Boosting Tech Startups and Productivity with NZGCP

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and today, real privilege to have James Pinner with us from the New Zealand Growth Capital Partners. Welcome along, James. How are you?

James Pinner:
Very well, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Paul Spain:
Great to have you here on the New Zealand Tech Podcast. First time we’ve heard from NZGCP, so maybe you can just give a quick intro to yourself and where you fit into the picture.

James Pinner:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I’m James. I’m the CEO of NZGCP. I’ve been with the organisation for 6 and a half years now. NZGCP is an agency set up by the government to help build a startup ecosystem. So we’re really about trying to mobilise more capital, get more startups flowing through, and bring more capital into the space so they can grow and have huge impact on New Zealand. Yeah, so I’ve been joined to set up the Elevate Fund, which is our fund of funds investing into venture capital funds. And now I’ve just recently taken over at the helm of CEO from 1st January.

Paul Spain:
Congratulations.

James Pinner:
Thank you.

Paul Spain:
It’s exciting.

James Pinner:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Well, before we kick in, of course, a big thank you to our show partners: One New Zealand, 2degrees, Spark, Workday, Fortinet, and Gorilla Technology. Really appreciate their support of the overall tech and innovation ecosystems in New Zealand. Well, let’s jump in. I’m keen maybe to start at the beginning of the NZGCP story or, you know, New Zealand Venture Investment Fund as it started out. Yeah. What can you tell us around how that all came about and what the world looked like back in 2002 from a tech startup and venture capital perspective in New Zealand?

James Pinner:
Sure. Yeah. And obviously I wasn’t quite around at that time. I hail from the UK originally. I’ve been over, I actually was around in 2002 and ’03, but then I went back to London. I’ve been here 12 years. But NZ VIF was set up as it was then as a fund of funds, so investing into venture capital funds. It did invest into quite a broad range of funds at the time.

James Pinner:
And the reality was there were some really good startups being formed around the time, sort of what the Zeros and the Trademe’s back then, but it wasn’t quite a depth of market that was there. So in 2007, the idea was sort of transformed a little bit to set up the Seed Co-Investment Fund, or SCIF as we called it back then. And that was really to try and stimulate direct investment into startups. It was a matching capital kind of programme that would work with accredited investors, like especially a lot of angels and early-stage investors. And that’s been going and morphed till about 2020. So the NZ VIF, the fund of funds, was winding down in the mid to late 2010s. The SCIF programme was carrying on and we’ve been recycling capital from those programmes. In 2020, we launched the Elevate fund of funds and that was an opportunity to take a bit of a look at this, the seed model and this buy model and move to a more, slightly more commercial mandate.

James Pinner:
So we are now making, and since, well, for over 6, 7 years now, been making our own investment decisions on the direct side of things, but also on the venture capital fund. So we are managing the Elevate Fund, which is on behalf of the government.

Paul Spain:
Looking back to those earlier days when things, you know, were starting out in that sort of 2002 era, Yeah, you know, as you mentioned, there was certainly some things sort of going on, but the world has changed quite a lot over that period of time. You mentioned investing into existing venture capital funds. What do you know, what was around at that time compared to what the landscape sort of looks like today? Because, you know, it seems like there’s a lot more that’s going on venture capital-wise. And, you know, and it seems like, you know, the government involvement through this journey as an important part of that picture.

James Pinner:
Yeah, absolutely. And I also look back to when I joined in 2019, just prior to the Elevate launch, and there was, like I said, there was startups being formed. The actual amount of available capital for venture capital at that stage was only $72 million. So there was one or two managers at the time. Blackbird was the most established fund manager in the country. Blackbird was just becoming— so Movac was the most established, Blackbird was just coming in, there was GD1 and a few funds being formed. And then we estimate that sort of from as far back as the data goes, so sort of around 2001, there’s about $1.2 billion invested into VC from, let’s say, 2002 to 2020. Since 2020 to 2025, we’ve had over $1.8 billion.

James Pinner:
So a 50% uplift in 5 years compared to the previous almost 20 years. So we’re seeing a lot more going in. We’ve got a lot of A few more managers now with track records emerging, which is what investors need to actually sort of give them confidence to invest into. Seeing a much broader range of venture capital funds coming in locally and a lot more startups. So our estimates are around sort of 1,500 to 2,000 startups live at the moment, which is definitely a significant lift from where we were. We’ve still got a long way to go. So we still think, you know, we think there should be more like 5,000 startups for a country of our size. Which does mean more capital at all stages.

James Pinner:
But yeah, the government support that’s been shown has been instrumental in lifting that and sort of crowding in private capital, which is exactly what we want to do.

Paul Spain:
Now, I often hear that New Zealand startups seem to be sort of somewhat undervalued compared to the valuations that would get put on, say, a company, a startup based in Silicon Valley.

James Pinner:
Silicon Valley.

Paul Spain:
Is there some truth to that from your perspective?

James Pinner:
Yes, there is. There’s always the exceptions that prove the rule, and you’ll get, you know, we see it in round sizes, we see it in valuations and so on, that the scale of investment into New Zealand companies is significantly lower than the equivalents in Silicon Valley. And we have to be careful sort of comparing ourselves to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley’s been around for, you know, decades and decades. There’s 300 million people there. It’s always going to be a bit bigger, more competitive, which drives valuations up. But our aim is to get New Zealand companies onto that global stage. So get them there quicker, get them, you know, we’re looking for globally ambitious companies that are going to space.

James Pinner:
And we’ve seen, you know, seen great successes like Rocket Lab, for example, which, you know, struggled to get money domestically at the time, has really, you know, now really, excuse the pun, taken off and is doing very well listed in the US and is able to access much larger pools of capital. And I don’t think we’re ever going to solve, or should want to try and necessarily solve, that later stage sort of capital piece. We’re always going to be able to build a pipeline to the US, sort of Series B onwards, kind of in the later stage investment capital is there. Globally, the markets are always going to be bigger outside of New Zealand than they are here. So companies should always be, and will always be, looking to go into overseas markets. There will be greater talent pools overseas, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to do a lot more here. So we do want to keep companies here longer. We want to give them better chances of success.

James Pinner:
So more capital stays, you know, is invested earlier in New Zealand, which is then recycled out of the successes. We get to build talent and keep more people here. So maybe people keeping more R&D facilities in this country and the headquarters here, still sending people into overseas markets to, you know, to get access to those markets. But I think it’s an and. We shouldn’t be looking for one or the other. I think if we can keep growing the base and keeping companies here for as long as possible, but giving them the best sort of launchpad to get into overseas markets. That’s our ideal.

Paul Spain:
[Speaker] Yeah. And do you have a view on sort of success rates? Because, you know, often, you know, certainly looking at Silicon Valley, it’s like, you know, the metrics there are obviously different and different in every, you know, part of the world. There we see, you know, firms that end up being, you know, trillion-dollar type firms. Yeah, it seems in Silicon Valley that there’s maybe some really, really big successes, but maybe more failures overall. Is that, what do the stats kind of look like in terms of failure? Certainly when I look at the sort of, most of the startups that I have interacted with over the last decade or so, And maybe it’s just because I end up talking to the ones that are really good and are already very well on their path by the time they kind of come onto the radar. But it seems like we have a pretty high success rate compared to some of the overall stats.

James Pinner:
Yeah, and it depends how you measure success, obviously. You’re right, we haven’t had any trillion-dollar companies yet, but we do seem to punch above our weight in terms of creating unicorns or billion-dollar valued businesses. Holter is one of the more recent ones, and then you’ve got sort of the Landsatex and the Rocket Labs and Zeros that we’ve had over the years. But I’d say it is sort of almost a game of two halves. We are taking longer, New Zealand companies, partly because of the capital raised, and there’s less capital going into these companies. We do take longer to get there than our competitors, and in global markets especially where you’ve got, you know, you just be able to put more money to work, you’re able to hire talent to move quicker. So we do take longer to get there. And we have this sort of dialogue and sort of conversation around, well, New Zealand is very, very capital efficient.

James Pinner:
We are able to do more with less, which is a great imperative and a great trait to have. But at the same time, I don’t think that should be our narrative that we should lead on, or an excuse not to have companies properly funded and to be able to compete on a global scale. So I’d say our failure rates overall are fairly similar. We do also have a little bit of a habit of holding onto companies for too long in New Zealand. We don’t like to let companies go. And you can never know to prove the negative, but, you know, and maybe some of the companies that were successful, if someone hadn’t given them a go, we’d certainly know that’s the case, then they wouldn’t have become a success. But there is certainly a, and US in particular and more established markets are much more open to letting a company fail quickly recycle that talent so that founder’s now going on to work on a different programme or different initiative. But they’ve got more experience and lived experience, which is what, you know, serial entrepreneurs are generally much more successful than sort of first time statistically.

James Pinner:
We have the stats show that we are able to, let’s say, sort of punch above our weight in creating those big companies. And I think that’s the general underpinning of why we still, we fundamentally believe this will work. We have the raw talent and capability and entrepreneurship and mindset to create huge disruptive companies. And New Zealanders have historically, you know, broken the norms and created these huge things, whether it’s Ernest Rutherford splitting the atom or Bruce McLaren, or, you know, we all know the stories of the famous New Zealanders, Edmund Hillary, you know. So we have that raw talent, and if we can get behind that, you know, if we didn’t have that, that would be— you can’t force that. Whereas putting capital to work and supporting those companies grow is something that we can replicate and do.

Paul Spain:
When you look back over this, you know, history, NZGCP, NZFIF over sort of, you know, 20, 24 years, is it clear that it’s been a good investment and good thing for the government to be involved in? What are the things that sort of stand out to you?

James Pinner:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
You know, if you look at that journey, wherever politics is involved, you know, some things can get kicked to the curb pretty quickly. It’s actually a reasonable period for, I mean, obviously there’ve been changes and so on along the way, which these things need to, often need to happen. But you’re still here, so.

James Pinner:
Yes, yeah. Yeah, and I would say this, but I generally wouldn’t be here unless I thought we had a really important place to play. I’m here because I want to do this for New Zealand and the benefit that technology companies have for New Zealanders there. And I think, you know, even the data, you know, without me sort of the partisan sort of saying this is definitely a good idea, I think the data shows that as well. Like we, if it goes from the capital in the Series A/B stage, like I said, sort of it’s gone from $1 billion over 20 years to $1.82 billion over the previous, the next sort of last 5 years. We’ve had great successes in terms of some of the startups we’ve backed. And even financially, and this is one thing I’m not sort of, we have to sort of measure or sort of think about as a GCP. We are responsible for taxpayer money, so we are custodians of that and we want to make, we don’t want to lose money.

James Pinner:
But actually our primary role is economic and market development. So we are trying to build a market, we’re trying to get more startups there, we’re trying to get more private capital into this space. And our actual real goal long term is the economic impact we have for New Zealand. That’s why we believe in it and we want it to be so successful. But at the same time, as I said, we’re custodians of taxpayer money, so we don’t want to be losing money. So we’re trying to find that sort of sweet spot to balance that. So in NZGCP, for example, we haven’t actually been funded since 2017. We get a small appropriation each year for market development, which we put into sponsorships of key initiatives, but we have been basically recycling and reinvesting from realisations we’ve made in our own portfolio.

James Pinner:
That covers all our operating costs and all our new investments. And we had a really good exit a couple of years ago with Kami, which is a company that we first invested sort of 14 years prior. It’s a long journey. So from a financial sort of point of view, I think, you know, we’re more than keeping our nose clean. We’re actually making the returns and relatively self-sustaining. That said, I think we’re massively underscaled and I think we can do a lot more. And I say that because of the impact we’re having in some of these companies. So we’ve invested directly from our seed fund, Aspire, previously Skiff, coming up to 300 companies now over that period.

James Pinner:
There’s been some great successes and a lot of those companies are still maturing now and then getting into the pipeline, you know, whether it’s an OpenStar, for example, or Volumio and Avassa, some of these newer companies that we’ve been backing. So we are building the pipeline of future economic growth. And on the Elevate side of things, then sort of building, bringing that private capital in. And that sort of, yeah, Elevate for example, so we’ve had $400 million committed from the government so far over the last 5 years. We’ve already realised $20 million of exits through companies like Tradify and Quantify Photonics. And those companies, the 13 funds, they’ve almost invested in, it’s almost coming up to 200 companies themselves over the last 5 years. So that’s 500 startups we’ve backed. And there’s the economic benefit, and this is, you know, startups are a power law game.

James Pinner:
It’s one or two winners make both the financial returns but actually the productivity gains. And I’ll come back to productivity ’cause we all know that’s really important to New Zealand and we’ve been sort of lagging a bit, to put it a bit mildly.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

James Pinner:
But those power law companies are the ones that create thousands of jobs. And, you know, we look at how many people Rocket Labs employing, zero, and also the spinouts of those. Xero, I think, claim that through their sort of, as they’ve grown, they’ve created 1,000 spin-out new companies that have come. Rocket Lab, we’ve already seen lots of companies already being formed from people who used to work there. Rocket Lab, I think they’ve created 150 millionaires from some of their early employees. That’s money that can come back into the ecosystem and is raising the prosperity for New Zealand. So not only is the sort of power law companies, those big companies creating big jobs and having big economic impact, you know, if all those employees are paying taxes, these are high-paid jobs, these are opportunities opportunities to raise the base. But even the ones that fail, like, you know, the ones that don’t become the billion-dollar companies, they’re still hiring people along the way.

