 I have an amazing group of individuals on stage with me right now to talk about technology and how technology can really help unlock human potential. I think the challenge of a blank slate, an opportunity to think from scratch, think from a fresh is really, really relevant for us. And so what we're going to do first is maybe spend three minutes per person telling us who you are and how your experience informs your thinking around how technology is helping unlock human potential. So I'm getting this on that end and we'll end with Scott here. Hello. My name is Adam Gettings and I'm from the States, grew up on a farm, started working on different projects at a pretty early age, always looking for ways to make something new, just can't help but try to get out new ideas and put them into form. So I've worked in medical, software, robotics, technology, consumer tech, fashion, a few other kind of random things, but in general I think I definitely have a heavy bent toward technology and I guess it's a bit of an addiction and it's like anything, it's really a powerful tool and it's something that you can continually improve upon and build into something very powerful and interesting that can make change and I think that we're change machines. So obviously you have unintended consequences of that and I'll try not to focus on that today but focus on what I think is happening at a large scale with technology now which is that it's actually bringing the whole world together into one culture, for better or worse currently it's one economic system in one culture that's increasingly interlinked and I think as we come to terms with the, I think with some of the negative consequences or unintended consequences of this development, this great sort of conversion of the world into human created concepts like stuff that's non-naturally produced, I think that that's something that we're going to be able to adapt to as a group more effectively because of the technology, if that makes sense. So that's I guess in a nutshell, my view, less than three minutes I guess, but. Some of you know me as the bee lady from last week, I guess this is how the rest of the world normally sees me, so I'm a technology entrepreneur, Phil O'Reilly is here somewhere, where is Phil? He was here, he looked like the men in black a minute ago, so Phil was actually my very first customer and what I consider to be my first real company, but I went to university at 15 and there was a slight problem which was that I wasn't eligible for any of the student assistants because you were supposed to be 16 before you went to university, so I started my first business which was a stop go company, so I hired students to do traffic control because I was also, even when I graduated university, I was still on youth rates which really sucked and so I was a necessity entrepreneur, I came from a very long line of social activists and being a business just never occurred to me and so the reason I mentioned Phil is that I started a health safety environment company in 1992 and my very first invoice went to Phil O'Reilly who's going to be speaking later and I'm going to tell you two little stories. So one of them is that I was watching my youngest child who is now 15 and I was watching her, she was three and she woke me up on a Saturday morning and she went mum the wireless is down and I remember thinking what have you done, I poked it in the back with a paper clip which is what you used to do to every Apple product to reset it and I've tried turning it off and on and it doesn't go and then my second question was what are you doing on the internet and I kind of started looking around and I realised that for me I'd grown up in a community where the kids around me and I didn't really resonate a lot of the time. I was kind of a bit weird, I was really curious about the world, I had very different political views than most of the people I grew up with and I spoke a couple languages, it was all very different and I started to look at her and I started to look at the internet and I went out and I built a community of one and a half million kids around the world who were all interested in environmental issues and what I realised was that for the first time with the internet kids can find communities of interest as opposed to the neighbours they may be stuck with and I just want to leave you with that thought because what we did with those kids is we inspired those kids to take 15,000 real world environmental actions and often I think people think it's like real world versus virtual world or all this terrible stuff with kids spending all their time on the internet whereas for me the internet has enabled me to find, to live in New Zealand in a place that I love where I can ride my mana bike around for a couple hours yesterday, go for a swim after work, go for a kayak and still be deeply connected to people who are thinking about things and who are international activists. So for me that kind of area has been really useful. I'm going to tell one other little story which is a slight brag which New Zealanders don't like doing but two years ago I was reading an article online and it was an article about the Marshallese Islands and as I'm reading it my heart starts beating a little faster and I click, you know, copy on the URL and I email it to my dad and I go, dad who lives in New Jersey, I go, dad you really have to help these guys and he emails me back he goes, you know, they haven't really got a prayer. I go, well if they haven't got a prayer they need help, right? And you know, you could really help them and after a little while it kind of goes silent, the conversation drops off and then last year we were talking and dad said, oh yeah, I've got to go to this meeting and I go, why are you going to this meeting? He goes, oh I'm helping this Marshallese Islands team and I'm like, yeah. And a while back my dad is an international him, rights lawyer, international criminal lawyer and he