TechMates

Two investors — one government-backed, one fresh off a flight from San Francisco — make the case that New Zealand is post-product-market-fit as a startup ecosystem, and now just needs the capital, culture, and ambition to go 10X.
Recorded live at the NZVC Portfolio Day as part of Auckland Startup Week, this panel brings together James Pinner, CEO of NZGCP, and Warren Scheffler, a partner from San Francisco-based Pair VC, who recently relocated to Auckland — alongside TechMates hosts Mark Pavlyukovskyy and Hendrik Remigereau. The conversation covers the state of New Zealand’s startup ecosystem, what it would take to get from $1B to $10B in annual venture investment, and why the country already has better fundamentals than most people realise.
James walks through NZGCP’s “Five Fives” ambition — 5,000 startups, $5B in capital, 50,000 jobs, $50B in economic value — and makes the case for why government still needs to be the biggest risk-taker at the earliest stages. Warren brings a fresh outsider’s perspective: New Zealand’s enterprise value per VC dollar is 11X, Kiwi founders consistently undersell themselves to US investors, and the ecosystem’s biggest bottleneck isn’t talent — it’s ambition and connectivity.
🚀 The Five Fives: NZGCP’s plan for 5,000 startups, $5B in capital and $50B in economic value for New Zealand over the next five years.
🌍 NZ vs. Israel: Why Israel is the most relevant comparison — and the one key difference that still separates the two ecosystems.
🌱 The Tall Poppy Problem: Why New Zealand’s cultural fear of failure is one of the biggest real barriers to startup growth — and how to change it.
💰 KiwiSaver & Institutional Capital: Why the money is sitting there, why it’s not flowing into VC yet, and what it will take to unlock it.
🔗 The Four C’s: Capital, Capability, Culture and Connectivity — how New Zealand scores on each, and where the biggest gaps are.
🏭 Deep Tech as NZ’s Edge: Why the physical world — atoms, not just bits — is New Zealand’s natural advantage, and how to lean into it.
🎧 Listen On:
YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gQnb_WbB
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4is21QI
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/42KZ2x1
🔗 Learn more about NZVC: https://www.nzvc.co.nz
Mark Pavlyukovskyy — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavlyukovskyy/
Hendrik Remigereau — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrik-remigereau-09a03067/Timestamps:
00:39 — Introductions: James Pinner & Warren Scheffler
01:00 — The Five Fives: NZGCP’s bold plan for NZ startups
02:58 — Warren’s story: why he moved from San Francisco to Auckland
04:00 — NZ vs. Israel: the comparison that matters most
05:50 — Kiwis undersell themselves to US investors
07:17 — Is NZ growing fast enough? A contrarian take
09:30 — The Four C’s: Capital, Capability, Culture, Connectivity
10:21 — Rocket Lab’s halo effect and the startup flywheel
12:18 — “We’re post-product-market-fit as an ecosystem”
14:33 — The tall poppy syndrome: audience poll
15:30 — “Failure is the fertilizer of success”
17:00 — Great at introductions, bad at asking for help
19:48 — Rocket Lab: $70B market cap, born in NZ
20:30 — What sectors should NZ focus on?
22:40 — What happens when NZ startups need to scale offshore?
25:36 — Power by Proxy: Apple’s R&D base in Auckland
26:44 — Should government fund growth capital or just seed?
29:30 — The Active Investor Plus visa: where is the money going?
31:00 — Political risk: the K-shaped economy and startup narrative
33:00 — Can NZ handle inequality differently if the ecosystem succeeds?
35:15 — One wish for the incoming government
#TechMates, #NZVC, #AucklandStartupWeek, #NewZealand, #NZTech, #StartupEcosystem, #VentureCapital, #NZGCP, #JamesPinner, #WarrenScheffler, #RocketLab, #Halter, #Partly, #NZStartups, #DeepTech, #KiwiSaver, #Entrepreneurship, #TallPoppySyndrome, #StartupHub, #Innovation, #GrowthCapital, #NZVenture, #Founders, #TechInvestment, #StartupCulture

He built a viral game at 14. Now he’s creating rental millionaires and taking on U-Haul with Lockii.
In this episode of TechMates, Hendrik and Mark sit down with Bodhi Hawken, founder and CEO of Lockii — and the conversation starts exactly where you'd expect: a banned school game, two terabytes of copies, and a school IT guy hitting delete while Bodhi watched. From there, Bodhi traces the path from teaching himself Unity at 14, to building a paddleboard vending machine for his uncle at 17, to coding nightclub bottle service software from the back of LA clubs at 19, to founding Lockii — a fully automated rental platform already turning side hustles into million-dollar businesses.
