A Nyriad of Lessons – Alex St John

Special thanks to organisations who support innovation and tech leadership in New Zealand by partnering with NZ Tech Podcast: One NZ HP Spark NZ 2degrees Gorilla Technology

Episode Transcript

Paul Spain:
Hi, folks. Greetings, and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. This is the show where we explore the latest trends and innovations in the tech world with the decidedly New Zealand slant. I’m your host, Paul Spine. And on this episode, which is a long one, it is well worth sticking with because the Conversation features some fascinating insights that you probably can’t get anywhere else. Our guest is Alex St. John, a legend in the gaming industry and a visionary in the tech sphere. He has a remarkable career that spans over 3 decades and several continents.

Paul Spain:
He was instrumental in the creation of DirectX, the technology that enabled Windows to become a successful gaming platform And was the foundation for the Xbox and Microsoft’s broader success in the gaming sector. He founded Wild Tangent, one of the largest online gaming companies at the time, which grew to generate over $100,000,000 annually in revenue. Alex St. John is well known as a founder of Nyriad, a New Zealand based company that developed a fresh and innovative approach to storing and processing data using graphics processing units or GPUs. Sadly, Nyriad is in the process of liquidating its assets. It is this that has triggered Alex to open up and to share some of his insights, viewpoints, and opinions on the Nereid story. This comes to us along with many fascinating, stories and thoughts from his broader career journey And the tech startup and gaming sectors. There are many great insights to be had by all involved in the New Zealand tech ecosystem, including start up founders and even for those in government who are wishing, to really support our gaming and tech sectors and to see them thrive. So let’s jump in.

Paul Spain:
And, of course, as we do, a big thank you to our show partners, One NZ, 2 Degrees, Spark, HP, And Gorilla technology. Alex, great to have you on the New Zealand Tech podcast today.

Alex St. John:
Hey, Paul. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Paul Spain:
Now, you know, I always like to kinda get a a a little bit of the the background. We you know, where did where did you grow up? What’s your your story?

Alex St. John:
Yeah. Well, I have a weird background. I was raised in Alaska for 16 years in a log cabin with no water, no electricity, and no plumbing. So I lived I grew up a very, subsistence lifestyle for most a lot of my early childhood. And then my parents, you know, moved back to the US to take care of their parents, put me in a public high school, and I promptly dropped out and and hitchhiked from Massachusetts back to Fairbanks, Alaska. So I didn’t adjust to civilization well, and that’s probably true to this day. You know, it’s so I have a very strange education, mostly self taught. I got into, I moved back to the US, when I was, like, 18 or 19, and I really wanted to study physics and physical simulations of, light interacting with matter, quantum mechanics, that kind of thing.

Alex St. John:
So I used to I got a job delivering pizza so I could send myself to SIGGRAPH conferences in the eighties. And and so I most of my graphics and mathematical expertise, ironically, comes from taking courses from, like, Jim Blinn or Jim Kaguya, Jim Blinn, and, Andy Van Damme and some of the very early graphics experts who who taught at SIGGRAPH. I was attending SIGGRAPH when the very first Pixar movies were brought out. Wow. So that’s the so oddly, a lot of my graphics education came from SIGGRAPH conferences, paid for by pizza delivery.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. And so how did how did you get from there into the into the workforce?

Alex St. John:
Well, I wanted very badly, to go to MIT, and I didn’t know how to get in because I didn’t have a degree. And I was applying for technical jobs around the Boston area, and Linotype Hell Graphics, had an office there, and they needed a, customer support person for the new postscript rips that that the Germans had cloned, to drive these very high end image setters.

Paul Spain:
Now just just to those, that are listening, and we don’t know what a rip is. It’s the raster image processes. So it it takes the output out of whether it’s Photoshop or in those days, Pagemaker was another tool, that I used back in those days that would have a design, and it needed to, you know, basically Printed out in super high resolution effectively using the photographic process. Right?

Alex St. John:
Yeah. Adobe would sell an Adobe Rip, and they were a $60,000 proprietary computer to drive, put an image out at eight 1,000 dots per inch on a laser recorder. So very high end imaging, which is, you know, the standard for magazines. So they That system’s got used to print US money at one point, or at least design it. So very, very high quality imaging, and there was big freaking computer to do that back then. These were the days before, you know, Photoshop was just being born. I went to the Photoshop gamma presentation on a black and white Mac and back in that in the eighties.

Paul Spain:
I loved those early Macs. They were really cool.

Alex St. John:
Very yeah. Very, and but that was amazing. It was magical. And I went to the demo, and it just crashed constantly. So the people trying to show Photoshop were immensely embarrassed, and the whole industry, you know, in that era, I remember them just going, We’re gonna be using giant mainframes from Germany for photoshopping forever. So I worked for the company that made multimillion dollar Photoshop, basically. And the funny thing is PostScript was coming. They had cloned PostScript.

Alex St. John:
They didn’t wanna pay Adobe, and they needed support people, and none of the many German PhDs who ran the company, New Postscript. So, you know, they interviewed me and said, you know, how many can you program? I said, Yes. And they said, well, could you learn PostScript? And I said, sure. And they said, well, we don’t know if we’ll believe you. We’ll we’ll give you a contract and a 90 day shot of the job. And, it you know, I immediately learned it and and excelled at it, and so that was my 1st real tech job. Was was that line of type. And the the weird thing about that experience, which again, now I know it’s strange, but remember, you know, I grew up in a cabin.

Alex St. John:
So kind of the worst case of homeschooled kind of, you know, social, conditioning that you could imagine. The funny thing is that that This product the Germans made that it was supposed to be supporting really worked like crap. It was so broken. And so, you know, the sales guys would sell these $1,000,000 systems to Playboy Magazine and GQ Magazine in New York, and they’d have to get a magazine. Those to be printed on paper, you know, way back in the dinosaur days, and it was really important to make it to press. And they tried to use this German postscript rip, and it would break. And they’d call me in huge panic going, we gotta go to press with the magazine. This page isn’t ripping.

Alex St. John:
That’s going through the post rip rip. And your customer support, you gotta fix it. And the problem was the rip was just broken. It just didn’t work. There was nothing I could do to fix it. So I’d call Germany, and I’d say, you know, hey. This is Alex in support in Boston. I’ve got an important customer here, and and the rip’s just blowing up on this job, and they really need to get it through.

Alex St. John:
You know? Can we get somebody to take a look at it? And the Germans would go, tells them that’s not what we designed the product for. I I I can’t tell them that. We gotta fix it. No. They’re using it outside Size the specifications that the product is intended for. It tells them not to do that, and they wouldn’t help. And then I I go to the sales guy who, you know, just bought a brand new Porsche and, a young girlfriend to go with it, because with the commission he got selling this thing and say, I can’t fix it, and they go, no. No.

Alex St. John:
I’m not giving the the Porsche back. I’m not losing the girlfriend from the huge commission I got from this thing. You gotta that, and so I was terrified because it’s my 1st job ever. I’m a young guy kid. Just just earned my way into the job. I was terrified of being fired. So I would take these postscript jobs and I’d open up the code that was generated by, you know, Photoshop and manually hack around the bugs in the German rip to fix it, and then I send it back working. And the problem was that that was so successful.

Alex St. John:
The customers would use it more. And then all the customer support people in New York and so forth would get these problems, and and management would say, well, send them to Alex. He he knows how to fix that. And so I ended up spending day night fixing just this endless thing of brokenness that the Germans wouldn’t fix. And my manager saw that I was working myself to exhaustion. He said, well, you have any ideas as to what we can do about this? And I said, well I said, you know, another branch of the company has a different clone post script rip made by a British company called Harlequin. Maybe they would fix things. So we called up this British company in Cambridge and said maybe you guys would fix the postscript rips, and so we’ll make you a deal.

Alex St. John:
Because, a customer support call to me back then was, like, $5. And so we said to this company, anytime I get a job from that fails on our rip, If you can run it on your rip, we’ll buy 1 license from it for $1500 and install at the customer site, and I was in charge of building all the dollars for the product in the US. So I would just replace the German rip with the harlequin one. And pretty soon, we replaced all of them, and we didn’t tell anybody. So I just because I was sick of taking the support calls, and I made the installers for everybody. So I quietly replaced the German product with one that I was like, product product managing out of the UK that nobody knew about. And and the weird thing and, again, I was just trying to save my job. I was terrified.

Alex St. John:
And I was, You know, sweaty at night going, oh god. I hope it’s not discovered that I replaced the German rip with one that actually worked so that nobody would scream at me. And so I was terrified. And and the oddest thing happened, which is that Hell Graphics acquired Linotype in that period and laid off absolutely everybody in my office, except for me and my boss, because the only successful product was the post script ripped product that was selling. And so they said they fired all the German PhDs who supported the combiscopes, all this stuff. And I remember I was very young and naive, and I’d roll around these rollerblade around these empty cubicles, happy as could be while my Very senior bosses white knuckled in his office going, oh my god. What happens if this kid gets hit by a bus? My punchline is is I got told one day the president of Linotype US is coming to meet you. He has a proposition for you.

Alex St. John:
And he comes in, for the meeting. And, again, I was very young and naive. I had no idea what was really going on. I was terrified the whole time. And and he says, we hear you’re very smart and really good at supporting this product and so forth and have really made it successful. So we would like to offer you a job in Germany working with the brilliant German engineers that you work so well with to make this product. And I was like, he doesn’t know it’s not their product. So I politely resigned and moved to England after that.

Alex St. John:
And I got hired by the UK company, Harlequin, and I moved to England to kinda run that product team over there. And at that time, Microsoft you know, jumping ahead, I apologize for wondering, but in that era, Microsoft was very competitive with Apple in imaging and publishing for good reason because Windows really sucked at it. And they said, you know, we just gotta find somebody who understands what we need to do in this space. So they opened a job to find somebody from outside of Microsoft who was probably really young because they liked that, who really understood what the company needed to do to get competitive with Apple. And, You know? I was in Seabold Magazine. I was well known because we’d ended up driving Adobe out of the high end rip business with clones of their own product. So Arlequin was very, very successful at that. And they got my name and recruited me to Microsoft, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Alex St. John:
I have the worst case of imposter syndrome because I didn’t like Windows. I was a Mac guy. Right? I didn’t. I liked Bill Gates. I was back then. Bill Gates was, you know, like Elon Musk. He’s the cool, you know, nerd, and IBM the bad guys. You know? So Bill Gates was really sticking it to the man back in that era, and so I really had a lot of you know, Bill Gates is cool, but Microsoft crappy and enter boring operating system stuff.

Alex St. John:
So they recruited me out there, and I was embarrassed because I go, I don’t really know anything about Windows other than that sucks for all the things I’m good at. And they put me through the Microsoft interview process, and and and I I would keep saying, I don’t understand what I’m interviewing for. They say, Don, don’t worry. This was 1992. Yeah. That was 92. Yeah. And, you know, now I understand, but again, at the end of the age, I was getting So they Microsoft was looking for what are called they called evangelists.

Alex St. John:
These are charismatic engineers. Basically, an engineer really knows their stuff, who’s also incredibly articulate or persuasive or charming, whatever you wanna say, but weirdly social engineers. And they wanted those people because they wanted them to promote the adoption of Microsoft technology to developers, say, hey, make your products using our systems. And so they had people all across the organization who specialized in various branches of that, and they decided I’d be a great one of those who understood publishing. And I remember when I was they were offering me the job, and I was with Cameron Myerboel. That name’s significance is Nathan Myerboel’s brother. That’s those are the guys Bill Gates acquired to make Windows. Okay.

Alex St. John:
So I was hired by Nathan Muirvold’s brother, and And Nathan said to me, and I said, I don’t understand what my job is. And he said, we want you to lead the strategy to make Windows a dominant graphics publishing platform over Apple. And I was like, like, I’m in charge of it all? Like, I just tell everybody what to do? And which was stunning to me because a huge successful company there, and I was way in over my head. And he goes, no. No. No. No. No.

Alex St. John:
No. You have to do it through influence. I was like, what? You have to persuade everybody at the right thing to do. I’m like, okay. So I was told my job was to drive Microsoft’s vision for publishing, and I had to persuade everybody in in this huge company. And so the the weird to make a long story short, I was shockingly good at that and had no idea I would be. So shockingly good at it that, you know, I was writing speeches for Gates, traveling around the world with him, coaching him on what to say to the press, bringing him to Seibold, and so I got became quite a public figure on that front and actually had a a relationship with Gates at that time. So I excelled at it for strange reasons, so much so that by the time Windows 95 was about to ship, all the work to make Windows 24 bit color.

