Business Is Boring

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by economist Tony Alexander. As chief economist at the BNZ for 25 years, Tony Alexander held one of the biggest jobs in New Zealand economics. He helped advise the bank and nation through a lot of economic change and disruption – until last year, when he decided to disrupt himself and left. Since then you can still find him in the media as one of the leading commentators, and now through Tony's View, a weekly free newsletter, with a paid, more detailed, subscription offer. In a year in which a lot of commentators have come a cropper, his measured, data-driven offering has been fantastic. Tony specialises in helping people understand the economy and making it simple and clear enough that they can make better decisions on their businesses and house purchases. It’s a big goal, but like the saying goes: any old fool can make something complex, it takes genius to make it simple. To chat commentary, predictions, making yourself redundant, housing obsessions and what’s next for him and all of us, Tony Alexander joined us via Zoom from Wellington this week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pour yourself some eggnog and join the hosts of The Spinoff’s podcast network for our annual Superpod round up of the year that was.Representing Gone By Lunchtime, Dietary Requirements, The Real Pod, Papercuts, The Fold and On The Rag our hosts dive into the key events, issues, heroes and villains of 2020.From National’s botched election campaign to Ben Thomas’ take on TikTok, via the collapse of Bauer, the rise of oat milk, with a detour through controversial frozen grapes and Simon’s Sausage Spot, there’s something for everyone in this year’s Superpod. Featuring special guests producer T and Covid-19. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Blackbird’s Sam Wong.Last year one of the biggest venture capital operators in Australia moved over and set up offices in New Zealand. The company, Blackbird, is famous for backing big companies like Canva, but has also been involved in supporting local successes from very early on. One of those is like Sunfed, the makers of plant protein meat alternatives, and it’s the Blackbird partner that led the Sunfed deal who has come over to set up the local office.Sam Wong started her career at a prestigious law firm. She did well but didn’t quite love it so left, moved home, worked minimum wage jobs to pay her way and got into start-up life. She ran product for a high-growth ecommerce company, founded a company that went through the VC cycle, and got into working at Blackbird.Blackbird VC has invested in a bunch of local companies like AskNicely, FreightFish, AO Air, Partly, Multitudes and Mint Innovation. And it’s recently announced it’s raised a lot more money, partnered with the Government to invest, and run big events for the local start-up ecosystem. To talk moving from law to the start-up world to VC, what it takes to be a great company – and a great venture capitalist – and how Blackbird works to back local companies, Sam Wong joined Business is Boring for a chat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by See-LEVEL founder Dudley Jackson.Around 25% of the population experiences seasickness to an extent that makes ocean-going uncomfortable or even impossible. If you happen to be an engineer working on a sea-based wind farm and are among that 25%, you might find getting to and from work a nightmare – and you might not be much use once you get there.It’s a problem this week’s guest knows well. Dudley Jackson loves the sea, and with dreams of bringing his kids up on the water sold the family home and moved with his wife, two kids and a dog onto a 40 foot yacht – only to find out the hard way he was one of the 25%. The dream had to be put on ice, until a new technology came along that caught his interest because it was making a lot of people sick.Dudley looked at virtual reality headsets and had a lightbulb moment. If some people found these sets created motion sickness, could they be used to reverse that feeling and get people out of it too? It was a unique idea that with his background in IT he was able to experiment with and landed a concept. His company See-LEVEL has now picked up funding, Callaghan Innovation R&D support and is now in use with operators like the Navy, tourism companies and overseas wind farms. To talk about it all, Dudley Jackson joined us via Zoom for a chat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Foodprint founder and CEO Michal Garvey.Food waste is such a massive problem that it’s hard to fully comprehend. Everyone would have heard the stats that say more than a third of food, fruit and vegetables are wasted, and one of the many causes is the struggle to accurately match supply to demand. Cafes and food sellers will fill a cabinet and hope with the best intentions, and the last thing they want to do is waste that food, but if people don’t buy those fresh items they don’t have much of a shelf life.This week’s guest, Michal Garvey, saw the beginning of a solution to this while living and working in Sweden, and came back to New Zealand with the goal of helping to make the food industry more sustainable while at the same time giving customers access to heavily discounted food. The app, Foodprint, is an ingenious way for great cafes and food makers like &sushi, Ripe and Bluebells Cakery to list items for half price and ensure they sell everything through. It helps give people great food for less, measures carbon saved and cuts down the upsetting waste.To talk about the journey, the uptake and what’s next, Foodprint founder and CEO Michal Garvey joined Business is Boring for a chat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You’ve probably stood in a supermarket queue and thought you could be spending your short time on this earth more productively. That’s what happened to this