The core thesis is simple but big: rentals are the next generation of e-commerce, and there's still no Shopify for them. Lockii is building exactly that. Whether it's mechanics garages in California scaling to 50 locations, trailer operators going from $0 to $10K revenue in two months, or floating saunas in Europe — Lockii automates the entire process so operators never touch a booking manually. One customer put it best: switching back to legacy software would save $800/month on software — and cost $30,000/month in staff.But what makes this conversation stand out is Bodhi's obsession with quality over speed. In a world where anyone can vibe-code a feature overnight, Bodhi runs 10,000 test bookings before releasing anything, tracks a "bad day" metric for every operator and every customer, and rebuilds features from scratch until they actually work. His take: taste and quality are the last real moat — and they're exactly what AI can't replicate yet.
🏄 The Paddleboard Vending Machine: The accidental origin story of Lockii — and why his uncle's request to automate paddleboard rentals became the seed of something much bigger.
🔑 How Lockii Actually Works: Booking, verification, IoT locks, pin codes, e-bike power cutoffs — handing a physical item to a stranger without being there.
📈 The Shopify for Rentals: Why rentals are the next generation of e-commerce and how Lockii is turning one-trailer operators into million-dollar businesses.
🎯 Quality as the Last Moat: Why Bodhi tests 10,000 bookings before releasing a feature — and why taste is the one thing AI still can't replace.
🎧 Listen On:
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ghhpj9fekuI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/3TttiM7
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/4xTmPZg
Connect with the Guest:
Bodhi LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bodhi-hawken/
Lockii Website: https://lockii.app
🔗 Learn more about NZVC: https://www.nzvc.co.nz
Mark Pavlyukovskyy — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavlyukovskyy/
Hendrik Remigereau — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrik-remigereau-09a03067/
00:00 — Intro
01:09 — The Game That Got Banned
03:19 — Learning to Code at 14
07:17 — How Lockii Started
11:51 — The Shopify for Rentals
14:15 — The Future of Rental Businesses
19:50 — Building Software for Nightclubs
24:10 — Lessons from Nightclubs
33:11 — How Bodhi Got His First Startup Job
34:54 — How Lockii Became a Business
38:28 — Building a Reliable Rental Platform
42:09 — How Lockii Works 45:05 — The Hardest Things to Rent
47:50 — Why Lockii Isn't a Marketplace
49:38 — Creating Rental Millionaires
55:56 — Competing with U-Haul
1:04:18 — Why Rentals Are the Future
1:05:40 — AI, Product Quality & Founder Advice
If this episode made you rethink what the next generation of e-commerce looks like, hit Like and Subscribe. Drop a comment — do you think rentals will replace dropshipping as the go-to side hustle?
#TechMates, #Lockii, #RentalEconomy, #Shopify, #StartupFounder, #SideHustle, #Entrepreneurship, #ECommerce, #NZVC, #NZTech, #AutomatedRentals, #SharingEconomy, #Airbnb, #StartupGrowth, #PhysicalWorld, #AIInBusiness, #ProductQuality, #Founders, #NewZealand, #SoftwareStartup, #RentalBusiness, #TechPodcast, #BuildInPublic, #FutureOfWork, #UHaul

Jamie Beaton couldn't legally sit on his own board at 17, but built Crimson into a global education empire — and is now taking on Big Law with an AI visa startup, teaching a unicorn-building course at Auckland University, and quietly betting on the next generation of founders.
In this episode of TechMates, Hendrik and Mark sit down with Jamie Beaton, founder and CEO of Crimson Education, for a second time — and this time the conversation goes deeper. Since they last spoke, Jamie launched an AI-native immigration law startup called Concord Visa, opened New Zealand's largest charter school, and is now teaching a unicorn-building course at the University of Auckland with Peter Beck as a guest lecturer.
🎓 The West Is Losing the Education War: Why India and China's obsession with academic intensity is quietly winning the global talent race — and what New Zealand should do about it.
⚖️ Concord Visa: How Jamie built an AI-native immigration law platform that's already serving Halter, Partly, A16Z and Blackbird — and why Trump accidentally made it take off.
🏫 Fixing NZ Education: Jamie's three-step policy blueprint — replace the national curriculum with A levels, get University of Auckland into the top 25, and give students loans to study abroad if they come back.
💼 The Founder Skill Set: Why a generalist founder mentality beats a single degree — and what the top 20 people on Meta's AI team have in common.
🗳️ 2028 Hot Take: Why Jamie thinks AOC might be the next Democratic presidential candidate — and what AI angst has to do with it.
YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gQnb_WbB
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4is21QI
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/42KZ2x1
Jamie Beaton LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-beaton/
🔗 Learn more about NZVC: https://www.nzvc.co.nz
Mark Pavlyukovskyy — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavlyukovskyy/
Hendrik Remigereau — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrik-remigereau-09a03067/
00:01 — Welcome back: married life, India tour & what's changed since last time
01:16 — Julian Robertson, Tiger Management & the mentor who shaped Crimson's ambition
04:14 — Why Jamie's mum had to sit on his board at 17
04:44 — The first board meeting and the moment he knew the race had started
06:27 — Investor relations: why long-term capital is Crimson's secret weapon
08:09 — The India tour: 5 cities, 3 days, 4 Subways and hundreds of families
10:44 — Is the West losing the global education war to China and India?
14:57 — "For every weed-smoking Steve Jobs, there's a million Call of Duty players"
15:29 — The founder skill set: why generalists beat specialists in the AI era
17:20 — Why Jamie seriously considered running for National — and what stopped him
19:21 — Policy blueprint: A levels, University of Auckland top 25, and student loans abroad
23:54 — Concord Visa: building an AI-native immigration law platform
26:57 — Did Trump make Concord Visa's business explode?
28:25 — Where else AI will demolish traditional law firms
30:29 — The bigger Crimson vision: from age 5 to first startup investment
33:57 — How Crimson is different from Andela — and why education is still the core
35:01 — The Forbes column on AI and intersectional thinking vs. deep expertise
38:21 — What should parents actually teach their kids in the age of AI?
41:51 — Why human tutors still beat AI for young learners
47:46 — Why writing still matters — and what we lose if kids stop doing it
49:00 — Are we heading toward an AI-controlled dystopia?
51:20 — AOC vs. JD Vance 2028: Jamie's hot political take
53:20 — How to restore faith in technology and entrepreneurship
54:45 — Will anti-AI politics kill New Zealand's startup ecosystem?
#TechMates, #JamieBeaton, #CrimsonEducation, #ConcordVisa, #NewZealand, #EdTech, #AIEducation, #Startups, #NZTech, #NZVC, #Entrepreneurship, #FutureOfEducation, #AITutor, #ImmigrationLaw, #FounderMindset, #Stanford, #HarvardAdmissions, #NZStartups, #AILaw, #GlobalTalent, #Education

How the right brand decision can double your revenue overnight, and how skipping it can quietly kill a good product.In this special compilation episode of TechMates, Hendrik and Mark bring together three conversations with one common thread: brand as a real growth lever, not a nice-to-have. No fluffy logo talk — just the mechanics of how brand decisions drive revenue, unlock new markets, and build the kind of cult following that clears shelves overnight.
First up is Simon Pound, one of New Zealand's most respected brand strategists, who walks through the Appetize rebrand in detail — how a $4/week menu app called Menu Aid transformed into a B2B food data platform, and why a single strategic name change led to a 20% overnight user bump and quadrupled revenue over the following years. Then Toby, co-founder of Appetize, shares what that rebrand actually did for the business from the inside — and makes the case for why the food brands winning right now aren't the ones with 400 SKUs, but the ones building deeply loyal, hyper-targeted communities like Moody and Poppy.
Finally, Anna Henwood, co-founder of StickyBeak, closes it out with the practical counterpart to all of it: how do you actually know if your brand decisions will land before you spend the budget? From testing brand names to logos to ad creative with real audiences in 48 hours, Anna's framework — test the ingredients, not the cake — is the clearest branding advice in the episode.
🎨 Brand as a Growth Platform: How the Appetize rebrand unlocked a new business model, a 20% overnight user uplift, and 4x revenue growth — all from one strategic name change.
🍔 The Food Brand of the Future: Why cult-following brands like Moody and Poppy are beating legacy players with 400 products — and what founders can learn from their playbook.
📊 Test Before You Commit: Anna Henwood's "test the ingredients, not the cake" framework for de-risking every brand decision before you spend the media budget.
🧪 How StickyBeak Works: From brand name testing to ad creative to product formats — get real customer feedback from any market in the world within 48 hours.
💡 Why Most Startups Skip Branding Too Long: Simon Pound on the hidden cost of founders who build great products but leave their brand untouched for years.
🔗 Learn more about NZVC: https://www.nzvc.co.nz
Mark Pavlyukovskyy — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavlyukovskyy/
Hendrik Remigereau — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrik-remigereau-09a03067/
Timestamps:
00:37 — Intro: brand as a growth lever, not a logo exercise
01:02 — Simon Pound: how the Appetize rebrand actually happened
01:16 — Menu Aid to Appetize: the strategy behind the name change
04:24 — 20% overnight user bump and 4x revenue — the results
05:14 — Why being an investor made Simon's advice land differently
05:58 — Intro to Toby: the rebrand from the inside
06:21 — How smart brand positioning doubled sales in a month
08:15 — The food brand of the future: cult following over product range
09:19 — Moody & Poppy: the brands everyone is watching right now
11:19 — Intro to Anna Henwood: test before you commit
11:42 — "Test the ingredients, not the cake" — Anna's core framework
13:00 — How bad creative quietly kills your ad account algorithm
14:00 — Testing brand names, logos, and messaging before launch
15:30 — How StickyBeak works: results from any market in 48 hours
If this episode changed how you think about brand decisions, hit Like and Subscribe for more founder-focused conversations. Drop a comment — has a rebrand ever changed the trajectory of a business you've been part of?