Alex St. John:
The video conferencing you and I are talking over, I designed the direct show APIs we’re still using right now. So all the work to get 24 bit color and video and color correction and gamma support and 32 bit postscript drivers and and true type and type one font support into the OS was done by then. It’s very successful. And so I got a pleasant message with it. They basically said, look. We’re about to ship the operating Somebody can’t make any changes. Good job. Take a break.

Alex St. John:
Go work on something you feel like working on because your work here is done. And my management said, well, what do you wanna do? I said, I wanna do games. I think I knew that Windows 95 was breaking all these DOS games I loved. Yep. And I like playing video games, and Windows 95 was gonna break them all. So just I’m working on it. You go, I wanna play my game, and it just was horrible. And I go, what a shame that Windows 95 on micro they Microsoft didn’t know about it, didn’t care, nobody thought about it.

Alex St. John:
They were gonna flat out level an entire little DOS gaming industry. They just didn’t care. Didn’t rise to any level of awareness. And I said, you know, I’d like to try to do something about that. So So I just kinda took it on my own initiative to go and meet with all these game companies, and I’d show up with my Microsoft business card and say, hi. I’m from Microsoft. I’m here to help you. And they boo, and they do Darth Vader impressions.

Alex St. John:
And, I mean, they just hated me just because of who I where I came from. Right? And then I’d have to say, go, look. I’m Sorry you hate Microsoft. I kinda understand. Don’t get me wrong. But you’re all dead. You’re dead. You’re all out of jobs.

Alex St. John:
Your companies are dead If you don’t work with me because I know that they’re breaking everything you do. Every game you have on store shelves that are paying your paychecks right now, Microsoft’s gonna hit the button tomorrow. It’s gonna ship on every new PC, and your games are gonna stop working. And they’d be like, oh, shit. Sorry. What was your name again? And so the first thing I did is I collected up thousands of games and I just bring them to this this this guy is famous today. He was Hilarious personality. It was a, an engineer there who was just working on DOS compatibility, and I just flooded him with he’s got books and things published.

Alex St. John:
I’ll get it. His name will come to me in a second. I just, digress. But the punchline is is that he would manually hack Each DOS game I bought him brought him in assembly language in the DOS emulator to get it to work. And I would bring these game companies in to work with them, and they saw this guy was killing himself, working day and night tirelessly with piles and piles of games, anything he could. And so these guys who hated Microsoft said, well, this guy really cares, and he’s really he has no reason this big evil company that we hate, this guy, and that other guy, you know, with the beard is going are going overboard to save our livelihoods even though we hate this company. And so, weirdly, there was a little tiny filament of a connection that that formed. And in that era, I would say to these guys, Look.

Alex St. John:
That’s not gonna last. Obviously, DOS is done for, and they’re not this can’t last forever. So I said, hypothetically, What would you want from Windows to be able to run games? And they told us, and it was a huge convoluted list. And the problem was it was too late. Windows was done. It was gonna ship. And the kind of requirements to run a game were where we require rewriting the entire operating, a massive undertaking. And, of course, I had other friends like me who are all really the hardcore engineers who like games, and Microsoft, and we were in this weird transition to shipping.

Alex St. John:
And so we said, well, You know, why don’t we try to fix it? And so I wrote a big strategy document and sent it up screen to Bill Gates and said, hey, Bill. The day document’s public. Called Taking Fun Seriously Too. I can send you, like, this thick we wrote saying here’s what we should do for gaming and the operating system. And it kinda kinda politely received. And, yeah, no. We Have other people and whole armies of people working on that stuff. We already have a strategy.

Alex St. John:
Not gaming, but, you know, stuff we think is more important. So it wasn’t received. So myself and my friends got together and said, well, let’s just do it anyway. Let’s just build it on our own. And we did something really quite crazy in retrospect, but we were young and didn’t know better. It was too late to fix the operating system. So we rewrote drivers, which, you know, drivers are things that are hardware that install to support hardware. So DirectX was implemented as a set of 6 media drivers that pretended to be hardware that weren’t and they pretended to be Windows compatible drivers that weren’t.

Alex St. John:
And what these drivers and we shipped them in a library and gave them to the game developers. They were called DirectX. The very first DirectX game was Doom. I worked with John Carmack at id, and I had a small team, and I was using my Microsoft credit card to pay the contractors. And we ported Doom to these APIs we made that we ended up calling DirectX APIs. And what they really were were direct driver APIs. And when you install the game, we install the drivers, and it would push Windows out of the way and shut it down. Windows would think it was talking to a graphics card, and the driver would be going, yeah.

Alex St. John:
Sure. Yeah. That worked great. Whatever. Go away. And so the game would push Windows aside. It would take over the screen. It would run great.

Alex St. John:
And then when you close the game, Windows would be put back gently, and it looked like it all worked. And then I told the press, hey, did you guys know Windows 95 is gonna play games great? It was front page all over the media press. Microsoft, Windows 95, great at gaming. So when Bill Gates would be on stage. The press would be like, tell us about how great you are at gaming. Right? And then you go, Hold on a second. Gaming? What what are you talking about? And then I they go, oh, well, that’s something Saint John’s doing. And so I’d be up there going, your bills, what we’re doing in gaming, blah blah blah.

Alex St. John:
I’ll tell you this to the press. And so Microsoft completely inadvertently became a game company. And if you and people, you know, I tell the stories because, you know, That’s a little bit of an embarrassing corporate narrative, so it’s a bit of a revisionist history. But if you go to YouTube and look up Bill Gates’ doom 95, That’s a video I persuaded Bill Gates to produce that nobody in my it was buried. The PR people were so enraged that Bill said, sure, Alex. I’ll go do your crazy video for you that they buried it for about a decade before somebody slipped it to me, and I got it out on the press. But it was a, live video Bill did for the launch of DirectX that was only meant to be shown once. And he’s in doom.

Alex St. John:
Blue screen is a doom. And I’m there handing him a trench coat and a shotgun, and he’s doing a shitty job of reciting a script I wrote for him, and that was the launch of DirectX. So Microsoft accidentally became a game platform. And, one of the funny jokes that that that, you know, is hilarious years later because we thought it was hilarious, Is that that was just the very earliest days in the Internet. 94, 95. It was like, oh, Netscape. What are we gonna do? Right? And and Microsoft had a website and the joke around campus is the number one search term on Microsoft’s website was sex. Right? And it had been for years.

Alex St. John:
Right? And everybody would joke why because it was a it was the ego. You know, if somebody would just make something that the from Microsoft that was more popular than sex. That would be a win. And after we launched DirectX, It was DirectX has been the number one search term on Microsoft’s website ever since it was launched to this day. Sex is still number 2. And we considered making a direct sex API so we could pick that up as well. But, somebody vetoed it. I have no idea why.

Alex St. John:
So the whole Microsoft becoming a game company, was a very weird, accidental twist of strange circumstance, and not a brilliantly planned corporate scheme that was highly analyzed. You know, we just sort of went, we Stuckum told the game industry that they’re a game company now, and and then whose bill to say no, and oops. Now we have a gaming operating system. Better make a console.

Paul Spain:
Well, I hope everyone’s everyone’s listening to that lesson because there’s some good takeaways there, aren’t they, around How things often often play out, and it often isn’t part of this you know, the the best things often aren’t part of anybody’s strategy.

Alex St. John:
Wasn’t the plan. And so, you know, I realized in retrospect, my old age, I do have a pattern of doing things like that, making a product and accidentally and shipping it and having it take over and, or making an operating system that that, You know? So I I seem to have a a tendency to just go innovate something crazy and make it become an industry standard by some strange means, and and and I’ve done it more than once, so I have to assume it’s a personality trait. And

Paul Spain:
And, you know, when when Xbox and so on came along, that was using the same the same Direct X technology. Right?

Alex St. John:
Yep. It’s the Direct Xbox. So DirectX, you can think of it as its own operating system, and the Xbox is the DirectX Box. It’s the DirectX OS box. Today, all of Windows is built on top of DirectX, so people don’t realize that DirectX was almost a separate media operating system that we just sort of parasited into Windows, and then it took over. And today, all of the Windows architecture, graphics, everything sits on top of what used to be the DirectX layer because it was faster and leaner and better driver architecture. So over the years, these 2 kind of parallel operating systems kind of found their natural layering, if you will. So the video conferencing we’re using now is DirectShow, which I prototyped, you know, way back in 94, and then it’s direct video, and then it’s DXGI today, and then there’s Windows Media Services on top of that, and then Zoom and video The browser uses is all layered on top of that.

Alex St. John:
So it’s like 20 years of media strata on top of that little media layer that I designed, you know, 30 years ago.

Paul Spain:
Now on from on from Microsoft, just I’m I’m I’m mindful. We don’t wanna run out of time. You Started a company, Wild Tangent. Tell us about that because it seems you had some incredible Success there seems really, really fascinating.

Alex St. John:
I’ll give you the short ones, and you’re free to if you say you want me to expand on them, then we can. So, Ironically, while tangent started with me inventing Google Maps. I had built at Microsoft, a thing called the Chrome media browser. So Microsoft was about to there’s a book about it called Renegades of the Empire. So Microsoft was gonna launch a browser that I designed with the same guys who built DirectX to compete with Netscape. And it was a DirectX, super media rich, turbocharged browser called Chrome. And then we later Microsoft’s lawyers wouldn’t let us call it Chrome. It called renamed it ChromeFX.

Alex St. John:
And in it, Microsoft I had left Microsoft, but they’d called me up and said, could you help us produce some of the marketing materials to launch this browser. So I started a little consulting company just to produce Chrome effects demos, and the first one I made was streaming mapping. You know it today as Google Maps because I sold them the patents. And so Microsoft said we need something other than games to show why it’s useful. So the very first demo I made with streaming mapping. And the DOJ trial hit Microsoft, and Microsoft didn’t wanna be in the middle of an antitrust trial launching a Netscape killing browser, So they buried the project. They didn’t launch the ChromeFX browser. And so there I was with a consulting company and some of these cool tech, and I knew how that worked.

Alex St. John:
And I knew it absolutely certainly Microsoft was never gonna compete in the space while the DOJ trial went on. So I went to Silicon Valley and raised a few $1,000,000 on the back of that demo, and founded Wild Tangent. And originally, I was gonna just build general streaming media browser type technology, at Wild Tangent, but the .com bubble burst in 1998 and killed this massive whole industry of startups and VC funded companies. And I very quickly realized that my company would be dead if we didn’t focus laser sharp on something that would make revenue. So I very quickly said forget web media, video, and animation, and 3 d graphics. Let’s just publish games online. So while Tangent quickly refocused to going, we’re gonna just publish games on. So we were one of the world’s 1st online game publishers.

Alex St. John:
We made the very first app stores. We had a global monopoly on all PC OEM desktops, so the wild tangent game store was on all. We used to use New Zealand as a test market. Whenever we launch new games, We would test its gameplay and pricing in New Zealand because you behave like Americans except you’re contained.

Paul Spain:
How did that work? You’d you put different content based on an IP address or what somebody registered their address as or something?

Alex St. John:
Yeah. Well, we had an app store on all HP Compaq, Delta, Sheba, Sony, Lenovo machines worldwide. So all computers sold into every country, including New Zealand, had a little wild tangent app store. And so if we saw your IP your your gameplay come up in the New Zealand IP range. Then we would say, let’s offer the Kiwis this new game first and see how they like it. And then we’ll tune the game and then refine it until the Find it until the Kiwis really love it, and then we’ll sell it to everybody else. So New Zealand used to be our favorite test market. I said I should visit that country one day.

Paul Spain:
That’s really interesting to know because we we do often talk about that here, but I’ve, you know, there I think so many instances where we, you You know, we don’t necessarily, realize it. And and, you know, sometimes it’s through just a chat like this that you you find find out.

Alex St. John:
Yes. That was my greatest awareness of New Zealand at the time is that you were a great test market for American consumer gaming behavior. Okay. So while Tangent became the world’s largest online game publishing, by 2011, number 1 on MediaMetrics, bigger than Zynga, 140,000,000, users, like, simultaneously monthly worldwide. Really big for that era on the Internet. Mhmm. And it was it was tremendous. It became after a lot of struggle, it became tremendously profitable.

Alex St. John:
So I learned a lot about online game publishing and media and all that kind of stuff at a very large scale. And I went from there to I was saw Zynga explode and Facebook explode on social media, and I knew there was something important to learn about that, because it was really quite a remarkable phenomena. So I joined Highfive, which was the world’s 3rd largest social network as president and CTO. And I sold my interest in wild tangent because I’ve been doing it for a decade. And I ran, Hi5 for a few years, and Hi5 wasn’t very successful, the VCs. I was brought on board because There was a founder turnover and drama and and and so they bring in a salvage management crew sometimes, and I sold the company off for them. But in that time, I did get to, work clone we cloned the Facebook APIs. We brought a bunch of Facebook games onto the network, and I learned a whole lot about the dynamics of social gaming, which was very educational for me, but the company itself wasn’t super successful.

