The Techstars Co-Founder on What NZ Gets Right

The main reason we invested in Sparro was it was just really cool. Company maybe went from 10 million in revenue to 150 million in revenue in 12 months. Every company I've ever worked in has had at least one near-death experience. Many of the companies died, but all the successful ones had at least one near-death experience. I'll be there as long as you don't lie to me. If you lie to me, I'm done. There's a difference between screwing up and lying. Y'all were helpful in a couple of introductions. Everybody kind of knows each other. They're not playing a zero sum game. We were talking earlier when you even three or four years ago there weren't that many funds, right?

There's not enough funds, right? There's enough startups. Most people in the US know Rocket Lab. Superbase would be another one that I think most people in the US, at least if you're a developer, you've heard of that came from here. Oh, Super Base came from New Zealand. Let's go and do it and see what happens. Ideas are worth like jack Absolute jack Like 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 it. 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. Brad, welcome to Techmates. Great to be here at your place in Wanuka. Thanks for thanks for hanging out. Why not? Yeah, absolutely. Great location. This is our first actually in person recording. So, um we'll see how this goes. All your recordings so far have been Zoom. Yeah. Fine. I like to be first at things, so why not? Yeah. Perfect. See, we'll see if the lawn mower stop us. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

Um so, maybe we'll we'll we'll kick off. We we actually first got connected in 2017, I believe, when I was building Piper. And um you were an early investor from Little Bits and Sparro um a lot of those companies. Your your your thoughts on that space? uh you invested into some of these edtech companies, several based in Boulder. Um maybe we'll start there. Like why'd you invest was the thinking? Yeah, I wasn't I wasn't super deliberate about edtech as an investment. We we invested in Sparro in 2010 and the main reason we invested in Sparro was it was just really cool. They had invented a robotic ball and a robotic ball was technically really hard to do as evidenced by the fact that there's still only one of them.

Now the total if you think about the physics of it for a second and you go back to 2010 not even it's so hard today in 2026 but in 2010 there were so many different things you write sphere be able to be remote controlled by a smartphone in addition to sort of all of the sort of technical marginal things like Bluetooth connectivity was shitty you had to inductively charge it that wasn't a thing yet the control system for something like that on a device like a phone and and figuring out how to deal with the control system with the latency back and forth in terms of communication was hard. And then, you know, it's a lot easier to get a robot to move if the robot like has tire treads than if it's a ball.

Like, it's a lot more predictable if it's constrained in different dimensions. So, you know, the the three founders of the company, Adam, Ian, and Paul Babarian, were just obsessed with this robotic ball. And like the sense of where it could go as a market, nobody had any idea. So that that was really the driver. It come through Techstars and one of the early Techstars programs. Yeah. The the EDU vector came much later and I think it came they had this huge rise up with with Disney and with BB-8 because their ball was essentially the product that became BB-8. And I mean it was dramatic. Company maybe went from 10 million in revenue to 150 million in revenue in 12 months.

Wow. Sounds like an AI company today. Yeah. And it was it was profitable, but it was a very challenging very challenging period of time. The the other side of it though was they had a business within their business and maybe it went from 20 to two to 150. It's like a $10 million business by that point when BBA came out that was an education business where educators were buying the product to help learn coding and that had become a category. your business with Piper was in that category where there were venture venture funds funding that category. There a bunch of startups that were making robotic things that would help kids learn. Um, and we had separately invested in this company, Little Bits, which was essentially teaching kids electronics and how to do electronics and modeling and very simple stuff that could then be complex.

And they they were the same. They had some plenty of DIY, plenty of hobbyist customers and like a segment that was EDU based. And I think it wasn't until the other side of interest in hardware that it was that the other part of that business was the toy business. Yeah. Which is very much a hit driven business and a business you have to refresh continually. like the durable long-term kind of business, especially if you have any kind of recurring revenue associated with it versus just an individual product sale. But that that didn't really come together until around COVID 2019 2020. So for me, when I think about that category for us, we were very comfortable investing in hardware companies.

We had a lot of success as a firm in that. One of the historical big successes a lot of people know as Fitbit where we were an early investor there. current success that's a very large one is Whoops where we were relatively early investor there. We're investors in Makerbot. We're on the 3D robot uh the 3D printing side we're investors in Makerbot and today we're investors in Formlabs which is incredibly successful still private company uh in 3D printing. So we we were always comfortable with that as an part of our investment strategy. Yeah. Um there's probably a period of time 2016 17 18 where we overinvested in that did too many of that at the time because you extrapolate from I had success with this and so you keep doing it and it's very very hard to have success in those kinds of businesses but if you have clarity of what you're trying to build

you know what you're going after in terms of your market and you really have an essentially a hardware invention that is very hard to duplicate you can make a lot of progress my learnings from that whole time. I think at the time, love to hear your thoughts. At the time, there was this kind of idea that everyone's going to become a maker and everyone's going to have a 3D printer and people are going to be making their own stuff and little bits was part of that. I think Makerbot was kind of building that idea. We we were trying to with Piper empower kids to start building hardware. And looking back, I think I mean the making the maker fair kind of went out of business shut down and I think that that vision didn't quite come to be.

I think looking back also is to your point, we basically were making kind of all of us a little bit Miro Viper making kind of like interesting kind of like toys that were kind of educational driven business some point Ace changed. Yeah. Became kind of this EDU business. Um that was sort of you know powered by cheap electronics. They could build hardware cheaply because of smartphones and proliferation of that of that kind of like supply chain. How did your thinking on that whole area change and evolve? Well, it's interesting part of it is I don't think the premise is flawed. I think the way people went after it, especially with funding and how some companies and and investors approached the funding of it in hindsight was pretty clearly flawed.

So there was this idea that you you know you start with your product and then you put a lot of money against sales and marketing in the same way you would with a software company. And I think many venture investors really, whether it was suspension of disbelief or just didn't understand the complexity of making a thing, actually physically manufacturing a thing. And frankly, I think we're seeing it play out again with physical AI. And you've got a bunch of investors, you have more investors today, I think, that understand the complexity of making a thing, not just inventing it, but then actually producing it in in any sort of scale, right?

and all of the challenges not just with manufacturing but with supply chain with components with parts with the latency as you're trying to build enough of the thing of course you know and the geopolitical geopolitical economic stress and all this stuff is part

of the soup of a hardware product and I think you had a lot of software investors including investors had vertical focus like EDU investors but who were fundamentally software investors who didn't take into account all that soup I think then you had a lot of founders who were very very good promoters who didn't necessarily think very hard about how to create a financially sustainable business that would have frankly an economic return, right? And so you had the situation where you had uh venture capital doing what it does which is put more money in the thing. You have founders, charismatic ones in some cases who are good at getting more money in the thing, right? But then underneath it, you didn't really have a thing.

You might have had a product and you might have sold the product to a bunch of people, right? The biggest tell that was happening at this period of time once you started to see these companies scale was what was the gross margin of the business, right? And was the easiest tell. If the gross margin of the business was 50% or better, you're in good shape. Yeah. And between 40 and 50, okay, you're fine. You can get to 50, you're in good shape. Yeah. And once you're below 40, you're So, so is the right strategy to invest in hardware to not overinvest until you hit that margin until you figure out the supply. It became more complicated because then you have it's it's it's a good leading question, but you had the another problem which is, oh, here's what a SAS model looks like.

Here's what recurring revenue looks like. So, let's try to figure out how to add that onto my hardware business. So, buy my piece of hardware and give me subscription money as well. Right? And I [clears throat] I I learned a lot about the wrong part of doing that from my Fitbit experience. Fitbit was extraordinary at at selling product and building new product and coming out with new product on a very fast pace and grew very quickly through that. And the subscription part of Fitbit's business was an absolute a afterthought. I remember when we were getting close to going publicly talked about 50 50 million active users at the time went public something like that. Wow.

