Caffeine Presents: Founders' Brains on Tap
Plus: Auckland biotech company eyes global health challenge
Happy Thursday!
Kia ora Caffeinators. Very happy to lead the newsletter this morning with our latest Caffeine event made in partnership with our mates over at KNK - Founders Brains on tap. Ever wanted to have a shadow executive team tackle whatever problem you have live on stage? Of course you have, this is your chance. Check out more details below.
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Caffeine Presents: Founders Brains on Tap
Auckland biotech startup eyes global health challenge
OpenAI is making its own social media and I think we might be doomed
Sponsored: Making global work travel simple with Deel Business Visas
What does the US Govt shutdown mean for startups with visa work underway?
As always, thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription or simply recommended Caffeine to friends and whānau. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
When: Wed, 5 Nov 2025 5:15 PM - 7:00 PM NZDT
Location: Precinct Flex Britomart Place, Auckland
Caffeine Presents: Founders Brains on Tap - I love all of our events but this one I am particularly excited to announce. Caffeine and KNK are partnering to work through real founder challenges live on stage. Selected founders will step into the ‘clinic’, present their toughest problem, and have the masterminds of KNK unpack it in real time.
When you register, you’ll have the option to submit your own challenge. We’ll select three founders to feature on the night (with your permission of course).Everything is strictly run under Chatham House Rules.
Register here and remember to use your promo code CAFFEINEFRIENDS for a free ticket. Or send to your friends to get them a free ticket too.
About the speakers:Naomi Ballantyne is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished insurance entrepreneurs. After helping to found Sovereign and later leading ING Life, she saw a gap in the market for a modern, customer-focused insurer. In 2010, she built Partners Life from the ground up, starting with just a handful of people and a bold vision to disrupt the industry.
Alongside her, Kris Ballantyne has played a pivotal role in shaping Partners Life’s brand and customer experience, helping the company connect authentically with advisers and clients. Together, they scaled Partners Life into one of New Zealand’s leading life and health insurers, known for its innovation, culture, and commitment to doing right by customers. Music to everyone’s ears, right!
Their journey came full circle in 2022, when Partners Life was acquired by Dai-ichi Life Holdings, one of the world’s largest insurers, a major milestone that marked global recognition of what they’d built in New Zealand.
From startup grit to international success, Naomi and Kris’s story is a rare look at what it takes to build and scale a category-defining business from scratch. We are lucky enough to be running a founders clinic with both Naomi and Kris, where they will show you the type of service they are now offering to New Zealand companies through KNK Consulting.
Auckland biotech startup eyes global health challenge: We love seeing startups tackle serious problems and there isn’t a much more serious problem than growing antimicrobial resistance. Auckland-based biotech startup, The Experiment Company, are doing just that.
Context: Essentially, antibiotics are becoming less effective over time. This is due to a combination of factors which are almost all deeply frustrating - like the fact people take antibiotics unnecessarily, we feed massive amounts of them to farm animals and we simply don’t fund the research to make new ones. All of which combines to mean the microbes which make us sick are becoming resistant to the drugs we use to fight them. In the doomsday scenario, the days where you get an infection and pop to the doctor for penicillin could end We live in a golden period of history where an infection isn’t immediately life threatening but if we aren’t careful, we will go back to the dark ages of medicine.
Sri Govindaraju and Sunil Pinnamaneni cofounded The Experiment Company in late 2019 with a focus on raising the profile of local honey but pivoted and is now developing a platform that could transform how laboratories around the world detect and manage antibacterial resistance.
The Experiment Company is developing precision hardware and software to automate bacterial resistance testing, a process that currently takes seven to ten days.
“We started with a very specific area in honey. Now we are actually targeting a much higher cause,” explains Pinnamaneni.
Their system can cut that to just two to five days—saving laboratories up to 40% in costs and enabling a tenfold increase in throughput.
Despite being a team of just four, The Experiment Company has already been recognised as a finalist in the prototype category at Fieldays and the Parnell Innovation Awards.
Plans are underway to establish a pilot production facility and distribute early hardware units to overseas partner labs. The feedback and data collected will form the backbone of their seed funding round planned for early 2026.
OpenAI is making its own social media and I think we might be doomed: It’s Thursday which means Finn gets to talk about terrifyingly/interesting/terrifyingly interest global developments in tech. As we touched on yesterday, OpenAI have now launched Sora 2 - the latest in AI slop generating technology which generates a much higher calibre of slop than earlier models. They also released what is essentially a TikTok competitor with an AI twist, also called Sora, alongside it.
The app version allows you to upload a ‘cameo’ of yourself and inserts it into whatever kind of AI video you can imagine. You can even do it to your friends and share the often hilarious results. In a very bold move, Sam Altman has allowed his likeness to be used, so prepare for a deluge of brain rot Altman style content in your near future.
I have always felt the natural end point of this AI wave is something like ‘hyper bespoke instantaneous media’. No longer do you wake up and scroll through a curated feed of content generally made by humans, loosely in your areas of interest.
Instead you will wake up to a feed created almost entirely by AI and hyper targeted to you - including your face and likeness inserted into the content. Instead of reaching the bottom of your feed and new content being found and surfaced, new content, even more closely targeted to you, will just be created.
The AI slop backlash is intense and growing but you can hear advertisers frothing already. How much easier will it be to see yourself in a new pair of jeans being advertised in the feed when you literally see yourself in those jeans instantly thanks to AI. The slop is becoming more concentrated and more commercially viable and soon I think it will be completely inescapable.
In positive news, I was recently reminded that at some point, the sun will explode. So at least there’s that to look forward to.
At Caffeine we love to see our founders going global. That’s why we’re so excited to partner with Deel as hiring and paying talent around the world has always been their core mission. Its immigration arm has already helped thousands secure permanent visas in 70+ countries. Now Deel is tackling short-term global mobility with Business Visas, designed to strip the friction out of international business travel.
From flying a founder to pitch investors, sending teams to client meetings, or getting execs to strategy offsites, short-term visas are a hidden headache. HR teams wrestle with eligibility checks, quotes, and messy spreadsheets. Employees waste hours on embassy sites or expensive consultants. The result? Delays, missed opportunities, and compliance risks.
Deel’s new service, powered by its partner WorkFlex, simplifies the process:
Eligibility in minutes – instantly see what visa is needed.
Quotes and cases created on the spot – no back-and-forth.
Fast, compliant processing with expert support.
Centralized tracking for HR and self-service updates for travelers
With coverage across 100+ countries for all worker types, Deel is betting that global mobility should take hours, not weeks. In the race to scale internationally, Business Visas could be the difference between landing the deal or missing the flight.
Check out more information and book a free consultation here.
What does the US Govt shutdown mean for startups with visa work underway?: Shout out to Kevin Park over at Concord Visa for quickly analysing what the current shutdown could mean for startups with visa work underway.
He highlights three immediate factors:
1) DOL FLAG system is offline: No LCAs, wage requests, or PERM applications can be filed.
2) E-Verify is inaccessible: Employers must still complete I-9s in good faith and add cases once systems resume. OPTs holders may need to remind employers of this route.
3) Consulates remain open (for now) but expect growing backlogs and cancellations if this drags on. This can be quite a major with recent changes to interview waivers + interview in home country/residence already increasing wait times.Check out his full post here or hit up the team at Concord who are the local experts in times like this.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co