The Business of Tech

Starlink has quickly become the hero – and potential hazard – of rural broadband in New Zealand.
In a few short years, Elon Musk’s low-Earth orbit satellite service has gone from curiosity to default option for many farms, small towns and remote communities that never made it onto the fibre map. It’s racked up 58,000 subscribers and generated around $100 million in revenue last year, delivering broadband access via satellite with a self-install version that has amassed many raving fans.
In a country where the “last 5–10%” of connections have always been the hardest and most expensive, Starlink looks like the magic bullet.
But in the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Alex Stewart – the 21-year-old founder of Greater Wellington wireless ISP WombatNET – suggests we risk ceding sovereignty to one or two US companies when it comes to rural connectivity.
Stewart’s company is one of dozens of small, regional wireless internet providers that have spent the past decade building towers, stitching together backhaul and hand-holding customers who were too far from the cabinet, tower or fibre trench to interest the big players. Now, those same operators are watching customers churn to Starlink at a rapid clip, undermining the economics of infrastructure that taxpayers helped fund.
Too much of a good thing?
Stewart argues this isn’t just a competitive problem. It’s also a resilience problem. In the interview, he explains how some rural communities now rely on Starlink for almost everything: home and business broadband, school connectivity and even the backhaul that keeps local mobile towers online in emergencies. If Starlink suffers a prolonged outage, changes its commercial terms or decides New Zealand is no longer strategic, large swathes of rural connectivity could be collateral damage.
What’s most startling is what Stewart discovered when he went digging into the Government’s thinking. Through 28 Official Information Act requests to ministries and regulators, he found very little evidence of cohesive, forward-looking analysis of these risks, despite international warnings about monopoly, displacement and sovereign risk in satellite broadband markets.
In our conversation, Stewart lays out how spectrum policy and lack of capital are boxing local wireless ISPs into a corner, why he believes current policy settings are accelerating a de facto monopoly, and what a more balanced model, including wholesale satellite access and better use of existing rural infrastructure and radio spectrum resources, might look like.
Listen to the full interview with Alex Stewart on The Business of Tech on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to the data centres of Silicon Valley or the cloud regions dotted around the world.
It is heading into orbit, hitching a ride on satellites and space stations in a way that could transform defence, climate monitoring, disaster response – and the balance of power itself. Starcloud, Google's Project Suncatcher, SpaceX V3 Starlink satellites, and Axiom Space represent the first wave of the orbital AI race.
When SpaceX undertakes its initial public offering (IPO), as early as next month, its valuation will depend to a large extent on how much credibility its plans to put data centres in space are deemed to be. In space, solar panels can supply constant energy to power the chips running high-capacity AI workloads. But that's only part of the reason why tech companies are scrambling to put data centres in space...
This week on The Business of Tech, I talk to Wellington‑based enterprise architect and AI governance specialist Andreas Hamberger, whose new book Space Mafia explores how quickly “orbital AI” is moving from sci‑fi to infrastructure.
Drawing on three decades in enterprise tech and a deep background in logic and ethics, Andreas argues that putting high‑capacity AI into space opens up an accountability gap that our laws – and our institutions – are nowhere near ready for.
Heaven or Skynet?
On the upside, orbital AI promises what Hamberger terms a “heaven vector” where satellites analyse live sensor data to spot tsunamis in the Pacific, track major polluters in real time, and give us a planetary‑scale view of climate risk. Done well, it could become an engine of equity, giving every country access to insights that used to belong only to superpowers.
But there’s a darker “Skynet vector”. Space is, in practice, a legal grey zone. When companies start training models and running inference beyond the reach of terrestrial copyright, privacy and weapons laws, who are they accountable to? In Space Mafia, Andreas shows how orbit could become the ultimate jurisdictional escape hatch, a place to crunch stolen data, generate “kill lists”, or run ethically dubious experiments with almost no legal friction.
In our conversation, we dig into four real‑world case studies, from data‑centre constellations through to human‑genome work and defence systems that blend orbital AI with hypersonic weapons. Andreas explains why small countries like New Zealand, one of a handful that has space launch capability thanks to Rocket Lab, are unexpectedly central to this story, how new regulations here and in Europe might bite, and what boards, architects and founders should be doing now to close the accountability gap before it’s too late.
Listen to my full conversation with Andreas Hamberger in episode 150 of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes
Space Mafia: The Battle Between an Accountable "Heaven" and an Unfettered "Skynet" in Orbital AI
Space Mafia - the documentary - Andreas Hamberger
SpaceX and Google Are in Talks to Launch Data Centres in Orbit - Wall Street Journal
Data Centres in Space: A Pipe Dream, or AI’s Next Big Thing? - Wall Street Journal
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The Opportunity Party is attracting growing support from young tech professionals, scientists, and startup founders, demanding bolder, more evidence‑based leadership.
That’s according to Opportunity party leader Qiulae Wong, the businesswoman, climate leader and mother who will lead the party into the election in a bid to crest the 5% popular vote threshold needed to see the party in a position to support a coalition government.
On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I sit down with Wong to discuss her party’s plan to lift New Zealand out of its low‑productivity rut by putting innovation at the centre of economic policy.
You’ll hear how the Opportunity Party wants to double R&D investment from around 1.5% of GDP to 3% – finally putting us in the same league as other advanced economies – and pair that with much stronger support for commercialisation so ideas don’t just die in the lab.
We also dig into how greater competition in highly concentrated sectors like supermarkets, banking and energy could free up capital and lower barriers for new, tech‑driven challengers.