#TechMates, #Branding, #StartupGrowth, #Appetize, #StickyBeak, #SimonPound, #AnnaHenwood, #NZTech, #NZVC, #BrandStrategy, #StartupMarketing, #FoodBrands, #CultBrand, #Rebranding, #GrowthMarketing, #NewZealand, #Entrepreneurship, #MarketResearch, #ProductMarketFit, #NZStartups, #ConsumerBrands, #Founders, #MarketingStrategy, #Moody, #Poppy

Wayne Brown: blunt engineer, Auckland mayor, and the man on a mission to make NZ the South Pacific's startup capital.
In this episode of TechMates, Hendrik and Mark sit down with Wayne Brown, Mayor of Auckland — and he's not your typical politician. A trained engineer who put half a million of his own money into a mayoral campaign, won by a landslide, and then won again even bigger, Brown has spent four years doing something almost unheard of in politics: actually fixing things. From stepping in to restore Auckland's power after a catastrophic grid failure in 1998, to overhauling the city's flood preparedness after a storm that caught everyone off guard, his approach is the same every time — go back to first principles, find the engineers, ignore the lawyers.
But this conversation is really about what's coming next. Brown is halfway through an audacious campaign — 100 days, 100 startup T-shirts, 100 short videos — designed to put Auckland's startup ecosystem on the global map ahead of Auckland Startup Week. He's seen the full bell curve up close: the dogs, the future billionaires, and everything in between. His view is simple: Auckland already has the next 25 Halters and Rocket Labs hiding in plain sight. The world just hasn't noticed yet — mostly because New Zealand keeps ending up cut off the bottom of flat world maps.His pitch to founders is as unfiltered as everything else he says: Auckland is safe, cheap, well-connected to Asia, and rich enough to enjoy once you've made it. Silicon Valley is a shithole. Wellington is the worst thing about Auckland.
And plastic in the ocean is a bigger threat to humanity than climate change. Whether you agree with him or not, you won't forget what he said.
🏙️ Auckland as a Startup Hub: Why Brown believes Auckland is quietly home to the next generation of global breakout companies — and what it's missing to make that undeniable.
👕 100 Days of Startups: The story behind the T-shirt campaign — what he's seen, what surprised him, and which ones he'd actually put his own money into.
🌏 Auckland's Geographic Edge: Why the shortest route between Asia and South America runs through Auckland — and why the world is only just waking up to it.
🔗 Learn more about NZVC: https://www.nzvc.co.nz
Mark Pavlyukovskyy — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavlyukovskyy/
Hendrik Remigereau — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrik-remigereau-09a03067/
Timestamps:
00:00 — The 100 T-Shirt Startup Campaign
02:18 — Fixing Auckland's Power Grid in 14 Days
03:20 — Why Lawyers on Boards Kill Cities
06:25 — The Night of the Flood
07:57 — Media Attacks & Taking the Long View
11:00 — Engineers vs. Politicians
11:17 — Why Brown Ran for Mayor
13:18 — The 100 Days of Startups Explained
14:12 — Auckland's Innovation Gap
17:12 — Who Picks the T-Shirt Each Morning?
19:37 — Plastic Is More Dangerous Than Climate Change
22:27 — The China Trade Mission
23:50 — Auckland as the South Pacific Startup Capital
25:26 — The Value Prop for Early-Stage Founders
26:52 — Wellington Is Auckland's Biggest Problem
29:32 — Auckland's Hidden Geographic Superpower
30:11 — What Auckland Can Be World-Class At
32:02 — China, America & NZ's Foreign Policy
34:43 — The Bell Curve of 100 Startups
36:47 — AI: China Builds Things, America Makes Trivia
38:43 — Advice for a 24-Year-Old Founder
40:39 — The Pitch for Auckland Startup Week
#TechMates, #WayneBrown, #Auckland, #AucklandStartupWeek, #NewZealand, #StartupHub, #NZTech, #Entrepreneurship, #NZVC, #Founders, #StartupEcosystem, #DeepTech, #RocketLab, #Halter, #NZStartups, #Innovation, #Mayor, #SiliconValley, #AsiaPacific, #SeaCleaners, #NZBusiness, #TechWeek, #StartupAdvice, #CityOfSails, #GlobalStartups