Derivatives

When we measure our startup ecosystem we love to count the number of new companies that are started. Or, as they progress, to count how many dollars of capital these startups raise. But we are poor at reporting on how many of these young companies survive beyond the early stage and go on to ever contribute anything back, either to their individual investors or to the economy as a whole, via jobs created or tax paid. We forget that a startup is a phase, not a destination.

Because the failure rate of early-stage startups is so high, it’s tempting to treat them, in aggregate, as a lottery, and believe that to increase the chances of a win we just need to buy as many tickets as we can afford. But that’s not how it works. It’s not a game of pure chance. There is a pattern. Increasing the number of random bets we make doesn’t increase our likelihood of success. It just increases the amount we’ve spent.

It’s true, we need more people to start companies and grow them into successful businesses. But support for startups in New Zealand is seldom centred on individual founders and their teams. We focus instead on public and private sector programmes that support startups – what I call “startup derivatives”. It’s like describing our national parks by showing the Department of Conservation organisation chart.

In calculus, a derivative measures how much one value changes in response to changes in some other value.¹ For example, as an object moves we can measure its speed (the first derivative of its movement) and its acceleration (the second derivative of its movement). The higher the derivative the more abstracted we are from the underlying object. Likewise in finance, a derivative is a contract whose value is based on the performance of an underlying asset.² For example, a stock option is an agreement that provides the option to purchase a share in a company at some date in the future for a pre-agreed price. The profit or loss on the option depends on whether the actual price of the stock on that future date is above or below the pre-agreed price. Without the underlying company the option is worthless. As investors discovered to their cost in the global financial crisis in 2008, when risky assets get packaged up, given interesting names, and abstracted enough, it’s easy to completely lose sight of what we’re actually investing in, and indeed if there is any value in that bundle at all.³

So what are startup derivatives? All the people and organisations that are part of the startup ecosystem, but which are not themselves startups: business incubators, innovation hubs and technology clusters; shared working spaces all around the country; accelerator programmes of different flavours; networks of angel investors pooling their resources and investing in a portfolio of ventures; public and private organisations that provide advisory services to startups and mentor founders; countless competitions or networking events hoping to flush out promising new business ideas; numerous business awards celebrating entrepreneurship, growth or innovation; various initiatives to commercialise research done at universities; and, last but not least, millions of dollars of local and central government funding including direct grants to companies, subsidised professional services and advice, tax credits and even co-investment.

We fund all of these things, and mostly just assume that they help actual startups. It’s like pouring gasoline onto the roof of a car and hoping some of it ends up in the tank. Many people have put significant time, effort and money into creating all these things. A large and growing industry has sprouted, all ultimately trying to increase the number of startups. Early-stage startups especially are suffocated with support. And still we continue to invest in more. It’s great to have good intentions and high hopes. Eventually we need to ask the question: is it actually working?

Signs of life

This concept of derivatives gives us a useful way to categorise any ecosystem initiative. We can simply consider how close they are to the underlying ventures they depend on.

Founders and their teams are the people in the arena, “dust and sweat and blood” on their faces.⁴

Incubators and accelerators are first derivative. Their success is a simple function of the subset of ventures they work with.

Active investors are first derivative for the same reason. They are like a tender to a steam train — providing the fuel and getting pulled along at the same time. Passive investors, or anybody investing indirectly via a venture fund, syndicate or angel group, are second derivative, since they are an additional step removed from the underlying ventures.⁵

Advisors working directly with founders are first derivative. Agencies that connect founders with advisors are second derivative.

Business awards are first derivative. Sponsors of awards, or judges, are second derivative. Networking events are second derivative – the purpose of these is not to create ventures directly, but to help connect people who might and provide some experience in a controlled setting. Dragons’ Den (just humour me here!) is second derivative, but only if we very generously assume that some people watching might be inspired and encouraged to become a founder or investor themselves.

Government funding adds an extra layer of abstraction. Funding NZTE to provide in-market support for startups is second derivative. A fund-of-funds, such as a government venture fund, is third derivative. Funding government agencies like Callaghan Innovation to run a programme to support and develop accelerators… we are up to four derivatives at that point!⁶

In case you think I’m just throwing shade at others here, writing a book about the startup ecosystem is third derivative at least. And the scientific name given to a third derivative of position in physics is “jerk”.⁷

Categorising the different things we do to support startups like this can help us to separate the signal from the noise.

