Business Is Boring

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by economist Tony Alexander.  As chief economist at the BNZ for 25 years, Tony Alexander held one of the biggest jobs in New Zealand economics. He helped advise the bank and nation through a lot of economic change and disruption – until last year, when he decided to disrupt himself and left.  Since then you can still find him in the media as one of the leading commentators, and now through Tony's View, a weekly free newsletter, with a paid, more detailed, subscription offer. In a year in which a lot of commentators have come a cropper, his measured, data-driven offering has been fantastic.  Tony specialises in helping people understand the economy and making it simple and clear enough that they can make better decisions on their businesses and house purchases. It’s a big goal, but li

Pour yourself some eggnog and join the hosts of The Spinoff’s podcast network for our annual Superpod round up of the year that was. Representing Gone By Lunchtime, Dietary Requirements, The Real Pod, Papercuts, The Fold and On The Rag our hosts dive into the key events, issues, heroes and villains of 2020. From National’s botched election campaign to Ben Thomas’ take on TikTok, via the collapse of Bauer, the rise of oat milk, with a detour through controversial frozen grapes and Simon’s Sausage Spot, there’s something for everyone in this year’s Superpod. Featuring special guests producer T and Covid-19. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Blackbird’s Sam Wong. Last year one of the biggest venture capital operators in Australia moved over and set up offices in New Zealand. The company, Blackbird, is famous for backing big companies like Canva, but has also been involved in supporting local successes from very early on. One of those is like Sunfed, the makers of plant protein meat alternatives, and it’s the Blackbird partner that led the Sunfed deal who has come over to set up the local office. Sam Wong started her career at a prestigious law firm. She did well but didn’t quite love it so left, moved home, worked minimum wage jobs to pay her way and got into start-up life. She ran product for a high-growth ecommerce company, founded a company that went through the VC cycle, and got into working at Blackbird. Blackbir

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by See-LEVEL founder Dudley Jackson. Around 25% of the population experiences seasickness to an extent that makes ocean-going uncomfortable or even impossible. If you happen to be an engineer working on a sea-based wind farm and are among that 25%, you might find getting to and from work a nightmare – and you might not be much use once you get there. It’s a problem this week’s guest knows well. Dudley Jackson loves the sea, and with dreams of bringing his kids up on the water sold the family home and moved with his wife, two kids and a dog onto a 40 foot yacht – only to find out the hard way he was one of the 25%. The dream had to be put on ice, until a new technology came along that caught his interest because it was making a lot of people sick. Dudley looked at virtual reality head

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Foodprint founder and CEO Michal Garvey. Food waste is such a massive problem that it’s hard to fully comprehend. Everyone would have heard the stats that say more than a third of food, fruit and vegetables are wasted, and one of the many causes is the struggle to accurately match supply to demand. Cafes and food sellers will fill a cabinet and hope with the best intentions, and the last thing they want to do is waste that food, but if people don’t buy those fresh items they don’t have much of a shelf life. This week’s guest, Michal Garvey, saw the beginning of a solution to this while living and working in Sweden, and came back to New Zealand with the goal of helping to make the food industry more sustainable while at the same time giving customers access to heavily discounted fo

You’ve probably stood in a supermarket queue and thought you could be spending your short time on this earth more productively. That’s what happened to this week’s Business is Boring guest, William Chomley, who instead of shrugging off these musings started a company to solve the problem. IMAGR is a New Zealand start-up that uses computer vision to power smart shopping carts, with the ultimate goal of removing check outs, meaning grocery store customers never have to queue again.  William Chomley was working in an investment fund and didn’t have time to wait in supermarket lines, but he did find the time to build out and validate the concept of solving the problem. His company went from side-hustle to more than full-time, raising multiple investment rounds including $14 million dollars this year in a round led by Japanese tech giant Toshiba. IMAGR are now working on delivering the shopping experience of the future in Japan and Auckland, with a team of hardware and software experts solving a problem that Amazo

