Business Is Boring

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In the pilot of a new monthly special, host Simon Pound speaks with Maria Slade, from the communications team at Callaghan Innovation, and Duncan Greive, managing editor at The Spinoff about business stories making the news that month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you think about awards ceremonies for traditionally male dominated industries like tech and business, diversity is not the first thing that jumps to mind. These awards have long been the nights to celebrate the people that made it under the old rules, and so have  showcase a lot of successful old blokes. But one prominent event, the NZ Hi-Tech awards, has made it its mission to fast forward the process of change by making diversity the focus of its awards for this year. It’s pushed forward a conversation many industries need to have, and got conversations and initiatives started all around the country, working with the excellent Ally Skills team to help companies learn practical steps to take, and in a step perfect for the tech industry, they even provide a toolkit. The chair of the Hi-tech trust, Jennifer Rutherford, is emblematic of and driving this change. With a career in corporate management and industry governance she took over as chair this year.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more i

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Sophie Gilmour about Bird on a Wire, a chicken shop grown from an old Ponsonby takeaways. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Vodafone Xone. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Jade Temepara about growing a family business from a seed potato.  In the wake of the Christchurch earthquake a local gardener was given a task by her koro. Her grandfather asked her to help keep a potato variety going that had been grown by the family for more than 100 years. The deep connection to growing kai, and the the way it provides and protects kicked off a renewed interest in for Jade Temepara in the power of gardens to anchor and support families. In addition to being a acclaimed gardener who placed at Ellerslie flower show, Jade had been working with families doing it tough and thought she could bring the worlds together. She launched Hand over a Hundy, a concept where a family is given 100 bucks for supplie

In the wake of the holy what the hell disruptive force of President Trump outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times have turned around years of subscriber decline as readers vote with their wallets about the importance of news and what is fake and what isn’t.  On The Spinoff that has been through Press Patron, so you might be familiar with the model. The founder and CEO of that company, Alex Clark, saw this trend form years out, with a master’s thesis turning into a real world product, now in NZ Australia and the US and helping X outlets harness their following and supplement ads, paywalls or whatever else is needed.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They say where there's mystery there's margin and one thing that is deep in the depths of mystery is trade credit. What's trade credit? It's the second biggest source of loans in the world after banks. It's like when a business wants to buy something from a supplier and pay them 30 days later. And so much of business operates on these trade terms, but so often not on the actual terms. People are late, people need to be trustworthy, people need to guarantee they will pay. Well, one person who looked into this abyss of paperwork is Miriana Lowrie. After a career in banking and looking at strategy and ways to improve business for outfits like ASB, she saw an improvement that could be made here and launched 1Centre. The app has gone through incubation, setting a record funding round for an product at the Flux accelerator, was part of Vodafone xone and is helping solve the hard problems, with customer usage doubling month on month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about you

We’re very excited to introduce todays guest, someone extra inspiring, even by the pretty amazing standards of the people we talk to week in week out on this show. Someone, I kid you not, that Tony Robbins looks to for motivation and inspiration. He’s an author, entrepreneur, doctor, extreme skiing champ, former drunken backflipper and current dedicated father and inspirational business leader. He even got the modern version of the Hippocratic oath changed(!). Let’s rewind to the end of uni study, when a drunken stunt of a backflip led to Dr Sam Hazeldine, then in his last year of medical school with a promising extreme skiing career on the cards, waking up from a coma with a poor outlook for future success at both. What could have been the worst day of his life he made one of his best, resolving to focus on what matters, then going on to out-performing the best hopes for his head injury: within a year he was a grad doctor and skiing national champion. Entrepreneur Dr Sam Hazeldine is the founder and managing

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Vodafone Xone. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Ben Reynolds about how his company Spalk is making sports commentary more accessible.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As business thinker Cindy Gallop says, there is a lot of money to be made by taking women seriously. But the reason there is that opportunity is that traditionally, particularly in tech and business, women and women’s interests have not been. One person that’s been creating more space and fighting this battle over the last 20 years is local entrepreneur Jenene Crossan. In 2018 it’s easy to take for granted the social web, paid independent female voices, and that Teen Vogue is political. But in 1999. it wasn’t this way. This was the year Jenene founded NZ Girl. It was also just after Google was founded. Jenene was already 4 years into building websites and living online, and saw where things were going with media. NZ Girl went on to be the biggest social magazine in the country and in 2015 was named best blog. It was also a business in the time before there was a clear business model for online media. This led Jenene to found companies to solve advertising online, to found Bloggers Club - one of the first comp

A flippant comment around a kitchen table in 2013 brought about a business that has gone from making one Thai Green Curry to now having a delivery or pick-up service for ready made meals, 2 cafes, a commercial kitchen, regular media appearances, 2 cookbooks, thousands of meals sold a week and a staff of 25. Jess' Underground Kitchen is now very much in the overground. To talk about the journey, Jess Daniell joined the podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Zealand likes to think it’s clean, green and 100% pure, but if you look under the lid, quite a few things you would expect from such a place are not really all there. Like recycling. Even today there is a long way to go, but we are light years on from where we were 9 years ago when Steve Rickerby spotted a massive hole in the market for a company that could pick up food waste from businesses. Back in 2009, Steve was working at an insurance company that had moved in to Auckland's first 5 star green rated building. As part of the rating system, staff were separating waste in to rubbish, recycling and compost but none of the large waste companies offered a service to collect the food waste. So the carefully separated waste was just going to landfill. Steve saw a big problem to solve and launched We Compost collections with one bin on the back of his ute. They now collect over 30,000 kilograms of organic waste each week - Servicing corporate offices, food courts, schools, tertiary institutes, hotels, cafes, c

