless process. Today, global trade is a very, I mean, obviously it's really important. It's a huge percentage of global GDP, but it's really an antiquated process. It runs with lots of people pushing paper and making phone calls. And that inefficiency, one, it's costly and it leads to errors. But it's also when you have these sort of network businesses that you can connect and it's obviously a trade, it's a network. It's a trade network. You don't know what you're lacking when it's not working at its optimal level. You can get new possibilities to emerge when we get it right. So we're pretty excited about delivering that. So just a little context for the business. We're about seven years old. In 2020, we did $1.3 billion in revenue, moved about $15 billion worth of merchandise between 109 countries around the world. And we're still pretty early. We're only seven years old. So we have long ways to go. And we're still kind of small in New Zealand Australia and other parts of the Pacific. So we're really looking to invest a lot and I love this topic of job creation. I think it's one of the main things that technology can do. And I like to take the opportunity to dispel the myth that technology is gonna put people out of work. I think that's a very zero-sum game way of looking at the world. But happy to have that discussion here. And I'm really appreciate you all inviting me. We had to reschedule this because of me. I remember it was originally like six weeks ago or something. I apologize if any of you were let down by that one. My daughter had some health problems, but she's in soon a lot better. So thank you all for my flexibility on that. Thanks, Ryan. John. Yeah, happy to jump in. And also wanna give a shout out to Peter for Ryan Peterson for giving a huge amount of effort during the COVID crisis. We share a big alignment of values in philanthropy and Flexport has done an amazing job with Flexport.org. Lookout, my first company, which we'll talk about has Lookout.org as well. And so giving back, I think, is a huge part of what many of the HF fellows believe in. And I think it's really neat when you see entrepreneurs and founders kind of align doing well and doing good. So I think that's really cool and something that I'm excited about. Yeah, let's make sure we talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, I would love to. My backgrounds as a tech technologist have been programming since a very young age. Got super interested in cybersecurity. And when I was attending university with two of my closest friends ended up starting a cybersecurity company called Lookout ended up doing a lot of work, defense work, kind of protecting networks and infrastructure, working for the US government and a number of other countries as well, including New Zealand. Lookout today has 500 people, a very large company and growing very quickly. We have 200 million users globally, work with some of the largest enterprises and governments in the world, protecting their mobile devices and post perimeter networks from hacks. So background as a technologist and really working to help make the world more secure as it becomes more connected. I hired a new CEO to help kind of take the company to the next level and get ready to take the company public at some point in the future. And when I did that sort of focused my time more on both operating and investing. Started an investment company called BY Capital. BY is about 3 billion in assets under management from scratch in the last five years, which was super exciting. We make a small number of concentrated bets and companies and technologies that we think will be fundamentally transformative to the world and long-term platform place. So our largest investment is in a company called SpaceX, which many of you may have heard of, which we think is really exciting. We've been investors for years in a company called Reddit, which is getting a lot of attention recently and when I think a very important part of the story for the future going forward and a social platform that I think represents positive forces in the world, which is really neat. So we try and find very unique entrepreneurs and back them in really meaningful ways, writing on average a $100 million or more check and businesses we get behind. So that's my background as a whole. Big computer nerd, big technologists love nature. So a lot of really interesting overlap with New Zealand as well. And as I said earlier, also really, really keen on philanthropy, which we'll hopefully talk a little bit about as well and some of the things I'm doing both for profit and not for profit, helping the country in New Zealand. So thanks to both of you for those introductions. So really just starting off, we are at this real pivot point and we've been talking in New Zealand about, in a sense, always out of a crisis, you wanna see opportunity at the same time. And so we're really thinking about the ability to transition the economy, transition the economy to be a more knowledge intensive economy, more productive economy on this much more sustainable as well. So I think focusing in and having this engagement with you we're really, really keen to hear about, so what strategies can we take to get to that place? It's also with COVID, it's been a point in time. And I imagine, Ryan, in your business, all of a sudden, the world's been dependent on supply chains and logistics and completely different ways of interacting and so on. And so it is an opportunity for us to just think about what do we say to one side in terms of what we've done historically? So it's gonna be a bit about what do we do less and what do we do more of? So really I just wanna open up to both of you just to talk about what you're seeing as the big patterns here. I mean, one of the things that really jumps out to me as a big opportunity for a country like New Zealand is this obviously remote work is a big deal right now with so many companies going digital. And people have done outsourcing for decades of like let's have overseas labor and maybe we'll save some money on it. But I don't think that they've ever really onboarded people at scale onto the exact same tools, made them peers, got them into the Zoom meeting, into the Slack conversation. And it's like that's a huge opportunity for countries all over the world. And like all of a sudden it's just this really bringing to life what the internet should do. It's a really, for me, it's really exciting because I think there's so much talent in the world and it's frustrating. We're not going full remote at Flexport where we're gonna be more distributed than we ever were and we'll have some experiments around some remote teams. But even still it's just like the ability for more flexible work and to have people working. Obviously New Zealand's gonna be a place where people wanna be, it's so beautiful and there's so much talent speak English. And like one of the things that I'm just gonna know the country but realizing that it's only three hours behind where we are here in San Francisco, well 21 hours ahead, but it's like three hours behind. It's, there's not a lot of places that are that convenient that are global and give you access to the Asia Pacific and everything. So I think that's gonna be a huge opportunity for the country. Yeah, just building on that, I totally agree. And I think that, I mean, obviously it's a different time right now and getting into the country is not so easy. It will be hopefully in the not too distant future fingers crossed, but assuming if and when that does happen to me, building upon the principles and what was so impressive to me about EHF and the global impact visa and the structure itself was being able to create on ramps for qualified and value aligned talent to find its way into New Zealand and do that super easily. And I can think of multiple people I know who are ready as soon as New Zealand stores open to relocate themselves and their companies into the country, start hiring there. And honestly, many of the things that we've talked about being an advantage for New Zealand I think will have been accelerated by COVID. There's many human beings around the world who I think hadn't thought about making the plunge and COVID caused everyone to rethink where they are and what that means and what the future looks like. And I think we as a country in New Zealand can really capitalize on that in a really big way. And I think it's a, attracting people who are building companies and who are technically talented and otherwise to come into the country and then be within the country itself. How do we kind of pattern match amazing talent to companies maybe outside of New Zealand and build this network in the center face? And it's something that my cybersecurity companies I'm thinking a lot about. I think the challenge will lie in how smooth the process is and how easy it is for people to connect talent with companies and to move within New Zealand as well. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been quite an artificial situation. It's the downside of, since our response to the pandemic is this fact that at this point in time we do have quite a strong border, I think you'd say. With an elimination strategy in New Zealand public at this point are living very normal lives with the occasional little blip. But so trying to transition people from that to an open border over time is we've got to think quite carefully about how that happens. But certainly very, very conscious of this need to really start to connect again and obviously the labor market's part of that as well. So just in terms of, I suppose for us also looking out and connecting outwards. So there's bringing people in but there's also, we're feeling quite constrained in some ways, not online but in terms of making those connections globally. Do you have views about how New Zealand should in a sense, keep being internationalist and focus? I mean, in my mind, I think New Zealand's thought of and as we talked about an innovation nation and I think people really do recognize the incredible talent and products and services and things that get created within New Zealand. The questions that I have are, where are the areas that we can help scale? And to me, at least in my background of building technology companies, typically that's either with capital or helping people kind of expand into other markets. Super keen to help with that. And I think that what we'll see within the HF fellowship there's a growing desire to help fund additional New Zealand-based enterprises. And there's talk of building a collective of folks like Peter and myself who make angel investments and will collectively start funding New Zealand-based entities. But to me, I think it's finding where the most leverage can come, whether that's capital, whether that's advice to help scale New Zealand-based companies because it's either, how do we grow companies within New Zealand to meet the scale and hire more people and build a vibrant ecosystem or how do we bring companies that will scale to New Zealand? John, what can SpaceX, who can we get a Starship people transported to get to New Zealand in 90 minutes from the West Coast of the United States? I'm sure Peter would love nothing more. It's coming. We need to land one first without blowing it up. We're working on it hard. But yeah, it's super exciting. I mean, Starlink's on the way as everyone knows. It'll be in New Zealand very soon. New Zealand to New Zealand's credit has incredible connectivity compared to most countries. Fiber deployment and overall is really, really good. But obviously there's many super rural areas underserved populations who lack fundamental connectivity and that's one of the areas where I want to spend a lot of time and effort. I am spending a lot of time and effort. And it's a real trend to watch like is just people wanting to work from really beautiful places. And if you can connect it up and there's infrastructure, I think SpaceX is going to be just huge for the smaller towns and places that, you know, like maybe someone wants to live in the forest or in the, I don't know if you get service in the middle of the forest, but yeah, it's just like, I think it's a huge opportunity. And I didn't, I got together with my team, a small part of my team last week for an offsite, which we took a little bit of risk, but we, well, it was voluntary. And we went to a beautiful place where we could go and meet up and actually, and just forget how important that was. I mean, y'all in New Zealand are living normal lives right now, but we're not. We're like all remote and hiding in our houses and the ability to get together in person in a beautiful place. Like we, when we took a break, we went for a walk on the beach. It's very powerful. And I think that's something that can be really part of the New Zealand story that resonates of like, why should you have a team here? Because your team's just going to be creative and have a great culture, the fact that you can work together in such a beautiful place. I think it's going to be a really killer aspect. Yeah, so I think you touched on a point. So traditionally, when thinking about innovation and successful innovation systems, people have really talked about a globalization. People are lots and lots of people being very close together. And how do you see the evolution of, how can you have a successful startup because it's when it's a bit more distributed, but it might be that people are able to kind of live their lives in the way that you just described them at the same time. So it's kind of, how do you get all of that really good benefits of being connected, but at the same time, you're also grounded in quite a distributed... I think you have to remember that the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. So being fully distributed and distributed can be awesome and great. And so can also just like getting together all the time in a beautiful place. So like, I think both these things can be true at once. And you'll see people figuring out hybrids and trying new stuff. And yeah, I think it's a really exciting world that people who are innovating can take advantage of. Peter, one of the other things I would add that I think is a big opportunity for New Zealand. I think you're already doing it, but to take it a step further is just a streamlining government with new technologies. New Zealand has been incredibly innovative and you deserve much credit for this on the space front. You look at Rocket Lab, I think is a shining example of public-private partnership innovation, what New Zealand can produce. It's an incredible company, but I think everyone in the industry massively respects. And that's an example of a very hard problem where there's regulatory and overlays and all sorts of things that the government has to be involved. I think there's other forms of hard tech like that. And I think as we're seeing huge innovation across the world, New Zealand's ability to fast track deployment of hard tech in a kind of collaborative, safe, responsible partnership with the government is a really big opportunity. And I think you'll see that with transportation infrastructure. I'm sure people have heard about this idea of digging tunnels to move people around very quickly. Electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, different forms of communication like Starlink. There's a bunch of these hard tech areas that I think the more open and collaborative as it has been, the government of New Zealand can be the faster we're gonna see a lot of that get adopted first in a country like New Zealand in my opinion because at least I can speak for the United States. Most of the government entities you're dealing with, there's just a lot of red tape. It's very slow to deploy and the agility given the size of New Zealand is a huge opportunity in my opinion. And by the way, that's not necessarily, that's not just true in hard tech. I think you look at our industry of global trade and it's free trade gets a huge amount of attention but there's good reasons to have tariffs on certain products and like that's economies are complex and tariffs have existed for, there's tariff law going back to Hammurabi's code like thousands of years. So it's not like there's good reasons for that but it's not so much free trade that we want as pain-free trade. Like how do you enable that the filings are easy that there's good APIs, that it's easy to exchange the data, get the government what they need to keep the border safe or enact whatever policy they want but also allow commerce to flow and not have so much paperwork and so much confusion. I think there's a huge opportunity for governments to innovate in this area that still achieves their goals. In fact, even might accelerate their goals and a lot of government, just some progress in this, like United States finally adopted a single window. So we have in the US, we have 43 government agencies that take an interest in imported products of one kind or another. And they finally, I think it was last year that you before finally got them all like piped through a single data channel to exchange the data but that took decades to do and so there's big opportunities for governments that are gonna do this okay, you will get more economic activity and more jobs as a result. I'm quite confident in that. Yeah, the thing that we've... I think we've definitely in the space context we really worked on the idea of really moving as fast as possible to kind of adapt our regulatory systems and think about it. And it sets whole systems to respond to emerging technologies. And we're doing that in advanced aviation at the moment is a sort of a, is an offshoot of that. But what we do need however, because the companies that are coming either come out of New Zealand or come to New Zealand to test and trial and do this, they want to be able to translate that back into the markets. So for us, we have to be connected to regulators internationally and so on so that you can take the New Zealand certification or be recognized those things globally. So again, it comes down to we have to remain really, really connected at lots of different levels. So how do we deal with the issue of the COVID disruption? But humans sometimes you have disruption and then people then, that everybody gets vaccinated and then they go back to doing what they did before. So how are we going to deal with that? Well, probably we'll go back to, a lot of things will go back to the way they were before, faster than we expect once vaccines come out and people start to feel safe. I say this because talk to people who lived in Hong Kong during the SARS epidemic and you had like 18 months where everything was crazy and people were terrified and wearing masks everywhere they went. And after that, last 10 years, Hong Kong's been pretty normal last 15 years. So I think a lot of things will hopefully go back to normal. But some of the stuff like once you try Zoom instead of getting on an airplane so many times to do a meeting and once you realize like, oh, I can get five people together and chat real quick. Some of the stuff is like for sure gonna be here to say it's kind of like their social norms. Like video conferencing is just better and it has been better for a very long period of time than driving across town through traffic to get the team to go meet a customer. But it required everybody to agree and standards are powerful and norms of behavior are powerful. So some of these things we definitely you're not they're not going to go back to the way they were. But what it is it's hard to predict human behavior. You said you studied rational and logical decision making. I've never heard of such a thing in my life. So the ability to predict when people are being irrational is very hard. So what are these jobs going to look like in the future? So this is all about job creation is what we call a job going to change. So if we're sitting in New Zealand we think that we're going to create