The Future of Capital in NZ | NZVC Portfolio Day

We think that's going to require about $5 billion of capital going into the market. 50,000 jobs and $50 billion of economic value to the country. We think that requires less than 5% of the current Kiwis Soviet balances. And New Zealand already punches above its weight thanks to the work of of many of you in this room including the NZVC group. New Zealand can actually be the next Israel, right? There can actually be like pretty consistently like one or two unicorns being produced here a year. Can I get a show of hands if you think tall poppy syndrome is real and holding New Zealand back? pretty much everyone in America. Failure is the fertilizer of success.

It is a necessary ingredient for things to be tried. Rocket Lab was born in a small island nation of 5 to 6 million people and it can be done again. Let's go and do it and see what happens. Ideas are worth like jack Absolute jack Like if you can't execute there's nothing. Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it. Love it. Wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud. New Zealanders don't know any better. They will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest.

Go to dream that ultimate dream like what is it that you ultimately want to do? And it's all achievable. So we got a few more investors on stage unfortunately now. Two really interesting ones. So we have James Pinner from NZGCP and Warren Chefer who just moved here kind of half. I'm sure you're going to talk talk more about this but why don't we start with a quick introduction. Um starting with James and following your introduction if you can give us a prediction for what you think is going to happen in the next 10 years in New Zealand venture that'd be really good. Hi yeah I'm James the CEO of NZ GCP. We're a government backed fund essentially established to to grow the New Zealand startup market.

We invest through two main funds. We have an Aspire seed fund which invests into early stage startups. We invest into over 300 companies now and we have the Elevate fund of funds which invests into some of the VC funds. Um so and then we're just launching a couple of new products to start growing the pipeline for both of those. So a scout program which is available to founders to at a very early stage the first check to co-invest alongside other matching capital and a very light well zero touch DD process for us. Um and an emerging manager fund of funds to grow next generation of VC funds. Um my prediction for the next 10 years, we we have a bold ambition for New Zealand.

We call it the five fives and this is over the next five years. So I'll come on to 10 years. Um so we believe New Zealand should have 5,000 startups. We currently have about 1,500. We think that's going to require about $5 billion of capital going into the market. 50,000 jobs and 50 billion billion dollars of economic value to the country and we think that requires less than 5% of the current Kiwis over balances. That percentage is actually dropping by the day. In 10 years, I think we'll the the idea is hopefully ends of GCP stepped that step back a long way from the market. We're here to support the market to grow and hopefully we can make ourselves redundant.

I think one of our plans is there'll probably still need to be some early stage funding required because I we'll come on to that. But I think government funding the very high highest risk stage probably will be an enduring necessity. But we're we're looking for much deeper pools of capital, much deeper from a broader range of VCs or with a broad range of investment strategies and styles which allows a broader range of diverse founders to to be able to start up and to go off the ground over time to fund that. We're hoping that we'll get more Cubisaver into and institutional investors into this asset class which will really scale up the VC funds and allow people to do more from New Zealand.

And and I think ultimately we've got we've got all the raw ingredients in this country. We've got the amazing talent and I think the growing ambition that we've um seen go over the last few years especially. So I think we have all the right ingredients and I think over the next 10 years we're going to start building that infrastructure scaling it up and allow us to to really to allow it to flourish and to see the economic impact you can have for the whole of New Zealand and globally. Hi everyone, I'm Warren. I'm a founder turned investor and as you might be able to tell by my accent, I'm not a Kiwi. I am fresh off the boat from San Francisco.

I relocated to Auckland about 2 months ago. Most recently, I've been a partner at a venture fund in San Francisco called PairVC. And PairVC alone manages over a billion dollars of capital. And I am very excited to be here. I married into the country. My wife was born here and have been coming here since 2017. But I'm not just here because I think it's a great place to spend time and be in nature and raise my kids. I actually think that New Zealand has the potential to be a leading startup hub around the world. And New Zealand already punches above its weight thanks to the work of of many of you in this room, including the NZVC group.

