The Morgo Podcast

Inhibit Coatings is a science -based company producing high-performance antimicrobial coatings for use in food safety and medical applications. It work s with resin manufacturers and end-users to develop bespoke antimicrobial solutions with high effectiveness and long-lifetimes using novel nanotechnology. Eldon talks about the journey from his PhD research to first commercial sales and pursuing a...

  Futureverse is a media tech unicorn at the intersection of AI, Gaming and Web3. Its platform simplifies W eb3 for developers and users and it works with brands to power their experiences , such as a rec ently released AI powered game built with FIFA. Aaron talks about how he & his co-founders started by building a portfolio of companies for Web3 and last year rolled up and acquired 11 companies...

  Asantha founded PaySauce to bring new technology and deep domain knowledge to small businesses wasting time and energy on paying their people. Asantha talks about the journey –learning the real pain points to solve for small businesses , and commitments to excellent customer service and to providing a great place to work. Its automating top-up pay for dairy farm workers and its pre-pay day lendi...

Pultron Composites make s glass fibre composite materials. Peter Holdsworth invent ed the technology for fibreglass fence post s . His wife Bronwen built the business & ran it for 20 years . Her son, Jasper , now runs it . This is a great story of innovation and building a global business. The core of the company remains in Gisborne where they experiment, make 20 product lines & build the machines...

  Sam is the c o- founder & the CEO of La wVu , a software platform for in-house legal teams . Lawyers using La wVu g ain visibility over all their legal work, improve productivity & show legal's value to the wider business. Sam talks about the journey : spending 3 years building the product with trial customers before going to market, winning an RFP for a legal team of 200 – which accelerated the...

John saw the need for a seamless SaaS platform for commercial training providers: automating all the processes for promoting, selling and delivering courses. John talks about starting out with sweat equity, spending a lot of time with customers to design the product, always appearing as a global operation even when they were working from his house, and how rewarding it has been to build a company...

Kea Aerospace's mission is to improve life on Earth using insights from the stratosphere. Solar-powered, remotely piloted stratospheric aircraft will fly continuously in the stratosphere for months to collect frequent high-resolution aerial images. Mark became fascinated with space a long time ago, and was the co-Director and seed investor of Rocket Lab. In addition to building Kea Aerospace, Mark...

  Forbury provides c ommercial r eal e state investment m odelling s oftware to customers in the UK, Australia, Singapore, Japan & New Zealand. Scott joined the founder, Steve Surridge, to build the business, with Steve focussin g on new product s and Scott buil ding the team. He talks about how important it is to focus on the people who will deliver your business outcomes , and how Covid was an a...

John Penno and Maury Leyland started Leaft Foods to c reat e a new food system by capturing the most abundant protein on the planet - Rubisco from green leaves . Leaft integrates with existing farming systems, extracting the Rubisco from common forage crops & producing a high-quality silage feed as a co-product .  Th is reduce s the total nitrogen loading in the farming system & lessen s the carbo...

Spice is a founder &  CEO of Marsello , a s mart marketing platform for small er retailers . M arketing is really hard for these businesses . The Marsello p latform has strong reporting & analytics. Retailers can run targeted marketing with data-driven automation, email, SMS, loyalty programs & social media and measure the impact of them . T housands of small and medium-sized retailers and hospita...

Tim is the founder & CEO of Runn .io, a resourcing and capacity planning platform . Tim previously co-founded SilverStripe , whose open - source content management system is used by thousands of organisations worldwide . He started Runn because of the frustration of being able to get company-wide visibility across sales, projects and the people needed to deliver them. Runn has employees and custom...

Socialites is a full-service social media agency that help s organisations thrive in t he dynamic digital world by using social media to bring a brand's DNA to life, creating communities of loyal customers . The Socialites Group has grown by acquisition . It runs multi-language, multi-platform campaigns across Asia, Europe, Australasia, the Middle East, the United States and Canada .     www.socia...

