Terrific. So I'd like to invite the panelists for the next conversation. Phil, Dave, and Susan, please. Terrific. Well, we're going to start with just maybe go around and tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey here, and what you're most passionate about. And start with you, because you're... Thanks. I'm Susan Irons. My journey started, well, let's see, a studied philosophy, so naturally come and find a manufacturing business to invest in in New Zealand. And, you know, invested in fake industries about a long time ago, and it started throwing off dividends, and so I had some excess capital to reinvest. So I went and got into the angel investing thing. Through that met other angel investors, and we've got a club going, which is all very nice, and it's a really great little ecosystem now. So it's a lot of fun. So I guess to distill it, it's what I said yesterday. I am passionate about creating jobs locally to improve lives globally, which I think is pretty self-explanatory, whatever businesses we do. It should actually have the possibility of improving lives throughout the world, not just here. How much time we got? When we start at one, two. So I guess I start off my life as a pretty frustrated entrepreneur, and so when I worked for Deloitte Consulting for 10 years in New Zealand and internationally in the States, came back and founded my own consulting business with a couple of mates. When it was time to kind of break the shackles of living the corporate life and actually make the decision to prove to myself whether I could do it or not. So that was one of the big drivers initially for me. We were fortunate when we created our consulting business. We actually, that's in the late 90s, had a focus from day one on reinvesting that back into the company and to the individuals that were around us. We wanted to create innovation within our, it was a software consulting business. So it was around the time of the dot-com boom around and the internet was just coming to New Zealand. So through a bunch of connections and friends, we managed to invest in TradeMe right at the start. TradeMe became New Zealand's eBay and was I guess the first real shining light of what you can do with tech investment in New Zealand. So that exited in 2005 to Fairfax. It was a real, to me it would be the first sign of actually the tall poppy syndrome getting shot down in New Zealand because he was a bunch of guys and an individual Sam who had had this incredible success and he was well supported in that I think. So that gave us the opportunity to just step back from what we're doing and just start looking at what we wanted to do and basically for us that became to continue invest back in entrepreneurship and the development of I guess the tech entrepreneurial scene in New Zealand and that's what we've been doing since 2005. I'm an active angel investor. I'm a managing partner of a venture fund in Wellington called MoVac and I do this five days a week or seven days a week really. So while we do this ultimately we did this to support entrepreneurship in New Zealand and if there's a loftier goal it is actually about raising the economic output of New Zealand and through that and this is how we look at how we have an impact. If we can raise the income of New Zealanders, if we can raise the wellbeing of New Zealanders the stuff will trickle down and flows back into the system and that's how we're looking to create change. Thanks, I'm Dave Moskowitz. I grew up in the US. I moved out here in 1982 on my OE, although I didn't know that's what it was at the time because Americans don't have OE. But after a career in the IT industry you got sort of bored of it in the 1990s enrolled in doing a PhD in applied linguistics, studying the phonology of New Zealand sign language in 1990 and eventually discovered the internet in the same way that Columbus discovered in North America I suppose already people living there. And in 1994 my wife and I started one of Wellington's first web development companies which we grew into 40 people in Auckland and Wellington and exited out to a multinational in 2002. Since then I've been using the proceeds from that trade sale mainly for angel investment as well as some philanthropy. Sometimes it's Phil's fond of saying it's hard to tell the difference between the two. But I'm a firm believer in building the world you want to live in and so I see investment in tech companies in Wellington as part of building the Wellington that I want to live in and the New Zealand that I want to live in. So I would love to see Wellington which is already a fantastic city but it can go so much further. I'd love to see Wellington where the tech industry was the industry where there was a constant flow of people and businesses and information and ideas with the rest of the world. We've already got that we just need to pour petrol on it and investment is that petrol that we're trying to pour on it. So I've been involved with Lightning Lab New Zealand's first accelerator program, a start-up weekend helping people recognize entrepreneurship. We've processed well over 2,000 people now in New Zealand through start-up weekends and it's just been amazing. So I'm passionate about bringing the best out in people and helping them realize that they have capabilities that they never even knew that they had and taking those capabilities and putting them to productive use by connecting them with other people and other resources. So just before we get going with the main part, kind of hands up, who here is a New Zealand resident? Please put your hand up, right? So who here is not a New Zealand resident? Okay, so that's probably around, what, maybe 20%. So I just thought that that could inform the conversation that we have in some ways. You can hold on to that. One of the amazing things of being on this panel with you is the three of you could have been in anywhere in the world at this point and you decided to be in New Zealand and do what you do here. So I'm curious to hear what your perspectives are on both opportunities and challenges of investing in technology and start-ups here in the New Zealand ecosystem. So there are many facets to that question. I mean, if you're asking why am I here in New Zealand is because it's such a fantastic place to live. New Zealanders, I think, are second to none in the world as a community of people that are good. New Zealanders are fundamentally good, deep down in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else in the rest of the world. And that's a really good reason for being here. But in terms of the opportunities and challenges that we have doing this in New Zealand, New Zealand is at the edge and is isolated in many ways and that is both a great strength and a great weakness. It's a great strength because in many ways we're not polluted with some of the sort of fattish ideas that happen elsewhere in the world and we can develop our own fads and develop our own ways of doing things. It's a weakness because often we're out of step with the rest of the world and when we do something new and people don't understand it, they