Intentions → Impact

There are four criteria that anybody promoting a startup derivative should answer in advance to assess its likely impact:⁸

1. Who does this help?
2. What constraints do they have?
3. How do we hope to reduce or remove those constraints for them?
4. How will we show that it’s working?

The first three criteria insist that we’re much more specific about the who, what and how. Rather than starting with the solution and trying to prove that it’s useful, we start with the people we’re trying to help and the problems they actually have then work backwards from there.⁹ The fourth criterion gets to the specific things we can measure, what evidence we expect to have, and when we will know if something is or isn’t working. If there is no way to show it’s working then it’s not an experiment. It’s just wishful thinking. The measures we choose should include some early indicators and milestones. It’s not good enough to say “it’s too soon to tell”.

When something is working we can generally demonstrate momentum right away. Rather than waiting until we can measure the long-term impact or lasting change (outcomes) we can show we’re on track by honestly assessing the things we do (activities) and the immediate results (outputs). Scrutiny and consequences help ensure we meet our expectations.¹⁰ Also, it’s useful to identify a “control” group as a comparison, so that we can attribute any results to the things we’ve done. Real impact is the difference between what happened and what would have happened anyway, without us. Unless we address these criteria in advance, it’s too easy to just shoot an arrow and draw the bullseye around whatever it hits.

Are we too scared to look too closely at results, in case it forces us to admit that we’re not really making as much difference as we hope?

The reality is many of the things we’ve tried have not worked. That by itself shouldn’t surprise us. We’re dealing in uncertainty, and that requires experimentation. The only way to know if something might work is to try it. But that approach only works if we are clear in advance about our thesis and identify the measures we will use to demonstrate that it’s working (or not).

This is not that hard:

1. Have a hypothesis,
2. Test that hypothesis,
3. Update the hypothesis based on the results.
4. Repeat, until we get the outcome we want.

Remember, there are only three ways to be wrong. We have to admit when things have not worked, and to stop and try something different, otherwise we’re just flailing. Real failure is not learning and improving on the next iteration.

If we already know it works it’s not an experiment, either. These criteria force us to be honest about the things we don’t know, which are also the things we might be wrong about. The goal is to get beyond working on things that just make us feel good and instead do things that really are good, eliminate a huge amount of the distraction that contributes very little to the ecosystem, and focus our limited time and money and energy where it might make the biggest difference.

Let’s consider the most common startup derivatives, and apply these criteria…

The neonatal unit

In a hospital, an incubator is a safe place to put a sick baby – a controlled environment where they can hopefully stabilise without having to worry about the many stressors of the outside world. In 2007 our son spent the first week of his life living in an incubator. It’s not a time we look back on fondly. Thankfully he recovered and we were relieved to get him out and home. So you might understand how confusing it was for me when people started getting excited about putting startups into incubators.

For a brief moment in time, business incubators were the hot new thing. The idea was to create a protected and supportive environment for fragile young companies.

Typically they offer a funky office space – often designed to within an inch of its life with bean bags, pool tables, Lego, etc – other early-stage companies to share it with, access to advisors and mentors, and a playbook to follow.

These days, very few business incubators still use that label. They prefer to be called innovation hubs or technology clusters. More accurately they would be described as co-working spaces or serviced offices. However, the “services” they provide to startups haven’t really changed at all. So for our purposes, let’s call them all incubators.

How do they stack up against our four impact assessment criteria? Who are these spaces set up to help and how?

When we look at incubators from a founder’s perspective, the value of the solution is constrained by the size of the problem. In my experience, none of the things that incubators offer startup teams address big constraints, so the benefits are limited. While it’s good to have a comfortable desk to sit (or stand) at, and to be surrounded by supportive and like-minded people who can advise and support, this is very easy to arrange when we need it, especially in a place like New Zealand where the business community is small and well connected and people are generally very happy to help if asked. Plus, the optimal amount of time spent networking with other founders is “occasionally and intentionally”, not “all day, every day”. If you like the idea of incubators because you prefer the company of like-minded people, my advice is simple: seek out non-like-minded people. You’ll learn more, and faster. If you think finding a place to work and some sympathetic friends is the hard part of starting a company, wait until you try to find your first customer.

From observation, the advice that startups get while in an incubator is often terrible. This is a pattern I’ve sadly seen repeated too many times: a promising startup has built a good-enough product, and needs to get out of their own heads and start talking to potential customers, but instead wastes time working on crafting an investment pitch deck or market positioning document or some other equivalent nonsense, all because the incubator they’ve placed themselves in has a methodology and their mentors need them to progress through each of the steps in the prescribed order.

One of the companies we invested in and worked on at Southgate Labs was ThisData (originally called Revert), founded by Rich Chetwynd and Nicole Fougère. Their first startup, called Litmos, was sold to US firm CallidusCloud in 2011. ThisData was their second, and was informed by all of the things they’d learned. I remember visiting Rich while he was still pre-launch, when he was sub-leasing a desk at an incubator space in Auckland. It was Friday and at about 11am there was a call for everybody working in the office to gather in the kitchen area for shared morning tea. Rich rolled his eyes. As a second-time founder he knew that there were much more important things to be spending time on that morning than sharing a drink and a biscuit with other founders.

For those who are at the very beginning it’s not always obvious if the advice being given is smart, or something that might only make sense for a larger company. When an incubator comes with advisors on tap, it’s easy to assume, incorrectly, they are the people who are best qualified to guide and coach. The problem is that so much of the startup thinking fed to naive founders in incubators is the equivalent of a backcountry survival guide written by somebody who has never spent time in the bush.

Who incubates the incubators?

Incubators are expensive to set up and run. None of the business models incubators use to cover these costs are founder-centric:

• User pays. This effectively makes the incubator a real-estate venture. Paying market rates for a desk and access to a fancy coffee machine isn’t a good deal for cash-constrained teams.
• Investment. This doesn’t work for either side: founders need to give up a percentage of their company in return for the limited benefits of the shared working space – that could end up being hugely expensive if things go well; on the other side of the equation, the incubator quickly ends up with a large portfolio of small stakes in ventures into which they are reluctant to continue investing time and money. As a result, very few incubators contribute more value as shareholders than they extract.
• Corporate sponsorship. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Large companies are always keen to be associated with helping startups, especially when they have unused office space to fill, can supply other products or services to the companies they host or when it gives their own staff something interesting to work on occasionally as mentors. But founders need to be aware of the strings that come attached.

Who really incubates the incubators? We all do. Most incubators are predominantly funded or heavily subsidised by local and central government. Given that many also use some combination of the three methods described above, that’s slightly depressing. On the other hand, if they had to fund themselves as purely commercial businesses very few would survive. It seems that every town around the country has decided it’s important for them to have a space to host young startups, despite the “investment” required and without regard to whether it actually helps anybody.

There is a better use for these spaces. There is a valley-of-death moment I’ve seen repeated a few times when teams grow quickly and get to a size where they really need their own office space, but they are not yet steady-state enough to take on a long-term lease of their own. A solution that gives these growing companies dedicated space (big enough to host the whole team away from distractions) but which doesn’t require founders or directors to provide personal guarantees or commit for multiple years would be welcome.

There is also a gap for distributed teams who mostly work remotely (which, over time, will become most teams). For them, there is a lot of value in getting everybody together in person from time to time. The gap is an airport lounge-like space where smaller high-growth teams can book meeting rooms, get good coffee (who am I to deny others their fix?) and overlap with each other (not necessarily all day) on an ad- hoc basis. There are now commercial spaces that provide exactly that, and companies seem happy to pay, leaving incubators to tend to the premature and permanently ill.

Taking the hit

If we consider the startups that have gone on to become successful high-growth companies, almost all did their hard yards, in the beginning, in a dingy flat or borrowed corner of an office, rather than emerging from the safety and comfort of an innovation hub. Trade Me and Vend both started by sharing desks in somebody else’s office. Xero started in an apartment.¹¹ Timely was a fully remote company for the first few years, so the team were all working from home. Most founders don’t really need a special desk in a special room and a poorly qualified grown-up in a nice suit or branded hoodie to hold their hand or to be constantly surrounded by other founders. It just doesn’t help them much.

In 1987, during the leadup to a heavyweight championship fight, Mike Tyson was asked if he was worried about the fight plan of his opponent, Tyrell Biggs. His response has become legend, repeated by everybody from politicians to business consultants. It was originally reported as:¹²

Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.

The wording has evolved over time. Sometimes the plan is getting hit in the mouth; sometimes getting punched in the face. The sentiment is the same.

