Business Is Boring

Rachel Taulelei is a strong advocate for the Māori economy and sustainability, and her connection to her Māoritanga has been vital in her career – from founding sustainable fishery Yellow Brick Road, to being CEO of food and beverage company Kono. Now at the helm of Oho, an Aotearoa business design and brand strategy firm, Rachel joins Simon and Brianne to spill her secrets to global success. Goin...

Growing up in poverty, losing his mum at age eight, and leaving school at 14, Saia Finau Latu had the odds stacked against him. In 2016 further family tragedy left Latu at a crossroads, and the path he chose led to founding a leading construction recycling business with a passion for sustainability and a heart for the community. Join Simon Pound for this very special kōrero with a truly remarkable...

Building the next generation of leaders is a key element of Marisa Fong’s business approach. Passionate about connections and how they impact sales, she’s gone from co-founder of Madison Recruitment to investor and director. She joins Simon Pound to share her journey as a leader supporting other leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Runaway Girl to runway success, for more than 30 years powerhouse designer Karen Walker has built her brand and business globally. Known for clever designs, adventurous collaborations, imaginative storytelling and constantly redefining her approach to retail, Karen shares her world class journey with Brianne and Simon. Going Global is brought to you in partnership with New Zealand Trade and E...

What do you get if you cross a pie with a curry? That's the question that led Ollie Morrison and Logan Stevens to found Roti Bros. The pair join the pod to talk starting a new business mid-pandemic, opening their flagship store in Auckland's Commercial Bay and what they've got planned next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Production company Augusto have pioneered a hit model. Harnessing the tagline "Blurring the lines between advertising, entertainment and production", their breadth of work truly surpasses all boundaries beyond being just an agency. Working with the likes of Tourism NZ and Netflix, to (most recently) royalty, we’re joined by Michelle Walshe (co-founder and global CEO) to hear their story - how they...

How do you take your business beyond Aotearoa to the world stage? Welcome to Going Global, a six part pop-up series where we find out. For its inaugural episode, Laura Bell, founder and CEO of SafeStack Academy, joins hosts Brianne West (CEO and founder of Ethique) and Simon Pound (Business is Boring) for a kōrero about everything from the export market for digital products, to how SafeStack Acade...

Even if you've never heard of Canva, you've definitely seen social media posts using its graphic design templates. Mahesh Muralidhar played a part in making the Australian company a global success story, and now back in New Zealand he's leading Phase One Ventures, a start-up incubator with big ambitions for Aotearoa business. He joins the pod this week to talk about his dreams for the incubator, t...

With Girls That Invest, Simran Kaur is dismantling the patriarchy through financial independence and making more women welcome in the world of investing. Now with over 150 thousand Instagram followers and more than a million downloads, hear how she grew Girls That Invest, and why investing should and can be for women/marginalised groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic...

With his workplace mental health platform Groov, Sir John Kirwan is continuing a journey to change the conversation around mental health. An open and prominent figure advocating for awareness in Aotearoa (and beyond), he joins us this week for a chat about the all-important intersection of mental health and business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A self-proclaimed "high school drop out", Janine Grainger now works in the blockchain and cryptocurrency tech fields as the CEO and co-founder of New Zealand-based cryptocurrency purchasing platform Easy Crypto. She joins the pod to chat about the company's build to a billion in sales, and where they – and crypto – are headed next.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coming from humble beginnings in an ambitious yet small market, Special Group has built itself up big from day dot. With a driven mindset of being the biggest and best agency in the world, they have now found huge success as one of NZ's most awarded agencies. Co-founder and CEO, Tony Bradbourne, joins us to talk opening offices around the world, their work (including Gwyneth Paltrow eating her inf...

NewFish is a startup aiming to change the fishing industry for the better. Using fish that might otherwise be waste, they are looking to massively increase our use of macro and micro algae, instigating further progressions of sustainability within NZ's food production systems. To talk the journey, the goals and what’s next, co-founder and GM Hamish Howard joins the pod. Learn more about your ad ch...