don't see any obvious way that it can plug in. And I'll let you guys go to some of the other ones. You can probably tell by my accent it's pretty easy why I'm here. This is home. You know, home's where the heart is and I wouldn't go anywhere else. I've traveled a lot around the world over the years, traveled with my family. I take various opportunities when I can to spend time overseas. I love to travel but I love coming home and I wouldn't bring up my kids anywhere else. So it's home. So that's got to be, I guess, as to why I'm here. It's pretty easy. On the investment side, the opportunities and the challenge, there's a ton of opportunities from a tech investment perspective in New Zealand and it's a sector and an ecosystem that's just gone from strength to strength since the kind of late 90s when we really started looking around and it's just fundamentally different in terms of the deal flow that we see with a lot of stuff that's kind of come on board in the last 10 years. But it is young and that's probably the challenge. So we're only 10 years in and we keep looking to Silicon Valley as an example. Silicon Valley's at least 30 years in, probably 50. I'm kind of looking at the Americans and the audience. So we're still maturing and we had the question before, I think, from Dan about serial entrepreneurs. So our biggest challenge as investors is that we're working alongside, when we invest, very inexperienced individuals, ultimately. You know, they have fantastic ideas. They've got tremendous courage in terms of what they're trying to achieve. But by and large, generally, they're inexperienced. And not only are they inexperienced but in my experience, in the US, there's a very high bar pod on education and a lot of people go on to secondary university sort of degrees. They do their MBA or they do some form of other higher study and we typically don't or haven't typically done that in New Zealand. So when I'm dealing with an entrepreneur, oh, look, 100% of them don't have a business degree. So some of the basics that go into, but some of the basic structures that you might be experienced of seeing often aren't there. So how do I put a business plan together? How do I put a budget together? How do I raise money? How do I present? There's a lot of support required about that. And then when you start to think about, okay, I've made the investment, how am I going to help this guy or girl scale their business from no sales to $10 million in sales? And there's nobody around the table with experience. So the thing that we've started to focus on as investors and it's so great to see something like Kiwi Connect here is how we create that connectivity to experience because we have to surround these companies with experience. And I can tell you this, as a Kiwi, who's grown up here for 45 years, 46, I think, we don't listen, okay? Our internal arrogance is that we know right. You know, there's a bit of she'll be right. You'll hear that in New Zealand. It's not really she'll be right. It's I know right, okay? Get out of my way because I know right and I don't need to listen. And natively, New Zealanders in my experience do not play well together. And there's been a lot of work with government agencies trying to hook up industries. But at the end of the day, when you try to do that, you've got competitive instincts that are at play and they all think they're world beaters. So they don't play naturally nicely together. And where we actually need people with accents on our board tables is they're much better at listening to them than they are to us. Yeah. Oh, no, no. So there's nothing better than bringing an American accent into a board table or as a mentor, particularly in the fields of sales and marketing, which is the areas that we struggle the most in, scaling that up. That I'd say is the biggest challenge here. So these sorts of networks, these bridges are really, really important. Yeah. All right. I guess this is where I admit to the American accent and not having been born here, I suppose I did skate over that a little bit. And I'll risk going on with some more stereotypes because in terms of challenges, a real difference between growing up in the U.S. and what you see kids grow up here and the effect of it, it's that it's more entrepreneurial to begin with. They'll have lemonade stands and we're likely to go door to door selling as part of what they have to do with their service clubs and that sort of thing. And I just don't see that much sort of the capitalist underpinning of the culture here. So that's more of a challenge in attitude and the inexperience that Phil was talking about, which is not just educational, is cultural as well because people won't have, you know, just gone and tried to make some crafts and sell them door to door, usually here, as in the U.S. for example, though that being said, there's always the exception. I did have neighbor kids come to my door and offer to sell me their dough gardens. It was really cute. Of course I bought a pet rock or something from them. So why I'm here and what I really love about it is the natural beauty, the character of the people, the sense that we can do anything. You know, you've got that here. I grew up in Southern California, but it's in New Zealand that I had people on my street who won Academy Awards. You know, we've got someone in Puerto Rico who won the U.S. Gulf Open. It's just mind-blowing that we achieve so much with what we've got. There's the sense that anything is possible. So that, you know, more than outweighs the challenges. That's interesting to hear because one of the conversations that keeps on coming up is around confidence of entrepreneurs. And Phil, I know you brought up the tall poppy syndrome. And Susan, you mentioned that there's so many key achievers from not just entrepreneurial community, but just from the wider community as well. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts around what the level of confidence is for entrepreneurs that you're engaging with here to create big, hairy, audacious goals and big targets that just beyond even the New Zealand market and try to solve big problems. I don't have any, you know, definitive idea there because I've seen both. I've seen people with big, hairy, audacious goals and ones with the idea of a business that could scale and really go a long way, but without the sort of vision to really believe in themselves about it. So I don't know what other people's experience are. Yeah, a couple of points. I think the tall poppy syndrome is a myth. It's something that hasn't really come up for us in five or six, seven, eight years. So I'll actually sort of counter some of what Shane and the other guys said earlier. And I also think the batch beamer is a myth. And frankly, folks that go and do that, I think that's tremendous because I think, you know, we're on this planet to live our lives and if you can go and do that, we shouldn't be ashamed of that. But everyone that I know who's made money is putting money back.  