Um, and the whole conversation was if we can get another dollar from those users every year, that's another $50 million to bomb. I mean, bottom line, like 80 90% margin. And if we get $10, if you get $10 from 10% of them, it's another 50 million. We just could never prioritize that in a way that was compelling part of the product. And you even look at it today, you know, sort of many years later with with Fitbit, which is still a hardware product with that, you know, as part of Google with that underneath it. You compare that today to a business comes out with new products on a regular basis but not frequently every couple years has nice step function leaps up with the new products but really is focused on using software and data to increase the value for the user on a continual basis.

Do you think that's a function of the hardware and getting good enough to offer you a value on the subscription side on the actual like data information insights part? No, I think it's a business philosophy. Okay. I think it's a business philosophy of being userdriven. Do you think Fed could have actually offered Absolutely. It's it's being userdriven rather than product driven. It's being focused on the innovation. The product innovation matters a lot, but the real long-term value is the user engagement, which by the way is kind of obvious. Like I say that and I kind of laugh at myself for saying something. Duh. But in in the world of hardware, people lost sight of it.

How much did you sell? how much went into the channel, how much right, it's like how much went into the channel, how much did people buy out of the channel and how much did they activate and how much do they actually use it on the other side of it? And if they're not really using it much on the other side of it, how do you think you're going to be able to sell them a monthly subscription? Because that doesn't work on if somebody tries a thing on software and tries it for a couple of days and doesn't get value out of it, they stop using it. So I I think there's like this gap in in the thinking and I think the founders that had the philosophy of I'm going to be completely obsessed about my product and my users and again we have we have two today in our portfolio that is very easy

to point to that are very very successful hardware companies where that's the the philosophy of the CEO who in both cases is the founder I mentioned just a second ago is obsessed obsessed about user value obsessed about the product innovation, but the product innovation is not just a thing I wear on my wrist. The product innovation is the whole thing. But but but to that point, user value comes from a user actually valuing something. Users, I mean, a lot of times we as people, we were mimemetic creatures, right? If other somebody's doing something, we value it more than if nobody's doing it. And we've had now kind of a culture last postco like this is on on health hacking like like I think this newer generation a lot of focus on alcohol.

There's like a renewed focus. I guess what I'm saying is is it also partially that the environment into which we launched is different culturally than what Fitbit launched into and what people actually valued was different. Yeah, I'm sure it evolved. But if I compare those two, I remember when we invested in Fitbit, the mockery, which is always a sign that you invested in something good, is when other people make fun of you. Uh the mockery was who cares how many steps they take a day. And and this is back to your how what's the level of technology? to a level of technology at that point was how many steps did you take a day and that was actually quite interesting to people because you could then say well how many steps you take a day has a correlation whether it's validated or not to your health walk more right and so very coar grain thing

and over time that coar grain thing had more precision now there's it's a very interesting thing to compare to at that time was I'm a long-distance runner I also had a garment and I used to have one of was Garmin. I don't know if people remember them, but they're this long cuz that was how big the GPS used to be. It was a Garmin 205 or something like that. And it was amazing. It was amazing that I had GPS on my wrist and I would go for a run. It was precise. And you know, it took Garmin a long long time because they're not a software company to start to actually understand that what the user wanted was a bunch of stuff, not just the raw data, insights, but the insights.

And then if you like again compare those things as they've evolved and I've been used I have I have running data going back to like the early 2000s you know the kind of data that existed heart rate [clears throat] data had chest strap for it uh distance for my runs like not not new but it's like how did that become usable and how did that then translate into something that I could take as actionable yeah where actionable is not oh good I did this many but actionable is here's how I'm feeling today and what should I do as as a result of how I'm feeling today. Yeah. And then as you keep working down the health stack, 15 years ago, I remember seeing my first My dad's an endocrinologist, so diabetes has always been Yeah.

And and anything about diabetes management, insulin management has always been something I've noticed. I've never been an investor. It was something I've noticed. I remember there was some company, it must have been 20 somewhere somewhere between 2010 and around 2015, you know, that was the first time you could like do a blood test and have it show up on your what your insulin level was. Like it's so obvious that the long-term arc of this thing should be continuous insulin delivery system, right?

that's completely monitored by a human and they're going to get smaller and smaller and smaller and isn't the thing that you care about not just measure the thing and show you what you have but figuring out and it's been a long arc why well you know healthcare infrastructure regulatory the some innovation but I think then it comes back to how many people are using it versus right how many people are

really getting the value that you expect from it over a longer period of time and do you have an economic model that makes sense for that I'll give a counter example I was an investor in a company called Nema. The two co-founders both had celiac disease and I didn't know much about celiac disease but I started sort of poking around when I met them. I met them through some MIT thing that I went to and I really liked the the the the co-founders and they made a a little piece of hardware and what you did when you sat down at the table for dinner was you took a little bit of food and you put it on a thing that you put in the hardware and the hardware came back either green red and you know gluten or not gluten and today [clears throat] like everybody said you got gluten free this, gluten free that.

Um, but whenever we made this investment in 2016, like it was still newish, but you could kind of see there were a whole bunch of people struggling with celiac disease. And one of the problems with with celiac disease, it was an easy one to get your mind around was not you controlling it through what you're eating at home, but you go to a restaurant, you say, "I want something gluten-free." and they bring you a thing and then two hours later you don't feel good because it wasn't gluten-free crosscontamination or whatever whatever they they they didn't invent and they said yeah of course it's I mean and and so super cool make the investment it's a neat device it works really well it doesn't have an economic model that works because each of the things that you have to do to crush your food up on to test are too expensive and it was a couple

of dollars per and so like the premise was that price would come down over time they'd be able to invent a product will be less expensive. And they got some early users and the early users loved the product. They had some decent software that started to show which restaurants you're in a restaurant, you could bring it up, you know, 27 different tests and this one tested false and this one. It got better at giving you something that was actionable, but it wasn't enough data. It wasn't restaurants everywhere. It was this random restaurant in San Francisco, that random restaurant wherever they happen to have a user. And to test I have to test for three bucks each time or whatever the number was.

So that econ and and then they weren't even making money on that. That was like what their cost was. And the idea was we'll do that at cost so that we can get more users. So yeah, but that is so much harder with a hardware product than a software product. And it's so much harder when you don't have if if their software had some magic thing in it that it was worth $3 every time I had a meal to do or it didn't cost me $3 because the software was able to do something that got me ahead of that problem. So I think that complexity just by itself investors in my experience pile into a bunch of that stuff me included have [clears throat] maybe they have their one success or they see someone that has their one success and so that becomes the archetypical model didn't really learn the core issue and then that

one arc that generated the success didn't work. I'm not doing any of that anymore. And so that's part of also the vibration of these things coming in and out of in and out of space. Interesting. Yeah. So when you think about this as as an investor, right, as somebody who kind of looks at trends. I have a bunch of different questions I want to ask you, but I guess the one thing is like some things some technologies you can sort of envision and see how they're obviously going to be a thing in the future. The question is is this particular instantiation the right one that is actually going to deliver all of that value? That I think becomes like the a question you have to ask and you can say this kind of thing is a thing that will be a thing that you should be able to measure the gluten of your food or

you should be able to continuously measure your glucose in your blood and and have insulin come in obviously out of but then is the company that's going to do it or is there even a company that's going to do it or is like maybe this is going to become different you know maybe Apple will do it in a different completely different way right maybe this is just a stepping stone to that right how do you uh have you gotten kind of good at figuring out like even if this is the right on the right trajectory this is the thing to bet. What are the things you look for? I think it's super I think it's super challenging to figure it out.

Yeah. I think what happens is there are multiple categories of types of investors. I think at the earliest stages, you're not going to figure it out. At the earliest stages, you're betting on two things. Founder founder and product. For me, the language I've used for a very long time now when I when I sold my first company in the mid 90s and then I I proceeded to invest over a couple years, three years, I invested about 40 companies as an angel, which today is not that atypical. In 1994 to96, it was ridiculous, right? Like an angel investor might do one or two a year kind of thing. Why? It was fun. I was, you know, I sold my first business when I was 28.