James Pinner:
They’re still developing talent. So the knock-on effects and the spill-off effects for every single thing that the startup ecosystem is doing are pretty phenomenal. And then, yeah, productivity. The Kinsey published a recent report which shows that productivity gains follow a power law. So, and to such an extent that a small number of companies can actually lift nationwide productivity. So we go back to the US and a small number of companies like Nvidia and Meta and Amazon, Apple, they actually lift nationwide productivity because they’re so impactful. So if we can have that, I don’t think it’s necessarily, you know, there’s an element of, yeah, all these tech companies and we’ll, I’m sure we’ll come on to AI in a second. Yeah, these will have incremental increases in productivity, but actually having some true nation-building tech companies like Rocket Lab.

James Pinner:
That is building nationwide productivity and that’s sort of the heart of, I think that’s how we shift the shift of nationwide productivity. It’s not about—

Paul Spain:
So you’re talking about lifting our overall kind of productivity stats. I guess Rocket Lab’s not necessarily changing the productivity inside every New Zealand business like a software vendor whose software gets rolled out. But when you look at the return sort of per head and so on.

James Pinner:
Yeah, yeah. And also, you know, like I said, sort of high-paid jobs as well. So it’s bringing in more tax revenue. And that’s the thing, if we can get more of these companies growing the economic pie and growing productivity, tax take, exports, that helps everybody. That helps us pay for all the infrastructure we want as a country. It helps us pay for a world-class education system, the knock-on benefits of that. And hopefully as well along the way solving some of the climate problems and things like that. We seem to be doing really well in that at the moment.

Paul Spain:
You mentioned Cammy. What can you share about Cammy’s story? I think that’s probably quite an interesting one for listeners and yeah, be interested in what your thoughts are on that journey from investing through to exiting.

James Pinner:
To quote them really, ’cause it’s their story, but when Skiff invested in them, there really wasn’t much capital around. And if it hadn’t been for the matching capital that we provided at the time, they really wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground.

Paul Spain:
They wouldn’t— So this was at the sort of seed funding, foundational level? Yeah, yeah.

James Pinner:
And we’ve heard multiple, so Aura is another great example where they’ve literally said to us that if it hadn’t been for that funding, they wouldn’t have got to even through some of the first steps. And that’s what we are trying to do. We come in at the earliest stage to help companies get off the ground. Back then and still to some extent, you know, there wasn’t a lot of private capital. A lot of, we all know, a lot of New Zealand sort of private capital goes into properties and doesn’t really, you know, go into the space. At the same time, this is a really, really risky stage. Like the earlier stages is, you know, most of the private investors, when you’re talking to big venture capital funds, they want to come in when things have been de-risked a bit. You’ve got, you know, especially in software, you’ve got some revenue, recurring revenue building up.

James Pinner:
So they don’t want to take the early stage. So that’s generally sort of people like governments do back this, whether it’s through incentives and tax or through direct investment like we’re doing. You’ve got angels who are generally wealthier individuals who can afford to sort of have more risk appetite and support, giving back generally. So that’s what we did with Kami and Aura. And if it hadn’t been for that capital at the time, they would never have progressed and grown to become what they became. Kami, the Kami founders, they are now using some of the capital they’ve taken from the exit and are now setting up their own fund. And this is like next generation of investors coming forward, which is fantastic. Yeah.

James Pinner:
We, you know, as a fund we made an 80 times return on our investment. So they gave us, give or take, about $40 million to then reinvest into the next generation of startups. So, Hopefully that $40 million creates, you know, 6 Cammies, not one Cammie. And that’s our ambition as well, is to, you know, these unicorn companies, these billion-dollar businesses, we’re not doing one every 10 years like we have been, we’re doing one a year. That’s what we really want to get to.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s exciting. And where does the New Zealand Super Fund, you know, fit into the picture?

James Pinner:
So they are essentially mandated to look after the Elevate Fund. So Under legislation for Elevate, the money was sort of ring-fenced and taken off from NZSuper and put into the separate Elevate fund. They’ve appointed NZGCCP as the day-to-day manager of that fund. So we make all the investment decisions, we do the monitoring and reporting, and then we report to them. We call it an LPAC, a Limited Partner Advisory Committee, which is very like a board really. It adds extra layer of governance. So they’re governing it and the actual accounts go into NZSuper’s annual report, but we do the management of the day-to-day making decisions.

Paul Spain:
And for those that aren’t aware, the New Zealand Super Fund, this is our superannuation sort of future for New Zealand, right?

James Pinner:
Yes. And I think it’s valued at around $85 billion now, and it’s been one of the most successful sovereign wealth funds in the world actually over the last decade. So yeah, and longer probably.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. In terms of the challenges of running an organisation like New Zealand Growth Capital Partners, what does that look like? What can you tell us? ‘Cause these things aren’t all easy and it’s great when there’s a really good sort of return on investment and when things are going well. But no one runs a perfect organisation perfectly through history. I don’t think we’ve got any examples of— No. Of that.

James Pinner:
And we’re only human, we all do make mistakes. I mean, just as long as we learn from them, that’s important.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So I mean, what can you—

James Pinner:
Where do I start?

Paul Spain:
What can you share? Any particular stories that—

James Pinner:
I guess even just sort of context of why we exist. So we invest in startups. The idea is of the companies we invest in become, these are really disruptive, huge global businesses. That is incredibly risky and probably over 95% fail. We invest at the earlier stage, which is the riskier stage. So we have a very high portion of failures in our portfolio. And all of the failures happen before the winners. So as you’re along that journey, you’re constantly having companies don’t quite make it, fail.

James Pinner:
Some of them, you know, when you say a failure, that’s not necessarily They have become— they’ve gone into insolvency. They just haven’t sort of become that billion-dollar, sort of $100 million revenue company that you hope they would be. And they’re still having really meaningful impact. But a lot of them do fail and they take on big risks. And we have things in our portfolio like OpenStar, which is— we call it a moonshot. If it comes off, it’s fantastic. It could have global impact on energy, but it’s incredibly risky and incredibly hard and no one’s been able to do it before. So We have to back those things to give them a go, but we also have to be realistic.

