Business Is Boring

A flippant comment around a kitchen table in 2013 brought about a business that has gone from making one Thai Green Curry to now having a delivery or pick-up service for ready made meals, 2 cafes, a commercial kitchen, regular media appearances, 2 cookbooks, thousands of meals sold a week and a staff of 25. Jess' Underground Kitchen is now very much in the overground. To talk about the journey, Je...

New Zealand likes to think it’s clean, green and 100% pure, but if you look under the lid, quite a few things you would expect from such a place are not really all there. Like recycling. Even today there is a long way to go, but we are light years on from where we were 9 years ago when Steve Rickerby spotted a massive hole in the market for a company that could pick up food waste from businesses....

Genevieve is External Relations Manager for Lion NZ, a company that is further along than most on the journey. Last year they were champion winner of the YWCA Equal Pay Awards, and of the DiversityWorks Work/Life Balance Award. To chat that column, her career and how you can have it all so long as that all includes flexible work and some effort to address deep paternalistic bias,  Genevieve joins ...

Great entrepreneurial ideas come from people, but also from environments that foster creativity, provide support and that lift people to help them to go further. This is part of why co-working spaces- places where creatives and companies can rent space by the desk or the week - have exploded around the world as hubs for people to go to, to make their dreams happen, and to keep the motivation and t...

In 2003 there wasn’t much of a computer game development industry in Aotearoa. But an entrepreneur that loved games, graphics and design set out to change that, and to make a Playstation game - not worrying they didn’t even have access to the Sony development kit. They managed to assemble a team, make a prototype and sell the idea internationally, all on their first hit-out. This pioneering approa...

Y Combinator is one of the great names in tech and start-ups. The incubator slash business bootcamp is famously hard to get into and famously hard full stop! Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe are some of the alumni and they only accept companies that have billion dollar potential. It’s also, like much of Silicon Valley, disproportionately made up of young, male, Stanford Grad founders, with not a lot of...

How is a country going to grow if the tangata whenua, some 15 percent of the population, are overrepresented in negative stats and under-represented in the ranks of entrepreneurs and owners? Well, that is a big question, and one that can be broken down into many parts, and the first of which might be how do we get frontline Māori workers performing better, growing and improving, and into upward pr...

What exactly could loving One Direction have to do with fixing the diversity pipeline problem in tech? Well if you hear ‘One Direction’ and go into dismissal mode, that might just be the root of the problem. A few years ago a tech industry leader in law gave a presentation at a serious Berlin tech conference about how perhaps the diversity pipeline problem could be traced back to the way that trad...

At 16 Alexia Hilbertidou looked around and saw that she was the only girl in her IT and physics class, then the next year the only young women in advanced physics. What was going on? How did women go from the forefront of coding to underrepresentation at a time when it is meant to be more accessible than ever? Well, to change the ratio you have to change the structure. So Alexia decided to take th...

Rowan Simpson has made his name about ten times and he’s not done yet. He’s had a large hand in the product and growth in some of New Zealand’s greatest tech exports, he was head of product for Trademe and that worked out pretty well. He did a similar role in the early days for Xero and that has worked out amazingly, it’s a global leader in software as a service. He was an early investor and board...

On September 4, 2010, when just 15 years old, Jake Millar’s life changed forever. His father and four close friends died is a skydiving plane crash. Prime Minister John Key visited the scene and Jake wrote to thank him. A hand-written note reply came from the Prime Minister who wanted to meet Jake. Away from the media. And as someone who had also lost a father young, and gone on to great success,...

A few short years ago a fellow looking for some good butter for a baguette noticed something odd. Although we were a dairy country if you went to the supermarket and wanted a fancy butter the option came in a blue pack, all the way from Denmark. Why and what on earth? This thought led Peter Cullinane to try to make his own top-shelf butter, and to then found and grow Lewis Road Creamery, beautiful...

Last July long standing TV producer Bailey Mackey (Code, The GC) came to the Spinoff Towers to talk about the busines of making TV. Earlier that year new had hit that the production company he runs, Pango, had sold a television format to Freemantle Media, the world’s biggest tv outfit. This was a massive coup, made all the bigger by the fact it was an under-the-radar show called Sidewalk Karaoke h...