All of a sudden, I had some money. I had bucks. I didn't need a couple million bucks. I was already living below what my mean, like whatever my means were. I had plenty of money. And all of a sudden, I'm like, "Oh, I can put $25,000 into this. I can put $25,000 into that." And so then, what do you put $25,000 into? And my my mental model was, I'm going to go, you know, I'm I was living in Boston at the time. I'm living in the middle of MIT. I'm very tightly connected to this community. I'm just going to meet with whoever wants to meet with me. I'm put money into a people that I want to work with.

be things I'm interested in. And I've evolved that over time. I'm I'm now about 1061. And having gone through lots of different trying to figure out how to be, you know, evaluate deals. When I was at Soft Bank, we had there were 10 partners at the peak of the experience that I had. You know, each partner across the top there were like, I don't know, seven, eight things down the side. I can't believe it was that number. No, it was 10. It was 10 down the side because add up to 100. And you had to get an average score across all the partners of greater than 70 to get a deal and move file. Very complicated.

That's stupid. It's just stupid. And hey, I'll tell you what, I'll give you a 10 on that one. Give me a 10 on this one. Right. I mean, it's just dumb. It was, you know, like whatever. every every process like firms create processes and the pro and for me I sort of evolved back to look three things was the where the founders put on planet earth to work on this problem today they might not work on it for the rest of their life it's not you don't have to work on one thing but today is this the thing you're put here to do that's super easy to evaluate like you don't spend a lot of time to figure out whether that's real or not now you do have to know how to index effects on the personality and the character of the people because extroverts can convince you that a microphone is super exciting and

an introvert can't convince you that anything's exciting, right? So, you have to understand the people and the archetype, but you can get the next level down below that if you if you're concentrated on it. Next, um, do the founders want to have me as an investor or us foundry as an investor or tech stars as an investor, whatever I'm involved in, whatever the investment dynamic is. Do they want that as much as I want to be an investor? And we see this especially now in 2026. you have a a phenomena where so much capital is chasing people that there's not much discernment around right when everything's working great no problem right if it's all working cool it's when things stop working that it matters who your partners are and so I'm looking as an investor for people who feel that way and are interested in that kind of dynamic and it's especially true earlier you

get as you get later and later in life okay who's really driving what for young companies before they've gotten to a point where they've really proven themselves. The partner matters and every VC has a shtick, including me. We all have marketing of ourselves. There's tons of stuff you can find everywhere about everyone. And you know, probably the only truth of 2026 is that most things are Right? I mean, marketing has taken over. The way people present themselves is no longer particularly authentic or true anywhere. And so, if you if you start with that kind of framing a little bit, it's not cynical. It's just like I'm not going to take it at face value. I'm going to go figure out for myself.

Is this the right thing for me? That's important. And then for me, the third is do I have affinity for this product. Do I care about it? Every company I've ever worked in has had at least one near-death experience. Many of the companies died, but all the successful ones had at least one near-death experience. And you could toss out a successful company in my world and say, "What was an near-death experience?" I give you a couple. You have to care about the thing as an investor. If you don't care about the thing, when the near-death experience comes, you're like, "Ah, it. I got It's both." Okay, it's both. If if you don't care about the founder when that happens, why are you even bothering, right?

But the thing I think I think my assumption is you care about the founder or you care about whoever's running the company, which might not be the but you care about the the the team, the people, the leader. If you don't care about the thing, it's really hard to keep your head in the game. really hard to focus on it with the same level of intensity as other stuff, right? It's just natural, normal human thing. But I didn't want to be the investor. It's like, oh, option value. Oh, that didn't work. Okay, next. Right? The guy that bought my first company that really infused me with a lot of my thinking was a guy who he was there for the whole lenler was there.

It didn't matter where you were, he was there. And they didn't mean that he was there forever. Even after the thing died, things die. That's natural. That's part of the experience of creating companies. But he was there for the people even after the thing died. Yeah. And you know it was important to him that there it wasn't that the people like him. It was that he fulfilled his obligation. He tried his hardest. He behaved in a way that from his frame of reference was honorable. It wasn't that he was looking for somebody else to say you behaved honorably. He needed to feel that way. And an example for me in that is I'll be there as long as you don't lie to me.

If you lie to me, I'm done. There's a difference between screwing up and lying. And yeah, okay, you didn't lie. You tried to figure out how to navigate through this. Okay, I'm going to call you on it. That's my responsibility to call you on. Hey, don't let's not do that again. Like, that's not cool. Bad news, just give it to me. Problem, just give it to me. We'll work through it. Don't trust me. It's okay. Say you don't trust me and let me have to earn the trust. Whatever it is, but don't lie. Oh, you lied again. All right. You know what? I'm done. So like there's elements of those kinds of things and everybody has their own way.

And I think a pure economic seeking animal is going to behave differently. If the only thing you care about is economic outcome, that's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum, you have somebody who is they care about economic outcome, but they really care about all the other stuff. Most people are not on either spectrum. Most people are somewhere in the middle of those two things. And so all those things kind of mess around with each other all the time. It's kind of interesting when you speak to investors who had several years of experience or decades of experience that they usually start with oh I just invest in cool founders and they go through an evolution of very complex investment frameworks and they kind of yeah how do you analyze a market then at the end of the day you go back to I just invest in founders and interesting markets.

I think there are lots of different ways to be successful as an investor in the same way that there's lots of different archetypes of founders that are successful. So I wouldn't ever want to come across as saying this is the way you do it. I think for the what I'm describing is this is the way I've come to it in terms of my own personalities way of doing it. And of what I think is important and I think another part of that is there's there's definitely people who want to be the most successful pick your thing or they rank themselves against everybody else for pick your thing. And of course in our, you know, in the venture capital business by definition, oh, we're first quartile or oh, we're first decile or oh, you know, don't mind that fund over there that didn't do so well, but here's why.

But here's why we figured it out. Like, it's it's competitive. That's fine. That has never been important to me as a as an individual. I guess I mean, do I have am I competitive? Sure. But I don't really care about that. that's not what drives you that that dimension of it. And so in some ways then it's easier to sort of step back from it and not get tangled up in what I think in a lot of cases creates either flawed or bad decision making. And I think it's even harder with groups because are you in a partnership where all the partners have to agree on everything? Are you a partnership where one person makes a decision and everybody else does it?

Are you in a partnership where there's a lot of manipulation of what the outcomes are going to be? And like if anybody said there's probably somebody listening saying yes we're we're all of those things. Yeah. Right. They're imperfect. They're imperfect things. So in a lot of ways it comes back to being comfortable with your own decision-m knowing you're going to make a lot of decisions that are wrong. I'm glad you um after you um sold your company, you used to work bank for a while and then you ended up sort of starting um uh tech service right in Bulg like what was that whole kind of like you know thinking that I mean your bet was that this a small town that didn't have a very big ecosystem startups or sort of success would would be something that that could produce that there was obviously university there Um, and now you are kind of in

New Zealand and you're seeing some of that here in New Zealand. I'd love to like understand your thinking there. How you saw was it that you saw in the future or was it that you created your own kind of law and then how does that sort of apply to New Zealand? Yeah, I think it definitely the second not the first. it was that I I followed a philosophy that Amy and I, my wife Amy and I have uh which we developed probably together and we probably developed it in our late 20s around the time that I sold that which was we decided that we wanted to figure out where we wanted to live and then built our life around rather than we wanted to go live somewhere because of a opportunity and where that came from simple and it's classic origin story right I grew up in Texas she grew up in Alaska Yeah, meet

in the middle. Go around. She likes to tell me that if uh if you divided Alaska in half, Texas would now be the third largest state in the US instead of the second largest state. We both went to school in Boston. Boston was great for both of us, but it was not home. Neither one of us felt like it was where we wanted to live. And like, you know, we play kind of a morbid game. Where would you live if the other one died? And and that's moved around for me for a while. It was Seattle because I really like Seattle. Today would not be Seattle. I I I've grown tired of what Seattle has turned into for a variety of reasons and it's too big for my tastes now.