James Pinner:
A lot of them won’t get there. So that’s the sort of general premise of what we do. We’re also investing in the venture capital market, which, as I said, when I joined, there was sort of 1 or 2 managers that had sort of track records. There was basically everyone else was what we call an emerging manager or a first-time manager. And again, investing in venture capital is a very long journey. You’re generally investing in things that your portfolio will mature after, so say 7 to 10 years we talk about, especially if you’re a Series A investor. It can be longer, it can be a lot longer, it could be 10 to 15 years. And some of the feedback loops in terms of what you’re learning, you don’t know whether you make an investment now really until 10 years’ time whether that was a success.

James Pinner:
You have lots of pointers along the way and you can definitely see when things have failed. But you know, trying to grow a whole asset class of investors is challenging. And knowing for investing in a startup is one thing, you’re investing in both the founder and the product and their dream and their vision. Investing in a venture capital fund is investing in people only. They don’t have a physical product to sell. They have a value proposition and you’re trying to test that and get as much references as possible. It is hard. Like it’s, and then again, balancing that sort of objective of commercial returns, especially in the Elevate side, we are trying to get more, much more sort of high-level commercial returns because we want to prove to the institutional investors like the KiwiSaver funds that this is worth investing in.

James Pinner:
But at the same time, we’re growing, we’re investing in a very nascent market and you know, it takes time and we are seeing maturity now. But I think it’s been, we’re pretty aware there’s also been funds that haven’t quite worked out.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, what are your thoughts on how KiwiSaver funds, you know, could be investing into this space? You know, we’ve seen, you know, a taste of that, I guess, in recent times, but there’s probably a much, much bigger opportunity.

James Pinner:
Yeah, and I hear varying numbers. I think the KiwiSaver balances in New Zealand, latest I heard was $125 billion. I think it might be a little bit higher. We have seen Some Kiwisaver funds go into it. The likes of, you know, Booster are doing their own direct technology fund. You’ve got Simplicity doing a little bit, you’ve got Generate doing things, Fisher Funds. So we are beginning to see some emergence in that. But when we look at it, there’s such a huge opportunity of that $125 billion.

James Pinner:
A very, very small amount would make, you know, 1% of that, you know, a billion dollars going into startups, into private via bench capital funds would have meaningful impact. And when I look at it from a sort of pure corporate finance lens, I do look at some of, especially the biggest KiwiSaver funds and say, well, globally I see allocations to much higher allocations to alternative assets. By that I mean infrastructure, property, private equity, and then venture capital’s kind of sort of the riskiest bit at the bottom. And we’re not seeing allocations, big allocations. I think the highest in any KiwiSaver fund is 3%. To alternatives full stop. And if we’re not getting, and I think globally it’s more like 20 to 30%, you know, 15 to 20 in some jurisdictions. So the question is sort of why aren’t, didn’t New Zealand KiwiSavers investing in more to those? Because if we’re not investing in alternatives full stop, and I’m talking proven asset classes like infrastructure and property and private equity, then they’re never going to invest in venture capital, which is sort of the riskiest stage.

James Pinner:
So that’s one key question. To ask. Venture capital itself, like there are genuine reasons it is still risky and it’s still unproven in New Zealand, but it doesn’t mean that’s the same in other jurisdictions. So, you know, Australia, there’s more of a track record. So one of the things we’re sort of exploring is there a sort of a product which would give you exposure to Australia and New Zealand venture capital funds, which is a less risky proposition for institutional investors, and that would really move the dial. But there are sort of questions around generally why are we not having greater allocation to alternatives, let alone sort of venture capital. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Okay. What do you see in terms of, you know, the appetites of individual Kiwis? Do we see, say, platforms like Sharesies where people are jumping in and investing in the Rocket Labs and Teslas and Meta and, you know, all these sorts of generally listed companies. And then, you know, folks involved in, you know, Bitcoin and crypto and so on. But it still doesn’t seem that easy for the general public to get involved in investing, you know, in our earlier stage companies.

James Pinner:
Yeah, yeah. And there are a few reasons that I think, and it’s— I’m sure Sharesies can give you a better answer than this, but my understanding would be that most people investing in shares will be investing in US tech stocks. Over the last few years, the returns have been pretty phenomenal, or more broadly, you know, established US markets or global. There’s also been a heavy reliance in New Zealand on investing in property, as we all know. So, and I’m beginning to sort of see maybe that potentially sort of shifting down, especially as property prices are, have been, well, certainly not making the returns that people were used to. And that’s one of the things we’d love to see is actually people sort of moving away from what we call non-productive assets, investing in a house or that isn’t sort of growing economy, isn’t actually creating jobs and having meaningful impact, that would be phenomenal. You know, buying a house is a cultural thing as well as, you know, and an individual thing of people want to own their own house. You also can leverage a house property, which you can’t do in any other kind of asset class for the general public.

James Pinner:
So Yes, we’d love to see people moving away from doing that and at least, you know, a portion of your investment because again, these are high-risk assets and different stages of different risk tolerances. So it’s not for everybody. You shouldn’t, I certainly would not be recommending putting, you know, a large chunk of your investment into, of your sort of entire net worth. And I’m not, this is not financial advice just to be clear, but it is risky. Let’s just, let’s be honest about it. That said, a lot of people want to do good and they want to do good for New Zealand and want to invest in helping lift, you know, investing in really cool stuff. Like, let’s be honest, it’s investing in nuclear fusion or rockets is quite fascinating. But I think the general public don’t know most, most, a lot about it.

James Pinner:
I think it’s— I live somewhat in a bubble and I talk to all of my sort of people around the startup world and yeah, we know about these sort of small little companies that are growing. We’re really excited about them. And this amazing water technology over here or zinc recovery over here. But if I go to a barbecue outside of that world, it’s like, oh yeah, I might have heard of Rocket Lab and I might have heard of Xero. And that’s one of the things we need to shift, shift that mindset of just because they’re huge opportunities, you can either go and work for one, you could invest in one, you could be buying their products in your company. There’s all sorts of different ways you can be helping. You can just be, you know, helping out a company as they’re forming and sort of getting ideas. If you’ve got business knowledge that could be appropriate to an early stage startup.

James Pinner:
You don’t even need to be putting capital into that. And a lot of that’s where the best angels are, they’re investing and giving their own time and expertise. So there’s huge opportunities. And as I said, Rocket Lab, you go and work for them, people have become millionaires and also doing amazing ground-breaking work. OpenStar will be the same. There’s going to be some of the most ground-breaking science in the world. And we see that across the whole country, whether it’s medical devices or clean tech or software and AI. So huge, huge opportunities for the general public to know about it.