these things called jobs. Meaningful things for people to do to create, produce, sustain. What are your thoughts about that as we step into it? I mean, the hope is that technology as a whole makes us more efficient so we can do more with less. Right. And obviously hopefully have more time to live our lives and recreate and spend time with our families and so on and so forth. And so in my opinion, you know, a couple of things are going to happen. One, I think more as technology is you know, software is eating the world, technology is eating the world. It's kind of pervasive throughout our lives and society. And I think more tech jobs and that takes many different forms are going to be created. I also think more typical jobs are going to be tech enabled. And this is something probably Ryan can speak to very well. You know, I'm involved with the cybersecurity insurance company called Coalition. And while we're selling a technical product, we're within the insurance industry and a big part of what we've done is build to build software and tools for brokers to make a traditional insurance broker just much more efficient in their job. And I can think of lots of financial services jobs, other jobs throughout the economy and the service industry that I think technology will touch and allow them to be much more efficient at their jobs, much more effective at their jobs and also do those jobs from other places that they might not have been able to do, even if it's not a tech job per se. And that in and of itself feels like a really big opportunity to me. So when I look at it, I would say in addition to creating and enhancing and enabling the technology job sector of New Zealand, what are the traditional ecosystems like agriculture, whatever it might be, you know, that technology could enhance, enable and kind of take to the next generation, if you will. Yeah, I also think well, I have two thoughts around job creation and what are the types of jobs? The first one is, you know, half of the jobs out there, it seems like didn't exist 20 years ago, like if I tell my grandmother about some of the job, like she just has never heard of this stuff. And that's even like normal stuff, like content marketers like, well, you know, so there's some new and so we shouldn't expect to know what the future jobs will all look like. And that's OK. And I tell that to a lot of young people like who are really hungry for career pathing and where are they going to be in 10 years and what are they going to do? It's like, well, let's have an open mind because there's going to be all kinds of new stuff that you couldn't think of being an influencer is now a job, right? And I don't I don't say that in a negative way. It's about my facial expression, like the the great, you know, it's like people are finding purpose and meaning and and doing and creating stuff that other people want to see who am I to judge? And I the other my other thought around job creation is something I heard Bill Gates say once, which was that people misunderstand the role of corporations of companies as it comes to job creation is that the job of the company is to serve a customer and you win that customer to the extent that you have the best product at the lowest or the lowest price or some combination they're in and doing it at the lowest price also often means being more efficient and having fewer jobs there for and so but the society wins because we get cheaper, better stuff out there and you free up more potential by making stuff cheaper for other kinds of companies to emerge and it's more of an ecosystem view of the world. You know, it is it is competitive and it looks a little ruthless sometimes both from the companies that are get too fat and up dying or have to lay people off. So it's it's it's a messy process that but but feeling like companies owe employment to their workers kind of misunderstands it like we're here to serve customers at the end of the day and and then there's a huge amount of benefit from the way that that works from competition from driving down prices from making the system as a whole work better but on any one case like you know you not to ask a company to employ more people might be to cause that company to die right and nobody's winning there so it's a it's a complex system in economy and I often remind people as well that the eco in economy it's the same eco as in ecosystem it's really you know we are the entities within a complex adaptive system that needs to adapt to your suppliers your customers your regulators your employees and everybody else and so it's it's hard to just pin down hey please hire more people. Yeah I mean what we do know is that there's plenty of evidence is that high high growth companies early stage companies are the ones that create the new jobs in your societies and inevitably disrupt other companies and you get that creative destruction process that totally one of my one of my first investors was an early employee at Google and I when I told him early on I'm like hey we're gonna really automate this process of shipping stuff and like I won't have to hire so many people he goes if you automate that in an industry that big you're gonna have to hire so many people you won't know what to do. Because you're just gonna be so successful you know and that's that thing it's like hey if you get your lowest cost because you hired less people per unit of production all of sudden you're just gonna produce a lot more stuff and be a lot more successful as a company and next thing you know you're hiring more people so it's not a simple linear equation. So but what do you do and this is in a sense you know working in government we have to think about because that disruption there are people involved in that disruption and and and so it then becomes one of how you transition and how people make those transition we have a very very strong focus in New Zealand on you know inclusion and making sure that we take people along for the ride and so so how do we set up people you know people who work as the workforces for that adaptive future. Yeah, it's it's it's so much of it is human psychology and understanding what what motivates people and what gets them because there's so much potential in the world if you can get people to go and learn it and and recognize it and humans adapt evolved in a very different time frame like and not even like ancestral evolution on the Savannah or something like until the last hundred fifty two hundred years like if you took risk and put your neck out there and stood up for something like you probably got killed or put in prison or something like we didn't have the kind of freedom that you have now to and so encouraging people that like you know a lot of those risks are like historical risks in the past but your brain is still adapted to that because we've all to live through that kind of a world and getting people to realize like hey you could do it take a chance like what's the worst that you can happen and go out and try things try to learn a new skill try to go learn computer programming learn design take a chance on yourself try to get you know ask for the raise like some of these things like we're just like wired to be afraid to do and I don't know what the role of government in that is but I think there probably is one and certainly in education systems is like how do we educate how do we train kids to feel and adults it doesn't have to be just kids how do we get people to realize like hey you have a lot more potential than you realize and some of the downside risk that your brain is a kind of hardwired to be afraid of and we all are loss averse right we were much more interested in avoiding losses than getting wins getting gains some of that's a little bit illogical I mean it's probably correct ancestrally what you know why it's there but the world is less has less downside risk than it used to and I do think governments have a big role in that and creating social safety nets to allow people to take risk. Yeah that's kind of where I was headed I think equality of opportunity which I think New Zealand does a very good job of I think is the basis for for a lot of this and to me you know the great equalizer of that really comes down to education and I think especially you know I believe it's a basic human right to have access to technology the internet internet access at least at some level and I think New Zealand is doing an amazing job but I think there's not a child or not a human out there that if you if they're literate and have a reasonable internet connection and access to you know YouTube and Wikipedia and all these incredible resources for learning that there's just so much opportunity to educate oneself to create opportunity for oneself to access opportunity you know outside their own physical geography and that's really exciting to me and so I think a lot about you know the best way for us to as Peter said bring everyone along and be in this together is to make sure we're really you know enabling access to the internet access to technology access to high quality low cost if not free education and you know to as many people as we can and then make opportunity available to them and I think generally speaking that's going to create a much better world for New Zealanders for everyone else yeah it's why I focus on the psychology so much though is because so much of this content is there you know like online education there's so much great free learning I mean Wikipedia out like the world is so so awesome the fact that all of the world's humanity has access to this insight the greatest encyclopedia in the history of the universe I mean it's it's it's incredible so how do you get people to really feel like hey I'm the kind of person that can take advantage of this and learn skills and and go take a risk and put it to use and it doesn't have to be risk like start a company take a risk try it you know go go learn something new and try to get a job in a new industry or go after