Fifteen years later reporter Mike Berardino of the South Florida Sun Sentinel asked Tyson to elaborate on the quote:¹³

If you’re good and your plan is working, somewhere during the duration of [the fight] you’re going to get the wrath, the bad end of the stick. Let’s see how you deal with it. Normally people don’t deal with it that well. How much can you endure, buddy? Most talkers, they can’t handle it.

Tyson won the fight by TKO in the seventh round.

At some point every founder needs to face their discomfort and meet the dangers of the real world. Eventually plans need to get punched in the face.

Need for speed

While incubators are all about nurturing, accelerator programmes are the opposite. They are all about speed. They take a promising idea and brand-new team and attempt to fast-track the venture to a funding event – ideally in just a few weeks or months. Over recent years similar programmes have proliferated all around the world, mostly copying the model pioneered by Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. The intention is to select the best founders from a big group of applicants, surround them with the best available mentors and advisors, invest a modest amount (enough for “founders to be able to run their company and pay expenses for around five to six months”) and take a small shareholding in the new venture (typically 5% to 10%, although some take more and others have some flexibility for ventures that might be slightly further along and so justify a higher valuation).¹⁴

In 2013 and 2014, 10 startups entered the “Lightning Lab” in Wellington (although the first year only nine made it to the end). Each got $18,000 in return for 8% of their company.¹⁵ From 2015 onwards a similar model was used in Auckland and Christchurch, as well as versions with a specific theme – for example, teams with at least one woman or teams focusing on climate change. The culmination in each case was demo day, promoted as a chance for the startups to pitch themselves to investors.

How do accelerators cope with our four impact assessment criteria? Who are they trying to help and do they work?

Mass assembly

At a programme level, the goal of an accelerator is to mass assemble startups the same way as high-tech manufacturing companies mass assemble electronics. Rather than building a startup, we’re trying to build a machine that builds startups. To make this model work efficiently and cost effectively requires a lot of volume. At the top of the funnel we need a large pool of capable founders. Y Combinator now has tens of thousands of companies from all over the world applying to be part of each intake, making it extremely competitive. They can accept the very best founders. By comparison it’s common to see local accelerator programmes pleading for applications and taking more or less everybody they can get.

We also need a big group of mentors and investors to fund them once they graduate. Overseas, mentors are predominantly alumni, who have deep relevant and recent experience. And investors are normally queuing up to attend demo day. In New Zealand the people involved tend to be corporates, angel groups or people whose main experience is running accelerator programmes. I completely understand the attraction of an accelerator from a mentor’s perspective – it’s a sugar rush. The work is compressed into just a few weeks, and the anticipation of the upcoming demo day means there is a much shorter payback period. Then everybody moves on.

These programmes promise founders “unparalleled access” to the “best technical and business talent in New Zealand”. Is it, though?¹⁶ Mentors are asked to donate their time and encouraged to treat it as an opportunity to “give back”. I’ve benefited from the experience of others, and I feel an obligation to do the same for the next generation of founders. But there are different ways to do that. I much prefer the idea of paying it forward. I don’t believe I have a penance to pay. Either way, advice is only valuable if it is well informed and well considered, and the founders receiving it are able to use it. Anybody applying to these programmes should look closely at the people involved and make sure there is an overlap with the skills they need and the problems they have.

To make it even harder for the local accelerators, they are competing in a global market. The best accelerators overseas accept founders from anywhere. The best founders are naturally going to be drawn to the best programmes – and there are many examples of Kiwi founders who have taken advantage of that opportunity. To pick just a few examples: Science Exchange, founded by two Kiwis, is a notable alumnus from Y Combinator; Melodics and Thematic are two companies I have invested in, which went through 500 Startups and Y Combinator respectively; and TradeGecko was the star company at JFDI TechStars in Singapore in 2012.

We’ve also seen Australian programmes such as Startmate run dedicated intakes for New Zealand founders. This further reduces the size and quality of the pool of founders available to local accelerators. Unfortunately, we can’t just replicate models that are successful overseas and expect them to produce the same results, unless we can identify our own competitive advantage. Comparing our local accelerator programmes to the international equivalents is a bit like comparing Rainbow’s End with Disneyland.

A better model for us would be one inspired by the philosophy printed on the back of every early-model iPhone: “Designed in California. Assembled in China.”