And and I should have actually first started by thanking you guys for putting this event together, for bringing so many founders and so many investors together to talk about what New Zealand where it is today and how it can be even better 10 years from now. So t typical American style, I'm going to actually go above James here and and actually say that we're not being audacious enough by just trying to increase things by by 5x. Although I think we're we're pretty much aligned in and kind of the trajectory, but in in terms of 10 years, I think that New Zealand can certainly invest 10 times more venture capital into the ecosystem than it does today.

I'm looking at your newspaper here that you guys printed out and it was something less than a billion dollar of capital invested into New Zealand the past year. I I think that can easily be 10 billion in 10 years and that the total enterprise value of the tech ecosystem in New Zealand can be 15x times or more. The the comp that I think about a lot is Israel. So it's a very similar country in terms of population. Israel has 30 times the amount of venture capital invested in that country relative to New Zealand. But it has many of the similar qualities. Very small local market, very talented engineering culture and needs to be building global from day one.

Israel's GDP per capita is more than 20% higher than New Zealand. I think New Zealand can certainly continue to punch above its weight and and I'm excited to to talk about how we can do that over the next 10 years. What from the first impressions that you had of the ecosystem here, what are the biggest surprises? I think Kiwis tend to be humble to a fault and there's so much raw talent here but often and you know again I've just come from being an investor in San Francisco and because I'm partial to Kiwis I get a lot of Kiwis coming to pitch me and often times they underell themselves so dramatically relative to Americans that that they are at a disadvantage and I think Kiwis need to to think even bigger than they do already.

James, you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I guess I'm I'm an immigrant as well, so I came over from the UK about 13 years ago. So, it is it's amazing to see how the market's grown, but I completely echo the point around you go to to San Fran in particular and and the most audacious, brave Kiwi sounds like them is more humble than the most h most um any American out there. So, we have to It's true. And the VCs over there know that they they always, you know, you give them projections and they'll scale them back cuz you're you're an American, you're massively scaling. we go to with our conservative approach and a conservative outlook and well we scale that back because that's all we're used to hearing.

So we instantly get dismissed at in some degrees in the US. So I think a lot of that is is just being exposed to to more of that more of that ambition, more of that scale. When we look at some of the fundraising rounds going on here, yeah, they're they're growing. They're 1020 million rounds. In the US, those would be 100 $200 million rounds. We we need to surround ourselves and connect more into that ambition and that visibility of it. I mean, I would maybe push back on both of you guys and say, "Hey, well, I think you can't just get to 100x in in a single day or a single week or a single year.

You sort of get on a trajectory and I think Israel got there over over decades, right? And there were other factors like being constantly at war, rightly or wrongly, being constantly under threat that that kind of focus the country. There's mandatory military service that that kind of builds strong bonds of young people, right, to then go and work together." And so so similar in some ways to Ukraine now where you don't have the resources so you have to use technology to to win in the battlefield or whatever. So I guess I think the real question isn't like is it is is New Zealand behind or not but it's the question is how is New Zealand growing fast enough and is or is it growing at the right rate right are all the kind of pieces in place whereas like okay great I think everyone understands who's thought about this New Zealand can actually be the

next Israel right there can actually be like pretty consistently like one or two unicorns being produced here a year. Now the question is like are all the pieces in place to now now get us there? Like are we or are we still blocked? Are people still not aligned? That that's maybe like I would reposition it. The data that I've seen shows that New Zealand's productivity lags much of the OECD. And so that needs to change for GDP capita to to improve. And there's an opportunity right now with what's happening with AI for economies to lean into that to transform themselves. And I think what New Zealand might think of as a disadvantage is actually an advantage, which is it's a small country that's very cohesive.

The government is accessible. So New Zealand can do a lot to accelerate its growth. Yeah. And and I I think you're right. There are there a lot of similarities with Israel, but there's also a lot of differences. I think what we have to focus on is the similarities that enable us. And we have so we have this remoteness is actually potentially a superpower. We have amazing engineering, science, innovation happening in this country. We punch well above our weight as has been mentioned. Um the reality is these things do take time. So when I look at the getting institutional capital into this market, the reality is that's going to require 10 15 VC funds for proven track records fund after fund.

