The Business of Tech

New Zealand’s startup scene loves a good success story, but few have moved as fast – or gone as deep – as Wellington energy software venture Factor.
In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Factor co‑founder Jessica Venning‑Bryan to she and co-founder Simon Pohlen assembled a team with serious domain expertise, built a specialised energy pricing platform, landed major customers offshore, and sold to NZX‑listed utility software company Gentrack in barely two years.
The exit, announced in May, was valued at $24.9 million with a $10 million earn-out tied to hitting $17 million in annual recurring revenue within three years. Gentrack funded the acquisition out of its cash reserves.
Venning‑Bryan doesn’t sugar‑coat the journey. She talks candidly about the “fastest and longest” two years of her career – the tension between capital efficiency and ambition, the stress of fundraising, and the constant questioning of whether the team was moving fast enough or in the right direction.
If you’ve ever wondered what startup life really feels like beyond the glossy pitch decks, this conversation delivers the unvarnished reality.
Deep domain experience pays off
What makes Factor’s story compelling is how textbook “problem–founder fit” looks in practice. After a decade inside the energy sector at Flick Electric and Flux Federation, Venning‑Bryan and Pohlen knew, in forensic detail, the headaches utilities face trying to price complex commercial and industrial energy contracts.
Instead of accepting that clunky, generic enterprise software was as good as it gets, they built a true SaaS product – APIs for everything, rapid deployment, and integration into the messy legacy systems that dominate energy, banking and healthcare.
The episode also digs into how Factor uses AI, including time‑series LLMs like Amazon’s Chronos.
What this episode reinforces is that deep domain knowledge can be the most powerful startup advantage you have. It also reveals why API‑first SaaS remains a winning strategy in conservative, regulated industries, and how to think critically about AI’s role in high‑stakes forecasting and pricing.
Most importantly, Venning‑Bryan’s story is a nudge to anyone sitting inside an industry, staring at a persistent pain point: if you understand it better than anyone, why not be the one to fix it?
Tune in to The Business of Tech this week to hear how Factor went from energy headaches to a $35 million exit – and what that playbook might mean for your own next move. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Australian fintech pioneer and serial entrepreneur Dom Pym knows a thing or two about starting companies and scaling them into market-leading players.
This week’s episode of The Business of Tech dives into Pym’s extraordinary journey, from bootstrapping niche financial platforms to building one of Australia’s most popular digital banks – Up – and then reinventing himself as one of the region’s most active startup investors.
Pym’s path into fintech started long before “fintech” was a buzzword. After a whirlwind early career working with Fortune 500 giants, he went on to build a grain exchange platform that digitised how Australian farmers sell their product, followed by Pin Payments, an all‑in‑one payments service that expanded into New Zealand, Asia, the UK and the US before being acquired.
That set the stage for Up, the app‑based bank that hacked its way through regulatory and infrastructure hurdles to become a breakout success with younger customers and a major strategic asset for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.
Now, post‑exit, Pym is channelling that experience into backing others. As Australian Investor of the Year, he’s supporting funds and startups via his family office, and pushing for more secondary deals so founders don’t have to wait a decade for liquidity.
In The Business of Tech, he explains his investing philosophy, why he doesn’t obsess over unicorn valuations, and how he thinks about risk in an era dominated by AI and software.
Pym is heading to Auckland in September to deliver a keynote at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo, New Zealand’s new flagship gathering for founders, investors and corporate leaders.
If you want a preview of the themes he’ll bring to the stage – and a candid assessment of where New Zealand tech needs to lift its game – check this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio or in your podcast app of choice.
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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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