Alex St. John:
Facebook was definitely eating all of that space. And so after that, it was, I yeah. Wild Tangent. I’d run I’ve lived all over the world. I’ve run development Studios. I had ran Wild Tangent. I had game studios all over the world. I lived and worked in England.

Alex St. John:
I love British engineers. And so at the time, I was going, you know, one of the things that’s kinda sad about the US is that that era of garage startups like you see on the TV show Silicon Valley is kind of over. And it’s wonderful that we all got so rich and technology became so successful, and there’s all these kind of young billionaires, but the competition for talent and and capital is So intense that the ability to just have a little idea with a few friends in the garage is just kinda too hard to do anymore. You kinda anything worth doing, you kinda gotta raise 100,000,000 Andreessen Horowitz and hire 600 people at a huge pay rate before you can even get started. And so I really like that startup feel. And while the US is very competitive and very wealthy, I worked with studios where there were very talented underemployed people by US standards. Right? A lot of countries where just a lot of talent and they just happen to be born somewhere that wasn’t as wealthy or as having many opportunities, and so you can get incredible people, and they were lower cost. And the one thing that was a challenge with harnessing that expertise is, you know, being American, you have to be kind of steeped in the culture.

Alex St. John:
Americans, just by immersion, are really hyper aware of market dynamics, and, you know, and consumer tech and that kind of thing. And so people grow up in another country who aren’t steeped in it. They don’t know how to make product services. They don’t know how to think about it with the same kind of clarity. And so I always found that if I could find really talented people And get somebody with Western management background or experience who would live and work with a team in the country they were based in, You can get this amazing result. You would get really motivated, you know, capable people producing something amazing, to a Western standard, and that was very successful for everyone involved. I really liked working that way. So I was thinking, you know, if I ever start another company, I miss that garage like feel, and it’d be really fun to to go to another country again personally and start it there.

Alex St. John:
And my reasoning for going to Dual Go Overseas was, 1, there’s no downside or there shouldn’t be any downside because there are a lot of countries who really wanna have a Silicon Valley. There’s lots of government programs. There’s lots of talent, and so you can get started over there very inexpensively with a lot of support. And at any point that you’ve Incidentally, you’ve built a Microsoft, and you need the western capital markets. So those things, you can put an office in San Francisco. It’s American company. You can still employ all those folks, and you can get all the benefits of that at the point that you need it. So I saw starting my next company overseas as a great strategy for having kind of the best of all worlds.

Alex St. John:
I can work with the best people at the lowest cost with as much support as possible, Really derisk it, and at any point that you really miss the stuff you get from Silicon Valley, you just open that San Francisco office like everybody does. So I was I had had a lot of experience with a lot of countries, and I was looking hard at Singapore at the time because I worked with DigiPen to open their university and had a good relationship with the Singapore government, and they had all kinds of incentives to develop a game industry. So I was thinking hard about going over there, and planning on stopping through New Zealand on a vacation just for fun because what a pretty country in Hobbiton. Right? And I didn’t really think, hey. I’ll still do it in New Zealand. I was I was hard in Singapore. And when I got to Auckland and, even though who ran your gaming community there at the time. Because when I got there, I go, I wanna look up the local game companies and ask than what it’s like being a game company in those market.

Alex St. John:
What’s the talent? What’s the taxes like? That kind of thing. So he heard from, I was meeting with some of the local games to us. He heard I was there, and we had lunch. And he said, you know, well, what about New Zealand? I was like, it’s, you know, pretty here. Sure. But not No. I wouldn’t start a tech company here, please. But he introduced me to the US consulate, and he introduced me to a lot of very eager, People really wanted to be in the game industry.

Alex St. John:
A lot of young talent, which I really like seeing. And I talked to some game companies about the successful game companies in New Zealand about the real economics of operating there. And then I have to say that when I looked at that, I said, you know, in in in Singapore. When I did the math, I go, in the end, it’s actually still expensive. There is a language barrier, and talent is actually kinda Scarce because the Singapore government has done such a great job of creating a vibrant economy that it really isn’t a low bar to entry, whereas New Zealand’s still, you know, really up and coming. So the funny thing is is I remember sitting with my wife going, is it just me? Are you thinking this might be a better plan? So your I got back to the US near Consulate General out of LA, it was your ambassador to the US. I think that’s So it was Leon Grace, called me up, and I flew down to, San Diego, I think it was, to meet with him. And he said, hey.

Alex St. John:
We hear you’re thinking about starting something. We’d like you to think about New Zealand, and here’s what we can offer you. So He he did a really good sell job on New Zealand, and I was pretty favorably exposed. We had a we just loved it over there. So I said, hey, wife. You know? What do you think? You wanna Go be Kiwis. And by the way, I was all in. I go, you know, you don’t know how long.

Alex St. John:
If you build a successful company, that’s all that could be a lifetime commitment. So you gotta plan on leaving and not coming back. Right? Mhmm. I thought it was entirely possible that that you’d go, okay. We’re so big and successful that you gotta open that US office. We left for New Zealand figuring we’re gonna go be Kiwis. So we moved over there in, I think, 2013, 2014, and then and then tried to figure it out. 1st, getting over the trauma of, you know, how slow shopping lines work.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Walk us through that getting getting used to being being in New Zealand and, you know, the the the sort of shock and And Yeah. You know, yeah, what what was your first sort of experience that really jumped out at you?

Alex St. John:
I’m afraid to tell you because, you know, people get real judgy, but it, I think it’s funny, and it was genuine, but but, you know, people get it’s you know, these are some I was living in San Francisco. Right? In downtown San Francisco and the problem like, you’d go to Starbucks and and a meth addicted, just grungy guy would come in, and there’s, like, little college student girls trying to work for tips at Starbucks with their little tip jar. And Some grungy vagrant would come and bully them out of their tip jar, and they couldn’t do anything about it. And and the tables are bolted to the floor, and there’s keypads and all the doors because it’s just dangerous and dangerous scary. And my like, when my wife got assaulted on the sub, the subway in San Francisco by one of these. And so it was sad because it’s this beautiful city but but scary, and and you wouldn’t you you go, hey. Maybe I’m tough and you handle it, but I you never have kids there. You don’t wanna go to you know, you can’t work past, you know, some sunset there.

Alex St. John:
It’s too bad. And I remember, you know, having that kinda I like this area and community, but I I don’t think you can be a family here. And I get to New Zealand and Auckland, and I I had several shocking experiences. The first was we get off the plane, and, of course, your phone doesn’t work. Right? And in America, phone people are completely useless. You go to it’s 2 hours and they don’t know a damn thing. And we walked up to the kiosk at the Auckland airport, and there’s this guy there serving 3 customers at once. Just like bam, bam, bam, bam.

Alex St. John:
Take out your chip, put this in there, put it here. You need this. You need this. Pay for that. Now bolt this in. Here’s your phone work, and off you go. And I couldn’t believe it. Right? So it’s the first time the first impression of New Zealand was competent phone service out of the airport, which was And you’re ordering a hamburger at McDonald’s, and the people cared.

Alex St. John:
Like, they were really attentive. Like, is it wrapped properly? Did you get your ketchup packet? Whereas, you know, in the US, it’s like, There’s your burger.

Paul Spain:
Throw it at

Alex St. John:
you. Culturally, that was the first impression. And, oh, the one of the biggest ones is we went and stayed at what is that casino tower that’s like Space New York.

Paul Spain:
Sky City. Sky Town.

Alex St. John:
Yeah. That’s the 1st place we stayed while we were settling in. Right? And I lost the the, thing to the parking garage ticket. And we you know, so we’re driving around trying to get out, and we haven’t got anything in it. In the United States, that’s it. You’re gonna just gonna find your skeleton in the parking garage. You’re never getting out of a parking garage if you lose your ticket in the US. Right? I get up there, and there’s the Kiwi parking attendant.

Alex St. John:
And, again, I don’t want to be rude and sound American. Right? But that’s a very in the US, that’s a very, how do you phrase it? That’s the bottom of the employment poll. The the parking tollbooth people are you really they have very low expectations of them. And I said I I, you know, I lost my ticket. He goes, oh, what’s your room number? I went, well, it’s this. He goes, hang on a second. And he calls up because, yeah, I got a guest here. He’s Lost his parking ticket.

Alex St. John:
Can we issue him another one? Yeah. He’s like, what room number? No. Make sure he gets his discount. And he fights with the guy on the phone about getting my $45 discount on the thing. Like like, he really passionately gives a damn that I not get overcharged for my parking ticket. He goes, yeah. No. He was here since Tuesday.

Alex St. John:
Yeah. I’m sure he was. And then and he’s like, yeah. I’m sorry about that. Don’t worry. Here’s your ticket. We already got your discount, so you didn’t pay for that penalties or any of that nonsense. Have a good day.

Alex St. John:
Right? And I was like, oh, who, like, really cares about my getting not getting overcharged at the expense of hotel. That. Right? And then there’s 1 Starbucks in Auckland, and the coffee is better than Starbucks in America, which was a shock because you’re really used to shitty coffee there. But the thing that made an impression that I’m afraid to tell you about because it’s such a contrast, and and I’ve just just I just saw it and was like, Couldn’t help but make the association. Is and I didn’t know at the times. I you know, New Zealand’s culture and racial history and all that, I haven’t learned all of that stuff. Right? I just It’s goes up just American Kiwi blur to me. And there’s a a a I mean, there weren’t a lot of vagrants or homeless people in Auckland, but there’s 1 just immense guy over 400 pounds, 6 foot something, just bursting out of his T shirt like his belly’s hanging out, and The weather is great, and he’s laying on a bench.

Alex St. John:
And he’s got a coffee can there, and he’s kinda sleeping on the bench with his belly out. Just enormous. Like, this guy’s not missed a meal in seconds. And there’s cash pouring out of this coffee can. And and and he kinda wakes up for briefly. Right? And he sees the coffee cans overflowing with money, and he kinda reaches out for it. Like, he’s gotta collect it. And then, he’s still tired and goes back to sleep.

Alex St. John:
Right? And it was such a stark contrast. And I I again, I apologize, but it was it it happened. I swear to God. So I go, wow. They go, what kind of fantastic country where this is the difference between your vagrants and our vagrants. Right? So, you know, that was so that was my well, some of my early impressions. But I moved to Cambridge on purpose in the Auckland. The government was really eager for me to set up in Auckland.

Alex St. John:
I go, if I was gonna set up in Auckland, I might as well stay in San Francisco. If I wanted competition, you know, for A slight discount on office space. Everybody hiring anybody who does hiring in New Zealand’s doing in Auckland. I’m not really I might as well stay in San Francisco. But Waikato University down in the country producing an excellent computer scientists and cryptographers. And anytime you hear I have a place that’s got a program that’s good in cryptography means that their math’s gotta be good. Yeah. And they’re down there in farming country.

Alex St. John:
So let me get this straight. The farmer’s kids are getting computer science degrees at Waikato, and there is no and there’s agri tech companies down there. I said, that’s where I wanna start a company. I want that talent to my I want people who are going, I don’t wanna shovel sheep shit every day at 5 AM on Sundays and Saturdays. I’d rather wiggle my fingers for money. I wanna hire those kids. So we settled in Cambridge. And and, oh, the re you know who recruited us to Cambridge? It was Gandalf.

Alex St. John:
There’s a in Cambridge, when we were driving around on when we were first touring, We stayed at a place called Earthstead because that’s where Gandalf stayed while they were filming the movie. So we were doing the Hobbiton tour, and Earthstead’s this Beautiful little, cottage in Cambridge, and and you could see they have the guest book. And there’s the autograph of the actors from Lord of the Rings still in the book. It’s really quaint. And the guy who runs the thing, Alastair, looks like Gandalf too. He’s like a kiwi wizard. And they were the nicest people. And he went on and on about how, you know, Waikato area and Waikato University and and Hobbiton and so forth Totally sold us on the area.

Alex St. John:
So, ironically, a year later, when we moved there, he put us because they were closed for the winter, we rented the cottages all winter and lived with them before we finally got our 1st house in Cambridge. So I was recruited to, Cambridge by. It is Alistair made me realize that Waikato University was work really where it was at, and he was right. He was totally right.

Paul Spain:
That’s real it’s interesting to hear. My father worked for Waikato University in the, in the 19 eighties. And, Yeah. He was very much a a maths guy and a Yeah. And a computer guy that he’d Yeah. Yeah. I don’t

Alex St. John:
wanna reveal your New Zealand secrets, but as a western entrepreneur, there’s a lot of good reasons to recruit Waikato students. That’s all I’m saying.