Otherwise an institutional investor isn't going to look at a portfolio of New Zealand VCs and say okay I I want to put as part of my portfolio. So that will come. The trajectory will come. is on the right way and we're going to get there. It's just going to take a bit of patience. But in the meantime, there's lots of other great things happening and and we've got to just keep building that momentum. The flywheel and the we call it a halo effect of when you see those great successes inspires the whole nation. So people have now heard of Rocket Lab. They' heard of Zero before. They had to wait 10 years for Rocket Lab to turn up.

And now everyone's you know the general public, we all talk in our little room of startups and VCs, but the general public need to get behind this. They need to be the ones telling their sick Kiwi savers and the government to to put money behind this whole system. The productivity thing is an issue that New Zealand's been trying to f to solve for I don't know 30 40 years and it never has. The reality is and McKenzie sort of published this this data quite recently that a small number of companies can have a disproportionate effect and can actually change a whole nation's outlook. You look at the the top 20 largest companies on the NASDAQ, they have transformed the American economy and then obviously the flow down effects and the impact of that.

You get people inspired by what Rocket Lab's doing or working for Rocket Lab and becoming millionaires now want to go and do their own startup and we're seeing that flywheel the second third generation of companies coming out of Rocket Lab. So those halo effects will build that momentum and build that flywheel. Um and we just need to just keep building on it but it will take time and we need to be prepared that you know startups like any startup journey takes a long time. I I just want to echo that startup ecosystems build upon themselves and I think that New Zealand has already proven that it can build really big important companies like Rock Lab, like Zero, many others on the way like Halter and Partley.

And that's the hardest part is that first initial unicorn decacorn company and I think that's going to be continuing to compound and that's why I'm here as an investor and why I think more international investors are going to follow. So if you think about New Zealand as a as a startup, right? And you want to get to five five billion. Warren, you want to get to 50 billion. Um 10 10 first. So So like, okay, imagine you're you're kind of in charge of, you know, New Zealand is basically your startup. You guys are the founders. Like what what what needs to happen? What do you need to have happen for us to get to that that that stretch goal of 50?

I think it's already happening. The the good news is is that we're postproduct market fit as a startup, right? We've proven that as an ecosystem big companies come from New Zealand. This the really interesting and encouraging stat is the enterprise value created relative to the venture dollars in in New Zealand is 11 times. So if you were to invest have invested in every startup company in New Zealand your return would be 11x which is an incredible great return for for venture. And now we just need to to accelerate it I think is the question. And so like a typical startup what we're saying is hey we've got product market fit. We need to now put more fuel on the fire and accelerate the trajectory that we're already on.

And James, I think you've worked more with the government to to bring in capital. I I could maybe talk more from the private investor institutional side, but maybe you have some thoughts on the on the government side. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think if we didn't have the raw talent, then this would be a different conversation. But we do we have the entrepreneurs, the ambition, we have emerging managers, emerging startups coming through, and we've seen great successes. So it is now we've proven we can do it. We now need to make make it repeatable and scalable. As you said before, as I said before, my my goal isn't to do this as a government job for, you know, forever.

We want to make ourselves redundant. But I do think government plays an important part in getting us to that. And I think whether that's funding the science and research and innovation, whether it's funding that commercialization of that, whether it's in the short term funding some of the catalyzing more money into the VC until it's a proven asset class. I think that will will need to happen. Capital is one answer. The other part is we need to build the capability. So we need to have the right education system to encourage entrepreneurship in schools and get kids doing science in schools and coming out and building that flywheel of more startups. We need to be able to bring in the right capability and talent from overseas and that goes from both startups and also to to investors.

We need investors doing this for 10 20 years. It's a long game to actually build those skills. So that takes time and we need the culture the culture of you know we have a you know very famous tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand where it's kind of you're damned if you do damned if you don't if you succeed well we don't like you cuz you're a big showy off thing or you fail so I told you you'd fail you're too risky. So we have to change that culture and it is changing in some of the media some of the media that covers startups at least they are really supportive of us. We need to embrace failure as investors.

