The Business of Tech

New Zealand isn't exactly famous for producing automotive brands, but FTN Motion is trying to change that.
In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, the company’s co-founders Luke Sinclair and Kendall Bristow recount how a backyard BMX hack led to them creating one of the country's most distinctive electric vehicle startups.
That was almost a decade ago, when two mechanical engineering graduates from Waikato University strapped a motor and battery onto a BMX bike in Pukekohe, before electric motorcycles were even a mainstream concept.
That scrappy experiment sparked an idea: a new vehicle category sitting between an e-bike and a motorcycle, built for the 20 to 30-kilometre urban commute. The result is the Street Dog, a retro-styled café racer that channels the romance of classic motorcycles while running on electric power.
I spent a day test-driving the new Streetdog 50 on the streets of Wellington, enjoying a smooth ride on a bike that’s easy to get to grips with. This version doesn’t require the rider to have a motorcycle licence, so will appeal to people who want a bit more flexibility getting around town than an e-bike provides.
Rather than chasing a futuristic look like many EV makers, FTN Motion doubled down on nostalgia and craftsmanship, betting that riders want something that feels like a classic, not a gadget. That bet is paying off, particularly in Wellington, a city custom-built for the bike's use case, with concentrated inner-city roads and no need to touch the motorway.
At the heart of the co-founders’ success are relationships and networks. Luke and Kendall reveal how a chance conversation at a barbecue led them to Wellington incubator Creative HQ, how a single media column penned by professional director Mike “MOD” O’Donnell generated their first hundred pre-orders almost overnight, and how those early wins snowballed into relationships with Wellington’s Angel HQ and engineering veterans from Rocket Lab and Dyson.
FTN Motion has resisted the industry's urge to over-engineer the user experience, deliberately skipping apps and unnecessary tech to keep the focus on the ride. And as the company eyes expansion into Australia, the US and beyond, Luke and Kendall get candid about what it actually takes to manufacture vehicles in New Zealand, why scaling slowly has been their secret weapon, and how they plan to stand out in a global market increasingly crowded with cheap electric alternatives from China.
Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Queenstown has long been associated with jet boats, ski fields and postcard-perfect mountains.
But if veteran entrepreneur and online travel heavyweight Roger Sharp has his way, the resort town’s next big export won’t be adrenaline, it will be software.
Sharp, who has spent decades at the cutting edge of online travel with companies like Webjet, Lastminute.com.au and WebBeds, is on a mission to diversify Queenstown’s tourism‑heavy economy by turning it into the southern hemisphere’s go‑to hub for travel technology.
His vehicle for doing that is Technology Queenstown, which has a 20‑year plan to grow a billion‑dollar tech economy in the region, lifting tech from 1.5% of local GDP to as high as 15–20%.
Travel tech conference as a catalyst
In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Sharp makes the case for why a town built on tourism must now become equally famous for tech. Next week’s Web in Travel (WiT) conference, which Sharp secured the rights to host, will see a who’s who of travel innovation descend on the lakeside town, including senior leaders from airlines, hotel tech, payment platforms, online travel agencies and B2B marketplaces.
For Sharp, hosting them is about giving Queenstown critical mass and visibility as a testbed for new travel technologies. He tells me how he’s been building the scaffolding needed for a true cluster, convincing Queenstown Resort College to teach data and machine learning, coaxing the University of Otago to establish a digital tech campus, as well as recruiting a roster of long‑term corporate backers from Accenture to Genesis Energy and One NZ.
Learning from tourism towns
He’s borrowed lessons from North American mountain towns like Bend and Boulder, which successfully layered high‑value tech jobs on top of lifestyle economies.
But this isn’t a Silicon Valley clone play. Sharp is well aware of the risks of creating “a two‑class society” where tech workers thrive while hospitality workers are squeezed out of housing. His vision is growth with guardrails: higher‑paid, lower‑footprint jobs that ease pressure on roads, emissions and infrastructure, and give local kids a reason to stay rather than leave for Sydney or London.
Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The National Party is aiming to introduce legislation for its proposed social media ban for under‑16s before November’s election.
The move, replicating a ban already in place across the Tasman, might look like a neat political fix – but it is far more likely to fail, backfire and leave our kids and critical infrastructure less safe.
That’s the stark warning from veteran tech consultant and internet governance expert Daniel Spector, my guest on this week’s episode of The Business of Tech. Spector, a long‑time KiwiFoo stalwart and current Internet New Zealand board member standing for re‑election, argues that prohibition‑style policies are the wrong tool for the job.
We don’t stop teenagers drinking by banning alcohol. We won’t stop them using TikTok and Instagram by declaring them off‑limits either.
Wait for the VPN boom
Instead, Spector says Australia’s under‑16s ban is already doing something unintended but entirely predictable – upskilling teenagers in VPNs, masking tools and hacking techniques, as they learn how to route around clumsy age‑verification systems and facial recognition.
In his view, New Zealand is on track to copy a model that not only won’t protect children, but will produce a more technically adept generation of young hackers while entrenching a surveillance architecture dressed up as “child safety”.
We examine the deeper question politicians are mostly dodging: why are we attacking the demand side – who can log on – rather than the supply side of harm, like infinite scrolling, rage‑bait design and hyper‑targeted advertising?
Spector highlights recent US court moves that treat addictive features such as endless scroll as “defective by design”, putting liability squarely on Meta and Google, and argues this is the direction New Zealand should be watching - and even replicating.