took a case on behalf of Samoa to the world court on the legality of nuclear weapons and they didn't go so well and that was why I'd seen this and the Marshall Islands is taking a case against the nine nuclear countries in the world on the legality of nuclear weapons and I'm going to cry because I'm so proud. So yesterday because my dad is typical Kiwi, you know, like doesn't tell us anything, I read on the internet on my sister-in-law's Facebook page that and she only knows because she's a graduate of the university. My dad teaches at that my father has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and isn't that amazing? Yeah. And to me that is the power of technology that I can see something on the internet and my dad, you know, reads the New York Times, right? He hasn't got a digital subscription. I can email it to him, he can email someone in the Marshall Islands and go, you know what, I'm up for helping. And then they can put a virtual team together of the world's best and they can use the legal systems that exist, you know. So I take on what was said before but sometimes you have to work within those systems as well as to transform them and use that technology then to take on some of the most heinous technology that we have. So, you know, the tools for us is whether we're environmental activists or whether we're waging peace, where our ability to grow community beyond the pod size to take up Joshua's is really enabled by the tools that we have around us that we couldn't do before. Very cool. Nice little set way here. I met Melissa in the backseat of a Ford S-Dort RS 2000 about 30 years ago but it's not what it sounds. We're actually headed for sure death over a cliff and patiti point which is outside Timurine. Kia ora. My name is Mike O'Donnell. Most people call me Mod. I was born at a very early age and I had a relatively okay career in doing private capital and investment banking until my early thirties and a dodgy ginga named Sam Morgan came to me and said, I've got this thing called Trade Me. I've been doing it for a couple of years and now it's tracking all right. I want to do motors and then jobs, then property. You're a bit of a petrolhead. Do you want to come and do that? So I left my job doing funds management and did the build and launch of trade me motors, trade me jobs, trade me travel, trade me property and a few other things and that sort of got me into the internet space. I'm 50 which means I'm not a digital native, came to it kind of late. Over the last 15 years, I've been quite involved in the start-up will and we would have a lot of people coming to us, but also I've reached out and got involved at the moment. I'm a director of Serato, which is the world's largest vinyl emulation software company and a couple of poor white boys in South Auckland created that and one of them managed to work out how to change the timing of a track without losing the pitch, which is quite tricky to do and the two of them came up with a thing called pitch and time and now their IP goes into debts made by Denon, Nakamichi, Pioneer, Rain, Ableton all around the world. It's a pretty cool story. I'm also director of Ray Gunn, which is a great little Wellington company that does bug-zapping online and also a company called Timely, which is another SaaS company that does beautiful booking software. So it's been an interesting kind of journey for me in start-ups and I've been involved historically in a bunch of others. I guess two starters for ten in this area is this kind of a great start-up myth, which I call the three Gs, not to be confused with the G spot, which is different. And the three Gs are there's a guy and it normally is a man, a garage, and then he comes up with a brilliant idea and then sells it to a corporate for a decillion dollars. So that's sort of guy garish decillion dollars. And my experience of start-ups is that is not the way it is. My experience of start-ups is more along the lines of a great quote from Richard Taylor from Weta, who I've had a little bit to do with. And he said that people tend to throw themselves at failure and miss spectacularly and hit success despite their plan. And you know, trying yourself at failure and missing, I think, says a lot about start-ups, but also about the disruptive nature of when you start this journey where you end up is often a side effect of you failing at something else along the way. Cheers. Hi, I'm Scott. Let's see, where should I begin? Well, I was originally an engineer many years ago. That was my training, so definitely linked to the tech industry that way. Early on worked in aerospace company called SpaceX, worked on the propulsion systems and the capsule a little bit. From there did a whole bunch of things, including consulting and started my own company and went to business school. And then now for about the last five years, I've been at a VC firm called Founders Fund where we invest in tech start-ups. And we do that across a whole bunch of different sectors. We're actually investors in Adam's company, Robotex. And so that includes we do things like the sharing economy, healthcare, education, food, materials, energy, all these sorts of different things. And we're always looking for the best company in every single sector and just trying to back that one that we think is solving huge real problems. So you know, maybe one framing I'd put on it is, you know, today's panel is on technology. And I'd say we definitely don't invest in technology for technology's sake, it's technology when it solves a problem and creates a great lasting business that can keep solving additional problems beyond that first one. And so yeah, maybe we can talk through some examples of that. I think tying back to one of the prior talks, there's ways to do that incrementally, there's ways to do it with a fundamentally new thing. And so we invest both in companies that are doing totally new things that were never possible before. And other companies that are doing maybe something 10 times better or 10 times more efficiently or 10 times cheaper or faster. So these things can come in a lot of different forms. And so we try and, you know, meet a lot of people doing cool stuff. Great. So one notion that we've been exploring over the last few days is the unique times we live in today, where a lot of our social, planetary and economic designs that we live within, we're in a position where we can question them and whether we can seek certain transformational changes in some of the ways that we've designed things. And I think tying to what Josh was saying today, we are in a place where we can use a lot of technological platforms to spearhead societal progress. So the question to you all is, how are you seeing these new platforms that we're creating and we're actively inventing within the technology space, helping us transform so many of our existing systems? And how much of that energy are we using to create incremental change versus that more transformational change? Amongst other things, I'm on the board of Radio New Zealand, which is our national radio, so like NPR, for those of you from the US, our NPR. And I'm listening to that, I really reflect on citizen journalism in particular, you know, I think about whether it was the, you know, the kind of the spring uprisings in the Middle East or stories that in the past couldn't have been told and can't be told well. And, you know, I think it's really interesting now as we start to use, you know, think about how do we tell the news through Instagram? You know, and that wasn't a question I would have thought to have asked two years ago. And, you know, one of the reasons I'm on the board is because they wanted to have someone who was a digital, digitally literate and would push things. But, you know, we've just launched our first radio with pictures. So if you watch John Campbell at five o'clock, you know, we broadcast what is not TV broadcast quality news, but we can crowdsource that in many ways. We can patch someone in from Skype, from Sudan, from a camp. And those are stories that you couldn't tell with the immediacy without that technology. So what I find interesting, though, is that it is still always about the human condition. You know, we, as radio, we're in the business of telling stories. We're not, you know, and we want those. I don't think that human nature is going to change. You know, the fundamental, we want to be fed, we want to belong. Those things won't change. But I think that we can use disruptive technologies to make those, you know, enable that human relationships more. When it goes awry is when we forget the humanity. I see that we're living in an age of like heightened transparency. And I think that that's something that makes all of us get the hippie-jeebies, you know, giving up our privacy and so on. But, but part of part of what that's doing is it's it's making us come to terms with a lot of things that that we don't want to we don't want to face. But it's coming it's coming right at us. And it's it's literally telling us head on. And it's and it's doing that in a social setting. And so there's a greater level of accountability now. And that's just ever increasing. So I think that I think that a lot of these digital technologies are are helping sort of build increase our level of awareness of what we're doing. And hopefully that leads to reflection and a greater sense of focus on what we want to do next. I guess I come at this slightly differently. Some of you'll be familiar with Clay Christensen's work and the innovators dilemma, where he talks about the difference between sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. And the example he uses there is steel industry in the US, where some Japanese companies came up with a new way of making steel rebars. And it was at 2% of the cost of the traditional way. Steel rebars made up a tiny part of the steel market in the US. And the big players there, mainly around Cleveland and Detroit, said, look, we don't really need that. And we're not going to discount our prices by 75% so we'll just let them have it. And so surely, but surely the Japanese took over the steel rebars market because they had disruptive technology that completely rewrote the metrics. And then the Japanese and now it's other companies as well, then did the next sort of step on the stairs and went into another part of the market. And sure enough that disruptive innovation, which rather than supporting the status quo, completely undermines the cost structures has taken over the steel industry. And, you know, to a large extent, if you look at our success in New Zealand at TradeMe, where we went up against newspapers where you could sell your Mr. Ambassador, what do you drive? BMW. If you were selling your BMW, which I'm sure you won't, actually, if you do, you should sell it to Phil Riley to see to let them. But if you're selling a car 14 years ago and some people in a room will remember what it was like, you'd pay 35 bucks, you'd get three lines in the Dominion Post or the Herald, and you'd use lots of abbreviations, you know, like ESC for excellent and what have you to describe it. You'd have to put it in six or eight times to sell. We came along with an offering that said, hey, put your car up online, $19 until it sells. You can keep it up there a year. You've got 20 photographs, a thousand words. And we'll do that at 20 bucks, so you can have the other at $35 ago. That sort of disruptive innovation that bought was terrifically empowering for us. But there seems to be often an assumption that for a good entrepreneur, for a good startup business, that it needs to be disruptive innovation. And actually I don't think that's right. There's a long tail and a lot of sustaining innovation that will give a perfectly good business. And for those of you out there right now that are looking at doing something entrepreneurially, I don't think you should look automatically to disruptive