Tom worked at Disney for over 27 years, serving as COO and CFO of the Walt Disney Company as well as Chairman of the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts worldwide. While CFO, Staggs was instrumental in purchasing Pixar as well as acquiring Marvel Entertainment. He left active duties at Disney in 2016. Last year Tom co-founded Candle media with longtime friend and colleague Kevin Meyer focused on acquiring creator-led content brands, including Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, Moonbug Animation, and Singapore's One Animation.
He is currently on the boards of Spotify and Weta Digital until they were acquired by Unity. Tom has long been a fan of New Zealand and is part of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship where he is in cohort 8.

NZVC partners Mark, Ajay, Glen, Vishal, and Andre will introduce themselves and speak about the origins of the fund, how they each became a part of it and why they are excited to be investing and working with Kiwi founders. We hope this is a fun session where GPs can share a bit more of their personal side and also take questions from founders and LPs.
Ajay will present a short overview of the fund to date, how many investments have been made, how much deployed, how much is remaining, and areas we're excited about.

Yoseph Ayele talks about the idea behind EHF and the impact it’s had to date.

A fireside chat looking at New Zealand’s rise as a tech powerhouse, what industries are particularly well suited to play to New Zealand’s strengths, and what we can expect to see in the next 10 years.

Over half of the NZVC portfolio companies will present a few slides about what they do, their growth plans and how the wider portfolio and LP base can support them on their journeys. Companies currently confirmed:

Jaan Tallinn started his career developing games with friends and classmates in Estonia. This eventually led to them creating P2P file sharing app Kazaa, and later Skype. Since exiting Skype, Jaan has been a prolific investor, including companies like Deep Mind which was responsible for creating AlphaGo (beating the world Go champion) and more recently AlphaFold (elucidating the structure of all known proteins). He spends most of his time thinking, speaking and writing about AI-induced existential risk to humanity. He is the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute as well as the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University.

Featuring NZVC portfolio companies Upstock, Firmsy and EasyRent, that are building and scaling software businesses out of NZ.

Featuring NZVC portfolio companies Dotterel, Zenno, KiwiFibre, Seachange on the advantages and challenges of creating deep-tech in NZ and exporting to customers all over the world.