some opportunity that appeals to you and fault you know what that's in your space whatever your space is as you define it. So John you did say something I found quite confronting in it so at one o'clock in the morning when I tell a 14 year old that access to the internet is not the basic human right. I'm going to have to read things. Yeah, so good. Some of some of some 14 year olds do their best work at 1 a.m. you know. Yeah. So so a lot of innovation is about connection you know it's it's about bringing different things together and seeing those opportunities but also being you know I spent this morning out of one of our research institutes that really has you know quite a broad based platform technology and super and super conductivity and you know the thing that we've been thinking about is well how do we connect them with the world how do we connect them with the myriad of you know potential use cases that would create value out there how do we connect them with the investment community. So I suppose as we start to think about you know on the topic here which is deep technology innovations or just broader technology innovations how do we make those connections on the investment side and on the in the sense that as people are thinking of shaping up ideas for their innovations. I mean from an investment perspective in my mind you know we can kind of break it down into a few different areas. You're breaking up obviously go to the start up because the startup ecosystem you know in the investment ecosystem is very good at finding capital for things that are working. But to me a big question we find more high risk taking seed and early stage series A capital you know that's willing to take risks on you know helping businesses in New Zealand. I think creating a vibrant angel investment ecosystem is going to be a really important part of that because often times it's not just capital but in the earliest days of a business formation and getting advice is just so incredibly important. You know I feel very fortunate that I had a well known angel investor in Silicon Valley named Kevin Hartz who was you know not only an investor but an instrumental mentor to myself and my co-founders. And so a question in my mind to your point Peter earlier building bridges is how can we leverage the HF ecosystem to create more experienced people who have capital and advice to help you know seed what's already happening from a seed in series A investment ecosystem in New Zealand and I'm very excited about that I think there's huge appetite for that and I'd love to see very practically and tangibly us take you know a dozen or a couple dozen angel investors and just start doing a number of deals and helping people and seeing if we can really accelerate what's happening in New Zealand. I haven't I haven't put enough thought into it from a policy and government standpoint. So I wouldn't comment too much there I wouldn't I wouldn't supposed to be able to come up with something on the spot that will help you there since you think about this a lot but I take I take the entrepreneurial view of like raising capital or someone who's done it. We've I've raised in my career one point three five three billion dollars in capital and I always include that last three because three million dollars like you can it's not a rounding error. And but I actually spent 15 years as an entrepreneur before I've raised my first dollar of venture capital and I built two pretty profitable businesses that generate cash and never raise the dollar of outside capital and never ask for anybody's permission to go and do it. And that was the reason why I had so much success in raising capital later was I didn't ask for anyone's permission and it was think it was pretty clear when you met me like I was going to do this whether you got on the train or not. And then that makes people really you know it's very counterintuitive but like you want to invest in the guy that doesn't need money right investors don't like risk as much as they pretend to. And and smartly so like if it's going to go you want to be part of it. And so I think whenever I meet a founder who's like oh I can't do my business because I can't get investment capital I'm always like well what other business could you do. I mean there's so many things that you could do to create value for other people and keep a portion of that value creation for yourself and not every business not every and maybe you raise venture capital or you do your harder problem later when you've earned the credibility with the investors or you've got enough traction for your thing that you could start with a v1 that does something that's useful and then go to v2 and v3. So I think there's other paths besides going out and asking for money that said some problems like the ones John's described like hard tech like you want to make rockets like you're probably going to need cash. So that's a that's a different problem. And whenever in general I advise people that are trying to raise money to try to be more famous. It's actually probably good life advice just good things seem to happen of all the famous people I know all the time. So if you can find ways to get your name out there be known for things create content. I remember with one of my companies is called importgenius.com we sell data on global trade. I've always been around global trade is my space. And that company I was a nobody I was in a state called Arizona. It's like not a there's not a lot of tech companies out there. And but I wanted I think I was actually trying to sell the business. So I was raising money. I was trying to sell the business and I thought OK I need to get my name out so people there's some credibility. So I actually hired I got I emailed a professor who has a course on global trade at a university and I asked him hey could I come give a guest talk at your he never heard of me before but I asked him if I could be a guest lecturer in his class and he was like sure as one less class I have to teach. And then I hired my own camera crew to come and film it. And I gave this guest I gave this professor lecture I'm wearing a suit you can you can find it on YouTube if you search a brief history of international trade and I'm there projecting now for the rest of my career people think I'm a real expert on global trade. Look I got invited to this university to give a talk on it. And I think it's really helped me. So I think things like this be creative. You know I get your name out there establish yourself as being credible and and digital world really allows this. So it feels distant sometimes you feel like you're not connected but I one thing COVID has shown us is like I haven't John was the last time I saw you. It's been like a year probably and but we still feel connected. I'm crazy. Yeah right. But but it doesn't you know distance is is mattering a little bit less and less and less every year and COVID really accelerated that. So I think there's a big opportunity but you got to get out there and get on your find your niche find your community online and promote yourself and that anybody can do that from anywhere. Yeah. It was great. So I fake it so you make it. There's always an element of that in entrepreneurship and you know sales and the artful presentation of the truth is I call sales and fundraising. So how can the Edmund Hillary Fellowship as a collective I suppose work with us to become more integrated with the New Zealand community and the scenes to correct this kind of a value and connection. I'll let John take that one first. Yeah yeah yeah I'm happy to I mean to me I think that you know the organization has done such an incredible job bringing together you know this very diverse set of people and also has done an incredible job interfacing with government. I mean that's how we've met Peter and Michelle's been incredible and I'd say that you know it's the seeds are starting to be planted and hopefully a beautiful forest will grow. But to me I think that EHF needs to build upon what it's put in place hopefully by really focusing initially on accelerating the impact of the fellowship itself and then taking the learnings of what things are working and doubling down on those. And I know it seems very very simple but to me it's A building those bridges as you talked about and B making it easier for talent to come into New Zealand to accelerate all this stuff happening. And so you know I'm very keen to make it easier for all the fellows who are waiting to come into New Zealand to come in. I'm very keen for it to be easy for their companies to come in and then for bridges to be built between the fellowship in New Zealand to help accelerate you know impact job creation helping the environment you know all the important things that I think the fellowship values stand for. Yeah the words that come to mind are engineering serendipity that you can't always predict how things are going to play out but if you get the right chemistry you know the right the right reagents in the room you can you can generate sort of all you need is a catalyst but it's hard to predict where that's going to come from and and I think you're going to get a lot of that magic when you get enough of the right kinds of people together to exchange ideas and inspire each other and work together. So I want to go to some of the Q and A's that people have been sending through here. So one of one of them here is is about you know equity issues and inclusion of indigenous people. So here Maori and so Maori in New Zealand only make up less than three percent of our technology or slash innovation sectors. And so one thing we've got to really think hard about is how how do we in the sense bring these communities into be much more full fully participants and leaders in these sectors. So have you got any ideas about that? So bringing in groups that are much more quite diverse but not have historically had this experience. You know I am to me. Oh, please go ahead. I was just going to say it