Who are the Edmund Hillary Fellows?
Original article: nbr.co.nz
The New Zealand Government recently changed its investor class visa settings, prescribing tighter criteria around what assets investors can invest in while they go through the phases of applying for residency here.
The old rules meant someone had to invest at least $3 million for four years in bonds, equities, property or other investments, while the threshold for the Investor 1 category was $10m.
Someone who invests in equities and philanthropy will need to invest $15m to be eligible. If they invest in private or venture capital the threshold drops to $7.5m, and if they invest directly in a business they need only part with $5m to be eligible. The time in-country requirement has also been lifted from 88 to 117 days.
But, as Shoeshine wrote five months ago, there’s a path to residence that avoids any significant financial outlay, and does not prescribe any minimum stay in New Zealand aside from an initial entry requirement.
This Global Impact Visa (GIV) is accessible only to Edmund Hillary Fellowship (EHF) members, the latest cohort of which gathered in Wellington earlier this month for the first ‘EHF Welcome Experience’ to take place since the pandemic unfolded.
The group of 46 fellows from more than 33 different nationalities, including New Zealanders and foreigners – was gifted the name Ngā Manu Titi Rere Ao – which means ‘The flight of the shining birds of the world’ by mana whenua, Te Āti Awa Taranaki Whānui.
The welcome experience provides an introduction to New Zealand life for the foreign ‘shining birds’, and a chance for all fellows to connect over an intense three-day period.
Some attendees flew in for the occasion, and to initiate their Global Impact Visas before they lapsed, while others had already been living here through the pandemic and are nearly at the point of applying for residency.
In lieu of attending the welcome experience itself (which EHF preferred to keep as a closed event), Shoeshine thought it was worth chatting to a few fellows to get their take on the value of the fellowship and the attractiveness of the path to residence.
The tech entrepreneur
American-Ukrainian tech entrepreneur Mark Pavlyukovskyy arrived in New Zealand the week of the initial Covid lockdown in 2020 with only a short stay to attend the Welcome Experience in mind. Now, two and a half years later, he has lived in the Coromandel, Tauranga, Queenstown, and Nelson, started a New Zealand-focused venture capital fund called NZVC, and is applying for a permanent residence visa (PRV) with the help of a support letter from EHF – which puts his points tally at somewhere around 28.
Applicants need at least five points to gain EHF’s support for their PRV application. They also need to have activated their GIV by entering the country at least 30 months before applying for residence (but they could feasibly spend most of their time overseas).
The points system means that no matter where they are, they need to be contributing to New Zealand. For instance, contributing more than $4m – whether directly or through connections – to a Kiwi enterprise’s capital raising would net four points, while writing a thought leadership article for a local publication gets 0.5 (and just writing 10 articles won’t pass muster).
The scoring guidance is comprehensive and Pavlyukovskyy reckons it provides the kind of guidance that entrepreneurs like, without being too prescriptive – which is a core idea of the fellowship.
“It’s basically them saying: ‘Hey, here’s all the pieces. Which role do you want to play?’ … My purpose here is actually to help New Zealand become one of the leading tech ecosystems in the world, and the points are the first approximation of the pieces that are required for the roles and parts I can play.”
Would he have come to New Zealand if it wasn’t for the fellowship?
“Oh, no. I mean, I had no business being in New Zealand … I was exploring business opportunities in China in that tech space, I was spending time in Asia, and EHF popped up on my radar somehow … I definitely wouldn’t have ended up in New Zealand without EHF.”
Edmund Hillary fellow Benedict Perez.
The banker
After 30 years in the perpetual rat race of equity sales for an investment bank, Benedict Perez felt like he needed a change. He started to think outside the box, establishing a startup to help people with bad credit history get loans.
Then, in 2019, he suffered an assault – he calls it a “life altering moment” – leaving him with traumatic brain injuries which, by all appearances, he seems to have overcome. But he couldn’t overcome the feeling he was meant to do something more, and he set about redesigning his life.
As the pandemic kept him locked down in New York, unable to visit family in the Philippines, he latched onto the possibility of applying for the EHF. He had heard great things from his younger brother, Miguel, who is a fellow from the cohort inducted in October 2019.