Paul Spain:
Mhmm. Oh, that’s that’s, that’s very pleasing to hear. Yeah. So so you got settled, and and, You know, was that much of a sort of a challenge for you in terms of from a, you know, family perspective? How how did your wife feel about, You know, San Francisco to, small town, New Zealand.

Alex St. John:
We all it was a culture shock. I I’m a little I I was I’ve been around a little more than she had lived in other countries, so I was kinda used to it. But there’s the you know, like, there’s the trauma of not knowing what to buy at the grocery store. And or and, you know, you’d go into a cafe and you’d say, can I have a caramel latte, please? And they look at to blank, like, what? And then they, like, think for a minute, and they’d whisper among each other. Oh, oh, do you mean a caramel latte? And, like, yeah, one of those, a caramel latte. So I remember there was sort of a language barrier for a while. And then really confused about the seasons. Yeah, that was a shock.

Alex St. John:
And, the the funniest thing, one of the I think one of the charming and most funny things is the you know, in America, especially well, not everywhere. But in Seattle and California. You don’t know who your neighbors are. You don’t talk to them. If you have any relationship with them, you hate them. I’m exaggerating, but maybe not much. Right? So we bought a house that was deliberately zoned residential commercial. It was Dick Street.

Alex St. John:
Dick Street has ambiguous zoning, so you can have a house or it can be an office there. And it’s on the fiber connecting Waikato University to the United States, runs down that Dick street lane that there’s a huge building in downtown Cambridge that nobody knows. It’s sealed like a bunker. That is the Internet hub of that region in New Zealand. All the fiber flows through it, and it’s just a big sealed box that everybody goes, we don’t know what’s in there. But it was next to that house. So I got that house precisely because it could be used as offices. And and the funny thing was that the neighbors We’re so freaking friendly, and it was that was like the grocery store thing going, oh, we we have to be nice to people.

Alex St. John:
And the and this was really traumatizing. Like, you know, if you wanna call send an American over the road, you you come home and you go, How come our fence is fixed? My wife would be like, that 86 year old guy said came over with some pieces and said he’d take care of it and fixed it. He just fixed our fence. Does he want any money? Right? And it was so traumatizing. Have Kiwis, like, leave fruit for you or fix something in your house or your yard just they dropped over and fixed it. Oh my god. Right? In America, just call the police. Where’s my lawyers? You know.

Alex St. John:
So it took it was real hard to adjust to.

Paul Spain:
Wow. And we wouldn’t recognize that, of course, because it Just this is the deal. Right? So Right. You sounding shocked about that. It’s, you know

Alex St. John:
And I’m embarrassed. Right? I’m embarrassed. We’re. Well, there’s all you know, I won’t even get you to the politics because Americans are very confident in their politics. And I got over there, and you messed up my politics badly because the the way you operate was so different that it just screwed with all of my life convictions. The I’ll give you a one without without a pining on the meaning of it. One of the bizarrest things was how garbage election was handled in Cambridge. Because we go and get this house and you go in the US, it’s like, there’s only 1 the city picks up your garbage and you pay them whatever you have to and You buy the bins the way they tell you to buy the bins, and that’s the only way to deal with garbage.

Alex St. John:
And so we got there, and they, like, give you a menu of garbage options. You can for these, you can call this. For that, you can do this. You can drop it here. But the most amazing thing was that you could go through the grocery store And buy these yellow bags with, like, coupons on them for a few bucks, and you just put garbage in them and drop the bag anywhere. Just wee. And so and because it had a bounty on it, anybody could pick it up and get money. And so you could people could just throw their garbage anywhere in those bags, and it would Quickly, everybody’s like, oh, I want that bag of garbage to deliver.

Alex St. John:
So it was the most remarkable. And whether that could work in America, I have no idea, but it was just Baffling to me.

Paul Spain:
So what? People would people would pick up the bags for the for the bag to go to the bag And then they would include it when they were going off to, Yeah.

Alex St. John:
They go take it to the dumpster, and I guess they they got money for that. Yeah. Yeah. Right? I I didn’t do it. I just was amazed that you could and you go, where do I put the bag? Anywhere. Just anywhere in sight, and it’ll poof. There’s there’s no garbage. Right?

Paul Spain:
I hadn’t heard of that.

Alex St. John:
Yeah. Yeah. I’d never imagined it either. Well, other I won’t get into it, but there, you know, you guys k. You have a really fascinating culture from an American point of view. So the punchline was we loved it. And and and, again, it was hard to get used to liking your neighbors and not living in sort of American isolationism with not making eye contact or even renting hello to each other in the morning. You have to stop.

Alex St. John:
You have to talk for 20 minutes. You have to get all the news and, so that and then and weirdly, after a while, you really start to enjoy it, and then you start to forget how hard you’re supposed to work to make a tech company, which, you know, was one of the challenges. I get it. I it was very tempting. Right? So, yeah, we had a great relationship ship of neighbors, which was very funny because, you know, at first, I started just working in the garage by myself building stuff, and my intention was to go to White County University and say, hey. I’d like to start an internship. I want college computer science majors before they graduate there. I need to get them trained and getting them work experience before you’ve handed them a degree because there’s so much that they need to learn that college doesn’t teach.

Alex St. John:
So my intention was to go recruit college students. And I’m in town and and some kids bang on my door because Kiwis just do that, knock on strangers’ houses and go, hi. So these kids in barefoot knock on my door, and they’re like, are you the Xbox guy? And, well, sort of. I mean, I I I I made the stuff before that. And they go, yeah. We heard there was an Xbox guy in town. I go, well, you know, to the extent this has an Xbox guy. It would be me.

Alex St. John:
And they’re like, well, we wanna learn all about gaming, and what are you doing, and what’s here. Right? Can we come in here? So Come in the house and wanna see the garage and what I’m doing out there and wanna just, you know, show them what I’m working on. And and and they’re saying, yeah. We’re you know, I’m a One of them, Tyler Hale, was, like, 15. He’s like, I’m a making websites for a local real estate company. Xavier Simmons was, You know, I’m into music, but they were just, you know, really excited to have that gaming guy in town. And I told them, and they said, you know, Can we, you know, learn to do that stuff too? I said, look. I’m I’m really busy in your kids, but, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.

Alex St. John:
If you wanna come in my garage after school, I’ll, you know, open the door, and I’ll put you to work. I’m just gonna give you things to do, and I don’t have time to walk you through everything. So if I give you a task, the rule is figure it out by any means, and only bother me if it’s an emergency. I’ll check-in on you once in a while if I’m not busy, but I can’t be distracted. I gotta do, you know, real serious work. And these kids would show up after school, and I’d go, you know, see that busted ass computer? Make it work. Right? And they’d kill themselves fiddling and figuring it out. Right? And then and then, I said, well, you know, you wanna learn how to code? Then I’d say write CUDA Conway game of life, right, which was actually a pretty advanced computer science thing.

Alex St. John:
I’d say do it. I go, that’ll keep them busy forever because it’s The huge learning curve. And they kill themselves just ages and looking up everything and struggling, and then one day, they’re showing the game of life. You know, sometimes I check-in and go try this, try that, but I really didn’t pay a lot of attention to them. And Long story short, it wasn’t long until I had dozens of kids in my garage all the time working on computer science projects, and the projects were getting more and more advanced. And I’d have mothers knocking on my door with their kid going, my kid seems a little socially dysfunctional. Is it possible he’s a nerd? And I said, well, we can find out. I’m not kidding you.

Alex St. John:
Right? Weirdly, I would have, and this is, you know, I think one of the, You know, one of the best stories from my point of view. Well, I’ll be I’ll be a little vague for the sake of the individuals unless they ever wanna raise their hands, but I had kids who were flunking out of school, just failing at it. Right? And the sad thing was in America, Americans would look at those kids and go, those are nerds. Right? They’re not they’re not social. Now those are nerds. And and if you put them in the right environment, they’re gonna thrive, and it’s not a very social, you know, typical environment. And so these kids were really failing, and one of them came to me and he said, He came to one of our open houses where we just my wife would feed everybody and say, hey. Here’s what we’re doing in the garage if you wanna work on projects.

Alex St. John:
And he said to me, hey. I really wanna do this, but but I don’t think my parents will let me. Can we keep it a secret from them? And I said, Well, why do you need to keep a secret from your parents? Because I’m kind of failing out of school. And I and I told them I don’t wanna go to college. And so they won’t let me, you know, do anything until I get my grades up. And I go, well, I can’t let you keep it a secret from your parents, but I’ll make you a deal. I said I gotta talk to your parents, but I’ll make you a deal. If you come and you finish high school and you come and and work on the stuff that I’m telling you to do and pursue a computer science degree.

Alex St. John:
And there’s actually a backstory because I had met, Bill Rogers at Waikato at that point formed a relationship with Waikato University. I said, I’ll if you do what I say, we can get you one of these Waikato scholarships, and you can skip the last year of high school. You can skip the 1st year of computer science and 2 years of computer science degree for free from Waikato, and you’re done. And so I said, you know, if you wanna come in my garage and you agree to do that and your parents are down with it, then we can do And so he brings his parents by and I said, you know, look. I’m sorry. I’ve got some bad news from you. Your your child’s probably a nerd, and they’re never going to function socially like Ordinary healthy children. I’m sorry.

Alex St. John:
They probably obsessively wanna relate to computers for their career. And if we let I’m exaggerating. But if you let them do that, they may be very, very successful at it. And I said, look. You know, I’ll put this kid through the program. And if Waikato gives him one of these if he passes one of the Waikato’s tests that Bill Rogers at that point was administering, I go, here’s what will happen. And the parents agreed. And so this kid, skipped his last year of high school.

Alex St. John:
He aced the exam, got one of the scholarships. I have video of him getting it, ironically, and passing the test. He was elated. And then he finished his degree there in 2 years, and he was extremely brilliant and just took off at Myriad. And he, later on got a big job at Google, moved to Australia, making shocking amount of money for a 20 year old, and He is now, really, accomplished working on what are called starts, which is this amazing new, cutting edge cryptographic, data structure for an Israeli company. So he went from, you know, flunking out of high school to having a a really amazing career, and and there were a lot of the kids that did that. Tyler Hale had a similar story. Kinda had a Harry Potter living under his cupboard kind of story, and now he’s an artificial intelligence cloud deployment engineer in England working at an artificial intelligence company.

Alex St. John:
Xavier Simmons, who was one of the 1st teenagers, is at NVIDIA, in California doing extremely well. So These earliest kids that came down there do that just have tremendous tech careers. And the only sad thing about it, Paul, and this is probably the thing you you know, maybe another interview. I don’t know. The sad thing about it is they all had to leave New Zealand to do that. They’re they’re all gone. So if you look at all the kids who kinda came through that garage and and really, you know then we we showed them how to be really accomplished as nerds. They left New Zealand, and and they’ll probably never come back.

Alex St. John:
And and that’s kind of a shame. Right? And I understand why they’d have to. They just isn’t there wasn’t another near there wasn’t an ecosystem of Nereids for them to develop and get the skills, and they would never get the kind of experience and scale and compensation as well that they get outside New Zealand. So They and and those Western companies know they’re valuable. There’s massive competition. So they’re like, oh, look at all the Kiwi talent Alex made and harvesting them away. So in some sense, I’m very proud of, you know, those kids. You and my wife, they’re all family.

Alex St. John:
But I I I what I really wanted to do was have them build tech companies in New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And and hopefully, there’s There’s at least a little bit of that going on, but, there’s also that opportunity and that and yeah. It may not may not seem, like it’s gonna happen, but hopefully, we’ll Some of those that have gone off overseas, you know, ultimately find find a a place back in New Zealand. And, you know, these are things that we have to work on.

Alex St. John:
Yeah. I think that’s the question is why do they come back? And and more importantly, why do they come back and start companies? Because That’s what you really need them to do.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Some of these things have been going on for a long time where where some of the best and brightest will go off to Other parts of the world and build their their, you know, $1,000,000,000 businesses and so on and and and don’t necessarily sort of, you know, Yeah. Bring that back, but, of course, these things happen in New Zealand too. So it’s it’s how do we how do we get that that right so that, you know, we we get we get more of it happening in New Zealand, and I’m I’m definitely keen to kinda circle back in on those perspectives. But let let’s talk about the, you know, starting of of of Nyriad and, you know, how, you know, how things have evolved there for for that to, Take place.

Alex St. John:
So I had initially intended to found, a company to compete with Minecraft. I was gonna build a a a large scale MMO, which to a certain extent is what I’m doing today in a different form.