James Pinner:
And look, it’s hard. I haven’t got the budget to go and do a mass marketing campaign, but I think if we, if the general public begin to know about these things, it becomes one, it becomes a vote winner. So governments start investing more into the space and investing more into, you know, R&D and science and, you know, allowing people like us to do more. You get Kiwisaver, people voting with their feet with their Kiwisavers. Why are you not investing in this part of the sector? And I think that’s, that’s an important part of it. And I think we’ve seen globally, actually, a big marketing campaign isn’t going to shift the dial. It’s actually the successful companies that move the dial. It’s people suddenly realising, oh, I know someone who worked there, I know someone who worked at Xero, I know someone who worked at these other companies, so Halter or wherever.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, OpenStar is an interesting one that you mentioned because yeah, it is probably one of those edgier type investments, right? That kind of, you know, does, does, you very much sort of fit the profile of, hey, at one end of the scale, you know, it could, you know, if successful, then, you know, easily a billion-dollar business. You know, who knows what makes a trillion-dollar business? I’m not sure there’s kind of a cookie cutter for that. But, you know, on the flip side, there have been lots of, you know, lots of others, you know, trying to do somewhat similar things. For those that aren’t familiar, what can you tell us around around, around OpenStar?

James Pinner:
So I will caveat this with I am not a technical expert. I say OpenStar is essentially trying to— so nuclear fission, which is how nuclear reactors work generally around the world, split atoms and it creates a huge amount of heat which then heats water, which turns turbines, which creates electricity. Fusion is about containing those same— not nuclear atoms, and I’ll come back to that. So creating combining atoms bashing them against each other. So bringing up to huge amounts of heat, huge amounts of speed. So they are beginning to fuse together and that creates the heat that you need. The, the temperature I think they’re aiming for is 150 million degrees.

Paul Spain:
So we’re talking about creating the sun here, essentially.

James Pinner:
Yeah. Redoing what the sun does. Yeah. So that is— and slightly smaller, slightly smaller scale, hopefully, and slightly more contained. So yeah, and then again, that heat then will create electricity when it’s fully working at up to speed. It will be using hydrogen atoms and isotopes. So they’ve got to the very first stage and what they have to do is then create, contain this heat because obviously that’s, you know, creating, recreating the sun in the middle of Wellington is probably not the safest place. So they have created a— using superconductors that were essentially developed out of another Wellington government-backed research lab.

James Pinner:
They’ve now got the ability and the magnets to be able to contain this, and containing it also allows you then to sort of increase the heat and increase the propensity for fusion. So they have— they’re using something called a levitated dipole. They are trying to contain that plasma with relatively less magnets than other technologies who are trying to do the same thing. So most of them are sort of creating big donuts that you’ve probably seen on science papers and things. So it’s a different approach, which was, I believe, sort of originated in the ’60s. At the time they didn’t have the technology with the superconductors. Now we have the superconductors. So they’re hopeful that actually all the sort of stars are aligning, if we sort of use that pun.

James Pinner:
And they’ve, you know, got to 1 million degrees in terms of their plasma. In their views, they’ve sort of done some of the hard things. They’ve definitely done some of the things that everyone said was impossible. So That’s a pretty good start.

Paul Spain:
Pretty cool, isn’t it?

James Pinner:
Yeah. And then so the next stage is to go and build a bigger one and start scaling it up. So heating, getting to higher temperatures and it’s pretty exciting.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s a really good, good description. I put you on the spot there, so I hadn’t warned you, but I think it is fascinating to hear about some of these, you know, incredible startups that we, that we do have. And yeah, tell it, telling that, telling their stories is an important part of that. And in terms of getting to raising more capital over time, that becomes easier the more we share these stories, right?

James Pinner:
And that’s huge amounts of capital. Those things are hundreds of millions of dollars to raise before they’ve seen a penny in revenues. And that’s one of the things New Zealand’s really good at is we call it deep tech. So it’s science, whether it’s a medical device and one of our portfolio companies is literally developing a coupler to join arteries together so that surgeons don’t have to stitch, you know, half an hour per artery. Through to, you know, agtech. So Holter, for example, with their collars, which means farmers can actually control where the cows go without having to build fences, and they can control which fields they’re doing. Cleantech. We’ve got, actually there’s a growing portfolio of amazing cleantech companies where there’s Aquaforest, which has created a way to clean water without using lots of thermal energy and heating up water, which is the traditional way and is now cheaper.

James Pinner:
They can do it cheaper. Zinc recovery, recovering waste from electric arc furnaces, and some— and Mint Innovation recycling power circuit boards. Huge sort of opportunities there. But all those companies require developing a process or product which either has to be sort of regulatory approved through, you know, generally the FDA in America, or a lot of safety, or actually just proving to someone at scale it works or making it work at scale. And that can be 10 years and you obviously don’t get a single dollar of revenue until you’ve actually got a product you can sell as opposed to a software business, which especially AI, some of these things can be people spinning up in a matter of hours and selling to the market.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s, I guess, part of the journey and part of the risk, isn’t it?

James Pinner:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
When you look at I guess the KiwiSaver type investments and so on. Yeah, most of us kind of like to be able to see the growth of investments. And obviously when you invest in say, share markets and property and so on, those things are reasonably easy to sort of track and put valuations on. But it’s actually pretty hard, isn’t it, to, you know, put valuations on firms that may or may not make it. And, you know, they can, they can flip from one day to the next, you know, up or down, you know, quite significantly.

James Pinner:
And it can be, it can be binary sometimes as well. You know, something’s going really well, doesn’t get FDA approval, or they try to scale it and actually can’t scale to that next stage and it’s back down again. So yeah, it can be, it is incredibly challenging. And again, this is, and again, I’m not giving financial advice here, but you wouldn’t ever, that’s why you would only do it as part of a balanced portfolio. You’d be having a small sort of portion of your investments in this space, which is the high risk, high reward kind of outcome. And as I said, we call it sort of, you know, well, we, but it is called power law. You know, a few big winners will hopefully offset all your losses, but if you miss that one winner, that’s also catastrophic as well to your portfolio.

Paul Spain:
So it’s, it is hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now on the harder side, one of the challenges for you is picking who to partner with and who to invest in. One of the stories that sort of came through in the media and some, you know, there’s some blog post or two out there and bits and pieces was around Hill Ference VC, which was funded by Rob Vickery. I think we had him, if I recall correctly, on a sort of panel discussion that we ran on Clubhouse during COVID amongst a range of other voices. And at that stage, he seemed to be doing some pretty positive things. But I think he sort of left the country a couple of years ago. NZGCP had made an investment in in Hill Farrance that’s probably got some negative press.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, certainly has. Maybe you can sort of tell us from your perspective what that journey kind of looked like and how things have sort of steered since to be able to move forwards with those startups that we’re invested in.