She had Paris would be on our list, for example. And we had this conversation relatively recently. I said, I was I had just been in Boston. I said, I might I might move back to Boston. I I know it. It's comfortable. I couldn't be where we'd spent big chunks of time together, but it's far enough in the past. And if if something tragic like that happens, I mean, I know I couldn't stay in the same place we've been together. And I'm not sure I'm ready to go somewhere where I am not connected to it in any way. It is interesting kind of how it goes. That's Boston. Like it it is a place that we still have a lot of affection for even though it was not home.

Uh I told Amy that by the time I was 30, we'd be out of Boston. And about two months before I turned 30, she told me she was moving to Boulder and I could come with her if I wanted to. And we've been married for a couple years. Now, at this point in my life, I was traveling all the time. So, and I was traveling across the country all the time. And so I was like, "Yeah, you know, we'll go to Boulder. We don't know anybody." We knew one person there. He moved away six months later. Like, "We don't know anybody. If we've been there, we thought it was pretty awesome for the three days we've been there.

We don't like it. We'll try something else." Yeah. Uh, and I would say within a couple of months of being in Boulder, we're like, "Yep, this is it. We love this place." So, that was how we got to Boulder. Very much a where do you want to live your life? And then from that, if I look back on the over 30 years we lived in Boulder, it's been amazing what has been created in Boulder of which I was a participant and I I I've written a lot about it and books like startup communities and on my blog and things like that, but um you know, I was a very active and vibrant participant in the creation of this really robust startup community.

But it was not the creation of startups happening in Boulder. Startups happening in Boulder happened until the going back into the 60s. M uh and probably earlier there were a couple of different threads of startups that were interesting, not just technology, software technologies, but there was biotech stuff around the university and a couple of professors from the university that including one Nobel Prize winner that were very famous, but that did a good job of creating essentially multiple companies out of the research they were doing. Um and then you had the natural food industry which basically boulders where the natural food industry got started and is still one of the places where that that industry uh still takes a lot of leadership from.

Yeah. Um Boulder's a tiny little place. It's 100,000 people and the whole county is 300,000 people and it's 45minut drive from Denver which is a big city now. You know, a couple million people and metro I think is three or four million. Not that much. Probably two two and a half three million. And Colorado is a state is only five million, five and a half million people. Similar to New Zealand, similar to New Zealand, right? That's right. So I I kind of went to a place I wanted to be and then participated in creating all this stuff around me. Now the that's important language for me because there was a period of time where, you know, somebody would say, I'm raising, you know, they go out to the Bay Area.

Oh, I'm raising company for I'm raising money for my company. I'm based in Boulder. I'm based in Denver. Do you know Brad Feld? And that was not healthy for the fat healthy for our start in Colorado. It was invest in the things that fit within the themes that we had which was maybe 10% 20% of the things that were companies in Colorado would be even targets first. So learn how to navigate a lot of that stuff. There was a period of time where anybody that was coming through Colorado for any reason, which included ski vacation, you know, niec's wedding, uh, you know, layover at DIA, right? It was like, hey, I'm going to be in Colorado.

Can we get together? And like, if my answer was yes, all I'd ever can we get together for coffee was my favorite. If I if all we ever did was get together for coffee, all I'd ever do is sit around, drink coffee all day long, [snorts] go to the bathroom. Like, I couldn't get anything done. And by the way, I wasn't in Colorado that much because I was traveling all over the place I was doing. like understanding that dynamic of how to build a really robust startup community while building a network that is not dependent on one person. Right. Right. I I was valuable to that startup community, but it was not dependent on me.

And that that was a big part of what turned into the Boulder thesis that I wrote in that first book. And that was a philosophy that I espouseed. Part of that also was as you get older, and I've I believe this for a very long time. As people get older, if they really want to be great leaders, they get out of the way for the next generation of leaders, then you can decide what age you want to put on it. I would not put 80 on it. I would argue 70 is a little old. And it's not an age statement. You know, is it 60? Is it 55? I mean, people in the United States used to retire at 55.

And I line that up next to what's the purpose of your finite life? is the purpose of your finite life to accumulate as much money and power as possible. Some people believe that. Some people uh believe that, you know, once they get to a certain place in their finite life and have a certain amount of money and power, you wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize the continued extension of that through the behavior that got you there. For me, even at 50, I was already thinking and talking about I was part of I remember being 50 and I made a comment. I said trying to get people to vote. It was during an election cycle.

I was trying to get people that were younger to vote and and I said, "Look, I'm 50 or 51. I can't remember what it was." And it was the first Trump election. I guess it was for I guess it was 16. Yeah, it was. So I'd be 50. So yeah, it was probably it wasn't about it wasn't about the federal election. It was about the state election specifically around in Boulder around city council. This was one that that was that that kind of shook me a little in a way that was interesting. I I gave a big talk. Somebody wanted me to bring out the vote. And so I think a couple hundred people came, 200 people came, something like that.

And they were all, you know, college kids and whatever. Some of my contemporaries, but people in their 30s and 40s. And they like, well, look, I've been here now for 20 years. A lot of you have been here for five years. Some of you been here for less than that. Some of you been a few people here been here for longer than me. Y'all are the future. Not not the people here longer than me, but all the people in this room that are not right, you know, old are the future. And please vote. I don't care who you vote for. Just please show up and please participate because the future of this place is yours.

It's going to go where you want it to go, not where I want it to go. And then I said the thing that caused me some grief, which is I said, "Anybody over 50 is up. By the time we get to 50, the people that really matter are the 20 and 30 year olds in the room." And of course, the headline in the article is Brad Feld is agist and thinks anybody over 50 shouldn't be able to vote. And the the social media memes were stuff like that. The That's not what I said. What I said was, "Come on, young people, get, you know, this is your future, not my future." And so, even a decade ago, I was thinking that way.

And really, at 60, I'm like, "Hey, my life is my life has been pretty amazing. I hope it's I hope I have another 30 years on this planet, but I'm not the future, right? I am part of the last thing that the last thing that happened. I'm at the tail end of the last thing that happened. And the idea that I can define the future is specious. Why? And for me philosophically, that then links all the way back to the starting point and really your question, which is why why am I here? I'm not here to, you know, transform New Zealand or energize New Zealand. I'm here because it's an amazing place. Amy and I went looking for other places in the world to spend time at.

She grew, as I said earlier, in Alaska. She said to me one day, "I'm done with cold." It's about four years ago. Said, "All right, well, I I could live in I could just live in Aspen all the time. That would be cool." And she says, "Brad, you didn't listen to me. I just said, I'm done with cold like for, you know, for 5 months a year. It's cold there." I'm like, "Okay, so you're saying that you don't want to live in Aspen all the time." We get through that and I say, "All right, I accept that you're done with cold and I accept that we'll spend the winters what what is winters in Aspen.

We'll go somewhere warm." So, we started looking around the United States for places to live uh in the winter and uh I'm not a California person, nor she uh although she likes Southern California quite a bit, but I've never been a California person. I spent way too much of my life in California. Nothing negative about California. It's just not my thing. I grew up in Texas. It's not warm in the winter in Texas and the places that it's I don't want to be in those parts of Texas anymore. Florida, my grandparents, my grandparents lives in Florida. I spent a lot of time in Florida as a kid. All I think about when I think about Florida is going to the beach and having warm tuna fish sandwiches.

Like I It's not again not my place. Good memories though. Good with my grandparents were good memories, but funny stories. But again, I I had I had time there. I've been there plenty. It's not my place. And then in the United States, you run out of territory pretty quickly if you're looking for warm in the winter. And really the territory Samoa. Yeah, they're far away. Hawaii. And we ended up we ended up with Arizona being the place that was interesting to us. And there's two major places in Arizona, Phoenix and Tucson. And Phoenix is a giant city with tons of stuff going on. I called a friend of mine, Howard Linds, and just say that, you know, my confirmation bias on this.