Our strength is never going to be mass assembly.

Rush to pitch

We can also think about accelerators from the perspective of an individual startup. Great companies take a long time to build. That’s useful, because we learn as we go. Too much attention too soon can ruin a new venture just as badly as no attention at all. Rushing to make early-stage companies investment-ready in an arbitrary number of weeks for the benefit of investors doesn’t help founders at all.¹⁷

Many of these startups, chasing investment way too soon, remind me of young kids whose parents push them into competing in pre-pubescent beauty pageants. They are immature and brittle. They have spent much more time polishing and rehearsing their pitch to investors than on building a great company worthy of investment. It’s like the difference between cramming for exams and real learning. It’s also a terrible way to build a relationship with a potential investor. Great pitches start with the words “we realised”, and those insights always take time to absorb.

Most early-stage companies who boast about being “global from day one” are dead on day two. By comparison, the most successful companies have often expanded carefully and methodically from market to market rather than trying to boil the ocean all at once. Accelerators optimise for speed, but don’t often stop and take the time to consider the collateral damage.

One shot for glory

Many years ago, before drones were as reliable as they are today, I was taught a great mindset by a remote controlled plane enthusiast. He explained to me, “We fly three or four mistakes high.”

In other words, when (not if) something unexpected happens and the plane suddenly drops, the plan is to be flying high enough that this doesn’t immediately cause it to crash. There is tolerance for mistakes.

This is not how accelerators are set up. For founders the demo day is often a do-or-die moment. So who are these programmes really benefiting? People running accelerators will generally explain this away by referencing the benefits of failing fast. The whole idea behind “validated learning” (a term first popularised by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup,¹⁸ now a bible of accelerator programmes) was to encourage founders to create feedback loops in order to avoid failure. The most vocal adherents of this philosophy get it completely backwards. The same people who promote accelerators to founders by saying “in just 12 weeks you will prove if your venture works or not – fail fast!!” will typically squirm when asked how quickly they can show if their accelerator programme itself is working. They say, “It takes 10-plus years to build an ecosystem.” That’s an excuse masquerading as a boast. It’s not enough to justify these programmes on the basis they train a small group of inexperienced founders in a customer discovery process. The cost per person is too high and the collateral damage is too great.¹⁹ An accelerator programme encouraging founders to be cannon fodder and fly one mistake high just because advisors are busy and investors are waiting to pass judgement in a few weeks’ time is a bad deal. We should be more suspicious of anybody who has a fast-track or short-cut to sell.

Just as with incubators, the measure of an accelerator is also easy: How many startups achieve escape velocity and go on to thrive?

Velocity made good

By collectively funding startup derivatives for many years we have thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall. But how much has stuck?²⁰ We don’t really know.

Perhaps we should take inspiration from the sport of sailing. One measure they use when comparing performance of different boats is velocity made good (VMG). This reports the speed of the boat, but only counts the progress towards the actual destination. How much of the effort we’ve put in has moved us closer to the desired outcome?

If we are honest about where our best startups originated we would acknowledge that none of them started in an incubator or accelerator. It’s disingenuous for people promoting derivatives to shine the spotlight on these successes within the ecosystem without acknowledging they didn’t actually contribute. We need to understand the reasons why some startups are successful and others are not. We should be able to prove that the specific things we’ve done have made the difference. We should be able to link the inputs with the outputs, and attribute success. This will require better feedback loops. In some cases this will be the first time these have existed, and that will be a shock.

When we promote derivatives we need to focus on the constraints and problems that people working on startups actually have, and work backwards to the interventions that might help them. Too many derivatives have been designed from the top down. Far too often, the primary benefactors of these derivatives are the people running them or funding them, rather than the founders and teams they are intended to support. When we ask how the government can help, we should prioritise companies at the high-growth stage rather than at the early stage. This is when startups switch from worrying about their survival to worrying about how to scale; from an innovation challenge (needing to get one new thing right) to an execution challenge (needing to get thousands of details right at the same time). This is when system-level support can help. There are repeated patterns and it’s crazy to have founders each make the same mistakes as they go through this phase. When we design programmes to incentivise fast-growing companies they need to be as transparent and as low friction as possible. They should reward the things we want directly (such as export revenue and productivity, measured by high revenue per employee) rather than factors we hope will contribute to these outcomes in the future (such as R&D spending). Life is hard enough as a founder without having to deal with cumbersome grant applications and slow processes overseen by people with little or no direct experience.