innovation. There's a long tail out there that can just be about great execution. Cool. So I think the original question was around, you know, building new systems, using companies to do that. And I think, you know, trying to abstract it a little bit, like how do we think about that? I think the one thing that we often look for with great companies is a really deep insight around something. So an insight around, here's the system we have, here's the approach that we're taking, and here's the thing that's wrong with that. And if we can change that one core high leverage piece, we can approach the business in a totally different way. And so, you know, one example that I'm familiar with because we're investors in the company is Airbnb. And so their insight was, you know, when people travel, you have all this, all these large buildings with just empty rooms in them. And, you know, the fundamental problem for any hotel is how do we follow the rooms? And so you have these huge structures that are just sitting there, trying to, you know, fulfill, you know, kind of earn their keep by having people stay on them. Yet, we have all these empty rooms in people's homes. And so that one insight of like, do you really need all this capital going towards these large structures just so people can travel when we have, you know, all these empty homes over here and people that would love to make money helping pay their mortgages, renting them out. And so that's turned into actually a, you know, a huge company. And I think people say, okay, well, that's great. That's that's a huge company and people can travel, stay different ways. But one of the other purposes of that company is can we help people travel and get more immersed in other cultures so they can understand these other cultures better and have human connections in other countries that they would otherwise never had because they'd be staying in this very manicured hotel that's identical to the one that's down the street from their home and you know, if they're coming from the US. And so, you know, I think that all that is to say like, sometimes a very small insight or powerful insight around, we can do this business in a different way, unlocks a whole new framework for here's how we can impact, you know, this whole industry way beyond just housing and shelter, we can actually change the travel industry. And so, you know, they have a lot of ideas around what they want to do there. And that's one example of of how we see these things changing, you know, from a small, small start to a, you know, potentially big impact. We promise discomfort. So I'd like to stir the pot a little bit and talk about hubris. Now, in the technology space, you know, we talk a lot about how we can transform things and change the world and create a lot of impact, which, you know, I'm a very strong believer in. But I also want to bring the question of accountability, which Adam, you brought up earlier, as stewards of technology and as stewards of progress in that realm, are there, is there space for accountability to the people and the planet that we live on when we're doing the work that we do, both here in New Zealand and San Francisco or in many other hubs that are really at the tip of the spear and helping us evolve and helping us move forward? And if so, how do you envision that taking place while giving space of freedom for innovators to do what they do best? That's a tough one because I think I'll just provide my thought around the reality of the current situation, which is that what we're mostly using technology for today is to greater, rapidly depleted planet resources and bring people to a standard of living that's unsustainable without additional planets. So starting from that, I think accountability is creeping in and I think technology is actually making it creeping faster. And I think what your question is about, you know, how do we get people space to continue to innovate as we become more aware of some of these some of these challenges or some of these sort of by products of our of our addiction to technology? Well, I just think we have to be real with ourselves and start from the framework of understanding where we are. And that's OK, we can just admit that. I think that we have generations of people that that don't acknowledge where we are and they feel they feel very comfortable believing that we can invent our way out of it. And that's a great mindset to have because that's part of being human and that's part of being creative. But the same time, it's also it's OK to acknowledge what we've done poorly or at least not not poorly, I guess, but that acknowledge what we've produced as a byproduct because that's our resource for what we do next. I am. Yeah, I really agree with that. I think there's two bits to it. Some of it is that, you know, they say sunshine is the best disinfectant. And and I think that idea of really all of us taking it upon ourselves to to shine that sunshine into the areas that need to be made transparent to others, because it's not it's not always obvious to everyone. And and I think sometimes, too, you see that people believe that we'll invent our way out. I remember when people first started talking about carbon capture and sequestration and and I'm like, it's just really not the answer. You know, we have to stop it at the source not kind of find a way to bury it deeper. And and so we we have to also remember that a lot of our technologies turn out to be dead ends. You know, they may be great for a while. I do a fair bit of work in the agriculture space. And you can see that, yes, some of those pesticides or some of those fertilizers may have unlabeled parts of the economy to bloom or parts of, you know, us to feed more people. But we now know that that is not the future. And so there's a point there where we have to use the technologies we have to shine sunshine, you know, where it can't be seen so that we think about what sometimes we have to backtrack and