We need to embrace storytelling behind the failures because doing something really disruptive and really difficult is more than likely to fail. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. That's how we change the world and how we change the economic trajectory of this country. I think that's such an important point. I'm so curious from the audience as a newbie to New Zealand. Could I get a show of hands if you think tall poppy syndrome is real and holding New Zealand back? What would you say? Pretty much everyone. Yeah. I I think going back to your question about as a new person in the country, what am I noticing? And I I do think that if you could wave a wand and remove that cultural fear of failure, I think that's so important for a startup ecosystem to truly thrive.

And in America, failure is the fertilizer of success. It is a necessary ingredient for things to be tried, for people to learn from it, and to say, "Hey, you fell off the horse. Get back on and try again." And I I hope that everyone in this room can think about how do we start to chip away at the tall poppy uh culture if we truly want to accelerate the trajectory of New Zealand being a startup powerhouse. Yeah. And I I I I would say that I don't think the tall poppy is is is is is unnatural. I think most places have some version of it because most places don't really see what well most people work regular jobs and they do the same thing and then things are linear versus in places that are kind of explosive startup startup hubs you see what the power law results in right and NSF is a complete outlier

in that and so like you know you see every every kind of other person started a company raised money and like raising a couple million dollars in in San Francisco is like that's a normal thing that's like if you really step back and think about that and you think raising a couple million dollars is a normal thing. you go to a party every everyone's like a VC or founders raise and that that's not normal for for the and but and the way the way that becomes normal right is is is like you keep doing it you have exits and you have enough capital and so I think the way you sort of catalyze that is you have small like a small nucleus of people who are building startups who have exits who like all kind of like speak the same language and kind of grows from there right so I think these kinds of events

other types of events in the startup community are really important to to get people in a room with others and to and to feel like what I'm doing is actually normal it's it's okay playing for high stakes very likely to fail but that's just what the game is and yeah I'm curious comments on that just quickly on that yeah the there's there's normally four C's and when you talk about building a solar system I mentioned capital capability culture the other one is connectivity we did some external research done a couple years ago New Zealand are fantastic at connecting people you know we're two good degrees of separation away from the prime minister let alone you know someone that can help you in in your fund um or company but we're terrible at asking for Kiwis can make the connections and but they they don't get to the point of actually asking for help.

So have lots of coffees, have lots of conversations, but we've got to be bolder and bra. You know, people are willing to help. People, as you said, you know, overseas people have an affinity with Kiwis and want to help them, but we have to actually take that next step and and do that. But, you know, being remote, that's one of the things we need to work on and we're seeing more of the VC funds um setting up offices overseas, building that connectivity. It's not just a, you know, once and done. pop in and see someone and now I've got a lifelong sort of relationship with that person. As a startup, exactly the same. You've got to be in market.

You've got to be talking to potential customers. You've got to be talking to the potential talent you want to hire, building those connections. And it takes time and it does take money. And that's probably one of our biggest disadvantages at the moment is we sort of we have this legacy issue that we we can do things on the cheap in New Zealand, but actually it's harder. Okay, talent's a little bit cheaper domestically, but we have to fly more often. We have to be overseas. we've still got to hire those really good expensive people to compete with our other competitors. So actually we need to fund companies more at the earlier stages as well to allow them to build that connectivity.

I was curious I think you said we have product market fit in New Zealand. What is it like when you have product market fit? Usually it gets very easy to pitch that product in one line like what should what's what's New Zealand venture like how do you pitch it in SF when you speak to your friends speaking as wearing my American VC hat venture capital is a power law business has everyone who raise your hand if you've heard somebody say that before most people right it means that big companies pay for the losses of a lot of other investments New Zealand has produced big companies rocket lab I think is last I checked a $40 billion US market 5070 it's a very big company and it was born in a small island nation of 5 to 6 million people and it can be done again because of what we were talking about this ecosystem so

many people have seen the rocket lab success story are spinning out to create their own version of the next rocket lab and we can accelerate that by capital community capability and what was the fourth culture. Absolutely. And on the connectivity piece, what you're doing here, bringing people together. How many founders are in the room? Raise your hand. Founders. Okay. You guys should be friends with each other. The number one piece of advice that I give to founders who want fundraising advice is make friends with somebody who is one or two steps ahead of you because they have just recently successfully gone through the fundraising process. They're going to know which investors might be a good fit for you, which ones aren't.