He took the plunge and was approved on August 5, 2020 – almost exactly two years to the date that he actually arrived in Wellington for a long-awaited EHF Welcome Experience.
Edmund Hillary fellow Benedict Perez.
Perez jokes about wanting to reach New Zealand so badly during that time that he considered steering a waka across the Tasman. Now he’s finally arrived, he is three weeks into an eight-week trip around the country, and intends to also attend the Welcome Events scheduled for October and March next year in order to meet as many fellows as possible.
“That, for me, was the big differentiator between EHF and other programmes I was looking at. I could have easily probably done the Australian route because my daughter’s half Australian. I could have stayed on, being a US permanent resident.
“But I felt like it’s time for me to move on to a place where the social ethos was similar to something like this fellowship that I’d like to belong to, and the Edmund Hillary Fellowship was exactly what I was looking for.”
In terms of his contribution to New Zealand, Perez is already an adviser for EH Fellow Mark Bregman’s New Zealand-focused VC fund, Quidnet Ventures.
Perez runs a private investment firm called Inflo Capital Partners, which is focused on late-stage, high-growth pre-IPO companies in the Asia-Pacific region. He intends to start a New Zealand arm “maybe by October”. He also plans to start a pure New Zealand-focused fund investing in both private and public companies.
His investments ethos focuses on equality: “Anything that allows every human being to have access to the basic needs of credit, education, good water, fresh produce.”
Water Garden Organics
One of his current projects is Water Garden Organics, which claims to be building the largest organic leafy greens hydroponics venture in the US. His travels through New Zealand have already shown him the trend for regenerative agriculture needs to go hand in hand with agritech, so demand for food can be served even as organic farmland heals.
Perez is 100% keen to pursue his path to residency in New Zealand, saying – politically and socially – his adopted American home no longer feels comfortable.
“Here [in New Zealand] I can have a proper discourse about anything, it’s very respectful and we might have different views but we can still have a conversation and think about, OK, we disagree, but how do we make possible passive changes to improve the lives for everyone, not just for a certain group of people?”
Even Australia is too similar to the US, according to his 23-year-old daughter, who told him after visiting in 2019 she felt like New Zealand was somewhere she could “belong”.
The Learner First founder and Edmund Hillary fellow Joanne McEachen.
The teacher
The EHF isn’t just for foreigners. Joanne McEachen is a Kiwi who didn’t discover her entrepreneurial streak until she left New Zealand. Having been a teacher, principal, and Ministry of Education manager until 2012, McEachen then founded The Learner First – focused on designing educational systems that develop better outcomes around the world.
The Learner First founder and Edmund Hillary fellow Joanne McEachen.
But, sitting in her Seattle condo during Covid lockdown, it was the entrepreneurial introductions offered by the EHF that switched her on to coming home to continue her global ventures from Aotearoa.
“When I came back I was welcomed into to New Zealand differently than I would have been if I had not been part of EHF,” McEachen told Shoeshine while sitting alongside Perez via video link from Christchurch last week. “I feel like I’ve been so lucky because I’ve got all of these incredible mentors, people who are helping me to work through business ideas, work through challenges, and set up new, different ways of thinking.
“I've just had a huge opportunity in the States for my company over there and, because of the (EHF) Welcome Week. I've got seven people who are sitting right around me now and we’re just focusing on doing a whole big scale up. I could never have done that without EHF.”
“It’s like there’s this hotbed of young entrepreneurs in our country that are just hanging out – all of these incredible people – and we’re getting access to them. Some of the people I’ve met since being in EHF, my tongue hangs out because it’s like: ‘Wow, I wouldn’t ever have had the opportunity to meet them before’.”
McEachen is already channelling EHF’s efforts into education, having set up the Kia Kotahi Ako charitable trust as an alliance of fellows. It is importing solar panel suitcases in partnership with renewable energy companies owned by fellows, for use in the local school system.
Ecosystem builder and EH fellow Todd Porter.
The connector
One of the people that has McEachen’s tongue wagging is Todd Porter. The Tokyo-based social entrepreneur is a perennial globetrotter, but recently returned home from his first set of trips after a long Covid-induced break.
He had dreamed about visiting New Zealand since seeing Jacques Cousteau immerse himself in this country’s natural world decades ago.