James Pinner:
Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, through the Elevate programme, we invest in a bunch of emerging managers and Sometimes, you know, we do need to grow the market because, you know, ultimately to grow the number of startups, we need more capital. Therefore, we need more managers in that. So we have been investing in a range of local and managers have sort of come from overseas with experience. And ultimately we did, after quite an extensive sort of due diligence period, we chose an investment in 2023, 2022, sorry, into Hillferrance. And we invested $17.5 million. And yeah, I think as has been played out in the media, like it didn’t go to plan. We, Rob ultimately decided to go back to the UK and to, so as a result, NZGCP decided sort of on behalf of other investors to step in and, you know, got investors approval to do so, but to step in and manage that fund. So, so we are now managing that fund and we’re managing all the portfolio.

James Pinner:
As you said, Rob had done, you know, some really cool companies in that portfolio, a lot of gaming companies that weren’t, a lot of people weren’t doing at the stage and still aren’t, to be honest. There’s a lot of, that’s another sort of gap in the market where we see. And so we’re now managing that portfolio on behalf of all the other investors. I can’t get into too much detail around sort of what went on behind the scenes. I can assure everyone that we take our responsibility to invest taxpayers’ money very seriously. We had done extensive reference calls, we had done all the same processes we do for all our funds. But sometimes things don’t work out. And same reason startups don’t all work out.

James Pinner:
Any manager is investing in that super high risky portfolio. The portfolio is actually not doing too badly at this stage, but it’s a broad portfolio. It hasn’t gone to zero, has it? No, it certainly hasn’t.

Paul Spain:
No. Because I think they were maybe had in the direction of $36 million invested. Yeah. What would you say that kind of sits at now in terms of, I mean, it’s hard to value.

James Pinner:
Yeah, it’s getting back up sort of around that $36 million. It’s not, yeah, we are confident, well, confident is not a good word. We are hopeful and sort of expect that we’ll hopefully be returning money to shareholders, to all the investors in that, hopefully at least what they invested. So it certainly isn’t, you know, it certainly hasn’t gone to zero.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there were sort of allegations of misappropriation of funds and so on. I think that had come through from Hashbone Interactive, Hashbane, you know, who are game developers. Do you think that was more maybe an emotional sort of thing, or did you— I guess, did you find any sort of evidence of money being stolen as such.

James Pinner:
So on the Hashbrain thing, my understanding of it was that it was money that was promised to be invested that was never invested. So not technically stolen. I don’t think that’s the right framing of it. I think it was a lot of hope that there would be follow-on investment. And, you know, like all of our sort of anyone who invests, you’re hoping it does well and you invest and sometimes you don’t have the money or for other reasons that investment doesn’t happen. But I don’t believe it was money that was sort of taken from that company. That’s my understanding. In terms of the HillFrens fund, I can’t get into detail.

James Pinner:
All I can say is, you know, which I think I’ve mentioned publicly, we have done— we had did as part of sort of taking over the fund, we obviously had to do some investigations into things and there’s processes still underway. So therefore I can’t really talk much more about that one, unfortunately.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

James Pinner:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Okay. No, I appreciate you, you know, cheering on that. In terms of how you deal with startups where it doesn’t go so well, most Kiwis would see that as, well, this represents us, this is a government entity investing government funds. It is obviously the nature of startups, but what does the picture kind of look like when that doesn’t come out with the huge returns and so on?

James Pinner:
I think what’s been really encouraging is actually over the last few years that narrative has changed a bit. There used to be a big sort of, and there still are occasionally, sort of media stories of quite high-profile startups failing. But I think we’ve matured as a sector, and I think people understand that if you’re aiming for big things, sometimes there’s going to be failures, and probably more often than not, it’s going to be failures. And we will keep reiterating this, like we Yes, that hugely disruptive, successful company is fantastic, but to get there, you’ve had to back a lot of companies that didn’t get there. And I think as long as everyone understands the purpose of what we’re doing, and that is our objective, is to grow, you know, not just startups, not just the capital that goes into them, but actually for New Zealand and for the productivity of New Zealand, for the economic benefit of New Zealand and for the people of New Zealand. That is why we’re doing all this. That’s the— it’s not about about making rich people richer or backing fanciful ideas. It’s about having a deliberate attempt to grow everything for New Zealand and drive that change through innovation.

James Pinner:
So yes, companies will fail. Like, it’s on a— what really matters is the personal side of it. That’s really hard. Like, people are putting their life and soul into these businesses. People are— the founders who we’re backing are incredibly brave. They are challenging, giving up often well-paid jobs to go and work for very little money, especially at the beginning, with a hope that they get rewarded eventually. Most of them are, the vast, vast majority in fact, we generally don’t look at anyone that isn’t, is impact and purpose-driven. So they’re doing it for a reason.

James Pinner:
They want to change the world. And when it fails, it’s hard. It’s incredibly hard. And the only thing we can do is be as empathetic and support them. Sometimes, you know, things are played out in media and people, you know, rightly or wrongly, they want to make money from their investments. So they, they’ve, you know, a lot of people are financially invested into these things and when it doesn’t work, it can be emotive as well. But I think as long as you’ve gone in with the right purpose and, you know, we do have strong systems and procedures to make sure that, you know, these things have the best chance of being successful. To the extent you can when you’re investing in super, super early stage ideas.

James Pinner:
So that’s our constant challenge, is trying to back the bold and the brave, but also mindful. Obviously we are custodians of money, but I think we’ve shown that we’ve returned more than the money the government’s put in so far, and I hope that will continue. And Elevate again is, you know, it’s worth more than the investment we’ve put into it. So it’s tracking well. I think it’s over, at least on a gross basis, over 10% up on what we’ve invested. So we’re actually making money and we’re doing impact, which is a pretty good combination.

Paul Spain:
Who are the sort of most recent startups that you’ve invested in or funds that you’ve invested in? Maybe you can sort of walk us through some of the newest ones. Contented and others that are quite recent.

James Pinner:
I was going to say Contented is the one that sort of springs to mind on the AI basis. Lucy and the team there have created something really exciting and really got off the ground and got a lot of customers really quickly. It’s a really fascinating product and we’re really excited to back them. And my mind suddenly goes blank of the other recent investments on the direct side. Elevate side, well, most recent investment was into Altered Capital. They are doing, and actually they also invested in Contented and they’re Yeah, I won’t name— they’ve got a couple of very interesting investments coming up, which I don’t think have necessarily been named publicly. So they’re looking to sort of get another $100 million fund. So our $25 million will be matched by $75 million, hopefully, of— it may be more— of private capital.