Max founded Lumin to create a better way for people to annotate and collaborate on PDF files. He bootstrapped it to 30M users based on ad revenue, then made a very rapid switch to being subscription funded – in just 2 months! Lumin now has 80 M users and 80 staff around the world and many documents are being signed every second.  Max's vision is to solve the pain of digitally managing, signing and...

Izon Science i solate s & a nalyse s n ano-biological particle s . Its products are sold for medical R&D in 50 countries. A step change in the size of Izon's business will be driven by one of its customers tak ing a product currently in testing to market – such as a cancer test. Izon has 50 staff in N Z , the USA & France . Hans talks about funding a company when it's cash negative, getting focuse...

CerebralFix is a n international game development studio which games for large international companies . Its talented team of more than 70 developers, artists, and designers work tirelessly to bring their games to life : f rom brainstorming new ideas to coding, testing, and polishing the final product. Tim talks about the challenges of staying current while technology is changing so rapidly .   ww...

Rockets that operate like aircraft and satellite propulsion of the future – that is what Stefan Powell and the team are building at Dawn Aerospace. Their spaceplane, the Mk-II Aurora will be the first vehicle to fly to sub-orbital space twice in a day, and their satellite propulsion systems are already powering 11 spacecraft in orbit. Dawn now employs over 100 people in NZ, the Netherlands and the...

Bill Buckley is New Zealand tech royalty. Do listen to this! Buckley Systems makes ion implanters to put the metal into silicon chips (300 lines in the width of a human hair) ; its ionising machines mak e all the flat panel screens for your phones, iPads etc ; and they make medical devices and R&D machines. These are all based on using huge precision magnets to direct & accelerate ion streams. The...

ZX Security is a specialist cyber security consultancy with staff in New Zealand, Asia & Europe. It tests and finds vulnerabilities in an organisation's networks, cloud environments, buildings and more. ZX also provides senior leadership security advice specific to customer environments. Ian talks about the importance of the company's employees in building a company whose customers around the worl...

Portainer is a container management system for Kubernetes, Docker/Swarm, and Nomad that simplifies container operations so you can deliver software to more places, faster. Neil talks about the challenges of commercialising open source software and of building a business out into the world from New Zealand. The company now has thousands of customers across the world.   www.portainer.io

Dinosaur Polo Club is an independent game development studio, founded by Peter & Robert Curry. Well known for its award-winning games, Mini Metro and Mini Motorways, the last couple of years have seen the studio grow, and they're now working on some exciting new games. With an inclusive and supportive culture Chantelle, CEO, and Niamh, COO, talk about growing the business and the lessons they've l...

Calocurb's natural product capsules reduce appetite to help with weight loss. The active ingredient was developed by Plant & Food Research, who work alongside Calocurb in clinical trials. An FDA-approved drug for weight loss in the US has the same course of action, costs a lot more and must be injected – with side effects. Calocurb's sales of capsules have taken off as a result! Sarah talks about...

Spidertracks was born on the back of huge personal tragedy and an incredibly inefficient search and rescue effort following a high-profile helicopter accident in 2005. Initially solving the problem of locating an aircraft in distress, today Spidertracks is the preferred provider of aircraft tracking, flight following and flight safety insights for thousands of commercial operators across the gener...

CONQA is an online platform to give construction contractors quality assurance as you go – not as an afterthought, making quality assurance into a genuine measure of progress and saving time and money. CONQA can help construction businesses reduce defects, minimise risk, track progress and support your payment claims, altogether enhancing your reputation in the market. It now has close to 60 peopl...

Darryn and WayBeyond are on a mission to transform the way greenhouse and protected crops are grown using sensors, data, and AI. Three years of deep R&D was followed by the launch of Folium (an IoT network of sensors) and its digital farming platform, FarmRoad in 2020. It now has more than 35 enterprise customers across North America, Europe, Africa, China and Australasia, who represent thousands...

APIMatic makes the integration of its customers APIs as simple as possible. It provides documentation, SDKs, Code Samples, Assisted Authentication, Test Cases, CI/CD integrations - and keeps them updated if the API changes. Its Code Generation Engine emits code in a variety of languages. APIMatic is currently being used in over 190 countries. It employs over 60 people in Auckland, San Francisco an...