But Porter tells Shoeshine he stopped travelling just for tourism’s sake about 20 years ago, and now – perhaps like his oceanographer idol – doesn’t really go anywhere unless he has a pathway to immerse himself in innovation, furthering his goals of building ‘collaborative ecosystems’ that solve the world’s problems.
So, it was only because of the collaboration promised by the EHF that he recently spent two weeks in New Zealand, is coming back with his Japanese wife in the summer for an extended visit, and intends to follow through on becoming a permanent resident.
Porter’s business partner Daniel Goldman’s experience as a fellow [Cohort 6] inspired him to join.
Both men are experts at assembling groups of early adopters and innovators around a common cause and getting the best out of them, so their praise for the fellowship’s form and function is well-informed.
Ecosystem builder and EH fellow Todd Porter.
Porter says the EHF and accompanying Global Impact Visa is one of the most innovative migrant programmes in the world. Start-Up Chile and Portugal’s ‘Golden Visa’ might be comparable, but New Zealand has a unique combination of factors in its favour.
“New Zealand has many aspirational qualities that excite the global creative class and then they created this programme, so those two together are super-powerful.
“I believe so much in countries’ need to … look at all sorts of diverse programmes and ways to activate leverage points in all the different capitals. Financial capital is one piece, but creative capital, knowledge capital, and so on, those are equally if not more valuable when they get added into the mix in the right way.”
Will the programme drive reliable outcomes for New Zealand?
Think about it like an investment portfolio, he says: the country should employ a range of approaches including paths for people willing to invest capital, start businesses, work seasonal jobs, and for high-level innovators to visit, stay, and become passionate about the place and its people.
Returns from that part of the portfolio may be “non-linear”, but they could also end up changing the world he says.
“One of the best strategies is to have an open source approach and involve a certain amount of diversity, and with a pull strategy that actually harnesses people like myself.
“You would have to pay me a lot of money to obsess about New Zealand” through a traditional consultancy pathway, Porter says. Beside the cost, such arrangements typically end up handicapped by bureaucracy, which means it’s “probably not going to get on my dance card, ever”.
“But if you think differently and create a pull strategy that’s right for New Zealand – that’s right for the times we live in – you can out-compete in a very asymmetric way and have people like me … with both my knowledge capital and my reputational capital, I can be constantly sifting as I interact with local fellows and the overall community.
“One specific connection may create tens of millions of hard dollar value as well as untold trajectory value that will, over the years, be an evergreen fruit.”
In terms of what he hopes to achieve in New Zealand, Porter is still in listening mode, but he has already begun helping McEachen to scale up her The Learner First business and is in early talks with property developer Porter Group (no relation) about expansion of its innovation hub at Remarkables Park near Queenstown.
He eventually hopes to establish a Creators Village – “a gateway and soft landing pad” – in New Zealand, of the kind he is starting in Japan, which he thinks would help multiply the effects of the fellowship.
He sees a world where Japan and other countries may follow New Zealand’s lead in establishing EHF-like programmes: “We’re not in a zero sum game, so if Japan creates a sister programme inspired by New Zealand, it actually completely adds to New Zealand’s street cred, media exposure, network flow, and so on.”
Edmund Hillary fellows at the most recent welcome experience in Wellington.
Basecamp for growth
More than 3000 people applied to become EHF Fellows over the pilot programme’s life, which stopped taking applications in September 2020. Now there are more than 500 fellows, of whom, about 400 are deemed international.
The EHF says fellows tend to exceed the five point minimum required for applying for residency, but it is also commissioning independent research to understand the impact all fellows are making, irrespective of their immigration status.
The idea espoused by the EHF’s founders – Americans Matthew and Brian Monahan and Joseph Ayele – that New Zealand can be a “basecamp for a better world” may sound like a convenient slogan, but it’s the kind of mantra that motivates innovators and early adopters to create a reality that matches.
It’s an antidote to New Zealand’s tall poppy syndrome, and one that can have real benefits for the Kiwi psyche, as well as the make good on the country’s reputation of being able to punch well above its weight.
Seeking to create ‘non-linear’ returns with the help of people who have been selected for their genuine desire to affect Aotearoa and the world should only be encouraged, in Shoeshine’s humble opinion.
(NB: Anyone can peruse the EHF directory for information on all 526 fellows.)