I called him up. I said, "Hey, Howard, we're thinking about spending," he lives in near Phoenix. "We're thinking about spending the winters in Arizona and we're trying to decide between Phoenix and Tucson." And Howard, if anybody here knows him, he's like immediately launches into the thing. Howard's funny as hell, but he misses seven out of 10 times. So, he's willing to take the 10 shots to get the three that work that make you just pee in your pants. Laughter because the other seven just go and you just boom into it and he's like, "Oh, Phoenix, it's amazing. There's sports teams. There's movie stars. There's tons of restaurants. Everybody's coming here. It's the hot hottest ticket in town.

Like, you want to go to a concert? It's always going to come through here. It's Tucson, man. It's sleepy. Nothing's going on there. Yeah, they got nicer cactuses, but there's not much you can do with the cactus. That was a joke that probably fell flat. And and you know, we went on a little moler. I said, "Thank you, Howard, for confirming that Tucson's where I want to be." And he knew he knows. So, we bought a place in Tucson. And we spent the last couple years in Tucson. And and Tucson's been great. It's been actually sort of, you know, a place you go to live and you're like, "Here's my expectations. pretty high already based on what I know.

It's exceeded our pretty high expectation. You know, the biggest downsides for us, we're not super foodies anymore, but I would say that when when fine dining at an Italian restaurant is Olive Garden, like do a little better than that. Um, and you could you can do better than that, too. So, I'm just going to go looking for. But, it's been great. We've been able to have these wonderful warm winters there. I all my work is remote. It's actually if I have to go somewhere for some reason, it's relatively easy to get wherever I need to get. But about two years ago, so so about two years into that, we started talking about we never really spent meaningful time living outside the US.

We traveled a lot, but we never meaningful time. We spent in Paris, we'd spent a month here a couple times. We spent a month in Tuscany once in in between my junior and senior year in high school. Oh, I lived not with my parents but with another family in London for 3 months. So, you know, I've had a couple of experiences of being outside the United States, but never for extended periods. So, we started talking, I said, well, you know, if we want to be warm in the winter, why why are we limiting ourselves to the US? Let's open that aperture up. And we started playing that game a little bit. And we've been to MO and I like resorts in Mexico.

I've not been on a I like to run. And whenever I've been not on a resort in Mexico, I've never felt very comfortable. Um, so kind of wasn't that interested in Mexico. We sort of a lot of Southeast Asia. Amy doesn't like humidity, doesn't like bugs. Like there's the geography, the geographic landscape not that interesting. South America, been there not that many times, but a handful of times. Sort of not my jam again in terms of people and style and concentration of people and how places feel. And pretty quickly we landed on uh Ocean. We landed on Australia, New Zealand. I've been to Australia a bunch of times, but I hadn't been to New Zealand that much.

Uh I've been here maybe once. One of my foundry partners, uh Ryan McIntyre, who you all know well, had he and his family had lived here during COVID. He'd spent a lot of time here. He'd done the residency visa process and had gotten the residency visa for New Zealand. And so last year, Amy and I did a trip with Ryan and his wife, Katherine. And we spent about uh somewhere between four and six weeks in New Zealand. Uh, we spent six weeks, we spent four weeks together, we spent six weeks for total and we covered a decent amount of ground on the North Island, South Island, and we absolutely loved it. And I would say when we got to Wanuka, which was the last stop on our trip, yeah, it was kind of the same experience we had in Boulder.

There were lots of other parts of New Zealand that we like, but in this moment, in this place, we're like, yep, feels like Aspen to me with a lake in the middle of it. It also doesn't feel like the super high-end part of Aspen with all the the private planes flying in. And I like to say the uh the two kid for nanny crap, which is not my not my my jam, but the locals and and we're like we're the locals that are there halftime. So we don't live full-time there, but we feel more like we're Colorado's announcement rather than somebody else coming and like just wandering around here for a month. I get all the running I want to do.

You know, we're a little better than Olive Garden here. Uh you know, the sushi the sushi could be better. I'm waiting for a really good sushi restaurant to show up, but all right, that's okay. Um, but like everything else about this place, other than maybe Amy, if Amy was sitting here, she said sushi would be better. [snorts] Um, everything else about this place. Yeah, there's there's a sushi opportunity in Wanuka and that's who I'd at least eat there. Um, but but it was one of those things where it's like, huh, now we we also spent time in Australia. I also like Australia very much. I spent a lot more time in Australia over the years for work.

Uh I'm an investor in AO Ventures, which is the Australian Open Venture Fund. And I I enjoy we both love tennis. I enjoy live tennis. Amy loves tennis. And so uh last year we we went to Australian Open and had an amazing time. Not just because it's a fantastic tournament, but also they took really good care of us and we got a bunch of fun things that we got to do. And so we decided this kind of we left Australia and went back to Tucson and we're like let's do that again next year. Yeah, let's do that again next year for longer. And so this year we decided to spend three months in Wanuka and we're going to go to Australia at the tail end of the trip again.

Same kind of thing for the Australian Open. I have some friends in Adelaide. So we're going to go hang out in Adelaide some and we don't really know what's going to happen after that. Like I could imagine that we would spend more time after that in Australia just for fun. It's a great time to be there. It's again, we're in summer, right? We're at the I mean, this famously is cloudy. It was unbelievably beautiful yesterday. And we're at the very tail end of what in the US we would think of as spring. So, we're just sort of entering a perfect time. So, that's how we got here. and the process of getting here uh which is how uh how we got to in invest in your fund you know came through the residency visa process which I think I've seen lots of different countries around the world try to do whether it's citizenship or residency

visa I'm Jewish so anytime I want to run towards Israel I can do that but that doesn't I'm looking for quiet calm mellow that didn't feel like what Israel was um for me I wanted to if I was going to spend 3 months in a place or four months in a place or five months. I didn't want to do it on a travel visa if I was going to do it for the next 10 or 15 or 20 years, which I didn't know whether I would or not, but now like I wanted to build a positive feedback loop where that was more likely. Yeah. Um I didn't want to do it on a on a three-month travel visa that I could then go to Europe for a little while and then come back and get another travel visa.

Like yeah, the rules aren't going to play by the rules. If I'm going to be part part of a country for a while, live in a country for a while, I want to be doing it in a way that they view as respectful to their laws, their norms, their values. And the residency visa was an easy way to do it conceptually. Um because it's a visa. So So what are your what are your what are your thoughts on New Zealand so far? It's been fantastic. I mean beyond beyond obviously the the nature. No, everything about it's been fantastic. Uh I just gave we we just got here uh this week last before we came I gave a talk in in Boulder for the um uh New Zealand and NZ Invest and the AIP plus program and the residency and I just we had an open invite uh for people involved in Denver that wanted to

come. The New Zealand government I guess used to have a bunch of people in the US sort of doing that and they pulled those people back for budgetary reasons presumably. So now kind of private sector in New Zealand is having to do that. So the guy who does my taxes who works for a firm called the climb, one of the senior partners uh said, "Hey, look, we're going to do these program. We're going to do a thing in New York, we'd love to do, since I'm in the US, we'd love to do a thing in Boulder or we'll do a thing in Colorado if you came to help." I'm like, "Yeah, that's totally help. Put it together." And so we did this and hadn't contingency come and we just opened invite.

We had 100 people show up in Boulder to the which apparently is the largest the largest event like that that this particular group has put on which was surprising and nice. Wow. Um and I gave some a talk at the beginning and if I if I highlighted the I won't do the 10-minute thing I did but if I highlighted the thing to the Colorado and the crowd number one geographically you'll feel at home. It is an amazingly beautiful place in the same way that Colorado is an amazingly beautiful place. It's got a little more water than we got in Colorado, but the mountains are very similar sort of feel. Two, the people and the vibe of the people and the values, the way people feel, the way they engage with you feels very similar.