James Pinner:
Another fund we backed in last year was Outset, their Fund 3. And so, yeah, that’s our first investment into Outset. They’re doing a lot of deep tech stuff like ternary kinetics and OpenStar, companies that are sort of, yeah, much more deep tech focused. And they’ve got an investment committee made up of Safida Beck from Rocket Lab, Sean Simpson from Lanzatech, and then Will Barker from Mint Innovation. So yeah, so seasoned founders that have sort of been there and walked the walk as well. So yeah, it’s— and there’s— we’ve got a couple more funds in the pipeline, a lot more sort of direct side on that. And yeah, the pipeline’s been pretty busy in terms of the both the direct and the fund-to-fund side.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think it’s an interesting position that you’re in, having the fund-to-funds where you’re able to invest with the likes of Outset and other VCs. How do you kind of look at that landscape now in terms of where we are and how mature our venture capital landscape is? In New Zealand?

James Pinner:
It’s come a long way. I think if I look back sort of even the 5 or 6 years that I’ve been doing at NZGCP, the market is much deeper and broader. We’ve got a broad, you know, number of funds now sort of growing and on the second or third vintage. So when I say vintage, a fund generally sort of raises with the idea of investing over the next 4 to 5 years and then the next sort of 5, 10 years of sort of collecting, hopefully getting the returns from that. So every 4 or 5 years they raise a new vintage or a new fund to invest in the next cohort of companies or portfolio. So we’ve now got funds that are onto their second vintage. They’re getting to the point where their returns are beginning to come through from the first one. And that’s what investors are looking for, more institutional investors in particular, is a track record of actually, it’s nice having valuation uplift, but it’s even better to have cash back.

James Pinner:
So that’s what we begin to see. So we’ve got a growing cohort of that. We’re beginning to see some bigger funds, so it’s $150, $250 million funds, and we’re beginning to see broader range of sort of first-time managers coming up. So in our view, we need to sort of keep building that first cohort of emerging managers, first-time managers. And we’ve got some ideas around how to potentially much, much smaller checks, but more sort of, and helping more on sort of the operations piece to sort of help small funds get off the ground. Because it’s really hard to raise your first fund because you’ve got less track record. And then we keep doing Elevate and sort of raising the bar of the quality of managers through there as well. And then eventually we hope then there’s a cohort of enough managers with established track records for institutional investors to come into this.

James Pinner:
And then that’s when you get like a dial-up of actually how much money is going into this space. Because I think we’re massively underscaled. Like we are, we need ultimately we need billions of dollars going into this sector to really scale up these businesses. And especially if we grow the number of starters we have to 5,000. So that’s the venture capital market and it’s a long journey, as I said, but I think our intention is that our funding is a temporal fix. We’re there to keep catalysing until there’s enough established managers. And the other thing is we want to try and bring in more investor capability from overseas as well. So we’re thinking about ideas of how we can potentially do that as well.

James Pinner:
So we’ll get there, but that’ll take realistically 10 to 15 years, I think. But the idea is we make ourselves redundant on that process and the private market has then taken over. Aspire at the early stage is much more of a, I think it’s a long-term intervention. I think it is something that, same reason governments fund pure research and science and same reason they give grants, same reason they do R&D tax credits. I think investing in that early high-stage risk space is something that doesn’t go away. It doesn’t suddenly become less risky. Even if there’s more money in. So I think there’ll always be a need for that.

James Pinner:
You can incentivise people in different ways, tax incentives has been done overseas and things like that as well. So those pieces. And then on that side, we’re looking to go potentially a little bit earlier as well. So right at that sort of proof of concept, like small checks just to allow companies to get that first sort of tick over and then get, hopefully there’s more private investors then sort of with a risk appetite to invest a little bit further down the line.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. You mentioned Outset. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the other funds that you’ve invested in and what are your views on these different ones in the landscape? Why have you made those investments?

James Pinner:
Yeah, there’s a broad range. So we started off in 2020, a lot of our investments were what we call generalist funds. And so they’re funds that will invest in any sector, whether it’s software, medtech, agtech. And to be fair, that sort of— New Zealand is still a relatively small country and we still— general consensus is that most funds will be generalist. It’s quite hard to be super specialist when you haven’t got as many startups as Silicon Valley or obviously jurisdictions. So we did initially quite a few sort of generous funds. We did the Movax, Blackbirds, GD1. And Mobeck and Blackbird, they were more mature and they have now sort of progressed to the point where they don’t really need us.

James Pinner:
Like, in a way, I’d quite like the commercial— well, I would very much like the commercial returns from investing in those more established managers. At the same time, that’s not our purpose to exist. So it’s sort of that trade-off of, you know, obviously good commercial returns also means we get more money to recycle into the next vintage. So that’s great. But at the same time, we’re there to support emerging managers. So they’re still going, still doing very well. GD1 and Pacific Channel, for example. So I’ll keep on the generalists for now.

James Pinner:
GD1 is now sort of maturing up. They’ve got some really interesting portfolio companies, a broad range of startups. And then we also at that sort of stage, we said, well, actually we’re seeing quite a lot of deep tech companies in the market, so maybe we back a few more sort of deep tech specialist VC managers. So that’s the likes of Nuance, Pacific Channel, and more recently Outset.. And I think that’s been really helpful. We’ve seen more companies coming, more deep tech companies being funded. And Aspire, we sort of also focus more of our capital into that early stage deep tech side of things as well. So we’ve seen a shift and it’s getting more towards sort of 50/50 deep tech.

James Pinner:
When we started, I think it was more like 70% software, 30% deep tech. So it’s definitely shifted that. And that’s capital also, which, you know, the government invests heavily in science and research and innovation, so having the capital there to support those companies. We’re now rebalancing a little bit, so we are going back to a few more generalist funds. So we’re looking at Altered Capital as more of a generalist later-stage company. So again, for us, you invest in a venture capital fund which has its own portfolio, but as a fund-of-fund manager, you also have to have a portfolio of different managers, different stages, different risk appetites. So Altered Capital is more of a slightly later stage than, for example, a Pacific Channel. So we try to kind of balance that sort of risk amongst our portfolio and then also where, where we can be the most impactful.

James Pinner:
So, you know, where does our leverage, you know, if we, if we invest, does it crowd in much more private capital? And we’ve been quite successful in sort of bringing 3.5 to 4 times as much money as we’ve invested so far.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that’s encouraging in terms of, you know, where you see things going, going from here and, you know, what are the sort of things that you would be, or your board might be sort of nudging the politicians on?

James Pinner:
New Zealand should have 5,000 startups. That is based on global comparisons around similar-sized countries and populations. So we look at us, compare ourselves to Victoria in Australia, not all of Australia, but similar-sized states to New Zealand or Ireland or Singapore. And we think around about a million startups Sorry, 1,000 startups per million population. So about 5 million. That involves deeper markets, that involves, you know, every single element has to sort of work together. So you have to have more companies being formed through the science system, but also from spinouts from large companies, from increased risk appetite from people leaving corporate jobs to go and set up startups. Then you have to, you know, have the talent building around that, the sort of accelerators and, you know, Immigration.

