2 Commas: The $multi-million exit show with Josh Comrie

The Comma Club is now open for founding members — a private community for NZ founders building toward a multimillion-dollar exit: https://www.joshcomrie.com/club
Shane Young flew to Sydney six times to get a single purchase order out of Woolworths. On launch day, he walked into the flagship supermarket to find his product had separated in transit and was leaking yellow puddles across the shelf. Four years of work, and he thought it was over in an instant.
It wasn't. This is a special episode of 2 Commas built around one question: what does it take for a small New Zealand business to take on far bigger competitors and win? Three founders answer it from three angles. Shane covers product, and how getting locked out by contract manufacturers forced him to build his own factory and made the business unbeatable. James McGlinn covers strategy, and how Event Finder survived the NZ Government launching a taxpayer-funded competitor by fighting back with a guerrilla Twitter campaign that put the responsible minister on the spot live on Breakfast TV. Cornelius Boertjens covers market, and how raising his prices, building a deliberately annoying presence in Australia, and engineering deal tension between two acquirers turned a niche agency into a Havas exit.
We get into:
Why Shane's Brisbane disaster became the thing that made his business defensible
How James won against a competitor with millions in government funding behind it
Why pricing up got Cornelius more demand, not less
The modesty penalty that quietly costs NZ founders across the Tasman
The annoying itch strategy that makes a giant come to you
If you're building something small in a market full of big players, this episode is three different maps for the same territory.

The Comma Club is now open for founding members — a private community for NZ founders building toward a multimillion-dollar exit: ⁠https://www.joshcomrie.com/club⁠
Grant Baker was sitting in his office on credit watch with BNZ when his phone rang. Eric Watson was calling from Palm Springs to say he'd sold Blue Star for a hundred million dollars. The deal had been done on a golf course in the dark. Grant thought he was joking.
He wasn't. Ninety million came in shares. Six months later, when the lockup expired, those shares had doubled. Blue Star had grown from $2M to $1B in sales through 56 acquisitions and almost no working capital. That was exit one. Then came Empower, an electricity retailer Grant built to 150,000 customers and 10% of all NZ electricity sales before selling to Contact Energy. Then 42 Below, which Jeff Ross was making 500 cases a year of in his garage when Grant got involved, sold to Bacardi for $165M USD on $20M revenue. Then Turners, bought for $70M when Grant's own company was worth $20M, now approaching a billion dollar market cap. Along the way: a bowel cancer diagnosis the morning of his first Bacardi meeting, 50 Ferraris, and a decade backing Liam Lawson from a $4,000 airfare to Formula One.
We get into:
What 56 acquisitions taught him about what kills a roll-up strategy
Why Bacardi paid a technology multiple for a spirits business and what that tells you about brand
How to build a business that a specific buyer will have to acquire
The cancer diagnosis, the 50/50 odds, and what his father's death three weeks later changed
Why he disagrees with "follow your passion" and what he'd tell any young NZ founder
If you're building something and wondering what four decades of exits, setbacks, and survival actually looks like from the inside, this one's worth your time.

Tim Wixon built a lending model at BNZ that most traditional bankers said was impossible. Over 11 years he created a framework for funding pre-profit tech companies against their recurring revenue, on interest-only terms, with no personal guarantees and no equity dilution. BNZ has now funded over 1,700 NZ tech companies through that model. Then the board of the SaaS company he co-founded voted him off it.
That second story is as candid as anything I've heard in a studio about what actually happens when a founding team breaks down. Tim doesn't dress it up. The relationship deteriorated, the trust broke, and his co-founders used the board process to remove him from the company he helped build. He talks through what he learned from it and what he'd do differently.
We get into:
How BNZ built a lending model for tech companies that traditional banking said couldn't work
Why debt used well during a growth phase protects your cap table better than another equity round
The lead indicators Tim looks for that most founders don't track
What the SaaS apocalypse has done to NZ founder attitudes toward non-equity capital
The co-founder breakdown that ended with a board vote and what came after
If you're building a tech company in New Zealand and wondering what capital options actually exist beyond equity, this one's worth your time.

KiwiSaver fees in New Zealand will hit a billion dollars this year. Sam Stubbs has been the loudest voice in the country saying that's a scandal and building something to prove it doesn't have to be that way.
Sam is the founder and CEO of Simplicity, an $11 billion KiwiSaver fund owned by a charity. It makes almost no profit. It is worth essentially nothing. It can never be sold. That's the point. When you ask people to trust you with their retirement savings, being unbuyable turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful thing. Before Simplicity, Sam was at Goldman Sachs listing Chinese companies on the New York Stock Exchange, flying on the Rolling Stones jet, and having lunch at the Ritz in the same room where Princess Diana dined the week she died. He made all the money he needed by 50, felt nothing from it, planted trees on an island for three years, then came back to take on the finance industry from the inside.
Simplicity now gets between $5 and $16 million in member contributions every single day. It gives $10,000 to charity daily, builds 1.3 houses a day, saves its members $100,000 a day in fees, and gets 10% of new signups directly from AI engines with zero advertising spend.
We get into:
Why the finance industry is a priesthood and how they've kept it that way for decades
The deliberate bank lobbying that set NZ open banking back 10 years
Why KiwiSaver heading toward $1 trillion by 2070 is the most significant economic event in NZ history that founders aren't paying attention to
How KiwiSaver funds could become the exit buyer of choice for NZ baby boomer business owners
What Sam would say to any exited founder wondering what to do next
If you're building something and wondering what it looks like to take on a billion dollar industry with almost no marketing budget and a model nobody thought would work, this one's worth your time.

Carl Thompson flew to Singapore with $3,000, shared a pullout bed with his co-founder in a room so small he could touch the wall sitting up, and cold-called New York at 2am because that's when the market was awake. That was the start of TradeGecko.
He left the company two and a half years in, halfway through his vesting schedule, because he needed to come home for his relationships and his health. He split his role into five people on the way out. A few years later, Cam checked his spam folder and found an email from Intuit saying they wanted to buy the business. The acquisition closed at $100 million US.
Carl has ADHD, has been cycling in and out of burnout for 20 years, and now runs SortMe, a money management platform built around the uncomfortable fact that 60% of NZ households can't cover a $1,500 bill without borrowing. His clients aren't struggling. They earn $150K to $500K a year and spend every dollar of it.
We get into:
Why he walked away from millions in unvested equity and whether he regrets it
The dopamine science behind ADHD and why he thinks it's a competitive advantage for founders
How a spam folder email became a $100M acquisition
What lifestyle creep actually looks like at high income levels
What he did with the exit money the day it landed
If you're building something and wondering what it looks like to choose the life over the money and keep building anyway, this one's worth your time.