Genevieve is External Relations Manager for Lion NZ, a company that is further along than most on the journey. Last year they were champion winner of the YWCA Equal Pay Awards, and of the DiversityWorks Work/Life Balance Award. To chat that column, her career and how you can have it all so long as that all includes flexible work and some effort to address deep paternalistic bias,  Genevieve joins on the podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Great entrepreneurial ideas come from people, but also from environments that foster creativity, provide support and that lift people to help them to go further. This is part of why co-working spaces- places where creatives and companies can rent space by the desk or the week - have exploded around the world as hubs for people to go to, to make their dreams happen, and to keep the motivation and the energy up. And here, the name BizDojo has been synonymous with co-working since they started on Karangahape Rd in 2009. Founded by Jonah Merchant and Nick Shewring, they grew from a few people at 12 desks to now having thousands of residents, and a string of coworking and collaborative spaces across New Zealand, with some big plans for 2018. They were also a big part of bringing GridAKL into being - that many in Auckland tech will know, spinning up the original GridAKL prototype space, and later running coworking, networking, business support, events and activations in a new permanent building. With BizDojo spaces

In 2003 there wasn’t much of a computer game development industry in Aotearoa. But an entrepreneur that loved games, graphics and design set out to change that, and to make a Playstation game - not worrying they didn’t even have access to the Sony development kit. They managed to assemble a team, make a prototype and sell the idea internationally, all on their first hit-out. This pioneering approach has continued for Maru Nihoniho, whose Metia Interactive has gone on to make games that carry great messages and outcomes in amongst the fun of playing. There was SPARX, with the University of Auckland that gamified treating depression, with great success, winning awards and getting written up in the British Medial Journal. There was The Guardian, with a wahine toa, strong Māori women lead, a damsel doing the rescuing and distressing. And an idea I love, Māori Pa Wars, a take on the traditional tower defence game, available in te reo and quietly telling stories from history. Maru has been recognised for services t

Y Combinator is one of the great names in tech and start-ups. The incubator slash business bootcamp is famously hard to get into and famously hard full stop! Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe are some of the alumni and they only accept companies that have billion dollar potential. It’s also, like much of Silicon Valley, disproportionately made up of young, male, Stanford Grad founders, with not a lot of people accepted from outside the US, let alone from little old NZ. But Dr Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic, managed to break a lot of those preconceptions. She has a PhD pioneering new work in machine learning, doing it after thirty, with her husband as a partner in the company and their two kids in tow. Their company uses machine learning to get insights from customer feedback for big companies like Stripe, Air NZ and Vodafone, and was a part of the Vodafone Xone startup accelerator. They’ve just picked up a new funding round, have traction and momentum in an exciting space and we are very lucky to have Alyona join

How is a country going to grow if the tangata whenua, some 15 percent of the population, are overrepresented in negative stats and under-represented in the ranks of entrepreneurs and owners? Well, that is a big question, and one that can be broken down into many parts, and the first of which might be how do we get frontline Māori workers performing better, growing and improving, and into upward progress. That’s where Indigenous Growth comes in. They work with organisations with Indigenous workers, what they term those frontline workers, to unlock their potential and increase their contribution. It’s about bringing all of people to work, and unlocking the same positive qualities that many of these workers have in their whanau situations. A great idea and business from Michael Moka, an entrepreneur, scholar and leading voice in engagement. You might have caught him at TedX Auckland, or know him from his work with Executive Education and the Maori students association at Auckland Uni, or maybe through his love o

What exactly could loving One Direction have to do with fixing the diversity pipeline problem in tech? Well if you hear ‘One Direction’ and go into dismissal mode, that might just be the root of the problem. A few years ago a tech industry leader in law gave a presentation at a serious Berlin tech conference about how perhaps the diversity pipeline problem could be traced back to the way that traditionally female spaces of fandom have been minimised online. It was based around fan fiction, One Direction secret love affair conspiracies and honouring how people’s enthusiasms can lead them to learn about making things online. If you love something and build a fanpage, that is a very real way in to website building. The talk has led to more talks, years, and time spent on One Direction than Sacha Judd had ever anticipated. Sacha, a former partner at top law firm Buddle Findlay, has been an influential figure in tech – being very early on the journey of big firms like Vend, where I know her from, and now running t

At 16 Alexia Hilbertidou looked around and saw that she was the only girl in her IT and physics class, then the next year the only young women in advanced physics. What was going on? How did women go from the forefront of coding to underrepresentation at a time when it is meant to be more accessible than ever? Well, to change the ratio you have to change the structure. So Alexia decided to take the message to young women while still choosing what subjects they would take, and so founded GirlBoss NZ, an organisation which encourages young women to embrace STEM, Entrepreneurship and higher leadership. In just 18 months, GirlBoss NZ is New Zealand’s second largest network of women with nearly 8000 members. At 18-years-old, just finished high-school, Alexia has spoken to nearly 20,000 young people, teachers and business professionals about gender equity, STEM, and the future of work. This passion for future-focussed education has seen her named a Top 30 Global Teen Leader, a Top 5 Young Leader by the Ministry of

Rowan Simpson has made his name about ten times and he’s not done yet. He’s had a large hand in the product and growth in some of New Zealand’s greatest tech exports, he was head of product for Trademe and that worked out pretty well. He did a similar role in the early days for Xero and that has worked out amazingly, it’s a global leader in software as a service. He was an early investor and board chair for Vend, where I first got to know him and work with him and see how much he did to help us grow. Then there’s Timely, where he’s an investor and director, and that company just announced a seven million dollar funding round to take their profitable company in scale. And those are just some of the greatest hits - we haven’t mentioned his latest work, Ron is one of those people who could’ve stopped long ago, but uses his social and financial capital to bolster the next wave of tech companies. And through his charitable foundation is also giving back in more traditional ways. This might make him seem finished u