20 years ago a bunch of young comedians, and their manager, who’d spent years making comedy nights happen across Auckland, thought it was time for a dedicated venue. On Queen St, near the Town Hall, they found a venue that was a lot perfect and a bit yuck – The Classic, infamous as an adult cinema. Over 20 years of building the business and the state of comedy in New Zealand, one founder, Scott Bl...

At the age of 37 a young women, who made her way up through a pretty sexist world, got the biggest job in the country. No, it’s not Jacinda Ardern today, it’s Theresa Gattung, in 1999.For a brief little window there a few years later most of the top jobs in this country were held by women - Dame Sian Elias was Chief Justice, Dame Silvia Cartwright was Governor-General, Margaret Wilson was Attorney...

Today's guest is a serial entrepreneur. If you haven't heard of his latest company you've very likely seen their work on awarded and effective websites for clients like Marketo, Visa, Air Newzleand, Spark, and Les Mills. Having started just six years ago with a perfectly timed mix of design, brand marketing, and build for the market, his agency Little Giant came and got big fast. Little Giant was...

On the fourth of July just four years ago today’s guest started a new company in the technology space. Having come out of some of the world’s biggest ICT companies like IBM and Cisco, Mike Jenkins was keen to help use the power of this cloud technology thing to help businesses do better. And look at how it’s gone - today his brainchild The Instillery is working with some of New Zealand’s biggest c...

About 2 years ago the rent went up on a much loved cookie shop near the Civic in Auckland. Moustache Milk and Cookie Bar was facing a 40% hike. Owner/founder/manager Deanna Yang, a constant presence in the store and online through her energetic, revealing blog that charted the ups and down of business wasn’t going to take this. As an entrepreneur in her early twenties, from a single parent family,...

On the first week of the job at Coca Cola in 1996, today’s guest was wheeling out coke products from Pizza Hut after they moved to Pepsi. Although just a new sales rep he vowed that one day he’d get Coke back in to the big chain and its sister KFC. The years passed, and Craig Cotton moved up the ranks. He went from sales rep to a manager, into sales operations, marketing and eventually, all the wa...

What do The Evil Dead, Zena, Spartacus and an immersive 80s extravaganza live theater spectacular have in common? If you guessed Rob Tapert, you've got the chocolate fish. It's very exciting to get a chance to talk to a person who's brought about a billion dollars of overseas investment to New Zealand; jobs, he's helped build an industry careers and inspiration for local film and TV. Which is no m...

Today we're talking action. The debate is over, it is just fact increasing diversity of gender, background and age in the decision making parts of organisations helps businesses do better. But still, as we've been exploring a lot lately, only one of the NZX top 50 listed companies is run by a woman. And less than twenty per cent of directors on listed boards are women. Still. So it is past the tal...

Today’s guest has been mentioned at least three times on the podcast for her leadership on some of the biggest topics facing business and society today. Cindy Gallop has become a by-word for changing the ratio in advertising, business and culture, getting diverse perspectives and experiences in terms of gender, ethnicity, background and moving past the stale pale and male. As the leader of BBH New...

Big news this week, with Fairfax NZ, one of the largest and most influential media companies announcing a new name and CEO. Now to be known as Stuff, the company is to be led by Sinead Boucher. The move was very well received from journalists, happy that a fellow journo and someone from the news side of the news business would be in charge. Recently under Sinead, some of the most successful and ex...

Every company these days has a lofty goal.  App makers with silly camera filters say they exist to bring humans together. Every company says it is out to change the world and make it a better place, but often, that’s nonsense. Not so for today’s guest.  Professor Steve Henry is the founder and inventor of Kode technology who has worked to make commercialisation and mass application of research in...

You could look at the way work is arranged and decide that it’s something designed by the patriachy to avoid looking after their kids. A more equal society would have work start after school drop off and finish in time to help with the end of day. And that’s just if you have kids. You might also have a life. It’s just one of the ways that work is not really built for the modern age. One person tha...