And I think that's something that we can encourage here too and will just strengthen the product market fit that New Zealand has because great founders have built great companies here, they can continue to pay it forward. I think there was a similar question from the audience that's asking specifically about the um the kind of sector. So should Israel for example is very well known for deep tech and defense for for obvious reasons. What should New Zealand be known for? Is it is it deep tech as well James or Warren as well? I'm hesitant to limit things. It's it's sort of we can't we are a small country so we can't be good at everything. I think we're all aware of that.

But at the same time, who predicted the space industry? I know lots of people now claim they did, but no one did. Um we have to be opportunistic to allow the Peter Beex or whatever next is there. That said, we have clear areas where we are strong and I think the deep tech and the you look at the what the engineering schools and some of our strengths around that that's an area where we can do health tech is an area we're seeing more industrial clean tech. I think there are areas we should get behind and back but I don't think we should be exclusive to say you know we won't definitely won't do this sector that sector we need to have that opportunity and more capital with more different investment strategies to allow different kind of companies to to take off I would yes and that which is there there are always new industries that

are created with new technology uh deep tech was out of favor for a long time in Silicon Valley it was considered a capex was considered a dirty word and that thinking is starting to change especially as we're seeing a lot of consolidation and the AI software only space venture is starting to think about physical world as the next frontier of venture potential companies. So I think New Zealand is well positioned already has had success there and many of the people who have been at a halter or a rocket lab and many of the engineers in New Zealand have that physical atom capability and I think that is a strength worth leaning into. Maybe question about once a company starts seeing some signs of success, starts scaling, pretty much every company has to go offshore, right?

And it's easier to raise money, it's more capital offshore. So, so, so, so like in that framework, right, of the framework of how, you know, we want to invest whatever 5 billion or 50 billion, whatever the number is, and create lots of companies. How do you envision that? Is that is that companies that go offshore but still going to have a base here, an R&D base? Is it is is it that they just like Yeah. What does that in your mind look like? Right. Because most of these companies, Rocket Lab is a publicly listed US company, right? Is is it just like, okay, cool, we'll eventually just have an engineering base here and most of the R&D here, but the sales and global kind of partnerships, everything just scales out of US and Europe.

What's what's the model you think that the most companies would take? Most big companies are global. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, they have offices all over the world. And so New Zealand companies should be no different in my in my mind. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think you know we want these companies to be successful and giving them the best chance of success will often mean getting the talent from overseas, getting the capital from overseas, getting access to overseas markets. The markets are without doubt much bigger overseas. Um, that said, I think you you sort of hit it in your your question which is most companies have to go overseas. So, what we would like is the choice so that they can choose when to go overseas.

Um, it's not about not going into an overseas market. It's more about when do I need to go and raise offshore money? Can I can I do more here? And they may ultimately still go overseas. We've seen lots of Kiwi founders start up their business overseas and being very successful. Um you look at Substack and Euro and others. So I don't think it's it should be exclusively we want certainly not about keeping them here and forcing them to stay here, but also I've seen lots of really good models to your point of well we can keep the R&D facilities here. We can keep that high paid engineering talent here and have all our sales people overseas and different offices around the world.

a company that some of you may have heard of called Power by Proxy, which was bought by Apple quite a while ago, created all the um the charging and the wireless charging in your iPhones that you're using now. Apple set up one of its only only two of its global R&D facilities outside of America in Oakland. That company now hires lots of people and pays more tax than the acquisition costs of that purchase annually. There can be great examples even with purchases that bring talent here. Yeah, on that example, I I think the other company that Apple bought and kept the office is actually in Israel. And what I've heard is there's something like 160 employees for Power by Proxy in New Zealand.