Paul Spain:
MMO, of course, for anyone that isn’t aware, stands for massively multiplayer, online game. It’s an online video game with with a large, number of, of players that are that are able to interact and and play against each

Alex St. John:
So I went there to build an MMO company and, but, you know, this is a kind of you have to get the don’t just throw down and start a company. You gotta gotta learn the laws, the regulations, where’s the balance, how do you function. So I was consulting around New Zealand a little bit getting trying to get involved in the community. And one of the things that happened is I got invited to speak at the Square Kilometre Array teleconference in, at Auckland University because, of course, the Square Kilometre Array project, which I’d never heard of before, was involved some of the world’s largest supercomputing on GPUs. Right? And I’m I’m the father of GPU architecture. So I

Paul Spain:
was For those that don’t know what the the square kilometer array is, can you just

Alex St. John:
Oh sure. Yeah. The, it’s really exciting. So the short answer is that, one of the thing and it’s one of the greatest sort of epic visions, even if it’s not they’re struggling to Secured it well. I love the big thinking. But, essentially, what they’re trying to do is they’re saying, in order to if you ever watched the James Bond movie where he slides down this giant dish. I’m trying to remember which one it is in Chile. Right? So that’s a radio telescope, and those radio telescopes pickup infrared radiation that’s, you know, very old and a very long distance away, and the quality of the image they collect is proportionate to their size.

Alex St. John:
And at some point, you really don’t wanna pay pave over an entire Amazon jungle to make a dish big enough to image the universe. So the Square Kilomet Array guys have a brilliant idea. They said, you know, the southern half of the planet Earth, Africa, and Australia, a lot of it’s just empty desert. So what if we just put a bunch of antennas, they look like piles of coat hangers, and just scatter them all over these deserts, and then we’ll just instead of making a giant dish, We’ll just put these antennas all over the place. We’ll hook them all up to cables, and we will computationally, mathematically, turned the entire southern hemisphere of the planet Earth into a dish the size of half the size of the planet. So that as the planet rotates, It’s imaging half the universe. So incredibly ambitious science. And the universe is about 44,000,000,000 light years across in either direction.

Alex St. John:
And a telescope a radio telescope that size is said to be able to eavesdrop on a cell phone on the opposite edge of our galaxy. That’s how powerful it is. That’s insane. It’s an absolutely crazy vision, and it gets even cooler than that because the The funny thing is you go, well, why? What do you wanna know about the universe? Well, we kinda wanna see all of it. Just like Imagine in 14/92, if you said, wouldn’t it be nice to have a a globe of the Earth with, like, everything on it, but all they have is half a planet. Right? And everything is not in place. So, you know, we’re gonna sail around, try to have a map of the whole planet we live on. Well, these guys are trying to get a map of the whole universe we live in.

Alex St. John:
Every galaxy, every star, every planet. Every planet might be extreme, but everything. And the funny thing is that that at the very dawn of time during the very birth of the universe, these super massive quasars collapse these these solar objects early in the universe. And so the 1st stars that collapsed and became spinning pulsars, these stars spanned with the universe to the very edge of time so that today if you have a telescope sensitive enough, they’re spinning at the speed of an atom at the very edge of the universe and their light is so old and they spin so fast that they’re like GPS’s systems that God put at the edge of the universe at the beginning of time to help us navigate. I’m not actually that religious, but it’s it’s a beautiful thing. So what these guys are saying is in order to map the universe, we have to triangulate where everything is very precisely. And the way we do that is we need to find a 150,000 of these pulsars from the birth of time that are now at the edge of stym and spinning at the speed of an atom so that we can coordinate, triangulate where everything else is in the universe and that in 25 or 50 years, if everything goes according to plan, We’ll have a globe 90,000,000,000 years across of the universe we live in with everything on it. Just we, like, we have a globe of the planet.

Alex St. John:
So it’s incredibly powerful and beautiful vision, and and like I said, I’d love to see that happen. And the amount of computer science it takes to make it happen is beyond imagination. And of course, the chips that they have to process, that kind of thing of this, are the GPUs that that we worked to create and play video games. So a GPU is a graphics processing unit, and GPUs didn’t exist until DirectX. So DirectX enabled three d hardware acceleration in the Windows operating system for gaming so that all the competing chip companies who made Windows 2 dimensional graphics chips became three d chip companies. And so, a lot of them can be died off from competition, but ATI, now AMD, and Nvidia became the world’s largest suppliers of these chips, which were just made for gaming early on, but now they’re the most powerful physics and artificial intelligence processors we use for scientific computing. So I got asked to advise or consult on how to build a supercomputer capable of doing the kind of processing they need using GPUs because I’m an expert at it. And the funny thing was, you know, there’s lots of great stories about how the Square Kilometre array relationship started.

Alex St. John:
But the first one was I shot my mouth off to these, academics. Bunch of PhDs don’t understand computer science. Sure. They think they’re smart and it’s a hard problem, but how hard can it be? And they, you know, long story short, They said, you know, the amount of electricity it’s gonna take to power the computer we need is more than the budget of all 12 participating countries. We gotta get this power way down. And they sent me a Fourier transform, which is what they use to generate the images on the GPU. It said, could you optimize this? And I said, ah, no sweat. Let me tune that up for you and get it faster.

Alex St. John:
And I got I spent Weeks weeks in the code, and I couldn’t I got it half a percent faster. Somebody far, far smarter than I expected had already optimized that code, and everything I tried failed. And so I was afraid I was gonna go have have to go back to these guys going, look, I know I’m the big shot GPU guy. For the life of me, I can’t get any more speed out of this algorithm, and I really didn’t wanna have to go tell them that. And so I was like, crap. This algorithm is as optimal as it can get. I can’t think of another way to get faster. How am I gonna how am I gonna, you know, save face after I shot my mouth off? So I called up my friends at NVIDIA, and I said, hey.

Alex St. John:
I’m working with these guys in the Square Kilometer Array, and, they asked me to optimize this Fourier transform, and it’s optimal. But I said, you know, if you modified the Foyer library in your, library to take these 8 bit values and spanned them to 32 bit on the on the GPU. The result would be about a four x speed increase, but I can’t do that. It’s your driver. And so they did that, and then I went back to them and said, here. It’s 4 times faster now. They’re like, woah. How did you do that? And I said, well, I called NVIDIA.

Alex St. John:
And they were like, You can do that. You can you can call NVIDIA and go help, and they’ll just do it? I go, well, I can. I mean, I I think they’d probably if they understood what you’re doing, they’d be eager to help. So they were like, oh, woah. This guy’s got some magic, man. He can call NVIDIA, and they’ll just poo 4 times faster. So that’s actually where probably the basis where all my credibility ended up really coming from on that front was when they saw that trick. But so, anyway, they gave us so I was planning to make a game company.

Alex St. John:
I had kids just again, funny, they just I was just accumulating them in my garage because, You know? They liked being fed and yelled at for not working harder. You know? Like, they go, this is hard. And I go, are you gonna give up yet? Like, no. I go, right. Keep it up. They go, well, you know, don’t you have the answers? I go, what kind of engineer would you be if if The no problem worth solving is answered. That’s the job is is solving problems nobody has the answer to. So if you aren’t excited about figuring it out And need the answer from somebody, you’re not gonna be a successful engineer because it’s a that’s the job is inventing, and I used to tell them that all the time.

Alex St. John:
And The Square Kilometer Array came along and they said, well, you know, talk to us about getting contracts to to prototype some of the ideas I had for reducing the power consumption. And I would have these kids prototype them. And Xavier freaking Simmons, you you know, he was like sixteen when he started. Maybe he’s 17 when he started on this. And I just gave it to him as a torture test because the Square Guys, look, this vast volume of data coming in, the biggest part of the power consumption is storing it all. So and I’m not a storage expert. Just story. It all is a problem.

Alex St. John:
And, one of the Waikato professors’ parents’ kids whose parent was a professor at Waikato, who was in the garage, said, you know, have you thought about Reed Solomon Reshier encoding? I said, what’s that? And he goes, well, it’s a Fourier transform for distributing information across a lot of things. It of the superset of RAID storage. I hadn’t ever heard of it. We studied the algorithm, I looked at the math, and I said, wait a minute. So all the supercomputer does is massive Fourier transforms, and this algorithm is a way of distributing the computation uniformly across all the nodes, and it’s a Fourier transform. I said, then if you did that, you wouldn’t have to move all the data back and forth over a network or storage array. You would just mathematically process it and store it in place. Well, that would stop all the data movement and should save, like, 50 to 70% of the power.

Alex St. John:
And I showed the idea to the professors. They said, yeah. That might work. We’ll come up with a quarter million to prototype I bet. And so Myriad was founded with a bunch of high school kids at that point. And the 16 year old kid who liked music, Xavier Simmons, You know? I was like, hey, Xavier. I need you to figure out how to do a Fourier transform and implement Reed Solomon coding. And he hadn’t had linear algebra and the advanced math.

Alex St. John:
I just threw some looks at him. He goes, what’s that? And I go, read this and this and this, and here’s the paper. It works like that. Go figure it out. And, of course, the kid killed himself. He ultimately wrote the world’s fastest Reed Solomon erasure encoding on the GPU. And so if you look at the early Nyriad demos where I’m just able to rip out drives and the whole thing stays working, it was written by that kid. He’s the one with NVIDIA now.

Alex St. John:
Rightly where you, you know, should be able that huge IQ.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. We we need to include that video, actually. Yeah. And that sounds like there’s more than 1, but, yeah, I mean, that’s There’s a lot

Alex St. John:
of stuff on the several up on my LinkedIn.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Certainly caught my attention, you know, some, yeah, some some years back when I saw that and, scratching my head trying to work out, how how how that happens.

Alex St. John:
Oh, yeah. These kids went you know, I and the funny thing is I go, look. I’m proud of myself. It sounds impressive, but these kids went way beyond anything I expected. Like, again well, so I’ll name a name you guys put, but Andrew Milson, who did the blockchain stuff for me, he was a web kid and and just blockchain storage architecture and implemented and pro Mark Wilson, who you know, doing the the ex these voxel space, data search on a GPU, and he did that demo. I think that video’s up there. So these high school kids who didn’t even have a formal background, Adam, I would just, you know, Throw hard problems at them and act as though it was they’re you know, perfectly solvable, and they They would solve them, and I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I never expected that.

Alex St. John:
So the funny thing is I had great success with the college students I hired, but the most amazing successes. The most amazing thing I experienced there was these high school kids who would wander in and turn into some of the most amazing tech geniuses. And now it’s been a year decade, and you can see where they’re at. You go, look at where they went. You know? These kids would have been, you know, maybe doing real estate web design in Cambridge if if they hadn’t, you know, had their potential realized in some form. So it is it was quite remarkable. And Bill Rogers at Waikato really is the one who since that relationship, because I went to Waikato University while they were still just building PCs in my garage and said, here’s what I want. And I had a funny meeting with the computer science dean’s office because, you know, he said, well, what do you wanna do? And I said, like, I wanna get these guys in here, and I wanna put them under real pressure to ship software.

Alex St. John:
And and he goes, well, but they’re students. I go, right. A great I hope that they’re having a struggle keeping up with their studies, and I wanna add on top of that. And he’s like, well, why do you wanna do that? And I go, because I gotta get their nervous system to Western technology shipping momentum, and it’s gotta be done young done young. And Bill Rogers, who was sitting there, and First time we met, he goes, sounds like you’re running a sweatshop. And I said, yeah. Yeah. That’s what I’m doing.

Alex St. John:
And he was surprised. I was like, yes. And and he was like, you know, and he was like, well, why are you proud of that? And I go, because that’s how you got great get great, and that’s how I got great. And he goes, well, it seems like it’d be really stressful. I go, yes. It’s too much for ordinary people. But for people who are gonna be nerds, They’re gonna love it. It’s all they’ll ever wanna do.

Alex St. John:
And, yeah, it’ll select for them. The people who are gonna be great, They’ll they’ll love it and thrive on it, and everybody else will go, oh, hard work. Right? And that’s okay because they’re they’re the ones I’m looking for. And Bill Rogers said, why can’t I I wanna see this. And he came by, my garage. I said, yeah. Just drop by. And at the time, He didn’t know I had a bunch of high school kids hanging out there.

Alex St. John:
I didn’t mention it. I hadn’t I didn’t think anything of it at the time other than I was putting up with some kids because Everybody was nice to each other in New Zealand. I was trying to join in. And so he comes to the garage, and he sees all these high Cool kids killing himself working on projects and doing little CUDA, you know, game of life and that kind of stuff. Because what’s this? And I go, oh, they just show up and I make them do projects for me. And then he explained that he ran the Waikato University scholarship program and that he had a hard time getting qualified students from local high schools because the computer science programs from his viewer maybe a little weak. And so he said, you know, we really try hard to get qualified students, and there isn’t a lot. And he said, can I test these kids? And I said, oh, sure.

Alex St. John:
Absolutely. I’d love to see. I have no idea because I don’t. The funny thing is I go, yeah. I’m at whiteboard and talk about tech a lot in front of them, but I don’t really teach them. I make them work. That’s what I do is I say, here’s a really hard problem, and and don’t show up if you’re gonna give up on fixing it. That’s what I do to him.

Alex St. John:
And so he said, I’m gonna I do the scholarships at this time. I will come by, and I’ll administer them to your kids. And I did I’ve got video of me doing this, and this is another one of the stories that when I tell it, people look horrified. But I’m telling you, this is the way nerds are made in some form. Is that, you know, because I I’d say to him, look. You know, Bill’s coming by tomorrow to do the scholarship. Right? And I go, I don’t have time for, you know, wet nursing you through a classroom environment and so forth. So I go, we’re gonna do this once.

Alex St. John:
I go, here’s the test quizzes that he hands out from the previous years that people are allowed to review. I go, so here’s how it goes. I want you to all read them, and then we’re all gonna line up outside by my pool. And you’re gonna stand by the edge of the pool with your heels over the edge, and I’m going to throw these questions at you at random. And if you miss 1, I push you in. Now before so I’m gonna tell the story the way I told to them, and then I’ll tell you the truth because most of them to this day don’t know this. Right? So I get up there, and I’d start throwing questions. And I’d be Seem, you know, good and angry like a, you know, drill sergeant.

Alex St. John:
And I’d go, you know, what’s the square root of negative one? I. Good. Right? Oh, how would you include this in this algorithm? Right? And I do the kinda like You’re hesitating. Right? And that make them spit out the answer. And then, you know, one gets it wrong in the pool they go. Now between you and I, I’d arranged it with the kid and their parents in advance because the only thing that was important about the exercise is that the rest of them be terrified that I’m gonna really push them in the pool unexpectedly. So you always have to push 1 in the pool for the others to believe you mean it. Part of the, the programming.

Alex St. John:
But These guys, the the message you go, look. We’re not gonna practice and get a b and maybe get half of them right. I expect you to know it all flat out on one try or don’t waste my time. And so these guys would spit out every single answer without flaw, and the only one who got one wrong was was scripted, and they never knew that. And I get a volunteer secretly every year and range of my parents going, look. We gotta do this exercise. You know, will your kid be up for going in the pool? And they thought it was a lot of fun. Right? But I never told nobody knew this, unless they told them afterwards.

Alex St. John:
But it worked. And and so then they do the take the test, and these kids, almost a 100% of them got scholarships then. There was only 10 that that Waikato gave out every year, and we would have usually about 3 coming out of the garage, every year to Waikato. And Bill Rogers was the 1st investor for in myriad. We still have the Kiwi dollar he sent after he, you know, he came down and he saw it. And because those students that we sent up there, East Computer Science at Waikato. We were working on 60 to 80 hours a week. My wife was shoveling them back and forth to their classes.

Alex St. John:
She was serving them breakfast and lunch and dinner. They were sleeping on the couches and floors and coding, and they and I tell them, You flunk out of school, and you’re out of here. And so they were killing it at school, and they would all graduated early with Top marks and Bill Rogers are like, these are the best students we ever have. So Bill and I Bill became a believer. He’s like, whatever that crazy American’s doing to these, we were getting the highest quality students we’ve ever seen. And and, you know, and I said it’s you gotta put them under pressure. It’s Nerds, people who are really gonna take to this, they need the challenge. They they you gotta challenge them.

Alex St. John:
If it’s not intense, then it’s not interesting. Right? And so that batch, that generation of kids grew up really well, and I had a great relationship with, bill after that even though, you know, he he said I was running a sweatshop. I’m glad I didn’t do that.

Paul Spain:
I’m thinking there’s a there’s a there’s a little bit of exaggeration in your Yeah. That they were studying and doing 60 hours a week in

Alex St. John:
a school. Ask them. I’m not exaggerating. You would not believe the link. I can show you the picture. We thought that was hilarious. So to be clear, my wife served breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She’d shuttle them to class.

Alex St. John:
She’d shuttle them back to the office. They were just we just had couches and mattresses everywhere. And so she you know, they were like our kids, so He would take photos of them. So we used to see have a montage of kids sleeping at their desks or sleeping on the couch or sleeping in one of the chairs. So we have the most hilarious and, like, we had cats that bought that sleeping engineers were the best pillows. So we have this hilarious montage of all these kids that are just crashed out at their desks with a cat or a number, so forth. You know, they really were working that hard. That that part’s not an exaggeration.

Alex St. John:
There’s certainly a lot of American hyperbole in here. Don’t get me wrong. But, you know, I I can’t believe how how extreme those guys those Some of those early kids went for it. I don’t know

Paul Spain:
if they went

Alex St. John:
for it.

Paul Spain:
That was that was their choice to to to push themselves.

Alex St. John:
Well, certainly, You’re friends with Mark Wilcox. He was one of them. Ask him.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Alex St. John:
Ask Wilcox. Bring him on and say, what was it like working for Alex? Did he crack a whip? Or, you know, was the food and the energy just too much fun? You know? And it’s probably a little bit of both. I always you know, I How do you phrase it? I work all the time because I’m one of those people. I I love it. Yeah. So, certainly, if you were around me, people saw that I was working 247 Saturday, you know, Sunday, day and night. So, they certainly if they were you know, if I was any kind of role model, they certainly saw that that The American guy who is famous didn’t stop working. And so from that point of view, sure.

Alex St. John:
But, you know, you’re friends with Wilcox. Ask him. He was there. Let’s see what

Paul Spain:
he says. I’m just thinking there were gonna be, you know, people that will hear that in isolation and will will think bad things. But when we Yeah. When I hear the whole story, what I’m hearing is as amazing things that come out of that. And even when I think of myself as a youngster, when I got involved in the in the in the tech world, you know, I I was young, single, and, and I could work till midnight on a on a nightly basis, and and I enjoyed that.

Alex St. John:
Yeah. You can’t explain Claim it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. There’s but there’s some, I guess, there’s some some norms today that, that certainly, you know, certainly the norm, and the tech sector is very different to that, isn’t it?

Alex St. John:
Yeah. And I think there’s an easy way to explain it because I’ve because people don’t get it. I go, look. A tech startup. It’s not a company yet. It’s a company one that has a product that makes money. Before then, it’s an Olympic sport. Right? So you’re trying to raising capital and and surviving, to make a payroll is getting a gold medal and everybody else loses and dies, and the people who get gold medals are not mediocre by any stretch.

Alex St. John:
So when you think about what it means to found and run tech companies, you know, it’s an Olympic sport. It’s not a business in that sense.

Paul Spain:
And And I think I think there’s some, yeah, there there there is some important differentiation differentiations there And, you know, I’ve had conversations with a lot of people over the years that are describing this sort of lifestyle. Yeah. And And, you know, I’ve I’ve often struggled to get my head around it. Well, you know, what about the family? What about, you know, the marriages? What about the, you know, all the Yeah. The the downsides?

Alex St. John:
Yeah. Well, there’s easy answers to that. Right? The that lifestyle style is for when you’re young and single, and and the people who do it in America get very, very valuable and highly paid because of that experience. And so by the time they’re in their thirties or forties and getting married and having kids, over here in this area, they’re making 100 of 1,000 of dollars a year and going home at 5 PM, but it’s that experience in youth that got them to that. And and Again, I think it’s a fascinating phenomena because it is quite mind boggling how much expertise it takes to be that valuable. What they really get that way, but it’s done under fairly intense conditions. And that’s the other thing I liked about Cambridge is the whole town took right, and being an Olympic town, training town. I go, that’s that’s what making tech startups are.

Alex St. John:
If you look at a graph of how tech startups fail. It’s, you know, 90% die at this stage, then 90% die at this stage, then 90% die at this stage, and then Facebook. Right? And so if you recognize that that attrition rate is that aggressive, it’s very hard to get people understand that you got to create an environment that is very competitive and aggressive, or you’re not gonna make it because it that’s that’s the nature of the business. And I think it is a business for the I weirdly now, And I go, you know what? This is a business for the young, and, weirdly, it’s a business for the old because your kids are all grown up, made plenty of money, and I still love it. So I like doing it now, but there’s that little phase where you go now. Just get a job at, you know, Microsoft and take a paycheck home. Don’t you know, or not Microsoft, you know, Microsoft today, not, you know, in the nineties. Yeah.

Alex St. John:
But but don’t do that crazy startup thing if you got away from family and and 6 kids. That’s that’s way too stressful.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. And I yeah. I remember a a chat with, Alexis Ohanian who, you know, co I found at Reddit. And, when I when I spoke to him, I think he was in that sort of phase of of of operating, and I was, you know, I, you know, I was, yeah, really struggling to get my head around it. Now, you know, now I can think in the last sort of 5, 6 years, he’d married Serena Williams and, you know, probably his his journey’s changed a bit and, you know, prop prop probably isn’t isn’t working those sort of, outlets now.

Alex St. John:
Right. And that’s the thing is that and the thing that’s hard to Explain to people is you gotta go, yeah. And it’s definitely not for everybody. But this is an alien idea. There’s a small set of people for which The lifestyle of living in the mind of a computer and doing something amazing is so you know, it’s like being an artist, and you gotta have a passion for it. And for those people, it’s not work it’s never worked for me. And the people who I experienced, they don’t experience it that way. And and so certain certainly in your youth.

Alex St. John:
Right? As again, when you get to having other priorities. Right? And it’s nice at that stage in your career when you’re Getting married, having kids, or doing any of those things to have become so accomplished an experience that your value is no longer How hard you work but how good you are at communicating to others and managing and articulating that. So all that personal experience converts to leadership and management when you want to go home at 5 one day and still be paid a lot. And and so that’s That’s you know, I go the case. I go, yep. It’s not for everybody. So people go, well, so and so really hated it, and it was too hard for them. I go, I yeah.

Alex St. John:
They’re probably not cut out for it, and that’s It’s okay for it not to be for everybody, but it is a shame if you really condemn the people who do live it because it is, You know, they love it, and it’s really good for them, and they’re really happy at it. And it is sad when there are people who won’t understand that There are some people who are just gonna be happy living in the mind of a machine all the time over, you know, doing the other things that normal social people value highly.

Paul Spain:
Yep. Yep. He no. That’s that’s, that’s good to to delve into that. Yeah. Yeah. Where did where did things go from, you know, from from there? Because, obviously, you you were ultimately attracted, you know, millions and millions of funding. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
You know, I think things grew to, you know, quite some, some some scale through to through to where we are now, where, you know, you’ve exited and and sold out of the business, and and I think, you know, the company’s up for for sale at the moment. But, Yeah. What what are those sort of intervening bits that, you know, people might be able to learn from?

Alex St. John:
All the vision worked Great until it didn’t. Right? And Yeah. It’s interesting when I look back and you go, what are the, you know, because I asked, you know, one of the things is I came to New Zealand with a lot of Silicon Valley VC support. VC said whatever you do, Alex, you know, let us in on it. So I came over quite confident that if I wanted to do something in New Zealand and it had the right properties, I’d go and money would arrive. And then, you know, the market changed while I was away, so thanks. But one of the warnings I got a lot of was you know, there are not many Western VC funds who are gonna be comfortable with New Zealand governance or founded companies. They really aren’t set up to invest in companies that are not American and do not can’t sign up to Western governance standards to a high degree.

Alex St. John:
And, you know, I was like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I didn’t take it super seriously at the time. And and I realized, 1, they were it was turned out to be very true and for good reason, so I was naive about that. And so I think one of the biggest mistakes I made in New Zealand and again, it’s so sad. I would I wanted to it would be great to make it a New Zealand company, but Nyriad needed to become a US company much earlier. Says the momentum Neri had had in New Zealand made it a point of national pride.

Alex St. John:
And and I struggled with, you know, all those stories I told you about coming to me. I go, hey. I wanna come and be a Kiwi. Right? But, you know, I’m an asshole American by comparison to these people. And and so I want to add value, but I don’t want to add negative. There are a lot of things about I realize about being American that kinda happy to leave behind. I don’t want to bring that here. This is this stuff is good the way you have it.

Alex St. John:
And so I didn’t so the fact that the the new company had a lot of national pride and a lot of local enthusiasm was really positive. But, unfortunately, at scale, you know, 5, 10, 20 kids in my garage, you know, I could mentor. When a 130 kids in my garage and no other people with that kind of Silicon Valley experience and no long no more senior management and nobody with Silicon Valley credentials on the board because they can’t fly to New Zealand for board meetings, and maybe the video conferencing didn’t work as well as it does today. So you get you know, your board members are agritech founders, which, you know, maybe in New Zealand are very accomplished at that, but they’re the wrong managers and the wrong board members for a tech company that’s VC funded that’s trying to shoot the moon.

Paul Spain:
How how important is the as the board in in these sorts of situations? What what what are the key things?

Alex St. John:
Well, in my experience, it was critical. Right? Because, The and again, you know, how do you phrase it? I’m a product of my environment, which was Western Venture Capital Boards. And so in the US, the VCs are often, this is a broad statement, but often They’re the people who became billionaires founding companies themselves, and then they put their money into venture funds, and their expertise at understanding how to start companies attracts we we call it the dumb money. That is the people who don’t know how it works, but they wanna support and invest alongside that expertise. And so the classic American VC fund is is is run by founders who have done it. And so those people have a really intimate understanding when they sit on a board of what it is to be a CEO of a startup because they’re Very scary, and they’re dangerous, and there’s requirements on them that don’t seem obvious. Rational people wouldn’t say that seems to make sense. It’s it’s kinda crazy.

Alex St. John:
One of the things you have to explain to people is that a VC funded tech company either needs to knock it out of the park, hit a home run, right, or get killed by the ball. There’s no bunting. There’s no 1st base. You you better swing for the fences or, you know, break your break your neck trying. And so a VC funded company has to really go for it or fail quickly because in some sense, the worst thing to end up as what you call a zombie company, which is quite common, which is it’s got enough momentum to not die, but never enough momentum to be turned into a unicorn and be successful. And so a VC startup funded startup has to have a certain momentum, and I was having a real hard time getting and maintaining what would be considered competitive momentum in New Zealand, and it was the inability to scale more with the experience and especially with the board governance. And so I by surprise, because I was very hardcore in getting the product out driving, I was surprised that, by decisions, the board thought it knew best how to make, that I that I was I knew from a lot of experience would cause company to fail. And the problem is, you know, I have I ran global developer relations for Microsoft, which We’re dealing with lots and lots of VC funded startups, and I saw lots of them fail.

Alex St. John:
And there are a couple really common patterns in failure, which, again, founder board members know. Right? One is that when the founders, Pounding partners don’t get along and fall apart or the founders are removed, and the company isn’t a real stable business. It hasn’t hit its business base. Company’s almost always dead. That just kills it. And it happens very quickly, and it’s very consistent, and everybody knows that over there. And so, you know, when I got the situation going, wow. We’re really running badly.

Alex St. John:
Don’t have the right experience here. We need to I hate to say it because I love it here and I love the people, but we gotta get some people in the US. We gotta be able to get USVC dollars to go any bigger. The the economy is not big enough to support this thing. Storage, it takes a lot of capital, which is okay in the US. The funds go, yeah. I got a 100,000,000 to do storage. Let’s do that.

Alex St. John:
But not in New Zealand, that’s asking too much. And so I there was a lot of pressure by the board to go, no. This is a national pride. We like sitting on the board of a Kiwi storage company that’s gonna starve to death for lack of, you know, experience management cash. That was came unexpectedly. And the problem is and the other thing that happens that’s very bad and that’s common, and I I always made a promise when you raise money from people. In the US, often they’re nameless faces faceless investors, But in New Zealand, it’s, you know, farmers and people you know and their neighbors. It’s their cash.

Alex St. John:
It’s hard earned. Even if I’m mad, even if I disagree, I’m not allowed to Screw the company or try to harm it on purpose. So the problem is you go, hey, I’m the founder. I know that what’s going on here is a disaster, But I can’t go say, hey, everybody. Your investment’s lost. You’re all screwed, because that’s harming the company and the risking their investment. And I hired the board and my partner, so, it’s my fault too. So, The problem was I go, what is a a professional way to fire a flare and say, hey.

Alex St. John:
Look. There’s a a what’s going on here is real bad. And so what I did is I sold all my shares very cheaply. And because of the way the papers for the company were drawn up, the board is forced to tell all the offer them to all the investors. So that forced the board to call every investor in Myriad and say, hey. The American founder here is leaving the company because they wanted to keep that a big secret. It was very important to you know? And and and and selling their shares cheap, and you’re entitled to buy them. So that was my way of of saying, hey.

Alex St. John:
I I even though, you know, of course, I’d like to keep my shares and whatever in case I’m wrong because heaven forbid that happens sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes. I think the right thing to do by the investors is fire that flare, so that at least anybody comes along can ask a lot of questions and any when investors can ask those questions and and say, hey. Wait a minute. What went on here? So that’s what I did, and then I I tried to leave as blatantly as I could. And and I think I’m very disappointed by that because I went, oh, okay. Yep. I should have moved it to the US earlier. Got too big and out of control.

Alex St. John:
It really needed a Silicon Valley board sooner, and not necessarily because there was anything wrong with those board members for a New Zealand company, but definitely not qualified to make decisions for a for a VC funded startup. And so there was, you know, there’s details and drama to that that that, you know, I don’t think I’d it’s not necessary to out except to say my point of view was It grew too big too fast in New Zealand. And even though it would have been great to keep there, it wasn’t gonna work. And it was, poor judgment on my part not to get it shifted to the US more aggressively when it started to scene. Because the the company, you know, in some sense, a lot of what happened there, if it had happened in Silicon Valley, the early phase would have looked great. You’d have the sudden growth and big partnerships and deals, exciting contracts, and lacking the management and scale to satisfy it all, You would have gone down to Andreessen Horowitz, knocked on the door, raised $100,000,000, hired a bunch of people who make minimum $600,000 a year to come over from Google data storage or wherever to manage that division, and and that’s how you would have solved it. And that wasn’t definitely wasn’t possible in New Zealand. I’m exaggerating, but that’s kind of the, you know, the way Americans do this stuff with Yeah.

Alex St. John:
With all the cash and VCs.

Paul Spain:
So so for new When when you look at New Zealand, startups

Alex St. John:
Yep. You

Paul Spain:
know, there there is a sort of variety of of approaches and, you know, in terms of moving offshore or establishing a beachhead into a sort of particular, you know, market Yeah. You know, of which, of course, the United States is is, you know, the the most the most common. Yeah. What what are your sort of thoughts? Because that’s obviously get there’s gonna be a difference between a a New Zealander establishing something out of out of New Zealand, which which, in a lot of cases, will need to go to, to the US because of, you know, the the the market, you know, Usually for for for a start up that’s gonna scale is not is not the New Zealand market. You know, any any thoughts So on just from, you know, your what you you you saw and learned while you were while you were here and what you saw working well. Yeah. Or or not working well.

Alex St. John:
Yeah. So Kiwis, again, please forgive me for saying this. I love New Zealand, and I’m saying it this way because I love New Zealand. And I’m sorry I’m American. K? Just I apologize. That’s okay. I try to keep the American, you know, disease, you know, as much as contained as possible from your fantastic culture. But I think that there are some you know, if you said, Hey, Alex.

Alex St. John:
What would you recommend for New Zealand if we wanted to have more of a successful tech economy here? Right? And the interesting thing is you have some incredible miraculous says there in spite of all the obstacles that almost nobody knows about. And in some sense, it’s those exceptions that convince me that I’m right about my analysis. Right? You have a game company over there that is world class. Just amazing. And they raised A ton of money from Tencent. And they’re kinda little known and nobody talks about them, and they’re run by just Hardcore, real classic founders. Right? And it’s a and and and knowing what they did in New Zealand without the support of venture capital, so forth, Incredible testament. So I’ve seen them there.

Alex St. John:
And when I chat with them, I go, and I that’s why I’m not gonna name it here because they made lots of money, and I wanted to keep that way. Right? When you talk to me, go, oh, what’s the problem? They told me they warned me when before I came to Zoom about all the problems I would encounter, and they were right, the serious ones. And I would try to characterize it this way, right. If New Zealand said our goal, we want to Have a Microsoft happen here. Right? And that’s rule number 1. That’s the thing that the the one thing about that company is They’re made they’re a world class game company. Their MMO is played by everybody all over the world, and they’re New Zealand based. That’s what you want because you want all of the world’s money flowing to New Zealand and staying there.

Alex St. John:
And in order for it to stay there, The people who cause all the money to flow into New Zealand by making world class tech, they need to be allowed to get rich in New Zealand and stay that Right? Because if if they’re hated, if they’re resented, if there’s envy and contempt, and and, well, we really gotta punish them by taking that money away in some form. If that’s the culture, well, they go somewhere else, and it’s easy for rich people to go somewhere else. They do. And one is there’s a certain that Kiwi culture, which, again, is charming and enduring, that really seems to resent the idea that Somebody in New Zealand got really unreasonably wealthy there. That that would be kind of a source of hatred, and yet it’s What you need if you wanna create thousands of jobs and have 90% margin money that doesn’t cause any pollution in your waters field and doesn’t mow down any forest, just cash from the globe pouring into your cities and into your employees and your kids’ pockets. You need Kiwis to get rich in New Zealand and stay there with that money. And so if I were making laws in New Zealand, I would pass tax and stock option laws that were insanely generous to people who found companies there and let them and the 1st employees keep just keep all of it. Whatever.

Alex St. John:
Thank you for creating 10,000 jobs with, you know, payroll taxes for the next 30 years. Go ahead and become a billionaire in New Zealand and enjoy it. So there are a lot of things about New Zealand tax laws, regulation, employment law that I think is an obstacle to makes it quite hard for for people to hit that entrepreneurial velocity. Because look at your reaction and Bill Rogers’ reaction. When I go, you you you gotta work really hard, really crazy intense. And and that that which I get. You go, oh, that’s that’s terrible thing to do. That’s a mean thing to do to people.

Alex St. John:
I go, yeah. But that’s what makes a Microsoft or a Facebook, and it’s people who who do that, the few who who do that. That’s what creates those. And you want 1 to stay happen in New Zealand and stay there that because the next generation the thing that makes it Silicon Valley is those billionaires, they start VC funds, and they tracked other 1,000,000,000 from around the world to support their good judgment, and they fund other Kiwi startups. And you don’t have a tech economy until you created native billionaires who stay, and then they invest in local startups. When they’re doing that, now you’ve got a Silicon Valley dynamic. So, you know, I would write a whole treaties on things I would suggest about the way you change labor laws and some of the tax laws for entrepreneurship to support you want again, the same thing is you want them to be a billionaire in New Zealand. You want that billionaire to be stuck with them there.

Alex St. John:
You wanna make a nice well where being where getting rich in New Zealand It’s almost impossible to escape with the money once they’ve got it there, but boy, can they live great. Right? And you can say in some sense whether it was accidental or not. That’s really what happened in California with the valley. So I had a lot of kind of frustrating I can give you I don’t how much time you have, but I can give you kind of mundane, simple examples that kinda highlight, like, for example, like in Cambridge, You know, in America, everything’s open 247. You just used to you can I can get food at 3 AM? Right? And in Cambridge or New Zealand, you go to a restaurant, and they’d be open for breakfast and for an hour at lunch and for an hour at dinner and just closed the rest of the time. And you go, why are you closing? Oh, we have this very high minimum wage, and so the restaurants can’t afford to pay it when there’s no customers there. So they just close. So you can’t go buy food from them at that hour because, yep, the minimum.

Alex St. John:
And then nobody tips. Are you man, Americans are used to tipping? Oh, man. That I was setting so many Kiwis by trying to tip them. And it’s really confusing to Americans because in our culture, you know, that’s being a good person and a generous, You know, persons to tip them and the Kiwis just act like, you know, why do you hate me and and don’t you think I’m doing a good enough job and, you know, I can’t steal your money. It’s just So it was a real culture shock over tipping. Don’t get me wrong. Get the music. But the punchline is they have these contractor laws and so forth.

Alex St. John:
So The punchline was that these laws are kinda meant to protect people doing physical menial labor jobs from being abused at, you know, apple picking and running machines or factory jobs. And when your labor laws are constructed for that, well, sitting at a keyboard wiggling your fingers creatively for a lot of hours isn’t the Same kind of physical stress and very different type of economy. And those labor laws really made it hard to structure a company in an environment in a way that could have the momentum it takes to compete. And again, you may have all the people, oh, it’s a sweatshop, and it’s horrible, and we don’t want those people, and we hate rich bastards, And if, hey, it’s your country, don’t do it then. But if you did, then don’t pretend. You might just just let me You need to let you let your Kiwis get rich, and make sure that they stay rich, and nice and happy, and a huge luxurious mansion in New Zealand investing in other startups because that’s how it works. And that’s how you get Singapore. We’re just, you know, tons of cash flowing in in this incredibly vibrant economy, which they were very successful at deliberately engineering.