We first spoke to NZ company, Dotterel in 2019 as they were just coming together with a cool concept for making recording from drones less noisy. Now, over the last three years, they have become the global leaders in capturing sound in noisy environments. Having just announced a new raise of $3m to take a recording breakthrough they’ve made out of the drone industry, CEO and co-founder Shaun Edlin...

Michele Wilson, founder of AWWA period care, was once a corporate lawyer whose side hustle turned into her full time mahi. Now leading conversations around understanding the period cycle through her business, hear her journey of how she built AWWA from a standing start to half a million dollars in sales a month, and the mahi she does to share the sacred kaupapa of the business. Rawe. Learn more ab...

This week we’re talking tech companies and seeing it, to be it. Greg Denton excelled in his studies and afterwards, found himself in a big bank. Not loving life in a suit (and saying he was a banker), when he discovered the tech world, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t known it was open to him. If it was hard for him with his background, he wondered how hard it must be for others without his advantage...

We’ve all heard a lot about the metaverse lately; the virtual worlds we soon might be spending a lot more time in. However, for Sam Ramlu (co-founder of pioneering studio, Method), it’s already beginning. Having built the super successful Wanderer VR game in the unreal engine (one of the leading virtual world builders), how did they pull this off? What is the story behind her success at Method? We...

Business is Boring is back! With the support of Spark Lab, we’ll be talking with some of Aotearoa’s most successful business people and checking back in with some of the 250+ guests we’ve had on the podcast over the last five years. We last spoke with Sharesies 3EO Brooke Roberts in 2017, when the site had been live for a month and had just ticked over 2000 users. Today the platform has half a mil...

Supply shortages earlier this year brought attention to the fact that although we grow plenty of oats here in New Zealand – and know a thing or two about milk – we have been importing all commercial oat milk. Boring Oat Milk founder Morgan Maw was in a place to do something about that, knowing oats through her first oat biscuit venture. To talk about the three-year journey she had to go on to get...

Luke Nutting is an electrician who eight or so years ago saw that solar would be the future. He went from being a man in a van to now leading Lightforce, a company that does 20% of New Zealand’s solar installs, with more than 80 staff around the country. Now he has big plans to help create alternative energy choices by helping people sell their excess power back to the grid.  Business is Boring is...

Vignesh Kumar is a partner in Global from Day 1, or Gd1, a local venture capital fund which recently announced the first close of its third fund -- a $130m infusion of capital to invest in New Zealand companies wanting to scale to be worldwide successes. The company has partnered with a bunch of global experience across finance, marketing, venture, operations and hardware – including Vignesh, who...

Ockham Residential co-founder Mark Todd is not your usual property developer. Over the years Ockham has helped make Auckland a more compact and liveable city by building the kind of apartments people actually want to live in and have as neighbours. The company is pioneering build to rent, Iwi partnerships, offering more Kiwibuild options than a bank manager might recommend and giving back through...

Batteries are an ethical minefield, and it’s an issue that often gets overlooked in the important move to green tech. Now a New Zealand startup is helping solve the problem. Dr Shalini Divya is the co-founder of TasmanIon, who are commercialising her research into using the earth-abundant aluminium to make a new generation of more recyclable, sustainable and equitable batteries. To talk about the...

A couple of years ago Maggie Marilyn designer and founder Maggie Hewitt debuted her first collection straight onto Net-a-Porter, one of the most desirable doors in the world. Maggie Marilyn has since become a pioneer in sustainable luxury, being made in New Zealand and pioneering better production practices. Recently the brand has started moves to become carbon positive, and released lines that ar...

Samantha Gadd founded Humankind about ten years ago as a new kind of HR, people and culture company. Over time, Humankind has specialised to focus on the growing area of employee experience, helping some of our biggest, best and most successful organisations – from growth companies like Sharesies or Supreme Coffee through to government departments – design better culture to get better results. Sam...