eccuity Podcasts

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Matt Mudford, CEO of Ngāpuhi Asset Holding Company, the commercial arm of the largest iwi in New Zealand. On paper, Matt runs a $100 million portfolio. In practice, he thinks about something most CEOs never have to. He is not managing money for shareholders who want a return next quarter. He is managing it for 200,000 people, most of them...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Leonard Hope, a US patent attorney and computer engineer who has spent nearly three decades protecting the ideas of companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Nintendo, and who now builds his own AI tools for legal work. Here's the contradiction at the heart of this conversation: Leonard writes AI software that could draft a patent in secon...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Thomasge Aravinda, founder of CareerCraft and a supply chain professional who spent 15 years working across Sri Lanka, Dubai, Singapore, and New Zealand before building a business around the question most people are too comfortable to ask: is my career still going to exist? Thomasge started helping friends land jobs during COVID when the m...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Alexa Karpova, co-founder and CEO of Davos Premier, an agency that gets businesses, founders, and investors into the rooms they can't access on their own. Eight years ago, a crypto client asked Alexa if she could help host a dinner at the World Economic Forum. She didn't have a plan for it. She had a business partner in Switzerland...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Lorraine Miller, co-founder of Foot Mechanics, New Zealand's largest privately owned podiatry business, and co-founder of Whai Basketball in Tauranga. Lorraine and her husband John have spent 29 years building businesses side by side. Literally. They sit at desks next to each other. They are 50/50 partners in everything they own. At on...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Marcus Nelson, co-founder of UserVoice, the feedback tab that sat on the side of Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft Xbox before most people knew what customer feedback software was. He sold the company last year and moved to New Zealand as a single father with his youngest son. Marcus raised $900,000 during the GFC when only five companies i...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Manu Caddie and Kenny Au, co-founders of GEMS, an asset management platform built for the people who keep New Zealand's electricity, water, and critical infrastructure running. Both spent decades inside the industry before deciding that the tools they were forced to use were not fit for purpose. The process was always the same: pull da...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jase Te Patu, founder of Hauora Aotearoa and a man who has spent 33 years in wellbeing work, driven by something deeply personal. Jase started this charity because his brother passed away and left eight kids behind. When he asked his 12-year-old niece how she was doing, she told him she couldn't sleep because every time she closed her...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Anne Cullen, a relationship advisor who works with entrepreneurs and high performers navigating the overlap between business and family life. Anne spent the first half of her life in the US and the second in New Plymouth, New Zealand. She started out working with kids and families before realising that the parents she understood best were...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Will Zhang, CEO of EmoX, an AI mental health companion that has grown to 450,000 users since launching in 2024. The idea started as a joke. A friend showed up late to coffee after the worst road rage incident of his life, and someone said: what if you could just scream at an AI instead? That conversation led Will and his co-founders into a...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Yashar Ahmadpour, co-founder and CEO of Impressive, an agentic AI company based in San Francisco. Yashar was born and raised in Sweden to Chilean and Iranian parents, moved to California to study, and ended up in tech after a degree in literature and writing. He is building AI agents for businesses every day, and he thinks most of what the...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jon Randles, business coach, co-founder of marketing agency Mosh, and a man who started with a literature and classics degree, zero interest in business, and a student loan he had been spending on CDs and posters from an ATM machine. Jon's view of business changed completely when he got a job at the second ever Hell Pizza store in Well...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kim Barker, founder of Full Stack Creative and a marketer with decades of experience across analytics, digital strategy, and website optimisation. Kim left employment last year to start a boutique agency and expected it would take years to move into fractional marketing leadership. It took months. Small and medium businesses kept coming to...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Stephanie McKee Wright, founder of Epic People and an HR and leadership development consultant with 30 years of experience. Stephanie spent decades in senior HR roles across public and private sectors before her company was acquired by a global and the job she had built for herself disappeared overnight. The creativity was gone, the autono...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Andy Rolston, founder of Rolston Leadership Group and a leadership coach who learned more about leading people on a rugby sideline than he ever did in a corporate office. Andy left school and became a mechanic, moved into computing, spent time in corporate, then walked away to retrain as a rugby coach. He coached across New Zealand, Canada...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Ray Nicholls, owner of Chi International and the brand behind Chi Herbal Drinks. Ray spent decades inside blue-chip New Zealand companies as the person they put on anything that needed to break the mould. He launched products in the Middle East during a civil war, helped grow a beverage business through a private equity cycle, and then bou...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Mindy Gibbins-Klein, founder of the first book coaching company in the UK and the person behind over 1,400 published thought leaders across 18 countries. Mindy moved from the US to the UK following a boyfriend, got left behind, and decided to stay. After three redundancies in five years, including being laid off while pregnant, she used he...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Julian Zhu, founder and managing director of MiDeer Limited and partner at Skychee Ventures. Julian has spent over 25 years leading cross-border business between New Zealand, China, and the US, managing a $500 million investment fund and advising organisations from Fortune Global 500 companies like Tencent and NTT through to New Zealand he...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Joe Slater, co-founder of Six Barrel Soda and head of product at Consumer NZ. Joe built six businesses across hospitality, beverages, distribution, and e-commerce before stepping out of his own company and getting a job for the first time in years. The transition from founder to employee raised a question he hadn't expected: can I do this,...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Peter McKay, former Wall Street Journal markets reporter and Web3 content creator. Peter covered oil and commodities for the Journal during the Iraq war, reported on the 2008 crash from the trading floor, and says what's unfolding right now with Iran, oil, and the global economy is giving him flashbacks. Except this time, he thinks the...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kerri McMaster, CEO of ‘Goodair Nosebuds’. One in four people worldwide deal with chronic nasal congestion, and fewer than 15% are happy with what's available to them. Kerri took a prototype sitting in a university lab, one she initially dismissed the first time she saw it and turned it into a drug-free consumer product that sold out w...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Stephanie Pow, founder of Crayon and former equity derivatives trader at UBS. She studied at Wharton and Harvard, spent years on one of the largest trading floors in the southern hemisphere, and then spotted a gap in financial support that almost nobody was solving. When her first child arrived, she saw firsthand how life transitions chang...

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie is joined by Sajita Setia! Sajita is a physician specialising in pharmaceutical medicine, with experience across global organisations including Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson. Now based in New Zealand, she leads research into digital wellbeing and its impact on mental health, productivity and emotional development in young people. This episode...

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie is joined by Joost Schouten! Joost is the co-founder of nestr.io , a platform building collaboration software for the next generation of organisations. Born in the Netherlands and now based in New Zealand, Joost’s work sits at the intersection of organisational design, distributed authority, and the future of work. This conversation goes deep...

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie is joined by Alexander Bikeyev! Alexander shares his journey from corporate finance and financial modelling into biotech, machine learning, and entrepreneurship. After years of building models, working in audit, and pursuing algorithmic trading, he explains why he walked away from trying to beat the market and instead focused on solving real w...