starts with connectivity to me, which is asking the question, especially and I noticed in the question rural populations. How good is their access to technology? How you know if you put a child in front of a computer that's literate and curious great things are going to happen. So one of the questions I would ask is, is there access to technology? And if the answer is no, then we really need to work to resolve that. Things like Starlink I think are going to be transformational to that. And it's how do we both in public and private partnership, you know, help accelerate that. So, you know, one of the projects that I'm spending time on right now with SpaceX is to actually donate connectivity and early Starlink equipment and service to populations in need, especially ones that are hopefully leveraged to schools, communities, centers, you know, and we're working to identify my already populations that can actually partner with us to help solve that exact problem, Peter. And, you know, I'm really, really excited about that. I think it's going to lead to really great things. I think it definitely starts there, but I don't know that it ends there. I think that you're going to find something that's so important that I've found is and I haven't found this in a personal experience, but from from learning and trying to understand and I've spent a lot more time thinking about it with the black community in the United States and where it's a lack of role models, like one of my mentors in role models is a guy named Ken Chenal, who was the I think the third black CEO of a Fortune 500 company in the United States and at a time when this he was the CEO of American Express. And this was at a time when that was pretty rare. Obviously, he was the third and it was like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, even. And Ken talks about when he was young, the only role models he had of successful black people was professional athletes and that that's what he wanted to be when he was a kid. And no one told him what no one told me either. I wanted to be a professional athlete kind of too. But like no one told us all that a VP at Wal-Mart is making like a million dollars a year. They make more than these athletes if you can get the right job. And if you just knew that person knew what was possible. And so being able to see like some of the some of the folks who are successful, who are in these tech roles from from the Maori population have a real opportunity to inspire others and be part of that and let people know like, hey, there's these great jobs. It's possible you can do this too. And I think if you don't see yourself in some of the other people, even if you get all the connectivity in the world, it's only the really rare ones who are going to go and develop that on their own. I mean, none of us are really self made. Like you've got to have role models and people that you can emulate and copy and feel make yourself feel psychologically safe that, hey, I could go and do this thing. And so I would really look. Of course, you want to lay the groundwork and make sure there's basic opportunity there. But even when the opportunity is there, who's going to seize it? How do they get that self confidence to know that they can do it? And so that's where I would try. I always come back to human psychology, like, how do we get people to to want to do that and to feel like they can do that? I suppose being a role model like that can be quite a responsibility and a bit of a burden at times, I think. But for sure. Yeah, it's absolutely a powerful thing. And for sure. And by the way, I mean, it's everybody's an individual. So I'm not I'm not trying to say you must do this if you're from a certain background or something. I think you have an opportunity to do that and hopefully you get excited by it, but by no means do I feel like you have to. Yeah. So we've got some questions here about people saying we often hear that people need to go to the places where the investors are to sort of, I suppose, immerse themselves in those environments. So then they end up taking sales out of a New Zealand context and spending a lot more time out there. How do you think about that? And made that, you know, do you think that might be changing over time about, you know, how to how do investors interact with opportunity? I think that changing massively, especially post covid. I mean, the entire technology investment ecosystem went from, you know, standardization of going and presenting in person at a partners meeting, if you will, and and so on and so forth to being fully remote and distributed over Zoom. And so to that effect, I think capital is being deployed far more efficiently using Zoom, using the Internet than ever before. And I think the, you know, opportunity for people to access capital that they might not have been able to access prior to covid is definitely going to exist. Totally. I it's and I haven't raised any money since covid started. So I haven't had personal experience with this yet or made or really made any investments. But but at the start of covid, we're like, oh, all the startups are screwed. Nobody can raise money anymore. And no one wants to write a check on Zoom. You've never met the people, but their checks are being written faster than ever right now because it is very efficient. And this whole IPO boom that's going SPACs and everybody's going public. Remember all of that's happening without the traditional, like in person roadshow, dog and pony show that always happened to all being done on Zoom, like maybe too much. Like people are just like, oh, you know, just throw them right to check. Like, don't need to get to know the person. But that should be a huge opportunity for people outside the San Francisco because like, who knows where you're sitting? I don't know. Use a Zoom background with the city of San Francisco behind you. And maybe no one will even ask. Like, so definitely a new world that should be really big for outside the Bay Area San Francisco Bay Area. Great. Maybe if we get off in a different direction, just think about jobs in the sustainability context. And I know, John, you know, you this is a thing close to your heart. So how do we think about social enterprise as an area for job creation? I mean, social enterprise, I think plays an even more vital role kind of in the future of our society broadly, even beyond New Zealand, you know, at the same time, we're creating great technology and great opportunity, you know, the need for humans to apply their efforts, you know, to help one another, you know, in a social context to help our environment. I think these things are all absolutely critical. And I think that the creation of new opportunities in areas, especially things like climate change, are accelerating drastically, which I'm very, very excited about. And I think that that's going to be something over the next decade from 2020 to 2030. You know, we're going to see huge opportunity. I also think that there is a growing passion and desire for from corporations to even if they're not inherently a social enterprise to make ESG and kind of social focus a big part of what they do. And I think, you know, Ryan and I are great examples of that. We've both created foundations that are really meaningful within our companies. We're both applying our efforts and our team's efforts to help the world in various ways. At Lookout, you know, we are helping with global privacy initiatives to help make sure we have privacy as the internet grows, technology grows. We have a huge STEM focus to help women, especially get into engineering that are in an underrepresented fashion. So to me, you know, one, I think we're going to see a lot of inherent growth because there are problems that exist in the social context. And two, you know, one of the things I think is important. And I think this is a big banner of EHF is having everyone feel like social good is a huge part of what they do and getting everyone's enterprise to adopt, you know, giving back as a part of their core mission and inspire other entrepreneurs to do the same. And we we all inspire one another. So that's in my point, in my opinion, like really, really important to creating a future. We can all be excited about. It's not not just focused on, you know, capitalist output, but, you know, social good and in a great world for everyone. I think that there's this big opportunity to educate people who run businesses on what how what success looks like and how you create these really multi-sided win win win agreements where your company can just benefit in all directions. People are like happy that you're here. And I have a framework that I that I use for this to teach it to people who work at Flexport. And I call it the six customers. And I think every business and probably even nonprofits have six customers. And they are your actual customers, the ones who pay you money. They're your vendors. If you have to buy stuff, everyone has to buy stuff from somebody, your employees, your investors, your regulators and then the communities where you operate. So it's a pretty simple framework. You've got six customers and your goal as an entrepreneur, as a business person, as a member of society is to create a six way win where everybody's giving you an A plus. That's the goal. Now, you're probably not going to achieve that goal, maybe ever, but certainly not at the start and somebody's going to have to somebody's not going to get there. OK, we're definitely can't compromise on regulators. Too many people have made that mistake and I'm sitting here talking to Peter. So I'm definitely going to say that number one. But you've got your if you're not getting the six way win, you're going to fail. And the reason is simple. This is not like a departure from free market shareholder led capitalism. In fact, it's better for your shareholders because what do the shareholders want? Let's talk about that investor line because this is what founders will be like, oh, my board