There was a similar amount of people at the company that in Israel that office is now over a thousand people. And the Israeli government actually leaned in and said, "Hey, we're so glad you bought this company. We want to we want to what can we do to actually increase the amount of investment that you're putting here?" So, there are opportunities. You know, again, we have product market fit. Now, it's a question of how do we accelerate, how do we grow faster and lean into the strengths that New Zealand has. Yeah. And that that goes a little bit into one of the questions from the audience as well in terms of what the government's role is here, right?

You mentioned the in the case of Israel, they sometimes step in because they say we want the talent to be here, want them to pay taxes here. James, your pitch for NZGCP is is often that you say we don't have enough early stage capital, so we need the government to kind of start that and in 10 years hopefully we can step back. How do you think about growth capital because that's clearly missing in New Zealand as well and people are going overseas to get it. Should the government step in? Maybe I can just throw in a very contrarian take here before you answer. But because I remember when we first met you in 2021, I think your you know rem was to actually invest in a growth funds and that was exactly your thing about there's not enough series A funds, growth capital is missing.

I I thought well actually you don't need to provide the growth capital by that time. the company should actually go offshore and raise money. And like what I thought was actually needed was early stage funding to invest in a folks who are not who are not even thinking of starting a company, right? Because you can't compete with like the the peer pair VCs or like the Sequoas or whatever for the series A series B plus like you're obviously going to take their money over some New Zealand VC fund money, right? But but but on the seed on the seed stage, that's actually exactly where a New Zealandbased fund could play because they uniquely know the company that So I don't know that that's my quick sort of so anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. Um I think government does play a role in in being the biggest risk taker in the market. So generally we government should intervene in my opinion where the private capital doesn't want to go there yet. So where we we're happy to fund as a nation science and pure research and then MD have to then fund the very the very first check. So you see this globally DARPA still does this in the US with defense sort of technology. Israel definitely does the early stage things. They do incubators. They do accelerators. So I think there's always an element there where we're backing at the moment is also that sort of the riskiest element of and there's a lot of VCs in the room but they are still risky investments into VC funds.

So we're investing in those until they've got proven track records and then that's when we think the institutional investors will come in. So I think there is a role of catalyzing the market getting the market moving and d-risking it to some degree. How much of that is permanently required is debatable but even as a in the science system alone we we fund about half a percentage of GDP. The OECD average is 2% of GDP. We're four times under capitalizing our entire science system. And then you look at all the other elements. If we want to be globally competitive, we're under underinvesting as a nation in this. If we really want to transform an economy and have the hospitals and infrastructure and schools that we want, we have to grow away there and this is the clearest pathway to grow.

Another quick question from the audience on the AIP visa. So what's been the effect? I mean you you've probably seen it firsthand. What's been the effect of the active investor plus visa and how do you think this going to continue over the next few years? A lot of money in private credit. So yeah, it was set up originally to there was a two-track pathway for those you don't know it. If you're an overseas investor, you can put 10 million into your bonds and your safe assets or you can put 5 million into growth assets and that was there to stimulate the growth sectors um in New Zealand. Rightly or wrongly, that's a lot of that's going into private credit and and very little so far has flown into the VC world.

It's it's great. I think we are seeing pools of it going in there, but at the moment I think I'm not sure it's sort of fully mid. No, don't get me wrong, private credit, some of that is going to early stage companies, just not the companies we're hoping for. So, um, we'd hope that will change over time. Is there risk that it artificially blows up the um the amount that's available to startups in New Zealand that shouldn't get funded? Not at this stage. Very little of going into BC at all, I think. What What have you guys found, Mark and Hendrickk, in terms of it being attractive for for the fundraising? Yeah, it's definitely helped.

