Lance Wiggs on how TradeMe was worth even more than its $750m sale price

You might have heard of the PayPal mafia, a term given to people that came through PayPal and then went on to invest in, found, and help grow other tech companies. People like Elon Musk, Peter Theil, Reid Hoffman; companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, all trace back to PayPal. Well, in New Zealand I think we have our own version of that, the Trade Me mafia. The people who helped that company start, scale, grow and sell have gone on to use the capital they built up - both in terms of money they made and the social proof of their skill and judgement - to go on and foster a lot of the local industry. It's a theme of this podcast, and one of the key members of what I'd call that mafia is Lance Wiggs.

You can draw one of those detective show style photo boards with the lines and there'd be lines all over Business is Boring for today's guest. Lance has been a director, investor or advisor to many of our guests. Wierdly, Onceit, Vend, Populate and Timely to name a few of our guests. Lance has taken his experience and created a vehicle to help fund and propel high-growth companies forward, with Punakaiki Fund, and is a prominent commentator on local hi-tech companies.

We get him on today to find out about his career, his fund and why he keeps doing it when he has probably done well enough to go for a long bike adventure and not be busy as an active director on a number of companies.

Disclosure statement: I work at Vend, hold a tiny number of shares in the Punakaiki Fund and Lance is a semi-distant cousin. #NZ

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