It's a very welcoming community. It's a community that appreciates people that are not of the community. Not just because, oh goody, tourist, welcome, spend money here, which is part of Colorado because Colorado has a big tourist industry. But it's like, no, like we're building a life here. We we care about we want people here building a life here with us and if you want to build a life here with us build your life. the style of the people felt similar as I started to think about and get into and understand uh not just venture but the business community it's a different it's very agricultural place historically which by the way Colorado of course being very agricultural place historically shift your time frames a little bit but in the same way we mentioned it earlier Colorado's 56000 56 million people it's 56 million people here plus or minus a little bit it's physically about the same

geographic size right So, a lot of those things felt very comfortable in terms of a totally different place with lots of new things. I went to the grocery store the other day and I'm like, "Oh, look. I recognize that one thing over there." Yeah. You know, oh, they got Reese's They got Reese's peanut butter cups here. I take them home like, "Man, these taste like Reese's peanut butter cups taste look at it like no, you know, totally different honey than they're Reese's peanut butter cups. This is crazy. It's different formulation, which is normal. Well, I mean, I'm used to that from Europe because people have different things they like, but I joke about there's a lot of things that are different.

So, you get to have the new experience. You have lots of hedges here, right? The flat hedges, not a thing that you have in Colorado, but like all of the things we have fences. We have fences. Yeah, we don't have hedges. And we don't have that many fences. You have a lot of barb wire, a lot of fences that you can see through. Like so the idea that this would be a neighborhood this would be a fence that somebody would put up between the two houses but a lot of it is is is the same way you would see across uh cross forms but regardless like it's you drive on the left side of the road there's different things so as a human being on planet earth it's it's it's newness it's different the plugs are coming at weird I have to remember to press the button to turn on the power on the plug

thing didn't charge overnight because I forgot to press the button to turn it on. Um, so do you think New Zealand could evolve to to have a similarly dense and exciting kind of startup ecosystem? Absolutely. And I think this is the thing that that uh that I felt kind of out of the gate with regard to uh the process of of doing this visa. So my the the visa process includes an investment and I just there's a high growth growth version and a balance version. The balanced version is you have to invest more money, but you invest it in government bonds and stuff like that. Very safe investments. Put it basically in a New Zealand bank account equivalent.

The growth [clears throat] one is you invest in venture funds and direct service. Well, that's easy for me because I've been doing that for 40 years. And as I started to look around, of course, Ryan helped me navigate because of the relationships he made. Y'all were helpful in a couple of introductions. Everybody kind of knows each other. They're not playing a zero sum game, right? It's not that there's no competition, but you're you're not saying, "Well, oh, look, there's a there's a potential investor. You can't let anybody else know about that guy." No, no. Here, meet some other good people that you might like. Yeah. Um, you have enough critical mass here all of a sudden, right?

You know, you we were talking earlier when you even three or four years ago, there weren't that many funds, right? There's not enough funds, right? There's enough startups. By the way, there's a bunch of startups that have some similar flavors to the startups that you see in the US. And there's some that are totally different because of the things that are the natural resources of the country from where they're starting and the problems that they see. But that critical mass there's non-zero sum thinking important enough so that it's happening important. You're now starting to have some real wealth being generated from from technology companies that were created here. I think most people in the US know Rocket Lab.

Superbase would be another one that I think most people in the US at least if you're a developer you've heard of that came from here. Oh, Super Base came from New Zealand. Yeah. And so you you have this interesting dynamic whereas those founders have success some of them not all of them but some of them will recycle their capital back into Yeah. into the country. It's the employees as well. That's absolutely. So you know the employees now the stock option that they got was no longer a random thing that had no value. The stock option that they got was a thing that made them wealthy. Wealthy enough to either invest in other companies or to spend more locally or to believe that being in in startup was or to start a company because it motivated them to the company.

And I don't know the numbers I'm not you guys will know but somebody gave me anecdote recently about rocket lab and the the number of new space related companies that are getting created here as a function of that which is not just money. It's expertise. It's expertise, right? But it's also expertise. It's belief that it can be successful, right? And uh at the event that we did in Boulder, they showed a graph of I love the per capita uh divider because it's one I've used forever. Boulder per capita has the highest density of startups anywhere in the world. Per capita. Wow. It's a tiny little place. 100,000 people. That wasn't the case before. No, I don't I No, it wasn't.

But but you know by 2010 I think Koffman Foundation wrote a report that was I finally convinced them to write a per capita report and Boulder was like you know it was it was it was like two or three acts the next per capita and you were you were a big player. Yeah. And like like do you think it's just a function of if you just but I wasn't the only player. Well but but yeah it compounds right you you start and then others kind of see you and they kind of join you. Some of it some of it's that some of it's a philosophy. I mean, at the very first Tech Stars demo day, you know, when when writing a check into a startup in 2007 was still not a thing and then quickly followed in 2008 by a global financial crisis which for a couple of years put a damper a damper on

everything. Yeah. I would stand up at demo day and I'd say people would, you know, do you support these companies? Are you excited about these companies? A couple hundred people. Yeah. Wasn't this fun? Yeah. God, didn't you have a great time with the program for the last 90 days having all these startups, these 10 startups doing stuff in Ber? It's awesome. I said, "All right, great. Thank you." The way you can really show your appreciation is run a $25,000 investment to all of them. Like, that's what's going to matter. Like, you know, if you can if you can afford to lose $25,000 or you can afford to put $25,000 in philanthropically to something, view it as nonprofit, as for profofit.

View this as for-profit philanthropy, right? You're putting your money in. If it fails, you get the same tax deduction that you get for putting it into the museum or the hospital. By the way, do that too. But but think about it that way. Yeah. If it succeeds, you make two extra money, five extra money, 10 extra money, 100 extra money. Now you just have more to keep doing it. Yeah. So get that flywheel going. Now well my question is like he's saying the fact that Boulder became highest per capita startups um ecosystem globally is that a function of the fact that it was small you can make an impact like so you come to a place like New Zealand and like you if you work hard enough at it and you bring capital to it you thinking that that could that could be the case anywhere I I I do I do and I think

it's cultural I I think the idea I mean my my whole premise around startup communities which I started to talk clearly about from my frame of reference probably around 2010 was was the time frame so 15 years ago my whole premise was if you have a big enough city and for me big enough city was 100,000 people or you have a region that you can collect of places that get to that that's your your geography you don't need a million people you don't need four million people you don't need a university house but you don't need it you don't need the government to do something. Government can be helpful, but you don't need it. You just need a critical mass of people and you need a philosophy that says that innovation and company creation is important to the health of the city.

In the same way that you would say having an arts district is important, having sports is important, having education is important, having good healthcare is important, having good parks and whatever is important. Innovation is not an innovation thing is not singularly important. It's a component of a healthy long-term city for lots of reasons. Reason number one, it's a it's a wealth creation mechanism. Number two, jobs. It's jobs creation. Kids kids, not the right word. Younger people are more inclined to want to work for and stay in your city if there's that kind of thing happening than if their only choices are to leave and go somewhere where that kind of thing is happening. Right?

So if that's part of the fabric of the city, the chance of you retaining, especially if you have college, chance of people coming out of CU Boulder, staying in Boulder because there's opportunities for them to engage and they see

that happening even if they don't go work for those companies right away is higher, right? Um, oh, by the way, innovation is pretty tightly tied to creativity. So if you believe in arts and if you believe in creativity of human beings and you believe that people are going to come up with new ways to solve new problems, you want that in your culture, right? If you don't have that in your culture, then as a city, you're holding on to whatever the past was. And interestingly, when I think about my experience in New Zealand, um, and I think about, you know, interacting with not just companies, but some of the other cities that I've been to here, I think I think that's now in the mix.

It's not a thing, right? What's [clears throat] what's still missing from your perspective? Time. Time passing, you know. Oh, by the way, it's not a straight line and it's not predictable and you have lots of changes, right? What is is Boulder in the same that it was in 2016? Absolutely not. Are the things that are driving and motivating people? Are the structural challenges of the city all the same as they were 10 years ago? No, they're different. And they're different independent of whether you have a rapidly growing city like Phoenix or you have a no growth city or Denver or you have a no growth city like Boulder where it's purposely constrained what the growth characteristics population characteristics can be as part of the again cultural norms of the city.