I think for folks who are on the on the fence about things, it helps they get New Zealand residency as part of it. Yeah. One one kind of, you know, question that maybe you think about that that I'm kind of noticing right in a lot of Western countries, cost of living, the kind of K-shaped economy that that's driving a lot of lot of voters to to kind of lean very hard to the left. And I think you're seeing a little bit of that here in New Zealand. You saw as a classic example is Andami in in New York. seeing a little bit from what I understand like you know a little bit of that here as well and and and a lot of those folks you know I don't know how how excited they are about funding startups or or the idea of startups and growth and like kind of like growing our way out

of out of you know the debt that a lot of western countries now have yeah so so how do you how do you think about that right there are going to be successes and when those successes show up and people create billion dollar companies there going to be people who are not going to be part of that and so they're going to be like like and people in the US they're they think like some of these people who make the the AI labs like Sam Alman and and Daario, they're hated by a lot of people even though they've they've created these these these crazy amazing technologies, right? There there's just a level of that. And so I'm New Zealand right now is a very slightly left-leaning egalitarian country.

How do you think the country changes once you start having that that outcome that we we hope that it has that there's many many billion dollar companies, lots of lots of success, but not necessarily very evenly distributed? Yeah, it's a tough challenge and I think we have an opportunity to do this differently in New Zealand. So, we are a small country. We all, you know, it's a well-connected community and and we can do things differently. I I think even with the most ambitious dreams, I don't think we're at the sort of level of US trillionaires and and Elon Musks of this world, but there will be an inequality. At the same time, I see a lot of opportunity for, you know, we have an inequality problem already in this country and Maria is significantly underrepresented in the workforce in founders.

Same with females, same with Asian founders. So there are opportunities if we create more more successful businesses and create more jobs and put the right support systems around it, right education systems and and everything else behind it that we actually have an opportunity to do this differently and to level up level up. So I think that would be my hope for it. As kids, we're often offered, do you want to have pie or do you want to have ice cream, right? Choose one of these things. And I think that we should in general try to reject false dichotoies and I want to have pie and ice cream. So I think that we should strive for broad prosperity in this country and that means growing the pie and and I think we want that to be you know on at the political level distributed in some way that feels fair as a society because I think

you're right to flag inequality as a big risk for for everybody and for the cohesion which makes New Zealand so special. Yeah. And I guess all I was saying was if you if you look at the US, which is many years ahead, that that's not turned out in some in some pockets not turned out well. I don't know what the alternative I don't know. I don't I don't think you can argue for no growth. I just think that New Zealand already has fallen on a GDP per capita. At one point it was number three. I think it's number 25 or 30 now. And it's not good for an economy to to be in a recession.

And I think New Zealand maybe, again, I'm new here, but it's just coming out of a recession. And the goal for economic growth is to to find a way to have healthy growth and that a rising tide can lift all the boats in the economy. The other sort of part of our economy as well is we are heavily reliant on primary industries and have to as an as a country we should be factoring in the risk factors in that we've seen climate events. We that's that's happening now. We we see you know hopefully future trends in alternative proteins and and so on which could disrupt our our core industries of our business. So even from a diversification point of view, this is a sector that we need to get behind.

We have uh elections coming up in New Zealand as well. I'm sorry I said no politics, but there's there's one probably one more question on it. Just if you had one whoever is going to be elected and whoever is going to lead the country, if you had one wish to the new government, what would it be? Invest more ultimately. I think you know we need that the science and innovation system is massively underfunded as I said and I think we need that those next stages of those higher risk elements that the government should be funding and getting behind. Um we're doing a lot of stuff ourselves to try and sort of connect government and have a more cohesive way of delivering the stuff.

If we keep doing more of that actually there's there's a really good chance that we can actually deliver on the promise. Yeah. R&D feels very underfunded in New Zealand. It's that's 1.3% of GDP. In the US it's 3 and a half%. So that feels like an obvious area of opportunity for stimulating growth for the whole country. Yep. That's very clear policy advice. Cool. Thanks. Any other questions that we missed from the audience? Anyone wants to jump in? No. Tall Poppy syndrome here. Great. Well, then thanks so much for doing this with us and yeah, we'll see you around later. Thank you for tuning in to TechMates. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share with friends.

We'll be back soon with more stories of Kiwi and Aussie founders reshaping the future and disrupting Down Under. Until next time, keep dreaming big and daring to disrupt.