go that technology was useful for a while. It's no longer useful. Let's backtrack to where we invented that and take a different path. So I would really encourage you to to have the compassion for the people who don't yet know where we are, you know, I'm working on a building project at the moment where we're looking at what it is that really stops New Zealand from having great housing. And a lot of that is around this mindset that we're finding that New Zealanders think they're poor and that idea that came up this morning that Guy had, I think, or Shay, you know, that somehow when we're rich enough, we'll provide good housing for ourselves, which is kind of crazy. It's like, no, if you mandate that New Zealanders will live in warm, dry homes, then we will find the way to live in warm, dry homes. And I think it's that sometimes backtrack to find the technologies that will support us. Cheers. Three quick thoughts. The first is actually just stealing Melissa's really. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and the ability that the unrestrained distribution mechanism of the web devs us to shine sunlight is extraordinary. And I was, you'll probably be familiar with the story about the British woman who was flying to Africa and tweeted before she left, I'm off to Africa, I hope I don't get AIDS, whoops, just kidding I'm white and thought this comment in the 24 hours it took her to get from London to Cape Town, the thing was seen millions and millions of times, a whole campaign was waiting and when she got off the plane she had a whole circus to go through. And I think, you know, poor woman bless her heart is now a wreck. Now that's a personal example rather than a corporate example, but there is the ability to hold corporates to great much greater accountability. And while they may have given, you know, symbolic import to three line reporting, I think that has fundamentally changed and that, and it's a great vote for a free internet as well, you know, as long as that can happen. Second data point is reading on Mashable last night, the average age of CEOs of standard and poorest 500 companies has dropped 20 years in the last five. Fuck. And you know, I think people of, I was going to say our generation, but I'm older than you, your generation, they absolutely care about that so much more. They are digital know as they brought up in a very conscious mindset of the being finite resources. In five years, the average age drop in 20 years is gives me hope. And the last thing is just a really micro point that one of the companies I'm a director of timely has 30, 32 staff, 25 are in New Zealand, others diverse as Austin, Texas, Malta and Calduly and the whole company's never come together once. And there's a joke in the company that is the pamphlet organization because as far as we know, nobody wears pants because we only see them from their from their shirt up. And when they join the company, we give them a dressing gown because they'll be working from home. So that it's a cool dressing gown actually. And we're hiring. But what I was going to say is that pure distribution that means workforces don't need to come together in terms of fossil fuels in terms of all of those resources being burnt up. It's good news. You've heard the story before, I'm sure. Yeah, and I would agree with all that. So I think hard to hard to take any of those concepts further. Maybe going back to one of the original points you made around, you know, accountability, hubris, these sorts of things. I think there's definitely a caricature of, you know, the startup or business person who's, you know, trying to like take over the world and we're going to get rich and all those sorts of things. I think that's a caricature. I think the reality. And I think, you know, I'd say anyone in this room, imagine if if you had a really deep insight around, yes, we need to fix this thing and we're going to, what's the best way to do it? I could, I could do it through government or existing organizations. But no, I think I need to do it with a brand new company. I don't think that would doing that and making that decision doesn't mean that you're you're doing it. I have a place of hubris. It could be out of a place of like personal sacrifice or a mission. And I think the thing that we see in the best companies is almost unilaterally, they're led by people and teams who have a very deep mission and they see this thing as their life's mission. And if they thought there was a way to do this through the education sector or through existing organizations, they would do that. But they think the only way to do it is through a company. And so, you know, recently we invested in a company just at the very seed stage. And the founder said to us, he's like, I want to know that you guys are really aligned with what I'm doing because I'm going to sacrifice all of my 30s and probably destroy my health trying to do this really important thing to make other people's lives a lot better. And so like I want to know that I'm I'm working with people who are aligned around that. So I'd say you definitely see, you know, many of the best founders being extremely mission driven. And that's how they recruit the best people under their teams and go do these really hard things. And so while sure people will do things, you know, in life out of a place of hubris and all walks of life, I think out of a place of accountability and sacrifice, that's that's often really important. And so you see this when people are starting companies, you know, to make egg substitutes out of plants instead of eggs so that, you know, lots of chickens don't have to live in horrible conditions and consume a lot of natural resources. So I think there's examples like this where people have a real passion for something. And and so companies, it's actually the case where often they're not just not started of hubris, but they're actually started out of accountability. Hands together for this amazing panel.