Gold standard AI rules
A big focus of the episode is artificial intelligence and the weightless tech economy. Wong explains why New Zealand needs “gold standard” AI rules that are tight on outcomes but open for innovation, so founders can build globally competitive AI products here rather than in London or San Francisco. We talk skills, education, and the critical thinking needed to make sure AI boosts productivity instead of hollowing out jobs.
We also unpack how the Opportunity Party plans to pay for its policy agenda. Its newly released tax policy includes a 1.75% land value tax, a universal citizens’ income and compulsory “KiwiSaver 2.0” savings. Qiulae argues this package is designed to shift money out of speculative property and into productive investment, while helping fund a serious uplift in R&D and a faster clean‑energy transition.
Rounding out the episode, we explore a 25‑year energy strategy, ways to bring Kiwi tech talent home, and how citizens’ assemblies and digital voting could revitalise our democracy for a generation that lives online.
Has Opportunity got a chance? Recent polls have the party hovering around 3% of the popular vote, shy of the level needed to get its candidates into Parliament. But these are unprecedented times, with younger voters in particular looking for bold leadership. The momentum may be on this minor party’s side.
Listen to the full conversation with Qiulae Wong on this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Market research has long been a privilege of the big end of town. Got $50,000 and six weeks to spare? Great, you can know what your customers think. Everyone else? Good luck.
That model is being dismantled, and a New Zealand startup is doing some of the dismantling. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, I sat down with James Donald, CEO of Auckland-based Ideally, fresh from closing a $16 million Series A that values the company at $100 million.
Ideally is one of three AI-centric New Zealand startups to hit that psychological valuation milestone in the past month – a sign that our fledgling AI start-up ecosystem is gaining momentum.
James is a former Shell engineer turned serial founder whose previous company, Yonder, was acquired by a US travel tech firm. Now he's turned his sights on a $40 billion slice of the global market research industry – one where 90% of spend still flows to people-heavy agencies like Kantar and Nielsen.
His pitch: AI can do what took those agencies weeks to do, in hours, at a fraction of the cost, and with results in the hands of the people inside a company who actually know what questions to ask.
The pros and cons of synthetic data
In our chat, we get into the heart of what Ideally is doing differently. One of the most interesting debates in AI right now is the rise of synthetic data – building artificial personas to simulate how real people would respond. James makes a pointed argument: when the stakes are high, and you need genuine nuance, synthetic just isn't good enough.
We also dig into what James calls "living data" – the idea that consumer insight shouldn't die in a PDF buried in SharePoint, but should be a continuously growing, queryable understanding of your customer base.
And we talk about the SaaSpocalypse – that February moment when hundreds of billions were wiped off the value of software companies worldwide. Ideally sits squarely in that story: an AI-native challenger gunning for the market share of legacy research platforms and expensive agencies alike, with a usage-based pricing model designed to turn in-house marketers into researchers, rather than leave it to outside consultants.
This is a great example of how AI is being used to shake up long-established industries.
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New Zealand is quietly dismantling the productive base that built its prosperity – and we’re doing it without anything resembling a plan.
Over the past decade, the country has shed around 20,000 manufacturing jobs while the sector’s share of GDP has steadily eroded. Factories producing everything from pulp and paper to frozen foods and wood products have scaled back or shut down entirely, including household names such as Wattie’s and McCain.
For regional centres like Westport and Kaitāia, each closure is an economic shock that ripples through the whole community. The blow would be blunted somewhat if we had a plan B to revive manufacturing and offer employment prospects in the regions. But we don’t.
Some economists and industry leaders now openly talk about the “deindustrialisation” of New Zealand. Manufacturing is responsible for roughly 60% of our exports and employs close to one in ten workers, yet it has slipped down the priority list in Wellington.
Other countries – Australia, Singapore, the UK and the US among them – have modern industrial strategies and long-term Industry 4.0 programmes. New Zealand, by contrast, shelved its industry transformation plans and has yet to articulate what kind of manufacturing base it wants to have in 10 or 20 years.
Energy costs sit at the heart of the problem. For many manufacturers, electricity and gas now rank among their top 2 - 3 operating costs. The rapid push to electrify process heat, combined with volatile spot prices and an uncertain gas transition, has left some plants badly exposed. At the same time, manufacturers face chronic skills shortages, conservative lenders demanding personal guarantees for capital upgrades, and resource consent processes that add cost and delay to even straightforward investments.
In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I’m joined by Christchurch-based manufacturing expert Sean Doherty to delve into what’s gone wrong – and what can still be salvaged.
Beyond plug-in AI fixes
After a 30‑year career that includes a long stint at Rockwell Automation and leading the advanced manufacturing programme at Callaghan Innovation, Doherty has had a front‑row seat to thousands of technology and productivity projects. He’s blunt about the structural issues and the policy vacuum, but he also insists manufacturers are not powerless.
Rather than chasing silver bullets or “plug‑in AI” fixes, Doherty argues for a disciplined focus on small, practical productivity and efficiency initiatives: getting real‑time data off the factory floor, tightening basic management practices, and investing in people alongside machines.
In a tough, high-cost environment, those incremental gains can spell the difference between slow decline and a credible growth story you can take to the bank – and, collectively, between a country that drifts into deindustrialisation and one that chooses to rebuild its industrial backbone.
Listen to the entire episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes
Factories in retreat: inside NZ’s deindustrialisation crisis - The Post
Sean Doherty on LinkedIn
Aotearoa’s Industry 4.0 Journey - Callaghan Innovation report
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