This is episode one of Coming Home, a new five-part podcast series from The Spinoff podcast network, in partnership with Kiwibank. We're sharing it with you here because we think if you like Business is Boring you might find this interesting too. Have a listen and subscribe on your platform of choice to hear the rest of the series. New episodes arriving weekly. Coming Home delves into the phenomenon of high achieving New Zealanders returning to Aotearoa in the era of Covid-19. Join hosts Duncan Greive and Jane Yee as they seek to find out who these returnees are, why they left New Zealand in the first place, the reasons for their homecoming and what their arrival means for all of us. Featuring Peter Gordon, Julia Arnott-Neenee, Paul Spoonley, Jarrod Kerr, Rachel Morris, Joel Kefali, Polly Fryer and Mahoney Turnbull. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Lisa King from AF Drinks. As a society, we don’t have a particularly healthy relationship with alcohol. We work hard to ignore the fact alcohol is a serious carcinogen, and even harder to ignore the social and medical effects and costs of drinking. If we thought about that when people say they’re not drinking, we’d recognise that’s probably the better idea – but it’s not like that yet.  This week’s guest should be well known to regular listeners of the podcast, having been on before as the founder of Eat My Lunch. Lisa King decided to take a break from drinking earlier this year, and the weird reactions that prompted from people led her to reevaluate her and our general relationship with drinking. Now she’s helping amplify the conversation about changing our relationship to drinki

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Nada Piatek, co-founder and MD of Again Again. Every year, New Zealanders throw out 300 million takeaway coffee cups. Even the ones that are compostable, most often aren’t composted – only one in 400 compostable coffee cups make it to the compost, in fact.Many people have Keep Cups, but not everyone always has their Keep Cup on them at all times. And then there aren’t many choices. But one New Zealand company is out to change that. Again Again offers a service where users can pay $3 to borrow a reusable stainless steel cup with a lid. Bring it back, and you will get your $3 back, with the cafe washing it for future use. It saves cafes money on takeaway cups, and it reduces waste. So far it’s helped remove 840,000 cups from the waste stream each year, and it’s only just getting sta

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Morgan Donoghue from InMusic. Auckland’s Karangahape Rd has long been a home of live music, but it might be news to you that it’s also an internationally recognised hotspot for music software innovation and excellence. It's where InMusic, owner of some of the world’s biggest music brands like Numark, Denon and Akai make their software, while other big brands with offices in the neighbourhood include Serato and Melodics. Today’s guest has a connection to all of them. Morgan Donoghue was with Serato in key roles during its growth, is an investor in Melodics and is currently the MD at InMusic. On top of all that he’s also the COO for a very interesting new earphone technology company called Nura, who use software to create personalised audio experiences for listeners. Nura hit the ne

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Jo Mills, co-founder of Fuel50. The world of work has obviously changed a lot recently, making many of the HR processes employers and employees use increasingly unfit for purpose. With the rise of the gig economy, people changing careers, new ways of working and a growing understanding of the value of people bringing their whole selves to work, the traditional approach of a strict job description, set hours and a once yearly review are quite out of date, yet still being used.  One company out to change that is Fuel50, founded by Jo Mills and Anne Fulton – two New Zealanders working to help some of the biggest US companies with their people strategy. Their AI-powered software allows for all the permutations of shifting projects, personnel and interests, matching up people to work a

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Hengjie Wang and Alliv Samson, co-founders of Kami. If you have any school-aged kids in your life, you’ll know all about the changes and fast-adoption of technology the education sector has seen this year. During lockdown us parents had what seemed like endless repetitive problems with Google slides, things not saving, appearing or formatting properly and generally just not working.  But one New Zealand-based education tool has taken a bunch of these frustrations and made it easy to collaborate, annotate, work and see what others are doing in a shared online workspace. The app is called Kami – which means paper in Japanese – and it’s helping create a shared learning environment for millions of kids and adults around the world.  The app is now used in more than one in three schools

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Josh Emett, Michelin-starred chef and restaurant owner. Josh Emett is a household name in New Zealand, famous for having worked and won Michelin stars with Gordon Ramsay over more than a decade, before coming home to open a string of successful restaurants and find fame as a judge on Masterchef.  You may have visited his restaurants Madam Woo, or Hawker and Roll, or Rata, or Ostro, or read his cookbook of collected greatest hits, The Recipe, or seen his Instagram videos with his sons helping as sous chefs in the home kitchen. All his other restaurants to date have been partnerships, but this year he decided to take over Waiheke luxury boutique hotel and restaurant The Oyster Inn and open a new restaurant, Onslow, from scratch with his wife Helen. What’s it been like for them to ta