week’s Business is Boring guest, William Chomley, who instead of shrugging off these musings started a company to solve the problem.IMAGR is a New Zealand start-up that uses computer vision to power smart shopping carts, with the ultimate goal of removing check outs, meaning grocery store customers never have to queue again. William Chomley was working in an investment fund and didn’t have time to wait in supermarket lines, but he did find the time to build out and validate the concept of solving the problem. His company went from side-hustle to more than full-time, raising multiple investment rounds including $14 million dollars this year in a round led by Japanese tech giant Toshiba.IMAGR are now working on delivering the shopping experience of the future in Japan and Auckland, with a team of hardware and software experts solving a problem that Amazon and Alibaba have spent billions on. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is episode one of Coming Home, a new five-part podcast series from The Spinoff podcast network, in partnership with Kiwibank. We're sharing it with you here because we think if you like Business is Boring you might find this interesting too. Have a listen and subscribe on your platform of choice to hear the rest of the series. New episodes arriving weekly.Coming Home delves into the phenomenon of high achieving New Zealanders returning to Aotearoa in the era of Covid-19. Join hosts Duncan Greive and Jane Yee as they seek to find out who these returnees are, why they left New Zealand in the first place, the reasons for their homecoming and what their arrival means for all of us. Featuring Peter Gordon, Julia Arnott-Neenee, Paul Spoonley, Jarrod Kerr, Rachel Morris, Joel Kefali, Polly Fryer and Mahoney Turnbull. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Lisa King from AF Drinks.As a society, we don’t have a particularly healthy relationship with alcohol. We work hard to ignore the fact alcohol is a serious carcinogen, and even harder to ignore the social and medical effects and costs of drinking. If we thought about that when people say they’re not drinking, we’d recognise that’s probably the better idea – but it’s not like that yet. This week’s guest should be well known to regular listeners of the podcast, having been on before as the founder of Eat My Lunch. Lisa King decided to take a break from drinking earlier this year, and the weird reactions that prompted from people led her to reevaluate her and our general relationship with drinking.Now she’s helping amplify the conversation about changing our relationship to drinking, and helping make it easier to take control of your choices, with her new venture AF Drinks. The first products are alcohol-free gin and tonics that actually taste good, and they’re hitting supermarkets everywhere shortly.To talk about saving non-drinkers from horrible warm orange juice, starting an alcohol free drinks company and the reaction and reception so far, Lisa King joined Business is Boring for a chat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Nada Piatek, co-founder and MD of Again Again.Every year, New Zealanders throw out 300 million takeaway coffee cups. Even the ones that are compostable, most often aren’t composted – only one in 400 compostable coffee cups make it to the compost, in fact.Many people have Keep Cups, but not everyone always has their Keep Cup on them at all times. And then there aren’t many choices. But one New Zealand company is out to change that.Again Again offers a service where users can pay $3 to borrow a reusable stainless steel cup with a lid. Bring it back, and you will get your $3 back, with the cafe washing it for future use. It saves cafes money on takeaway cups, and it reduces waste. So far it’s helped remove 840,000 cups from the waste stream each year, and it’s only just getting started.Again Again began in Wellington, has 160 plus cafes around the country in the program, and is now looking to expand their impact and mission. They’re currently equity crowdfunding through PledgeMe – where they’re looking to raise at least $300k to help them expand to tackle other takeaway waste problems, including an exciting new project with Garage Project around their flagons.The company co-founder and MD, Nada Piatek joined us by Zoom, for a chat about how 20 years of entrepreneurship and sustainability initiatives led to this concept, the raise and the goals of the company. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Morgan Donoghue from InMusic.Auckland’s Karangahape Rd has long been a home of live music, but it might be news to you that it’s also an internationally recognised hotspot for music software innovation and excellence. It's where InMusic, owner of some of the world’s biggest music brands like Numark, Denon and Akai make their software, while other big brands with offices in the neighbourhood include Serato and Melodics. Today’s guest has a connection to all of them.Morgan Donoghue was with Serato in key roles during its growth, is an investor in Melodics and is currently the MD at InMusic. On top of all that he’s also the COO for a very interesting new earphone technology company called Nura, who use software to create personalised audio experiences for listeners. Nura hit the news recently for a deal with the All Blacks, where the team took equity in the company in return for a sponsorship deal – a novel and interesting business approach.It’s just the latest step in a long and varied career in music for Donoghue, who before these roles acted as the head of global music for Vodafone and manager of Hollie Smith along with his wife Nicky. He joined Business is Boring this week to tell a few of the many amazing yarns he’s got from his time in the music industry, and talk about the All Blacks deal, his many different roles and how to make New Zealand music tech sing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices