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

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.

Lisa King had a goal from the very first day of Eat My Lunch: the business would be a success the day it became unnecessary.
She built it in 2015 to solve a problem she couldn't stop thinking about, kids going hungry at school in a country of abundance. By week 12 she was making 2,000 lunches a day out of her own kitchen. At peak, nearly 5,000, with police officers, politicians, and grannies in their sixties all buttering bread before sunrise. Then the government launched its own school lunch program, and Lisa did something most founders never do. She closed the business on purpose.
Before that happened, a media story accused her of personally profiting off hungry kids, at a time when she was being paid less than she'd ever earned. She had to show a reporter her payslip to prove it. We talk through what that period actually felt like, what New Zealand's tall poppy syndrome did to her willingness to talk to press afterward, and the identity crisis of letting go of a business that had defined her for five years.
We get into:
How Eat My Lunch scaled from 50 to nearly 5,000 lunches a day
The media smear and what it actually cost her personally
Why she built the business to make itself redundant from day one
What closing your first business does to your sense of who you are
If you're building something with real purpose behind it, or wondering what it takes to walk away from your own success on your own terms, this one's worth your time.

Most founders won't give up 80% of their business. The ones who did walked away with more than if they'd kept 100%.
Murray Schnuriger made the jump from 20 years advising founders on exits to actually owning the risk at 5V Capital, a mid-market PE fund across Australia and New Zealand. Toby King has spent his career at Cameron Partners, one of NZ's most established M&A firms, allied with Rothschild and Company. Together they've sat on both sides of more NZ business exits than almost anyone alive.
The Education Perfect story is the one that sticks. Two brothers built an edtech platform into 50% of NZ secondary schools, hit their ceiling, and sold 80% to 5V. One went backpacking for a year. 5V brought in a new CEO, put sales teams on the ground in Australia, and tripled the business in three years. Exit to KKR. The 20% the brothers held at the end was worth more than their original 100%. That's the structure most NZ founders never think to ask about.
Murray and Toby pull no punches on what founders consistently get wrong, pricing on EBITDA when buyers price on free cash flow, waiting one more year for growth when the multiple compression wipes out the gain, and showing up to a sale process without a narrative that holds up under serious due diligence.
We get into:
Why selling 80% can leave you wealthier than holding everything
The EBITDA trap that costs NZ founders millions at the table
Why "one more year of growth" is often the most expensive decision you'll make
How PE investors actually think about your exit before they've even finished investing in you
What your business narrative needs to nail to earn a premium valuation
The succession wave hitting NZ baby boomer founders and why PE is filling the gap
If you're building something and wondering what it actually looks like to sell part of your business, back yourself for one more run, and walk away with more than you started with, this one's worth your time.

What if the most successful version of your company is the smallest one?
This week I sit down with Mark Zeman, co-founder of SpeedCurve, who quietly built one of the most unusual software businesses I've come across. No VC. No sales team. No marketing function. A team that never grew beyond seven people, paid two to three times market salary, and shared the monthly profit with everyone.
SpeedCurve had customers like Airbnb, the New York Times and the Guardian. They found him, not the other way around. And after 13 years, he exited to Embrace, not at the peak.
We get into:
- Why Mark turned down customers, capital and "grow at all costs"
- How a UX designer in New Zealand ended up shaping global web performance standards
- The handshake co-founder deal with Steve Souders and why it worked
- Monthly profit share instead of equity and a someday-maybe exit
- The moment the market shifted and SpeedCurve became the wrong shape
- Selling a declining SaaS business and why Embrace still wanted it
- What working inside a VC-backed company has confirmed and challenged
If you've ever wondered whether there's another way to build a SaaS business and exit on your own terms, there is. Mark just lived it.