Alex St. John:
Not that you necessarily wanna be exactly like Singapore. Believe me is There’s

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I and I think that there’s that aspect that that often comes up, and I I remember an article I, you know, wrote that that the media, an opinion piece that sort of picked up and and, you know, some of the main media here during during sort of early COVID and, you know, I one of the media outlets put a title on it of, you know, that we need to make New Zealand Silicon Valley, which wasn’t actually what I was saying Because there is a uniqueness to New Zealand, and we we we we wanna, you know, we want our own environment. We don’t wanna be Singapore. We don’t wanna be, Silicon Valley. We don’t wanna be, You know, Israel, but we want to we wanna be ourselves, but taking inspiration and and and, you know, the learning the best from from the most successful, you know, around the world. And, you know, I guess and and it doesn’t happen. Right? You don’t ever end up with an exact replica of what comes in Silicon Valley anywhere anywhere in the world because each environment has its own, you know, Uniques from, you know, people, culture, and and and so many other aspects.

Alex St. John:
And and I’ve had a front row seat over decades working with studios and companies in a lot of emerging economies and countries. So I’ve had a front row seat to the Philippines and India and Ireland and, Ukraine, ironically. You know, I can again, time not, but I can tell you some stories I think are fascinating about How they and North Korea South Korea, not North Korea. South Korea. I I remember the various government initiatives they had to try to form tech economies and how it happened. And, yes, sure enough, they, all of those had success. They all formed tech economies, and they’re all none of them look anything exactly like Silicon Valley. So I agree with you entirely, and believe me, I love the Kiwi culture so much, like, oh, I’d love to find a recipe that worked, but the thing you can’t ignore is that you cannot compete in tech if you institutionally can’t hit competitive market velocity.

Alex St. John:
That’s a requirement. So The one thing you have to be able to do is get people working at the velocity and intensity of immersion to be competitive at a global competitive marketplace. You gotta be able to support that in whatever your native form is. There there’s no path to a Silicon Valley for New Zealand at island time. And and and and I loved island time. I just sorry. You know? So I go you could I I’ll tell you One of the things the greatest frustrations I had as a manager there is I would tell the Kiwis, I go, look. You’re on an island that is it’s Saturday here when it’s Friday in America in the 8,000 miles in the Pacific Ocean from anywhere, and you’re trying to build a global technology company.

Alex St. John:
None of your customers are gonna be on this island. They’re gonna be in England and Israel and America. They’re gonna be all over. And if If you won’t come in on a Saturday or be on phone call in customer service at 3 AM, then I gotta hire that in India, and I’d rather be hiring a Kiwi for it. And it was quite because the labor laws and the culture, it was it was very hard to say, I need people on the phone line for our customers in England when they’re in England. I Need people on call with our customers and doing meetings in Japan time with our customers in Japan. And that was quite hard to sell and quite hard to organize from, you know, a labor point of view in New Zealand. And so, you know, and I so I hated sitting there going, I’m gonna have to, you know, dial 1800 India for my support staff or something because I can’t get it here in New Zealand.

Alex St. John:
And one of the biggest you know, the the Waikato day. Waikato day was the bane of my existence Because it was the one day of the year when everybody in America’s open and is at work and wanting to have business meetings with Myriad. And the Kiwi’s like, we’re barbecuing, mate. Sorry. That was my fake Australian accent. My best of them. But they don’t bugger off to barbecue no matter how much I plan, no matter how much I said, we got meetings. We got calls with Dell and Austin, Texas on, like, auto day.

Alex St. John:
Everybody is like, spike auto day. Gone. So that was very stressful and frustrating. And so I go, you know, I I get it. I like day. I the whole thing. Understood. But it’s So hard to build a global company in New Zealand.

Alex St. John:
With New Zealand employees, if they’re you know, you’re not on Those time zones where all your global customers are trying desperately to send their money to New Zealand if you’ll just take their phone calls.

Paul Spain:
Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. These and and I guess these are the things that that that we don’t, you know, necessarily realize, you know, as Kiwis, and, you know, it’s, you know, we we learn the things that we need to do When we’re, say, launching into the US market and

Alex St. John:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. You and I were talking about this before we started. Right? And and how, you know, where we’re, you know, not very loud. We’re, you know, where we’re, you know, reasonably sort of shy and reserved when it, you know, comes to sort of talking about our our start ups and our companies and, you know, how how good Kiwi things are, whereas, you know, the bravado of how things operate in the US is sort of, you know, opposite end of the, the spectrum on there. Right? So we we hear that a lot from founders that have, you know, had success in the US and and and, you know, we get nudged that way, but it’s actually really interesting to, you know, get a get a get a feel for, yeah, what it what it’s like for people coming coming the other way. Yeah. And the and

Alex St. John:
the things that you

Paul Spain:
see that we might not see. Right?

Alex St. John:
Yeah. Well, I know. And the same year, right, like I said, I had very strict, you know, political convictions when I got to New Zealand, and they got all messed up when I got over there. So it definitely was world view changing. But, you know, one of the funny things I’ll tell you is that Kiwi Executives’ employees are very successful in the US being the way they are, because the funny thing is the soft spokenness conveys us confidence. And so the funny thing is is that, Like, there’s the the head I don’t know. At the time I was working over there, the CEO of Walmart was a Kiwi. You find Kiwis in very senior engineering roles and in very senior leadership roles all over the US because that soft spoken patient island time kind of thing, where he manages hyperintensify Americans very well.

Alex St. John:
So I will say that, At the same time that that, you know, I go, yeah. Big talking in that American way is, expected part of how we sell. I have seen Kiwis be very successful in America being Kiwi like. And so, you know, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t discard that casually either. But there are you know, the funny thing is if we come to startups, right, you’d say startups where, Yeah. You really have to have a huge vision, and you have to be shooting the moon. Maybe that requires more of that, Western style exaggeration than, say, being CEO of Walmart, which is a totally different thing. So I think that the Kiwi personality I see has been very successful over here, and and certainly the engineers that I’ve trained that have come to the US and other countries are doing really well.

Alex St. John:
I’m very proud of them. So in some sense, you don’t have to change a thing unless you wanna raise money for start up companies, in which case there’s some new tricks you should learn.

Paul Spain:
That’s great. I’m mindful I’ve taken up a lot of your time. Was there, you know, anything else that, that that you think we should cover.

Alex St. John:
Boy. Well, I will say, if this is gonna, you know, go on the air, I wanna, you know, promote it with all the links. So, You know? I lived in Hobbiton in New Zealand. So I lived in Narnia. It was, what was a Xena film and wherever her world was and Middle Earth, and it is so beautiful there. And one of the things that was very confusing, and that’s why I go, oh, boy. Maybe it’s hopeless. Right? Is that, Man, when you weren’t in the basement grinding away, life was so you know, the hiking and the trails and the people, you know, and and so you go, oh, it’s much easier to be an intensifier engineer in America.

Alex St. John:
We all kinda hate each other. We don’t make eye contact. We don’t really like each other much. We Like, this have our tinted windows on our big SUVs, and and and so that that that culture in New Zealand, I I I got sucked in the island time too. And so, you know, we but from a living over there, could I live over there? You know? And and and, and I would love to be not be running a company in Seymour, New Zealand because I just loved it. And, again, I you know, I’m a very confused American from living over there because You go, boy, I’m gonna bring all my expertise and teach this poor primitive culture how to build a tech company and then get there and go, oh, hold up on that. I don’t really wanna ruin this because these this is a happier world than the one I’m from. And yet I wanna try to add some value.

Alex St. John:
So that’s where I go, caveat. If you seriously think you want a tech economy, sorry. You you have to be able to hit a much higher velocity where you cannot compete. I’m sorry. That isn’t necessary. How you fit that in with everything else that is fantastic is a puzzle for you to figure out, and I hope I hope you do. And I think it’s possible because I had a great experience there up until, you know, it it grew too much to be something that could be handled, you know, managed that way. And so I I my perception is that it absolutely can work, and there’s just a little more technique to getting it right.

Alex St. John:
And On the one hand, I’m proud to have, you know, tried to pioneer it. On the other hand, I’m sad that it wasn’t totally successful. But my impression was, Yeah. With a little bit of a twist and some refinement, you could probably get it there. You could you could definitely get world class tech companies there if you thought that was the thing you wanted.

Paul Spain:
Yep. Yep. Yep. Oh, that’s, that’s that’s really encouraging and, look, we’ll we’ll include on the, on the web page. Some some videos and, you know, other bits and pieces that will fill out the picture. Do you wanna share anything about what you’re up to now?

Alex St. John:
Yeah. Well, I sadly, you know, there’s a lot of folks who used to work for me who, need jobs. I am hiring all my former myriad colleagues who will need a job or happy to refer them on to the right folks. I raised, capital for Playcast Stio here in the US, and it’s a streaming media platform going back to the gaming roots. And Neridians who worked with me in the past, I’ve got a few job openings. Not all enough for all of you, but I’ve got a good network, and I’m very happy to help you make connections and references and get you all jobs. And I plan to have a a Kiwi office. We have I’m working for Playcast now, and I’d love to hear from those of you who need jobs.

Alex St. John:
Again, I don’t have a bucket of them yet, but, you know, I will over time. So I hope I’m looking forward to have an excuse. And my VCs, my investors at Playcast, the lead investor in in my new company is Bing Gordon, one of the founders of Electronic Arts. So all these guys like the idea of having a New Zealand development office and having excuses to I have board meetings and things over there, so, I hope that, that Playcast hires a lot of great, Kiwi engineers and, and I’m gonna stay US based this time based on some previous experience, but I’d certainly love to be hiring Kiwis again. I hope to hear from some of you guys. We already have a few hired, and we got interviews for them all this week. Well, thank you, and I really appreciate you giving me a chance to plug the new company. We’re launching Playcast, this year, probably, next quarter around the game developer conference, and it’s a streaming media platform that lets people stream games.

Alex St. John:
So it’s like streaming video from your own computer except with gamepad mouse and input for sharing everything, and it’s very exciting tech. I spent COVID in the last 2 years in my basement with my other basement troll friends building it. And in spite the fact that the market’s very hard, we got, raised some capital very successfully recently and and are ready to go. So love to, have some New Zealanders involved in that experience again. I’m happy to hire some of you guys if you need a good gig. I’m happy to help you get find them.

Paul Spain:
Thank you. Well, yeah, that’s that’s really, really interesting. And certainly, you know, wish you all the best with with Play Cast and, so they, you know, look forward to to seeing you back down, down under, here in New Zealand again, at at some stage Windmill.

Alex St. John:
I have 2 Kiwi children I have to, you know, return to their homeland one day.

Paul Spain:
That’s Great. Well, thanks so much, Alex. That’s been fantastic, having you on the New Zealand Tech podcast today. And, look, you know, I’m sure that listeners are gonna Find a bunch of of takeaways in there. As always, you know, people will look in and and, take different, different lessons or agree or or disagree, but, you know, appreciate you being, a straight shooter on on your your thoughts and and opinions about, about our our start up and And tech, seen here in New Zealand. It’s, it’s important that we get these outside, perspectives, I think. Someone that’s that’s been very much an insider and, you know, is now, not here, I I think, you know, you you have a a viewpoint we probably don’t don’t often hear. So, do appreciate you caring enough to, to take the time and to to share that today.

Alex St. John:
I appreciate having, yeah, having me on, Paul. And Like I said, I had a great experience over there, and maybe one day if I sell a company for another few $1,000,000,000, I’ll get to come back to New Zealand and, stay there with the money. But I’d really love to see some other Kiwis who went abroad come back and start companies over there. I’d be very excited to see that. Thank you very much for having me.

Paul Spain:
Well, thanks everyone for listening in to this episode of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. Look, I’m sure, amongst our listeners will be, you know, former team members of of Nyriad, whether whether that is, employees, directors, or shareholders. If you have, some commentary that you would like to include, then, you know, to please get in touch, via social media, or via our website. We would, you know, love to to hear from you. I think there there are always things to be, learned when, things don’t, you know, maybe pan out as expected. So, you know, of course, sometimes we look to our biggest, tech success stories, you know, the the the likes of, Xero and and and Pushpay, for learnings. But look. There are learnings to be had in every single start up, whether they ended up becoming the next big thing or not.

Paul Spain:
So, you know, really insightful what we’ve, you know, heard today. But do feel free to get in touch if you’ve got something you’d like to add to that discussion. We would we would certainly welcome that. And, of course, I’d like to say a big thank you to our show partners, for making the New Zealand Tech podcast possible. So thank you to Gorilla Technology, HP, Spark, 2 Degrees, and One NZ. Alright. Well, we’ll catch you on the next show, and, do make Sure. If you’ve been listening to, to this audio that you’re also subscribed to our video channels, so you get access to, our live content, and you can find, NZ Tech podcast not only through those audio channels of Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and so on, but across YouTube, LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

Paul Spain:
Alright. Catch you next week. See The New Zealand’s Tech Podcast brought to you by Gorilla Technology, proactive and strategic