If you don't like that, if you want to be in a city that's you know ever growing and more and more and more in terms of population that might not be the right place for you. So all of those things take time and I think the biggest challenge that we have as as a species against the backdrop of that is impatience with that time passing. It's true with startups, right? Think about all the overnight successes that took 10 or 15 years to be made. Think of all of the incredible companies that today, oh my god, in one year, look how much it I mean two years from now those companies could be gone. Yeah. And a lot of the revenue and a lot of the growth that they have is artificial.

M it's you know it's it's promulgated by an excess of capital chasing a set of things that almost by definition which you know again 40 years later it's easy it's just cycles we'll overfund everything it gets overfunded oh no no it's different this time come on like I was 20 I said it was different and the old guy in the room said you no it's not different and the old guy in the room was right the magnitude of funding god this time to the eye oh it's different it's totally different because by 2030 they'll have takis will have taken over and as a species will matter we'll just be pets that's cool or if you believe in parallel universe believe the cycle is what plays out and as in as investors we'll overfund the cycle does that mean that some people won't have incredible success no absolutely not there will be some companies have incredible

success it won't be equally distributed across the landscape of everything that happens uh and it doesn't perpetuate forever does that mean that it's bad it's about that because it it is part of the cycle. For me, the language I finally got to is is these are all just complex adaptive systems. And if you know complexity theory, the the important thing to understand is that the inputs generate outputs which become inputs. Mh. And you're on a non-deterministic path. Sound like I'm an AI. Like the reason this stuff is so cool, it's not deterministic. Well, that's part of what you have to be comfortable with. Yeah. If you're trying to get from here to there with predictability, this this is not it.

And and building a startup community, that term is not from here to there with prediction. And the longer the aperture is, the better your probability of success. What about the culture in New Zealand? Because that's often brought up as potential weakness compared to, you know, the American salespeople who are going out and raising hundred hundreds of millions of dollars. I think that's a rationalization by people more than its actual driver. I mean, I moved to Boulder in 1995. Oh, Brad, that's cute. Why did you move to Boulder? Why did you move to Colorado? Well, we decided we wanted to live. That's cute. They have, you know, why didn't you move to the Bay Area? I don't like the Bay Area that much.

It's okay. I mean, I like to visit it. I have lots of friends there, but Oh, you're dumb. You should just move to the Bay Area because that's where everything's happening. Okay, whatever. But I think I think plenty of things can happen that are interesting here. Well, you know, my experience as an investor both east coast and west coast with Colorado is that you've got a lot of great technical talent. I mean, people would say this over and over again, you know, a lot of great technical talent, but you don't have any managers and everybody just goes skiing on Thursday afternoon. Like, well, I don't know. Like I'm I've been here for 6 months and I'm seeing some people who yeah they like to go skiing but man they are working hard and they're focused on the thing they're doing and okay yeah maybe there aren't as many of the on a on a absolute

basis these skill sets but I'm pretty comfortable that over the next 10 15 20 years those will develop and by the way this is a pretty amazing place and so there's going to be some people that have those skill sets that decide they want to be here. I was also a pretty early proponent proponent of the idea of geographic dispersion because I basically been a remote worker since I sold my first company within two months of selling my first company where I spent a lot of my time in Boston because that's where I was based although I we had we had customers on in Boston and so I would I would travel but within the first two months all of a sudden I I was really having much more of a line job or staff job than a line job.

I worked for the co-chairman of the company and I was on planes every week. I was traveling all over the place and so I had to be a remote worker in 1993. Yes. Right. And so I'm like, "Oh, well, you can actually get a lot done this way." And it changes how you think about how you spend your time if you're able to get into that mindset. So from a very early point, I'm like, "And I don't know that your VP of sales has to be in Boulder anyway." Right. Right. Right. You're telling me, I understand your argument. Your argument's specious. Well, wind the clock forward, you know, 30 years. And I've never heard that from anybody anymore.

You know, Colorado, I think in the US now has maybe the largest absolute number of space tech companies in in one state. California might be more. I don't know. But but Colorado had per capita by absolute has an enormous kind of expertise. Now, you say, well, where did that come from? What's the what's the historical work? Colorado always had some very large space companies. Loheed Martin had a big uh facility in Colorado. Uh Nevada systems was based there, right? There were always some very very large companies in that ecosystem. So you had a lot of talent. Say where did all the software talent in order come from? Well, some of it came from kids graduating from university.

Some of it came from whatever uh you know random. But a lot of it came from that that there are two technology vectors in Colorado that were really prominent in Colorado. One was the disc drive industry and one was the cable industry. And both of those industries are very heavy hardwarebased businesses but that the software is absolutely critical and the embedded software is extremely important. Now end user software were they good at the consumer side of the equation in the cable business? No, of course not. But the the the software skill set to be able to deal with that ended up to be purpose-built for the internet. And then if you look at Boulder, well, Boulder's a hippie town, right?

It's a it's it's a college hippie place and it's got a lot of media and a lot of arts and a lot of creative. And you collide those two, this infrastructure software ability with the creative software ability and you're talking about the internet in 1997, 96, 97, 98. That was the essence of it. And so you get these very interesting things. And the question to step back from is is what's the collision that happens today in New Zealand in New Zealand that pays off 20 years from now, right? What are the Yeah, of course. You know, agot potatoes on Mars on Mars. Uh, you know, help Matt Damon get home, which apparently, you know, there's somebody told me this after the the Odyssey, they said there's a new theme.

The new theme is that movies should all be about helping Matt Damon get home. You look at the movies that Matt Damon did. Of course, The Martian, uh, uh, but Saving Private Ryan helped Matt Damon get home. And frankly, even the whole Bourne, the whole Bourne series has helped Matt Damon get home. But, but in, you know, the seriousness about it, it's like every place has its natural skill set, natural resources, which could be physical natural resources, but are also intellectual, cultural, whatever. Natural resources. Play to those strains. And you used the word compounding earlier. You only get compounding over time, right? And so view the over time as an important part of the equation.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, we what we see is we see a lot of interesting um space companies, right? Kind of off the back of the rocket lab success. Well, now you're going to see a lot of uh cow companies out of halter success. No, we we just saw them a few years ago when they're investing in their first round. They're now compounding very nicely. That's right. But I I say that jokingly, right? But that's an interesting one. The thing that Halter did Yeah. as a raw innovation was something you say, well, why why did that have to happen in New Zealand? Why couldn't that have happened in Iowa? Yeah. And that's a good example of a couple of things colliding, which is you have a lot here.

Right. And so that's a problem. And you had somebody who had a technology vision. It's not just a lot of cows. Most of them are actually freeing. That's right. That's part of it. And and the idea of a tracker, right? Right. whether the tracker goes on a dog like the 97 different companies that got started in the US at all. I think today is there's only one or two of them that are doing pretty well and they're doing pretty well. Yeah. Like again, oh well, if I could put a tracker on a dog because I could put a tracker on a human. Yeah. And the tracker can keep track of where the person is and I can build some software that helps somebody keep track of the things.