Preachers vs prophets

We should honestly assess how our activity translates into progress and stop funding programmes that generate lots of new early-stage companies without ever converting them into high-growth companies and burn through too many people in the process. We now have too many preachers and not enough prophets. Too many people raising awareness, too few working miracles.

Remember, there is a method to scale, from first experiments to genuine system-level growth. First we crawl; then we walk; then we run. When we try to create an ecosystem by investing in derivatives it’s even more important to understand this progression. First we create one great company; then we do it again; then we do it multiple times at once. The sequence is important, because the lessons from each stage provide the foundation for success in the subsequent stages. Nearly everybody who talks about wanting a larger, more vibrant and more successful ecosystem misses this. They aspire to create multiple companies at once but don’t really know what it takes to create one. The companies that are created by this system are exactly what we should expect: fragile, precarious, and underwhelming.

We don’t only need more startups. We need a higher conversion from early-stage to high-growth. Of course we need to be patient. But we also need to create much shorter feedback loops, honestly measure our progress against regular milestones, and stop repeating things which haven’t worked, hoping that next time will be different. The one thing we need to do is stop believing in silver bullets.

The paradox

You might read this and conclude I’m exceptionally negative about the startup ecosystem. Various people have accused me of that over the years, insinuating that if only I was more positive perhaps their results would be better. Actually the opposite is true. I couldn’t be more optimistic about the progress I’ve seen firsthand, especially in recent years. I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with exceptional founders and invest in some amazing companies through their early stages. Some have thrived and gone on to become successful high-growth ventures. It has been massively rewarding, both personally and for many other people who worked on and invested in these ventures. It’s how I’ve filled my days.

Here’s Lao Tzu on leadership:

As for leaders,
The worst, the people hate,
The next best, the people fear,
The next best, the people honour and praise,
But for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence,
When the best leaders work is done the people say:
“We did it ourselves.”

That resonates with me. While others were debating about how to build an ecosystem, and waiting for somebody else to do the hard bits, those of us who just got on and did it at companies like Trade Me, Xero, Vend, Timely and many others realised the paradox: the best way to grow an ecosystem is to create one great company. The multiplier effect from successes like these is huge and probably still underestimated. Unprecedented amounts of capital and expertise are recycling directly into the next wave of ventures. The future is bright!

Integrate

We should pay attention to people who talk about a startup they are working on, and think about what we can all do to help them with that specific venture. This could span from very high-fidelity things such as investing cash and working with them directly as an employee or advisor right through to lower-touch but sometimes still impactful things like giving them our perspective on a problem they currently have, based on our experience. But when anybody wants to talk about nothing but the ecosystem as a whole, run!

If you’re a founder, try not to be distracted by the ecosystem too much. Put on your own mask first, and then you’ll be in a much better position to help others. Don’t worry that there are not yet enough startups in your city or in your country. The best way to solve that problem is to try to make your own startup one that counts.

If you’re an investor, try to contribute more value than you capture. Stay humble about how much difference you can make. Show you can do it once. Then do it again.

If you are currently involved in a first, second or even third or fourth derivative capacity, try to reduce the abstraction. Consider instead working directly for one of the companies you’re supporting. It makes me sad to see smart people trying to “build a startup ecosystem” when existing successful startups within that ecosystem can’t hire people they need. Failing that, be more willing to investigate how your derivative assists. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you can accelerate multiple new startups every few months. Don’t pretend creating safe spaces for startups to start themselves is sufficient. Don’t just raise awareness and hope that inspires somebody else to do great things. Get as close to the source as you can.

If enough of us work directly on one company that achieves its potential then the meta problem will solve itself and we’ll all be much better off. The onus is on each of us to articulate clearly what we want, have a theory for how that outcome could be achieved, and honestly measure our progress towards that outcome. This is, I believe, the secret to building an ecosystem of innovative technology startups in New Zealand (or anywhere).

Startups are everywhere. Each of us can find one to work with. Ideally a team building something we want to exist in the world. Apply the skills we have. Try to make it great. If enough of us do this, we’ll have an amazing ecosystem to enjoy together, with all the benefits this will bring.

I appreciate that many people will be underwhelmed by this advice. But I’ve proven it works.

Related Essays