won't let me do this kind of thing. The investors don't want me to do that. They want me to focus on free cash flow generation. But what you're what what investors are looking for in investment is three three three things. They want high returns. They want low risk and they want a long duration. They want to be able to compound those returns for many, many years because that's where you make real wealth is through compounding and those they want three things. And so if you're if there's someone on that list of six who's not winning, who's not giving you an A plus, you might get high returns for a period, but it's not going to last that long because everything comes back to bite you in the ass if you're taking shortcuts and you're taking more risk. You might have brand risk if you're doing environmental damage, you might have brand risk if your communities don't want you there, which we've seen a lot from tech companies and sort of tech backlash. And I think that more companies that have this framework and and it's by the way, this is not just for useful for CEOs or something like you're looking for a job like let's score the companies that you're thinking about investing. How are they doing on all six is somebody losing? And I actually think that for example, if you took I don't need to pick on anybody but I'm going to. So take Airbnb. Let's just go through and say what happens with Airbnb on the six customers? Like, well, the guests really love it. It's awesome. New access to stay in beautiful places and maybe save some money or get an awesome new travel experience. The homeowners love it. They make more income than they used to. Employees seem to like working there. Investors are doing great, generating a lot of returns. Regulators. Well, I'm not sure it's legal in a lot of places. So but maybe that's debatable. Maybe that's up for a good test test case. Like maybe it should be legal. I don't know. The communities, that's where I start to have real questions and they are smart. They invest a lot of community. But like if I'm a neighbor, I don't really want Airbnb renting out the house next door to me. They're throwing parties and like it's not what I signed up for when I bought my house. And so you know where Airbnb it's OK, I guess. Like it's going to it's going to create long term risk and it's going to hurt the business model. And so they need to work over time on how do they solve that problem. And I think they they are and they do and they do it. I'm not criticizing. They do a pretty good job of investing and maybe on net, you know, five out of six is OK for some businesses, but you're definitely going to have long term worse returns because of it if you don't make all six customers happy. And so I think it's it's not a departure from like shareholder led capitalism. It's an evolution and a more enlightened understanding of it. Thanks for that. Something a little bit different here. So you're just asked about how New Zealand should think about crypto and blockchain technologies and other aspects that play some of New Zealand's natural advantages. I'm so happy you asked that question. You know, I think one one democratizing so in the same way that I believe internet access is a fundamental human right and access to education online. I think access to the global financial system is a fundamental human right. There's so many people in the world who are unbanked who don't have the ability to work with one another or transact with one another. And in many cases, if they do, there are middle kind of middlemen and institutions that are very fee taking, if you will, and make it very expensive and complicated for your average person to be a global participant. And so to me, if you have Starlink access to the internet everywhere and access to the open financial system through something like Bitcoin or, you know, other cryptocurrency technology, you know, I think very powerful things happen. And I think governments that realize this and help really embrace it. And of course, in a blue chip regulated way and making sure that there's, you know, rules are being followed, of course, but leveraging the technology for good, I think will benefit greatly. And I think you're already starting to see some countries and some governments do that. I think New Zealand, there's a lot left to be done. But I think New Zealand as a country, you know, seeing itself and the world seeing it as a crypto friendly regulatory environment, especially given its kind of bridge between Asia and the US, which are two of the biggest crypto markets in the world, is a huge opportunity. And I would love to see the government doing more and engaging with folks. I know there's a lot of really great crypto folks within the UJF ecosystem to help do that. And I know conversations have happened, but I think that a lot more could be done. That would be very beneficial. And then, you know, my crazier thing to say is I think that the government of New Zealand should treasury meaningful assets in Bitcoin itself. And we'll we'll be happy that it did. I was going to say, I watched EHF has some great content on your YouTube channel. And I watched Neval's talk recently where he tried to convince the government in New Zealand to go by like 50 percent of some arbitrary cryptocurrency and make it make it legit and have it automatically win the crypto war. Very innovative ideas. And you know, those kinds of things are possible and probably work. But over my above my pay grade, I do think that the recent like Wall Street bets, Reddit, chat controversy where they had to shut down this trading of a stock because of what actually when you go and look at the plumbing, look at first look like a conspiracy theory and everyone was up in arms was actually, oh, it takes two days to move money in the financial system. So if you have a huge growth in something, all of a sudden you need to forward two days worth of money before you get paid and you don't have the money. It's like, wait, why does it take two days to move money through our system? So there's clearly a technology that that made it very, very clear for me that there's a technological need for innovation here. Just like that very like real business case, they had to shut down trading in the stock, creating all kinds of disruption. And now there's congressional hearings today in the United States about this because of something that's really a technology problem that should be solved by now. So I actually went the next once I realized what caused it I went and bought even more Bitcoin after I saw that happen, because it's like clearly something that that's useful, not just a speculative asset. But that's not financial advice out there. You should got to make your own decisions with your money. So Ryan, I might ask you about New Zealand's big trading environment. We really rely on the free flow of goods and services across borders around the world. We were pleasantly surprised through COVID last year about the resilience of many supply chains when in the early part of the crisis we were quite fearful about some of the things that might have happened. But certainly over time that probably things started to unwind a little bit. But I'm sort of interested in how you see that the kind of the physical pattern of logistics and supply and how what might that mean for a country that's quite removed, but wants to be much more integrated into global supply chains and production processes. Well, it is, you know, trade is always about classical sort of trade of physical goods is always and really I guess of services as well is really about classic Riccardian comparative advantage and what are you relatively better at doing than others. And and so you want to look at your strengths and what is and a lot of that's going to be determined by natural resources and what does the geography of New Zealand allow and and so you'll see some of it is deterministic and there's not too too much you can shift at least when it comes to what what's the starting point. I think it New Zealand has done reasonably well with imports. I mean, if you look at what happened here in the United States, for example, with people just started importing way more stuff we and it's probably because we're locked in our houses and you're not but we imports into United States are up 30% and exports are down 20% at the same time. So we've had this crazy dislocation of our of our economy and from a global trade perspective that New Zealand's been able to ride through and not not experience that. So that's healthy. I think what United States is in really some difficult positions. I think it's very interesting New Zealand's how dependent you've become on China from a trading perspective is the number one trading partner for both imports and exports by some margin. To me, I if I'm in charge of the economy and nobody is. Let's all remember that not even the government. But if you if you were out of that would be worrisome is sort of like I think I think China is going to it's not and this is not for political not a political statement but dependency on a country that is really going to have a lot of challenges going forward to China has to input they'll buy lots of food from you. So that's great. They're going to need a lot of food. China has to put in five times more input per unit of rice than the United States does. It's just a really intensive agricultural input. So they're going to want to buy a lot of food from you. But I think that some of these things in China some of those trends are going to be really difficult. And so if I'm New Zealand, I'm like where what are my other sources? Where else can I buy and buy and sell things? Because I think over dependence on one market like that, especially a country that's so that's such a really a difficult situation in China. I think I would I would be looking around the world. So talent pool. So from what you know of New Zealand and your experience of being here and meeting people, I suppose what kind of