James Pinner:
There’s a whole sort of, all of these sort of impact every single kind of part of government in a way. Like it’s immigration, it’s education, it’s science system, it’s capital. So 5,000 startups is what’s appropriate for New Zealand. We think, we call this the Five Five. So we think that would need roughly $5 billion of capital in the next 5 years, not government capital, just capital in the market. And we think those startups would create 50,000 jobs, $50 billion of economic value. And actually the initial number was the $5 billion is less than 5% of KiwiSaver. Realistically, it’s probably an even smaller percentage now.

James Pinner:
And then if you add in some of our big sort of superannuation funds and ACC as a percentage, it’s quite a small amount would move the dial. And this isn’t, you know, this isn’t something we can do on our own and we have no intention of doing it on our own, working really hard in the capital elements piece, but we’ve got A lot of people really, really aligned with us. We’ve got all different government agencies, whether it’s NZTE and Invest NZ and MB and NZ Superfund and some of the public research organisations. We all believe in this. We all believe technology is the future for New Zealand and we all want to work together. We’re all hugely passionate about the impact it can have. So, and sometimes it doesn’t need, you know, a government mandate to do this. We just want to get on and do it.

James Pinner:
I hope everyone else can sort of join, join in because it’s, yeah, it’s the opportunity is there. Like I said, we’ve got the raw talent. If we didn’t have that, I’d be more concerned. But I think we have the ability and the entrepreneurship to do it. So that’s what we want to do. In terms of NZGCP, I think I’ve, yeah, we want to sort of slightly broaden our offering to make sure we’re sort of covering some of the gaps. Still very focused on investment as the vehicle. We are doing more in terms of investor capability.

James Pinner:
So we launched a learning platform last year called Venture Ed. Which is around helping VCs sort of learn from each other, learn from sort of best practice globally. And we might extend that sort of to other investors. Well, we will extend that to other investors over time, whether it’s angel investors or later stage institutional LPs. So that’s on the capability and then also on the connectivity as well. So just trying to get everyone talking to each other, building bridges to, you know, Australia is a natural place for some of our startups to be looking to raise capital and for some of our investors to be sort of talking to their sort of peers overseas as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I think I saw on your website a sort of a directory across the sort of startup ecosystem. What can you tell us about that?

James Pinner:
So we sponsor a platform called Dealroom. Dealroom is a global independent platform. Jurisdiction by jurisdiction. So, so for example, in Australia there’s Dealroom for Victoria, not the whole of Australia. New Zealand is small enough that we get our own sort of Dealroom for the whole country. And that is, the idea is to share data and access to help people understand what, you know, if you’re a startup, where to go for a grant or go to which investors are available. Hopefully if we can get more startups on there as well, it becomes a sort of like a job board for, well, both a job board, actually a real job board. So startups can advertise they’re looking for certain people, certain skills, but also it can sort of almost be a marketplace for when they’re fundraising so that investors know sort of who’s who in the market.

James Pinner:
And then we publish a whole bunch of data which then sort of says what’s going on in the New Zealand ecosystem, but then how does that compare to global benchmarks across the world? And that’s where we’ve got some of the data around how we’re actually punching above our weight in terms of unicorns and decacorns actually. So $10 billion businesses that are per capita, we’re above global comparisons.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay. Oh, that’s interesting. And is there a little bit of crossover with some of what Technology Investment Network are doing, but it’s just you’re kind of getting some similar information in terms of part of what you do there?

James Pinner:
Well, and one of our So the key initiatives for this year is to kind of refine our data and AI strategies to take the burden off investors in particular as much as possible. So working with other groups, we’ve worked with Technology Investment Network last year to do a sort of deep dive on some of the startup economic outputs and things like that. So yeah, we’re not trying to own the data, we’re trying to collaborate. And the more data we get, the more proof points we get of the impact of this, the easier it is to to crowd more capital into it. So yeah, absolutely. We’re keen to work with whoever we can. And Dealroom is more of a sort of open source platform that anyone can sign up to. It doesn’t have a paid subscription or anything like that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay, that’s great. Anything else you’d like to add into the discussion before we finish up, James?

James Pinner:
Really want to say, well, first thank my team as well because this is certainly not me doing all this stuff. This is my team doing all this stuff and then fantastic, incredible job and really passionate about growing the sector. And I think, yeah, a shout out for the opportunity really, because this sector has so much potential and we all just need to get behind it and share stories with our friends, people who don’t know about these things. And yeah, this can be the barbecue chat or the fireside chat over a glass of wine. So yeah, let’s spread the word.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, no, that’s good. And look, I guess across our listenership from the C-suite through to students. You know, we’ve got a whole mix there. Any particular advice or comments that you would share?

James Pinner:
Yeah, we’d love to see more corporate venture in this country. We are massively underrepresented. And some of this, you know, some of the companies we’re talking about are, they’re the ones that have the ability to disrupt your business. So why not get involved with them early? The startups can move a lot quicker and, can actually be meaningful ways of transforming larger companies who don’t necessarily maybe have the innovation engine of a startup. So it’s about working in partnership. All this is about working in partnership, and there’s huge opportunities there. I think for the students, just to raise awareness that this is a sector that exists. The tech sector exists in New Zealand, and there are great jobs.

James Pinner:
So if you’re passionate about art or design or engineering, there are jobs for you in the tech sector in New Zealand. You know, if you don’t know about them or where they are, then, you know, have a look on our website, talk to peers. Angel groups are obviously quite a good place to sort of go along and understand. And they’re definitely keen to get more younger people sort of invested and looking into these startups. Search on LinkedIn and the Technology Investor Network and technology news. There is, there is lots out there. It’s sometimes a little bit hard to navigate if you don’t know the sector. Yeah, but trust me, there’s stuff there.

James Pinner:
There’s some really cool stuff.

Paul Spain:
Excellent. Oh, well, thanks for taking the time out to join us on the New Zealand Tech Podcast. Thank you, James. And thanks everyone for listening in. And of course, a big thank you to our show partners, Gorilla Technology, Fortinet, Workday, Spark, 2degrees, and One NZ. And of course, lots more episodes to listen to. Of course, if you’ve been listening to the audio, make sure you’re following us on video platforms. If you’ve been watching video, find us on your favourite audio platform.

Paul Spain:
And be sure to check out the New Zealand Business podcast episodes. We’ve got some, some fantastic interviews on there that are very much in the tech sphere. Not all of them are, but certainly it’s, it’s, there’s plenty there to partake of. So yeah, thanks everyone for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.