A golden age of hacking
Spector also lays out why Anthropic’s Mythos and similar cutting‑edge models are likely to usher in a “golden age of attack hacking”, systematically hunting for vulnerabilities in decades‑old code. Criminal groups will get them eventually, and board directors – with the potential to soon face personal and even criminal liability for cyber breaches – are nowhere near ready.
We talk zero‑knowledge proofs, digital identity, data sovereignty, and why outsourcing our safety to offshore tech giants and hurried bans is a dangerous illusion.
You can hear the full discussion with Daniel Spector on The Business of Tech wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes
A Modest Proposal for the Orderly Dissolution of New Zealand. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn
The verification layer did say 'yes'. Well... once. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn
#DigitalSovereignty: A personal professional crisis. And a national one, too. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn
NCSC got nation-state grade AI. Now what? - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn
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Australian startup Heidi Health has become one of the most visible examples of AI actually shifting the dial on healthcare productivity – and New Zealand is at the forefront of that story.
In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Heidi co‑founder Yu Liu about the company’s journey from student training tool to AI “care partner” for clinicians, and its audacious goal of doubling global healthcare capacity.
Heidi didn’t start life in the emergency department. Yu and his co‑founders first built Oscar, a chatbot that helped medical students practise exam skills – essentially simulated patients for training bedside manner and clinical questioning.
Oscar was useful, but the startup team struggled to find students willing to pay for it. In 2019, Liu and his co-founders, Dr Tom Kelly and Waleed Mussa, pivoted to tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare – the hours clinicians lose every day to documentation and administration.
Widespread use in emergency departments
That created Heidi Scribe, an ambient AI scribe that sits in on consultations, listening to the conversation and producing high‑quality clinical notes tuned to each hospital’s templates and workflows. Clinicians were quick to adopt it. Liu describes doctors using Heidi in every consult and calling the founders directly when it went down, because they no longer wanted to go back to typing everything themselves.
In New Zealand, that enthusiasm has translated into national‑scale deployment. Health New Zealand is rolling Heidi out across all emergency departments, with clinicians in places like Hawke’s Bay cutting documentation time per patient from roughly 17 minutes to around four minutes.
Heidi, which has now raised around US$100 million across several VC-backed fundraising rounds, blends frontier large language models with specialised, region‑local models trained on clinical language and medication names, hosted in‑region to satisfy data sovereignty requirements. That’s how it pushes accuracy toward the near‑99 per cent threshold clinicians need to trust AI‑generated notes, says Liu. Heidi wants to transform assistive AI into something closer to infrastructure.
From scribe to evidence-gatherer
Heidi doesn’t retain recordings of conversations, and while many doctors create transcriptions on their smartphones or laptops, the Heidi Remote is also available – a mobile recorder doctors and nurses can carry around clinics and hospitals for easy recording that doesn’t rely on an internet connection.
The company is already moving beyond transcription. Heidi Evidence surfaces relevant clinical research and guidelines at the point of care, while Heidi is expanding into pre‑chart summaries, referrals and spoken commands that trigger real actions in electronic health record systems. The aim, says Liu, is to let doctors focus on diagnosis and human connection, and let AI handle everything else.
In the episode, we dig into Heidi’s founding story, its rapid uptake in New Zealand’s public health system, and the governance and privacy questions that come with putting AI in the consult room.
Tune in to the full conversation with Heidi Health co-founder Yu Liu on The Business of Tech, available wherever you get your podcasts.
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Another New Zealander has joined the global AI big league.
Auckland-raised engineer Jeff Hawke is now co‑founder and chief technology officer of Odyssey, a Palo Alto‑ and London‑based frontier lab that has just raised an eye‑watering US$310 million at a US$1.45 (NZ$2.55 billion) valuation – making it one of the world’s hottest AI “world model” startups.
On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I talk to Hawke about how he went from tinkering with autonomous forklifts in New Zealand to helping shape the next era of artificial intelligence from Silicon Valley and Shoreditch.
Odyssey isn’t building another large language model. The company is focused on “world models” – AI systems that learn from sight and sound to understand how the real world works and then simulate it. Instead of spitting out text, these models simulate the real world, allowing robots that learn like humans, and games that feel like living worlds.
Amazon to power Odyssey’s models
Global investors are piling in. Odyssey’s Series B is led by US fund Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD, GV, EQT, IQT and other heavy hitters on the cap table, plus a who’s who of Silicon Valley angels. Amazon Web Services has also signed on as Odyssey’s preferred cloud provider, betting that its Trainium AI chips can give the lab an edge in what is rapidly becoming an arms race for compute.
For Hawke, it’s the latest step in a deep‑tech odyssey. After studying mechatronics and computer science at the University of Auckland, he cut his teeth at a local autonomous forklift startup before heading offshore. Stints in the US and at the Oxford Robotics Institute led to him becoming the first technical hire at UK autonomous‑vehicle company Wayve, working alongside Kiwi founder Alex Kendall as they grew the company to a multibillion‑dollar valuation.
In our conversation, Hawke explains why he thinks world models are the missing piece of the AI puzzle, how Odyssey plans to move from a “GPT‑2 era” of world simulation to its own ChatGPT‑style breakout moment, and what this means for robots, jobs and the balance of power between tech companies and governments.
We also look at what his success says about New Zealand’s tech ecosystem – and why a new generation of Kiwi founders is quietly wiring itself into the very top tier of global AI.
You can listen to the full interview with Jeff Hawke on The Business of Tech, available now on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
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