So everyone that I know is back in the community in some shape or form. They're either mentoring or they're actively investing. And that tall poppy thing did used to be around about a decade ago, but I see very, very few signs of it anymore and I see a celebrating success more and more. But Kiwi's by nature are not driven by monetary success. I don't think it's, particularly in the way that I see it in the US, it's just not the same in terms of that driver. So I think the difference is when you translate that to business and the BHAG sort of conversation is what I would say is that, particularly for most first-time entrepreneurs in New Zealand who might have come out of the Lightning Lab or the startup community, and for some of them that are still in their early 20s, they might not have even done their OE. They haven't yet opened their eyes to the world. We're a long way away from the world so they don't see the scale of the opportunity. So they're thinking smaller than where they could be. And that's holding them back in terms of how they tell their investment story, how they communicate with their market in terms of their ambition. And it was one of the reasons we were quite keen to work with John on the Kiwi landing pad to create a base in San Francisco where if nothing else, we could send these guys up to the valley, spend two weeks there, and just get an injection of speed and size and scale. And then it fundamentally reshapes them actually when you see them come back because they come back with a different level of intensity and expectation. And then about three months later, they're back down to the Kiwi speed and the Kiwi way of doing things. So you put them back on the plane and you send them back up and give them that injection again. So, you know, there definitely is, we're growing up in a market here that has far less scale than what you see around the rest of the world. So we have to open eyes and you only really do that by travelling and experiencing things in market. Yes, so I mean, when entrepreneurs approach me for investment, the first thing I say, well, what's your plan to get overseas? What's your distribution strategy for the rest of the world? And many of them say, oh, well, yeah, I thought we'd, you know, first we'll do Wellington. And then if that works in Wellington, then we might go to Auckland. And then if we, you know, once we get to Auckland, you know, we might go to Sydney.  And it's like, okay. So, you know, Australia is just a big New Zealand, really. You know, it's very similar in so many ways. It's only 20 million people there. So for the same amount of effort, you could go to San Francisco or to London and achieve much greater things in much bigger markets. So that's part of the whole eye-opening process of getting people to be investment-ready because it is that scale that they need exposure to and then must realize that what they're doing actually has applicability on the world stage. And if it doesn't, then it's probably not worth doing. The Toll Poppy Syndrome I have seen, I see it more in the general population than in people who self-select as entrepreneurs. So that's, you know, not so big a problem for us. But I think part of, one of the things connected to the Toll Poppy Syndrome is our connectedness as a community in New Zealand. Everyone knows everyone. There's, you know, a degree and a half of separation. And I think it's that closeness which makes people maybe a little bit more reticent to, you know, to pop out from the crowd. And this closeness in New Zealand makes it such an easy place to get stuff done and do business. Whenever you want to, you know, if I wanted to ring up the CEO of, I don't know, any company, I could find out someone who knows them and ring them up and within 15 minutes I'll be on the phone with them. And most key was the surprise that the rest of the world doesn't work this way.  Oh well, yeah, my cousin Mary, you know, she did some bookkeeping for a while and she's out of a job at the moment. And, you know, we could bring her in and, you know, we could turn her into a CFO. You know, the rest of the world doesn't look like that when you want to set up a business internationally. You need to look for the best resources.  So that's one of the challenges that we have is pulling people out of that particular comfort zone. Dave, I've got to say I really like your QA accent there. It's funny, I've been here for two years now and I've heard the term Silicon Valley more here than when I lived in San Francisco. I'm curious to hear how much of the, the entrepreneurial ecosystem here is trying to emulate Silicon Valley and how much of the energy is going towards being the best version of who we are. So I'm really glad you brought that up because it was something I was going to bring up anyway if you didn't. And that is, you know, many people say, well, what do we need to do to become the next Silicon Valley? And to them I say, I don't want to be the next Silicon Valley. I left that whole place in 1982 to come here. I want to be the next Wellington. I want to be what we can be collectively. You know, what is it about us that's different? That connectedness? The goodness? You know, that's all stuff that's different about us that we can really capitalize on and turn into something that's even more awesome. So in terms of emulating Silicon Valley, I think that it's necessary to be plug-compatible, if you will, with Silicon Valley because, you know, in order to get investment capital to grow into the US, typically you're going to have to go to Silicon Valley in order to find that investment. Or to somewhere offshore. Phil says no. So, you know, we need to have, you know, similar sorts of structures in place. But in terms of, you know, a lot of the sort of very narrow sort of investment theses that they have in Silicon Valley and other structures, I think we can do so much better here and we can. But the issue that we have is that we're very resource-poor compared to Silicon Valley. There's so much money sloshing around there that it makes, you know, the money that we have here available for our startups look really poultry. And I can't remember who it was who described New Zealand startups as a bit like Gallipoli. You know, we under-resource them, we under-fund them, we send them into the trench, and all of a sudden we say, okay, you're going to go overseas now. We blow the whistle. Over the top, boys. Over the top. And down they go. So, you know, and we try to do that. We try to, you know, fund startups for a couple of hundred thousand dollars and get them offshore. Well, you know what? Most of the time it doesn't work at all. And so that's something that we really need to get beyond. And I think that's a matter of time before we can solve that problem in terms of recycling capital from successfully exited entrepreneurs and bringing money in from offshore. But I don't want to see us turn into the next Silicon Valley for the sake of that. I don't really have anything to add. Well, the only comment I would make is I'd say it's probably a bit mythical, like I said before. We have a perception of what it is, but for those of us that have grown up here, we don't really know what that is. I travel there two or three times a year, but it really doesn't give me any great insight into the culture of the place. And I hear different things from different people. I can tell you that the success rates of New Zealand companies raising money in Silicon Valley, there's one or two out of hundreds. And as an investor, I get a little frustrated that New Zealanders will quickly move to try to go to this mythical thing called Silicon Valley. I'm still trying to find the sign. Welcome to Silicon Valley. 101's great. Well, I love it. And I particularly like all those two-storey beige buildings, those office blocks that you've got. Anyone here who's an aspiring entrepreneur that wants to go to Silicon Valley, there's much better places in the US that you could go and set up shop. Got a Denver or something like that. That'd be way cooler. Yeah, so I don't really think... What we know is that it's an economic powerhouse and there's elements in there that we have to learn from in terms of the way they work as... the way people work as investors over there, how companies get created in much shorter cycles than they get created here. And what are the best parts we can take about that and develop our own culture down here or invite those who have been successful over there down there to work with us with the companies that we're trying to help up there? Yeah. Yeah, I don't really have anything to add to Dave's excellent comments and Phil's other insights as well. But with the Silicon Valley, I think Phil's comment of it being a myth is pretty close to what I'd say. It's just a concept or an ideal. You know, they've done something really well and we'd like to do the same kind of thing. And that's why we keep referring to it because that's the kind of thing we want to do well ourselves and their world class. That's just, they're the world leaders at it. They're the best in the world. All the same. Doesn't mean we want to be them. Just want to go back to what Scott Nolan was saying yesterday about how to fundraise in Silicon Valley. The number one way to fundraise is to be connected and already know somebody who's made money for a VC, right? So again, there's this network in Silicon Valley that we don't have very good access to here in New Zealand. And so that's one of the important functions of Kiwi Connect is actually helping extend the New Zealand network out offshore and extend the U.S. network offshore to New Zealand and hopefully meet in the middle so we can develop much stronger networks so that the flow of talent and capital happens a lot more freely when everybody knows each other. You can answer my last question which was how can we help? Is there, beyond just that networking and helping connect, are there other ways that us as Kiwi Connect but also as the foreign community that's gathered here today can help in supporting the ecosystem thrive here? It's wonderful that you've brought us together here and I really appreciate the opportunity to meet so many people in diverse areas in its own right, very helpful. There's carrying on what we've done here, the connections that have been made. There's perhaps some sort of database resource that might be made that would allow us to know in more depth what other people have to offer because we do have any number of needs particularly working with small early-stage companies. We need everything in particularly connections. We need expertise. We need lots of help like that. It's not just a shortage of capital that our small companies have. They need everything to begin with. They're not viable to begin with and you really have to put a lot into them to get them further. So it's a very complex question. I'm hoping that somebody else has put more thought into this than me. Thanks. Dave's already answered it, I think. Just get hands-on with a couple of Kiwi companies. In some ways, connections or introductions are kind of cheap and I say that you've got to be careful about your relationship capital when you introduce someone so they're not cheap but the stuff that's really valuable is when you're prepared to sit alongside a company for a day a month and that might entail making the right connection. I can tell you now that most New Zealand companies do not know how to design a sales force. So our number one issue is how do you take what we call the Arts and Crafts Department in New Zealand which is a marketing team and a bunch of sales people they're really good at just walking in the door and telling a story and systematising that in a way that will scale and most New Zealanders in the marketing and sales world resist that. Now what I do have to say about our New Zealand marketing our Arts and Crafts Department is we do wonderful art. Some of the marketing concepts I think we come up with are really, really good but then we fall down on execution so the people that we look to bring into a company that we're parachuting into the valley or into the US or another part of the world is where's that person going to come from that's going to lead the sales team through the next round in this company and if you folks can kind of make those introductions or those connections which become the first VP of sales hire who turns the sales idea into a sales process that's something we really lack depth of experience with the New Zealand. I'm getting better but still it's still green fields for us here. So just harmonising with these guys I think that's forming even deeper connections so that what we've experienced here in this milieu can extend on and whether those connections are electronic or whether they're face to face ideally I'd like to see them very personal so I'd like everyone here to if you're a New Zealander reach out to someone else if you're someone else reach out to a New Zealander make a friend keep that connection going come and visit each other frequently you know we love visitors here and I know you love visitors over there and so let's visit each other regularly and share our stories and our problems and our triumphs and just get to know each other better because there's so much good available to come from that so let's keep the relationship going after today. It's a lovely thought Dave. Just a way to perhaps make that happen would be if we could have a list circulating email addresses of everybody here so we know the names and addresses and just one list going around to everybody just for ourselves. I like that idea and that's one of the ideas that we're working on as well is to first get everybody in the same space and then follow up with email introductions so I'm glad you all brought that up. I'd love to open it up to the audience and know there are many more investors and members of the community who either have comments to contribute but also any questions for our panelists but others also in the audience to discuss so I'll give my mic to Rebecca. She's even waving her hand. So I actually this elephant's been in the room for several days and I keep forgetting to point it out. One of the critical issues for the venture capital community it doesn't matter where they are if they make a substantive investment in a company that generally means they have to travel to that company's headquarters. In the diligence that's one piece to look at how the organizations come together how well it works but then you have board meetings and in granted you can from here that time zone difference isn't that bad but that is an issue and so it makes me wonder how realistic it is to look to Silicon Valley. Now when Silicon Valley is really interested they put an office there. Barcelona turned out to have something like 15 technical universities and you know in three months all the major VCs put offices there so I think there's a question of realism for me about trying to get money there if it's not willing to come here. I entirely agree I think for a lot of Kiwi companies that expect to go and spend a month up in the valley and raise funds and they haven't done it with the right introduction they're wasting their time and the best thing they can do, I mean we talk to a bunch of VCs because we're looking for partners to come into out to the companies that we've invested in and it's interesting I've got a really straight bit of feedback from one the other day which was fantastic just come up here with momentum if you've got momentum you'll get funding and we were like well what about team teams are really important to what we're investing in don't care about team, we're a big VC we'll fix team, we'll get rid of all those guys we'll just bring in another one just come up with momentum and most of our Kiwi companies when they're going up there they first $50,000 in sales and you know that was $10,000 one month, $5,000 the other $15,000 the other and that's not momentum and yet we're investing a lot of effort to go up there and try to do this so I do think it's a bit misguided I tend to agree but there are other parts the US which actually look more like New Zealand in terms of their local economies which may be more open to it one comment I would make about board meetings and being remote and I can't comment on the US but as New Zealand investors we're really used to it so I've got a couple of board meetings in the valley coming up mid-March I'll be flying up there for those board meetings the other board meetings are done on Skype I had to go through the valley up to Philadelphia across to Chicago with one of my other companies last year board meetings over there, board meetings back here I had a board meeting on the speakerphone on the car, the way out here this morning which was for a New Zealand company we've been doing business this way for the last 5, 6, 7 years because we've probably got the biggest adoption rate with Skype, I was used to say to Americans, can I have your Skype address and they're like what's Skype and there's still a bit of that when I talk to a US VC they don't want to talk to me on a Skype they want to phone me on my cell phone but we'd do it for free on Skype and the call's better so I think we're really used to it but certainly coming back the other way it's not people aren't as used to it yeah so how many people here know David Tenhave yeah, there we go in his words you need to be there to be there so there's no point in raising money in a place if you're not actually already there as Phil points out with momentum if possible I'd like to ask Vaughn if you could share some of your insights on distance and how that has impacted Vanda and the work that you do because we haven't had many Kiwi companies raised from abroad and yeah, keen to hear your thoughts cool sure distance so one of the greatest opportunities we got is that the internet provides us is great connected to the rest of the world and I think it's a little bit of a trick for a lot of Kiwi companies that they think cool, we're super connected so I don't need to get on a plane when all the internet really provides us a neat way for you to send emails and documents and Skype but really the biggest impact you can make is actually getting on a plane and meeting somebody face to face because as humans those are the connections that we cherish just some random person on the other end of an email even though they may have something interesting to say it's really the relationships you build over lunch or over a beer and the relationships that take time you know there's this other myth which is so you get on the plane, you go to the valley and then you meet a VC and you've got a term sheet on the back of a napkin that never happens and if you get offered one of those then you're doing it wrong you probably shouldn't accept the terms every investor that we've brought on board has been a six to nine month conversation also it's not just about New Zealand and the valley we've raised the majority of our money from Berlin and Melbourne and around New Zealand with only a very small part of it coming out of the US so really it's what I tell people is it's about just having that opportunity to tell a story and take time to tell that story and make it a really fucking good story but that's the most impactful thing you can do is you know tell everybody your story just invest all of your time and energy in that all the investors that we've brought on board the very first time I met every single investor I didn't I had no preconception that they would become an investor they were just somebody I met and I told them the story and then at some point down the track they confess that they fell in love with the story and wanted to become an investor and I think those are the best investors that you can find I've actually got a technical question relating to that to kind of everybody actually anyone who's got a response to it is for starting entrepreneurs especially if they have to travel back and forth the flight price and having to do that I mean it's not cheap to travel to the US has anybody here try to do anything about that any solutions any ideas with Air New Zealand under others Peter Crisp the best thing you could do is wind up NZTE and put the budget into Air New Zealand to subsidise flights sorry Shane, you're very impactful we did that we gave every company 100,000 per flight 100,000 dollars to go to the market you didn't give every company that money Shane just be go easy so what happened to that it was shut down from the metrics it was like well where's the wind it was like well it's going to take more than two years to show a wind for those companies going backwards and forwards up and down in the market but again it comes back to what Matt was saying before that as government if we take risk there's about a thousand people lining up who are willing to throw rocks at us I think the environment in New Zealand has changed a lot now where actually particularly in the entrepreneur scene in New Zealand is actually much more willing and is pushing government to take risk which is good to see but we have tried and I'm not going to get peach to fire me so that I can send you up to the US next week more reflections I just want a second what you just said before there find the money to buy those tickets otherwise it's not going to happen you do need that face time that's for sure emails you receive a billion emails during a week it doesn't matter really I just wanted to throw out a contrarian thing that hasn't been stated today and that's not necessarily something I expect to happen but something I think we should all be cognizant of as a possibility which is this notion of careful what we wish for and if some trends all coalesce and catch it only takes a couple of weeks in value with a lot of money to change the dynamic of the investment ecosystem in a dramatic way because of how small it is and to your point just now about what we tried it it didn't work and so now it's kind of this feeling of like well we tried it it didn't work and now it's dead if investors come over and they write big checks and they get excited and those things don't pan out because the ecosystem is not ready for that much money at once you know in five years it might be like yeah we had a fund and we invested big in New Zealand and it didn't work out and so now we went to other international markets and so I think we also need to actually plan for like radical success like what would another $150 million more than what's currently being invested in the Wellington ecosystem look like just as a scenario or how do we combat that from happening because once something catches like the VC the ecosystem can often herd into that area just as a possibility Josh this is more of a question I'm just curious about who are the investors who inspire you and that you most respect and why told you he asked good questions it's a terrible thing to say it's not a terrible thing to say I'm actually going to say Sam Morgan so I know the American vests I read all the names I don't know them Sam I've worked with for a very long time and you know Sam's been to use the term here incredibly impactful with what he's done subsequent to trade me both in terms of investments and things like VN0 so he's had incredible repetitive commercial success which I'm envious of at one level but then he's also given extremely generously of his time and his money in terms of his philanthropic endeavor as well for a guy who's a good 7 or 8 years younger than me he's kind of leading the light I think to some extent in New Zealand and it's guys like Sam and it will be Rod when he sort of washes out of zero and has kind of done his time there that those entrepreneurs that have played big and won big when they come back into the community and start reinvesting back into the community they make a tremendous contribution yeah so Sam Morgan is one data point I think part of the problem is we don't have enough sterling exemplars of role models in New Zealand so we're making it up as we go along and we I think it's incumbent on us to become those role models each and every one of us you know I follow Brad Feld and Fred Wilson and Mark Andres and you know they're really interesting to read you know would you know how would this play out in New Zealand in the same way that I don't want to be the next Silicon Valley I don't want to be the next Brad Feld or the next Andreessen either you know I think we have to be what we are and become what we want to become and that's really important what Dave said one last question or reflection it's neither it's a call to guerrilla activism around flights and airfare costs so we came pretty close when we started Leading Pad to getting a pretty good deal out of New Zealand and Rob Fife the CEO then was very on board unfortunately the Christchurch Earthquake diverted $20 million of their kind of support fund quite rightly to much closer to home so we've reinvigorated that conversation after a pretty significant restructure there but a couple of points I think we could make significant progress out of just around this community one is that the good news is that New Zealand is actively increasing the number of flights to San Francisco towards the end of this year and of course that also means that commercially they need to find out what more pipeline but the focus for them when we ask the question can we do some deals on flights to there is that they're predominantly focused currently in North America about building pipeline to come here so of course this is a great opportunity today for a call to you all to say remember to fill out those My Voice forms remind them greatly of Hawaiian Airlines and some alternatives emerging and would be great support for our continued petition to them to have a think about giving us some relief for quite a growing an active customer community for them moving backwards and forwards to San Francisco particularly about the US in general thanks for that John one last question last last last okay thank you maybe a reflection on the VC and the culture here I think we've spent the past couple of days talking about how to make New Zealand an incubator for a different kind of company a different kind of vision and a strategy for holistic companies that take the greater good into thought and how we should be more and about just a great exit and I think oftentimes the aggressive strategy of any VC is to maximize its profit and to have a great exit just straight ahead of the corner as fast as you can is that what you want to build here is that the kind of market we want to build up if you want to see New Zealand as sort of a new element of how business should be I think it's you know clearly you want to invest in companies that are going to be long-term sustainable and and that long-term sustainability means that they've got to be respectful of a whole bunch of other things what I have to say from an investment point of view I do it also to make money and there's a bunch of angel investors in here and our only ability the only thing that gives us the privilege to keep doing that is when we get something back and 90% of what I do I don't get anything back from it's 90% for philanthropy and so we do have to for me I mentally separate those two things you know I don't want to be investing in stuff and we've got ethical guidelines about what we'll invest in what we won't invest in so we're not going to invest anything that's going to destroy the planet or exploit people or do these sorts of things and so we want to make money over here and then we want to spend it over here and if you kind of look at most of the top philanthropists around the world that's kind of how it's worked you know it's built a great business sold out of that business and then they've got into charitable endeavour and that's why we have the next foundation so I think there's always going to be attention there and it's more and more important that you know businesses have sustainable practices otherwise they're going to get beaten up by their consumers by their customers but at the end of the day we're still investing for profit and I'll take that profit and I'll do my philanthropic side with my other hand and the most successful business people I know are incredibly philanthropic it's the same community as well as that we are angel investors or early stage investors but any of us can invest in businesses in any stage in New Zealand we don't have a large enough base of large companies we've got a very very small base and the largest companies you know are way down the Fortune 1000 we don't have that base we need more medium size enterprises as well so with the angel investing it is usually planning for an exit that is usually what's in mind the exits in mind but there are lots of other business possibilities, opportunities, models you know you can build a business and keep building if the business is really good why exit really if you've got a business in hand then you should not exit unless you have a better opportunity to spend the money on that you'll get as income from your business but if you've got a business that knows how to grow and reinvest its capital successfully then you would roll with it it's not all a race for the door there are a couple things I'd like to add to that one is it's a startups are like young people each one is different each one has a different potential different skills, different capabilities and so I think what you're saying is right but I think we need to be investing in a wide spectrum of things and see what works best and then pour petrol on the fires and really back up those investments with more so it's not a question of choosing one path or another path even though our resources are scarce I think we do have to try a number of things but with respect to an incubation nation I don't need to be down but I don't see it working very well for the following reason that even though superficially New Zealand looks like a microcosm of the rest of the world in terms of the demographics technology uptake and so on once you scratch on that surface it's so tiny a country that the problems that you learn about starting a business in New Zealand are not the real problems that you need to solve doing a business in the bigger, wider world distribution sales and marketing these are the things that kill Kiwi businesses overseas because the scale here is so vastly different if you do want to use New Zealand as an incubation nation it's great to make sure that you've got clear boundaries about what you mean by incubation and that the moment you've validated the various incubatory ideas the moment that beak starts coming out of the egg that bird is flying offshore into a real market where they're going to be facing real problems and learning how to solve the real issues that they're going to face not the problems that we face here in New Zealand much for sharing all your perspectives and getting this conversation started really appreciated and I hope we continue it during the breaks that we have and the breakout session that we're going to have later on in the afternoon but first I just want to thank you all for your time


Well, good evening folks. My name is Ryan Hargraves and I am the Director of Admissions here at the University of Vermont. I wanna thank you for joining us here for this segment of UVM Live at Five. This Live at Five segment is an opportunity for you to get to know more about what the University of Vermont has to offer through the perspectives of some of our most distinguished community members. Today, we are very fortunate to be joined by a great faculty member, Professor Josh Bongard. And Josh has had a real impact on academic life and life otherwise at the University of Vermont. But I wanna thank him for taking time out of his schedule to join us. So why don't we, without further ado, give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, Professor Bongard. Sure, thank you very much, Ryan.  As Ryan mentioned, I'm Professor Bongard or Josh. And I'm a professor here in the Department of Computer Science. I've been at UVM for about 10 years. And I came to UVM by route of a number of other universities. I grew up in Canada and I did my undergraduate studies at a university in Canada. And then carried on my studies into robotics and AI, which we'll talk about shortly, at a number of other universities in England, Switzerland, Japan, New York State, eventually got a job here at UVM. And in my travels, I was at five different universities. Some were primarily focused on undergraduate education. Some of those universities were very research intensive where the professors spent a lot of time in their labs and not so much time in the classroom. So when I was looking for a job, I was really looking for a place where I could teach and do my research. And I'm happy to talk about both of those. All right. Well, thank you for your introduction. Yes, so tell us about your work in the artificial intelligence space. What types of questions are you attempting to answer through your research? Sure, yeah. So again, my research group here at UVM, we work on robotics and AI. So generally trying to make smart machines. For a long time, this was something sort of that just scientists worked on in their lab, but in just the last few years, there's been some exciting advances in robotics and AI and everyone's involved in the conversation now. So it's an exciting time to be learning about robotics and AI and doing research in that area. The basic approach in my group is we use ideas from evolution. So if you think about our human ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, we gradually domesticated wolves into dogs and we gradually domesticated the taosente plant into what today is corn and we did it through a very simple process. Plants and animals that provided some use to humans. We allowed them to reproduce and evolve and those that didn't help, we didn't allow them to do so. So in my group, we study this idea of evolutionary robotics where we use this ancient technique that our human ancestors discovered, but we apply it to a very modern technology. So here at UVM on our computers, we have virtual worlds inside our computers and inside those virtual worlds, virtual robots try and do useful tasks and those that do a better job at those tasks survive and reproduce and evolve and those that don't are deleted by the computer. So we evolve robots in our computers and in some cases, we then hook up our computers to 3D printers and print physical versions of these evolved robots and that's our approach to try and create intelligent machines. Well, that's some really cool stuff that you're describing there. And so, hypothetically, if I am a student looking at University of Vermont and I'm interested in STEM or your area, what advice, what guidance might you give me as I approach opportunities here?  After class, ask them what they do in the same way that Ryan was just asking me and you'll find that most professors are more than happy to tell you what they're excited about and what they work on and that's the best way to get started. Start conversations with your professors. In a lot of your classes, you'll find professors will come to other professors' classes and sort of advertise their research in the same way that I just did. So find out what your profs work on. Check out the department websites. Talk to them after class. Talk about what their other colleagues are doing in the department. Get the conversation going and that's usually a first step to opening the door and getting admittance to a research group on campus. Awesome. So could you tell us, you know, you said you've been here for a decade or so. So could you tell us about a specific student who's been able to really maximize opportunities, someone who's done something particularly interesting, a student who's really exemplified, you know, the opportunities available in STEM here at University of Vermont? Sure, I'd be happy to. I have one undergraduate student who's currently working with me, Jack Filag. Jack's currently a senior, but two years ago, when he was in his second year here at UVM, he found out about my work and knocked on the door of my office and sat down and asked me, again, questions like Ryan is asking and got really excited about what I work on. Jack's a mathematics student, but he took my course and built up his skills in robotics and AI, and then he joined a particular project going on in my lab called Twitch Plays Robotics. And in this project, we stream our evolving robots to the web where people can try and teach these robots various tasks through language. So it's a project that connects together robotics, language, crowd sourcing, the web, big data, mathematics. It's a very exciting project. Jack got really excited about it and he helped us actually build up the infrastructure to build the system to be able to allow people to teach robots through language. And Jack is a senior now and he's thinking about coming back to UVM as a master student to continue on his studies in robotics and AI. Wow. Well, that's pretty significant research, particularly for someone who is an undergraduate. So that's really cool to hear about that. But I have a serious question. You talked about some of the power that can be harnessed through robots. So my question is, should we fear robots and will robots at any point take over the world someday? That's a very good question and that, as you can imagine, comes up quite a bit for those of us that actually work in robotics and AI. As I mentioned, robotics and AI are becoming more and more popular. There's more and more drones out there, more and more discussion about autonomous vehicles. Should we allow them? How should we allow them on our roads? So as the technology improves, we're starting to see robots and AI that work literally alongside people here in the real world. And that raises very important questions about how do we make sure that these machines are both useful and safe at the same time? My answer to that is we need to make sure that these machines are able to understand people. And unfortunately at the moment, our machines are not very good at that. Some of you might have experiences where your phone rings in your pocket at the worst possible time. Your phone doesn't know that this is not the right time to send out an audio alert. Our machines in the world here at the moment don't have a good sense of people and what we like and what we dislike. So a big technical task, big job that we still have to do is how do we teach robots to be more social? How do we get them to understand that they're not alone in the world, that there are other people out there and they have to be careful about how they choose what to do and what to not do. That's the challenge. No one has a good answer to that at the moment and that's where research comes in. We need to try and study how do people become social? How do people understand how to get along in the world with other people? And how do we take those ideas and bring them back into robotics? So that's actually a connection between what's known as STEM, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the technical sciences if you like and it connects with the world of people. So now in AI and robotics, if we wanna make safe machines, there isn't going to be a purely technical solution. We're gonna have to come up with a socio-technical solution which is just a fancy way of saying, we're gonna have to think not just about machines but about people and machines and how those two groups should best get along. So if I hear you correctly, basically the challenge is to give or facilitate the emotional intelligence or something equivalent to that in these machines. Is that kind of the quandary? That's a great summary. So we're getting very good at making machines that have higher IQ or book smarts if you like. We're not so good at making machines that have emotional EQ, emotional intelligence. Exactly, that's a great summary. That's a big challenge and that's something we work on here in my group. And if you decide to join us here at UVM, you may find yourself part of that adventure. Awesome. Well, I have met you in person and I can confirm that you are not a robot and as such to give the audience just an opportunity to get to know you better. What are some things that you, and I've asked this question of other participants on this segment, but what's something that you like to do with your free time? Ah, yes, that's a great question. Yes, I am definitely human. You can ask my students about that and they'll confirm that. For those of you that have visited Vermont, you know that it's a beautiful place. We have the beautiful green mountains nearby. One of my favorite things to do is to go snowboarding in the local mountains around here. I like to go on a day that's relatively quiet. Vermont is a small place. You can often find a ski hill that where there is just you in the mountain. And I love to sit at the top of the mountain and sort of think my thoughts, think about research, think about life.   Awesome, awesome. Well, professor, we wanna thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule to join us here on this segment of UVM Live at Five. So we hope that you all enjoyed watching our interaction and stay tuned for the next episode of UVM Live at Five. Until that point, have a great evening and take care, everyone.


Many firefighters from multiple stations as well as friends and family turned out for the funeral of Island Creek Fire Chief Randy Courtney on Saturday, November 5th. Randy left a big legacy. I'm not sure that there's not anyone in the county who didn't know Randy and not one person is even going to be able to feel his shoes. He had so many hats in the fire with fire departments and with the community and he loved the Lord that not only one person is not going to be able to feel his shoes, it's going to take many and they're not even going to completely be the man that Randy Courtney was. Randy was incredibly beloved and leaves behind a massive legacy. Randy was the most amazing man you would ever meet. Never knew a stranger would talk to anybody that came near him. He loved everybody and he loved the fire community with everything in him. He was the best man I will. He's leaving behind a big, big spot to fill and I don't think that spot will ever be filled. Friends and family say Randy never met a stranger and made friends everywhere he went. His career as a firefighter is one to be admired not only for his accomplishments but for his dedication to the field. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsey Deen.