And we got a bunch of these cows, some that people want to control and some that are free roaming that you got to keep track of. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Right. You're combining some natural resources and building off of understanding of things from there. We got a great company called Boine. What they figured out was a guy who done medical devices in the UK came back home for CO realized his dad's farm had a bunch of cows have a mastitis and there was no way to very quickly easily detect it unless you culture it for 3 days which one of them disease spread or you buy like an overpriced system and the only large farms can buy.

design a simple device cost like hundred bucks. Anyone can install it. They now have like 5% of the New Zealand market and they're they're they're growing. They're going to be value 10% in the next year or so. Massive penetration and the confluence of like his own skills and the problems he saw here on airspace is another great one. Space plane that will hopefully take payloads into space in the next couple years. Um again kind of coming off that expertise from the rocket lab. And I think one really great one I don't know if you've been on the best boats. So this is this is like right this was actually one of the early guys at Coulter really was interested in in boats and the New Zealand team for for the sailing competition uh world America America yeah um they were actually the first to design a hydrooil system for their boats and that's what actually

a bunch and then all the teams started using hydrooils and there's a big statue in the middle of Auckland about that right right and so they took that took that expertise And then we're thinking well New Zealand has this whole like like this whole kind of mentality of like being one nature like how do we decarbonize the marine industry? How do we actually make boats that run on batteries and the only way to do it is actually hydro? So they're now kind of the first in the world uh commercial [clears throat] hydrogen ferry they can take passengers. So yeah exactly exactly to your point right like oh that that dimension is a pretty a pretty uh rich amount of things that can be done around energy right because you're on an island.

is actually 80% renewable energy. That's right. And and so there's enormous innovation where you look at a place like the United States where there's lots of companies that are doing stuff like that, but there's no there's no there's no built-in demand absolute. Right. Right. There's no real driver. So you're trying to generate the demand and try to get people interested in it versus a place where the natural resource almost by definition is a constraint that causes that innovation to then be built much better and much faster because it actually needs to be built to be effective. Yeah. If you think about all of these examples in 20 years, what do you think New Zealand could be famous for?

Oh, I don't know. I don't I have no idea. What you have that didn't have? We have water. We have very little water and we had a very rough summer this summer in Colorado. No water anymore. You have a lot more sheep than we have. More sheep than people. Although although we we have lots of animals in Colorado, so I'm not sure that that's uh we have animals that can kill you. You apparently one of the things I've learned about New Zealand is New Zealand has no animal that can kill you. Australia. Australia. Australia. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very I feel very very safe and it's very weird like you know I go for a run in Colorado in the mountains or hike in the mountains and and you're kind of paying attention especially as it gets close to dusk where the mountain lines are they track and here you're like oh not carefree no problem

well that's the other thing I mean it's a fun question I have no idea and you know what I'm the wrong person to ask that question for a couple reasons I'll just be like like around my own stickick I'm not a predictor I don't really care what's going to happen next year the the VC listicles of you know here's my predictions for next year of which several several close friends do that and then lots of people who I don't care about do that I don't care I mean I don't have any idea and why why a year that feels so artificial to me you know why is that the measure that we're using so like a long time ago I would get these calls hold on I used to get a call a call from the Denver Post used to run a thing every quarter about venture capital investment in Colorado and was it increasing

decreasing what was happening And they call me and my response was I don't give a And it was a you know the guy that was calling me was who I knew. I'm like I don't give a Like oh come on bro. Give me a call. I'm like no don't give a and he go call somebody else. He call me next quarter because he hey Brad the number went down. I still give a I really don't. It doesn't matter. It's totally irrelevant what happened this quarter. Well what do you think about this $200 million thing that you know was an investment that made the numbers really big this quarter. I'm like well we're not going to have it next quarter.

the numbers next quarter are probably going to be 200 million just take 200 million out and use the like well that's too complicated doesn't matter it really doesn't m and but people care about that stuff and that's fine I'm not saying it's bad but for me I don't care I've never thought about it that way that's not interesting to me somebody once said to me well aren't isn't your goal to invest in all the great companies in Colorado because I some company had been very successful then we had to invest that way no we made as a firm we made 10 investments a year sometimes we made 12 sometimes we make eight I plus or minus like my goal is to hopefully we made 10 investments that have a good probability of being successful because we know that seven or eight of them are going to fail by definition and so we're just hopeful that

the ones that don't fail become really successful so we end up being successful right like I it's so hard for us to talk about and think about it that way especially against the backdrop of list of who did the most and list of who had the most returns and list of who was the most successful Okay, I get it. I understand that that's part of, you know, maybe industrializing or assetizing this sort of thing. But from a little bit, yeah, if you go back to sort of, you know, where where we started in the conversation, you think about what's going to be interesting in the next 20 years. I you're not going to have more land mass in New Zealand.

I don't think you're going to conquer uh any of your neighboring countries. Well, who knows? Australia is pretty big. Pretty Yeah, it could take a while. Sure. This is a target. Yeah. But but you know sometimes we're saying in Australia, oh you're not going to grow. Well, maybe we could take over New Zealand. I like I don't like come on. That's not what either of the countries aspire to. Um all right. So you're not going to grow your geography. You might grow your population some because you got a lot of room here to grow population. Yeah. Um you may not want to grow your population, but you could. But you know at the same time the world is increasingly remote or able to be geographically distributed.

So maybe that's not working. And so then what happens and what happens is if you have from my frame of reference don't think about the country think about the population centers and making those population centers Mhm. right healthy and as part of them being healthy have an engine of innovation in each population center. So that part of the culture of the population center is that people are creating companies and around that in the country you'll have the resources and if you had one venture firm who was bouncing around saying we're the venture firm that's going to make New Zealand successful you'd be You wouldn't make any progress and I give you lots of examples in the United States that I'm opining in different places where there was like the dominant firm that had plenty of capital that then strangled things because they were the gatekeeper.

They were the one everybody looked to. And if they they were successful for a while, that was good. But when they weren't successful or all the things they didn't do that never got any resources to have the chance of being successful because they're not 100% correct. They're 10% correct, right? Most of the things they're going to do are not going to work. You're starting from a place where in 2026 there's plenty of that. I mean, I found 10 of them. Somebody told me recently there's 30 venture funds in New Zealand. I don't know if that's the right number or not, but uh I invested in 10 and and uh I you know it feels simil tell tell an anecdote from Boulder.

When I moved to Boulder, I invested as an LP in all the Boulder venture firms over the next two or three years. Kind of the same thing. I was showing up in Boulder. I wanted to be supportive. I had some money to invest. I was going to invest in companies, which I did as well, but I also wanted to invest in the the funds that were part of the the fabric. It was the late It was late 90s by now when this conversation happened with with one of the VCs at one of the firms he was a friend. I said to him, he was talking to me. He was kind of pitching me on something.

We see all Okay. He says, "We choose the best ones to invest in and that's our advantage over the other four venture funds involved." I said, "Oh, that's interest." And it wasn't too much later, I was having a meal with one of another part of the other funds. He didn't say exactly the same words. wasn't with the same tenacity. But you basically said the same thing. We see the best. We see all the founders and we choose the best ones and those ones. All right, get to the fourth one. And I look at I now have their portfolios. I see what they're all investing. Their portfolios are 25% overlap between this firm and this firm.

This firm and this firm, this firm and this firm, this firm and this firm, but they all they have 25% overlap. And then you keep going. You have some other pair. You have a couple of, you know, fruples. Three what? Thruples. Three people. Yeah. Yeah. um where three firms invested. Yeah. And [clears throat] I thought to myself, and then you have plenty where there's only one, right? I'm like, so tell me again how that how the the the logic works, like will you please write down the the the math formula that explains what you said to me with the actual data because it's not right. And so when one firm's trying to present themselves to the world as the gatekeeper, it's a bad thing.

If there was one firm that was saying we know all the things you should do in New Zealand to the US investors for series B and that was the only firm that series B investors or series C investors looked at that would be a problem. You're past that and once you're past that you can't go back to it because not a credible statement. Now does that mean you could be really informed and know everything? Absolutely. There's nothing wrong. In fact, that's a really good uh uh ecosystem. It's a really powerful one where you're spending time with founders you haven't invested in. M and you're willing to put energy into people you haven't invested in to try to help them be su successful especially when they are being successful because that might help some of your other companies like when you're when when you have a culture of being excessive versus oh well you know I

don't have money in your company so I I can't talk to you [clears throat] every now and now we shouldn't talk because I got investment in the competitive thing and you know I if you don't want to talk to the CEO of that company just tell me how to put you together then right but like that that cultural norm that I'm describing I feel that in my interactions with the VC community here and I think that will serve you really really well over the next decade. [snorts] I think this is a great place to end on and thank you so much for supporting the ecosystem. Thank you for supporting us. It's great to be in Monaco with you.

It's my delight. It's great fun. Thank you. Thanks. 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.