commentary do you have on what you've seen around the New Zealand talent pool and you know what we have and what we lack and the character of it. I've been blown away by the quality of talent. I think it's it's really incredible. And I also think, you know, for me, often talent is not exactly where you exist today, but the capability and opportunity you have to scale into something or to grow and to learn and the characteristics of the people I've met in New Zealand are just incredible. And my opinion in terms of hunger to learn to do more or to contribute and to be good, good global citizen. Like it's really special. I think how the culture of New Zealand. And so to me, I think that there's a lot of technical talent in New Zealand that I've already seen, which I'm really impressed by. But I also think that there's a lot of opportunity to engage people with capability, train them and make that talent even more capable. So, you know, within the context of my cybersecurity endeavors, you know, we plan to actually build a program to train for certain specific entry level cybersecurity jobs that are easily trainable. And I think that, you know, we're going to be hugely successful and building upon what Ryan said, at least for us, a lot of, you know, our operations on the West Coast of the United States, you know, it's the time zone works well. You've got an incredible population, good access to internet, you know, huge aptitude, live in a beautiful place that they're very happy. So if we can build a big pool of talent with this capability, how do we bridge that? And, you know, it's one of the markets where I see, I've been very impressed with what I've seen and think there's great opportunity to do something together. I don't have much to add to that other than I think it's less of a talent pool problem than getting the word out. And how do you make the country and its talent more famous so people are aware and that opportunity is there. And people are, some companies already do it. So how do we showcase that and make that more obvious to others that this is working and that people, that companies are finding amazing talent there and employing them or the New Zealand companies are crushing it and people should want to work for that New Zealand company wherever they might be in the world, which is a flip side of that because you build ecosystems in sort of dynamic interconnected ways that also involve like some of the great New Zealand companies going global. So we've got another question here, which is really around. Could New Zealand be the Netherlands of the Pacific in growing the quantity of food and using a small land mass coupled with technology to be an exporter of sustainable food? To some extent we are quite an exporter of sustainable food. But how far could we take that? Yeah, I mean, food is the largest export from New Zealand by a wide margin. I think I mean almost 10 times more than the next category. And so that that's already happening. How much I'm not familiar enough with the environmental implications of what's the level of sustainability and the practices being used in these farming to to comment on like, oh, we should try to double this or something. If anything, I think you're really leading in that space and I'd be worried if any one category's got 10 times more exports than the next things biggest imports in New Zealand is manufactured equipment, manufacturing equipment, which also sounds good, like, OK, bringing in the right kinds of equipment to do processing, manufacturing and start to get move up the value chain and not just sell raw materials. Selling raw materials is a never, you know, you haven't seen a lot of countries get super rich off of that. You've got to figure out how do we add more value to the services to the products before offshoring them? So the things that you can do with the brand, you know, like building brands is like probably the easiest way to make money out of nothing, create magic. And it's not easy to do. It's a magical kind of thing. But how do you improve the brand of New Zealand products and New Zealand foods so that you charge a premium for it? Not just have to create twice as much of it, because that'll probably have impact on the environment that none of us want to see. So maybe just opening it up to we've got some questions here around what areas could New Zealand really build, you know, it domains of competitive advantage. And in fact, is that the right way for us to be thinking about things as opposed to simply letting a entrepreneurial system really figure that out? I mean, I think playing this one strength is always a good thing, right? And there's many things that New Zealand's already great at. We talked about agriculture. There's there's a bunch of other areas. I think this hard tech thing is a real thing in my mind, you know, just with especially with the efficiency of the government, relatively speaking. So to me, you know, I think there's a bunch of areas that that are great to focus on and play to one's strengths. And then, you know, obviously, I think that this just this trend of remote work and and software engineers in particular, tech, technological jobs, being able to exist anywhere. You know, those are the big opportunities in my mind. Yeah, I mean, it's probably some hot combination of letting the free market play out and seeing what opportunities there and then trying to understand what are the blocks blockers to things that are working, working even better. And are those blockers good for society? Like, do we or do we have safety reasons or other kinds of reasons to maintain those if it's a regulatory blocker or is it just like, hey, we we got to get our act together and fix this thing. You know, and there's a lot of that in government. New Zealand government has a great reputation, but there's a lot of that in government in general. It's like, oh, like, nobody's trying to interfere. It's just life is hard and it's hard to define processes and make things run smoothly. I see that a lot in global trade. I mean, there's some countries where it's like, there's real corruption going on and you can't clear customs because you got to pay a bribe. And then there's other countries are United States included. It's like, it's not corrupt. It's just like a little bit broken and it's nobody's fault per se. It's just these systems evolved and they become creaky and they're not technologically sophisticated. So I think it's that it's like studying, OK, what is really working well? And you can see this in data, like what kinds of jobs that are out there, what kinds of companies are forming, looking at the things that are working and then having conversations like what's blocking you and then go reflect as a policy maker is like, do we want that blocker there? Is it something bad? But in general, if it's like the reason for the blocker is protecting another company and other industry existing businesses, it looks good. But it I guess the analogy might be the forest fire. Like if you put every single forest fire out the moment it starts when you get a real forest fire, it's going to take the whole forest out, right? Instead of like letting some small fires burn. That's one of the problems that you have with things like what we're doing with the Fed in the United States is like they put every fire out with lower and lower interest rates. Well, when we do have a crisis, like it's going to be a really, really bad one and your tools will stop working. So that's that's always the thing that regulators and policymakers have to really take in mind. It's like sometimes it's OK to have a little bit of dislocation and that's how economies work. And then they can they can heal and new entrepreneurs can come in and fill the gaps and things like that. So yeah, Peter, I was just reflecting on it. I think one other thing, you know, we talked about it earlier, but maybe to make a point which I think would be helpful and valuable. I think that if New Zealand decisively decides to make cryptocurrency, something really important, you know, it's it's very binary in that it's, you know, it has the opportunity to be at the front of the pack or be left behind in some ways. And I think that that's a really important area. I think we all could work to understand people's thoughts and ideas and the various constituencies and you've got the the seeds of it with some incredible people within the fellowship who have deep expertise, including one of the founders of Coinbase and others, people like Naval, to really accelerate that. I think that's a very concrete, tangible thing that could create a lot of opportunity within New Zealand. And I think is I would I'd be excited to see New Zealand take action on it. It would be unfair. You become the richest country in the world and you won't be the Holland of Pacific. You'll be the Switzerland of the Pacific. Thank you, Michelle. Do you need to go soon, actually? John's actually at the drop in a minute. Yeah, and he's late for a death. So any more questions for John, then, before he has to leave? Oh, John, thanks for coming in today. It's awesome. I hope you thank you for having your night. It's great. Yeah, super great ideas. All right. Nice to see you, John. Peter, thank you so much, Ryan. Thank you so much, Michelle. Talk soon. You're welcome. OK, so there's actually been a couple of questions that have come in for Peter as well. So what we'll do is we might get you to have a crack at some of those. So obviously, Weta Workshop and Weta Labs has had a great success early on and in the decades past. What learnings can we get out and what other sub-sectors are coming out of New Zealand? So I put in there like zero. This created a great fintech sort of ecosystem in New Zealand, which was amazing. But what other sub-sectors have we had in New Zealand that have come out from some really good companies? And we've had, well, Tate Electronics down south. Electronics coming out of New Zealand is pretty good. We've got Fisher and