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Simon Farrell-Green, founder of Here magazine. This podcast has always had a special interest in the ways people have managed to keep making things happen in business while the world seems to be falling apart around them. This week’s guest did just that when he crowdfunded and launched a new magazine title during a time of supreme uncertainty, when magazines were effectively banned in New Zealand. Simon Farrell-Green will be familiar to many listeners from his years of food reviews and feature writing for Metro, bfm, Eat Here Now, Kia Ora and as editor of Home. When Home’s publisher Bauer Media folded in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Simon wasted little time in launching a new title of his own, with the backing of a successful Boosted campaign. The magazine, Here, is a

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week's guest is Dr Elizabeth Berryman, founder and CEO of mental health app chnnl. Those in the medical profession have difficult jobs, and it can be especially tough for trainee and new doctors. Today’s guest, Dr Elizabeth Berryman, was a trainee doctor herself when she started wondering how many others in her position were under the same pressures and feeling the same stress. A lot, it turned out – more than half the people she surveyed reported bullying, harassment or other unacceptable workplace conditions. This led her to research and develop an app to track and understand the current state of frontline workers in the health sector, through daily check-ins on important measures. The app can predict depression and anxiety, with 90% accuracy, and help point people to timely help. When Berryman sta

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Dr Ju Zhang, CEO of Formus Labs. Hip and knee replacements are fairly common surgeries, but you’d be surprised how often they need to be revised or redone completely. That’s because every body is unique, and it’s hard for doctors to know what the perfect replacement piece looks like before they open a patient up.    Local company Formus Labs wants to help with that. They’re using AI and computer modelling to help surgeons design bespoke surgery plans for patients with their cloud-based software, taking CT scan data and building a computer model to help select the right implant and right approach. It’s revolutionary tech that removes the guesswork about size, shape, stresses and orientation – and it’s picking up a global market. The company stemmed in large part from the research of C

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jonathan Ring, CEO of C-Prize winning company Zincovery. Considering how important steel is to so much of the construction and manufacturing industry, it hasn’t seen a great deal of innovation, and it isn’t particularly environmentally-friendly, either. That’s especially true of galvanised steel, where the materials used create waste problems and tonnes valuable resources like zinc and acids usually go down the drain. But now a New Zealand company has a plan to fix this and create the first clean process, and it’s an idea that’s getting noticed. Zincovery has just won the $100,000 C-Prize – the Callaghan Innovation challenge to find environmental answers through clever business innovation. To talk about the C-Prize and creating change in the construction and manufacturing industries,

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Pony Club Secrets and The Princess and the Foal author Stacy Gregg. Stacy Gregg’s first job in media was as a secretary, a job she was fired from before being rehired as a staff writer. She went on to specialise in fashion writing, ultimately starting and selling a pioneering media title before sidestepping into a different field entirely – writing children’s books. Her specialty in that field was stories about ponies and horses, and her books – in series like Pony Club Secrets and standalone titles like The Princess and the Foal – have now found a large audience both here and overseas. It took a lot of time and business savvy to build and maintain that audience, in the process becoming one of New Zealand’s most successful international writers. To talk about the work that goes into

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to the founders of new fashion website Ensemble. When Bauer Media announced the closure of its operations in the last lockdown, a lot of talented magazine and media people were put out of a job and into a state of uncertainty. While some Bauer titles have since been resurrected – and others may still be – the advertising market and the economics of running these magazines are unlikely to be the same as before. Bit with change comes the chance to have a look and see if old models still apply, and this week's guests found the standard approach to fashion media was way out of date.  Zoe Walker Ahwa was editor-in-chief at Fashion Quarterly and Simply You, the top commercial and cultural institutions in local fashion media. It was the culmination of 15 years working in the sector, on titles

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Sam Harrop, Master of Wine. Wine is big business in New Zealand. The prices we command for our wine are some of the best margins in the world, and just about anywhere you go in the world there will be a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc on the menu. But this week’s guest believes the potential of our fine wine is only starting to be realised. New Zealand has had many trail blazers on the winemaking side of things, and a few on the industry side too. Sam Harrop is a bit of both. He worked as winemaker both here and overseas, before becoming winemaker and buyer for massive UK grocer Marks & Spencer, revolutionising the way they made, bought and marketed wine. Then he became one of fewer than 400 people ever to make the grade as a Master of Wine, and spent 10 years as co-chair of the Internat