Auckland's Mayor to Founders: "Skip the Valley, Come Here"
Mark Pavlyukovskyy and Hendrik Remigereau host TechMates, the NZVC podcast. The guest on this episode is Wayne Brown, Mayor of Auckland, and it went out on 17 August 2026.
Hendrik and Mark sit down with Wayne Brown, Mayor of Auckland, a trained engineer who put half a million of his own money into a mayoral campaign and won twice. Brown recounts restoring Auckland's power after the 1998 grid failure and overhauling the city's flood preparedness, and explains his rule of going back to first principles, finding the engineers and ignoring the lawyers. He is halfway through a campaign of 100 days, 100 startup T-shirts and 100 short videos ahead of Auckland Startup Week, and argues Auckland already has the next 25 Halters and Rocket Labs in plain sight. His pitch to founders is that Auckland is safe, cheap, well connected to Asia and rich enough to enjoy once you have made it.
- Auckland as a startup hub: why Brown believes the city is home to the next generation of global breakout companies, and what it is missing to make that undeniable.
- 100 days of startups: the story behind the T-shirt campaign, what surprised him, and which companies he would put his own money into.
- Engineers vs. lawyers: why putting lawyers and accountants in charge of cities, boards and grids is the root cause of most institutional failures.
- Floods, power grids and crisis management: how Auckland went from the world's least prepared city for storms to the most prepared in four years.
Auckland, Auckland Startup Week, Startup Ecosystem, NZ Tech, Founders, Asia Pacific