Parkour. So it's one of our sub-sectors. I think they're hugely diverse. I mean, they're definitely a big focus on SaaS companies. And that was sort of in some ways, that really played to some of the strengths here that you could overcome the tournier distance and with their ability to scale. So we've seen, you go to the high-tech boards and it's really dominated by that sector. And then I think when you started to talk about like the deep-tech or other manufacturing, then you start to get not so much a board-based sector but a company that sort of comes up and becomes quite notable in there. And they're often, I mean, it's the classic New Zealand thing is you can be a niche in a global context, but quite a big player in New Zealand by serving that niche, just because of the size of the domestic economy. I mean, our big challenge and Xero has come out a multinational and really, really, really successful. New Zealand's economy, I suppose, if we look at our firm's demography, our firm demography only looks weird at the end of the, we lack the really, really, really big businesses. So other advanced economies that we compare ourselves to small advanced economies maybe have four or five times as many kind of domiciled multinationals that are imported in those countries. And that's been the bit that's sort of been missing in our system. And so having a Xero emerge, for example, into that area, then they really, that's great. We just need three or four more that are really of that scale. And then they have the great benefit of driving, management capability, people in those companies learn how to scale things in a way that you don't get to and smaller enterprises and they don't know how to internationalize in a way that you don't otherwise do as well. So I think that's a critical bit. In terms of some of those sub-sectors, well, definitely, I would say it, but the new space economy in New Zealand is growing really, really fast. And it's just the more we introduce global players to it and they have blown away by the quality of the technology and the ideas in those areas. So we're going to continue to kind of really curate that and support it as well. Our biggest sub-sector in tech is health. It's health tech and med tech and we've got some remarkable companies in that way. And it's been interesting through COVID because those companies that thrived in a COVID context because medical technologies have been absolutely critical. So you've seen massive growth in that context and probably just access to talent and a workforce is probably one of the natural constraints there, but that'll sort itself out over time. So I wouldn't kind of necessarily pick any particular area. People are really pushing hard on ag tech. Ag tech is in some ways underdone in New Zealand. So remarkably, agricultural technologies, but often serving New Zealand's production systems and not global production systems. And so now you're seeing a much greater focus on how do we serve the world's agricultural systems as a technology provider, as opposed to just, you know, underpinning a really successful biological economy here. In terms of the biological side of things, yeah, it's funny, because we talked about, you know, simple products, you know, simple products going around the world would actually, you know, we spent a lot of time going, well, New Zealand's a lot richer than it should be when we look at the kind of like the technology, you know, the types of products that we export, except that it's actually quite different because some of the products we export are simply a kiwi fruit, but that kiwi fruit is based on a phenomenal amount of technology. Yeah. And so the statistics don't actually reveal the knowledge intensity that's driving that value creation as well. Yeah, so anyway, that was probably a long-answered question, Chelm. No, it's actually really good because it gives people a sense of all the fellows in particular, like, what area should they focus on? What is it? Because I know one of the questions that was in there as well is about what is New Zealand's talent pool? What is special and unique about it enough for them to, you know, like, what is that special sort of thing that kiwis have? Like before we were to talk about that number eight wire and that we're very good at that, but we know that if people don't keep learning and doing certain skills, that number eight wire mentality is going to disappear in a couple of generations. So it's kind of like, what is New Zealand's sort of magic that we're going to have there? I think it's just increasingly diverse, but I didn't touch on the creative industry so you talked about the film sector. Well, that's just blossomed and it's grown and in sheer scale itself. It's technology that's associated with it has got deeper and deeper. So that, which is, you know, gives us greater comfort in terms of the source of the competitive advantages is getting more and more, you know, entrenched here in some ways, but then out of that, you know, gaming and into AR, VR and a computational media really, really a big up and coming area here. And there's people out there in the world move to 5G and other things like that. The big missing bit is going to be for what? You know, what's the content? What's the experience you're going to have? And I think again, that really plays a big role in the development of the industry in New Zealand's strength, which is quite interdisciplinary. So it's got the creative side, the content side as well as the technology development. And I think that's, I think one of my big themes across it is the smallness is a real advantage. The smallness is a real advantage because people come together from across lots of different fields and, you know, experiences and those conversations lead to a tremendous amount of big challenges, how do you scale that? So there's no shortage of opportunity. It's all scale is the issue. Yeah. And then how do you bring that relationship sort of that one to one kind of thing through with scale? Yeah. Which New Zealand's kind of renowned for. So just in summary then, so, Ryan, what's some parting words that you'd like to leave the audience with about, you know, New Zealand is an innovative place, a great place to actually do business and set something up and when I come here, do it. I mean, you know, it would be crazy for me to come and give advice when I think you've created such a great program and it's a welcoming to me and others who are friends of mine have been part of it already before me. And I'm just like thrilled to see how I can contribute and add value. And I would avoid trying to over engineer the future in some ways. It's like set yourself up for success, be prepared and then allow good things to happen and in ways that are unexpected. It's also why I give people advice to try to be more famous because like stuff will happen, you know, and so get the word out there about the work that you're doing. Don't be shy about it, promote your company, promote your nonprofit organization or even just the work of the fellows in general. You'll see that success compounds in ways that are a little bit unpredictable and that there's probably much more upside in the world than there is downside these days. We all, our brains just are hardwired to focus on the downside of what could go wrong or all the terrible things that are happening, but allow good things to happen. There's so much opportunity and I think you'll find that there's, we live in a power law world and most, you know, like the most you could lose is 100% but the most you could gain is a million percent, right? And so that's an asymmetry that can be to your advantage if you're willing to put your neck out there and take some risk and go for it. So be famous. That's a funny thing to say to New Zealanders who are renowned for being humble and the good old tall puffy syndrome, right? Well, yeah, and where a lot of us are hardwired that way and you're gonna sort of like, okay, what do I want to try to do? What do I want to be known for? You probably don't want to be just generically famous and you don't want to, you definitely don't want to be famous if you're a crook or you have some problems but I don't think you have that problem. I think you're all, you know, doing, it's like the amazing people that get the word out, find ways to do it. And by the way, self promotion is dead. So like nobody really wants to hear you talk about how you're great. They want to see your creative ideas. They want to learn from you. They want to see that you're putting out goodness into the world. And that, you know, that's a be creative, be funny, like, you know, be authentic. That'll work much better for you than like, nobody, it's too easy now to say, I'm great. Like that you can, anyone can do that. Any company can do that. It's much more interesting is it? Yeah. You need to prove it, right? Have proof that you can, yeah. And create value for others, right? Before you ask for anything in return. Yeah. So Peter, what's some last words in that you'd like to leave the audience with? Oh, embrace the power of small. You know, we're smaller than agile. And that's the, I suppose that's the journey that we're on at the moment. Really trying to shrug off that using that as an excuse and actually flipping that around and saying, it's actually the source of great advantage. So that's the journey we're on. Brian. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, team. Thanks. Thanks, Ryan, for spending the time. And Peter, for being a great host with great questions. And it was nice to have you asking them and driving the discussion this time. Normally you are on the firing end and a big last thanks for John also. So we have few more live sessions coming up over the few weeks and days. So everybody just tune in. You can see them on our website. Paul will post that up on the chat screen. And this recording will also be up on our website afterwards. So thank you very much. Thanks for tuning in. Pleasure.