Good afternoon Caffeinators!
Welcome to mid week.
First and foremost, thank you so much to everyone that came along to our (sold out!) event in Auckland last night. If you scroll to the bottom I’ve included a lovely little token of the evening instead of leaving you with some terrifying bit of A.I news like normal.
For those who couldn’t make it, don’t worry, there’s plenty more events on the horizon with Caffeine - we are very much just getting started! For now, get stuck into your Daily Shot and I will catch you in the morning.
Here’s what’s in your Daily Shot of news you don’t want to miss
KNK: How to get Founders’ Brains on Tap
Sea-Flux secures nearly NZ$3 million investment
Event: Aotearoa AI Summit 2025
Pod Pick: This AI startup knows everything about you
Got a tip, press release or just a comment? Drop us a note: hello@caffeinedaily.co - we love to hear from you.
Finn & the Caffeine team
We’re excited to partner with BNZ. As New Zealand's largest business bank, BNZ shares our mission to support the next wave of founders and operators. Over the coming months, we’ll be working together to share insights, tools, and stories that help you grow smarter and faster. Keep an eye out every Thursday for content powered by BNZ.
KNK: Founders’ Brains on Tap
When you strip away the jargon, setting strategy for your startup is about making sense of where you are, where you want to go, and what you need to change to get there.
But for founders, particularly those scaling beyond the seed stage, setting strategy sounds simple on paper but is incredibly difficult in execution. Most don’t have the luxury of guidance from people who have been there and done it before.
That’s the problem KNK is trying to solve.
Founded by Naomi Ballantyne, one of New Zealand’s most accomplished insurance entrepreneurs, and Kris Ballantyne, a seasoned executive with deep expertise across technology, marketing, and corporate strategy.
KNK offers something rare in the local market: the experience of people who have actually built, scaled, and sold companies, available on demand for the founders now trying to do the same.
Their proposition is simple but distinctive: they’re not here to run workshops, sell slide decks, or drown founders in frameworks. Instead, KNK positions itself as a shadow executive team, the kind of brains trust most startups can’t afford to hire full-time but desperately need to access.
The Founding Story
Naomi’s entrepreneurial record is remarkable. Over the course of her career, she’s played a leading role in creating three of New Zealand’s largest life and health insurers. First at Sovereign as an early employee, then as founder of Club Life and then founder of Partners Life - which was sold for $1b in 2022.
Building insurance companies from scratch is a feat very few attempt, let alone succeed at. The industry is capital-intensive, tightly regulated, and famously resistant to newcomers. Regulators view startups with suspicion; competitors often actively lobby against them. On top of that, founders are selling products nobody wants to think about until they desperately need them.
“I’ve spent my career building businesses in one of the hardest industries in the country,” Naomi explains. “You have to sell a product people don’t want, fight regulators who don’t trust you, and take on incumbents who will do everything they can to shut you down. That teaches you lessons that apply far beyond insurance.”
For years, Naomi was the lone strategist in rooms full of sceptics. She carried both the vision and the burden of convincing boards, investors, and teams to back scary but necessary decisions. What she lacked was someone who could sit alongside her, a peer who’d walked the same path and could challenge her thinking without undermining it.
“I never found anyone like me who could help me think those things through,” she says. “That’s why KNK exists. It’s what I wish I had.”
While Naomi built companies at the founder level, Kris worked his way up inside them, starting in insurance at 15 before becoming one of the earliest employees at Partners Life. He eventually joined the executive team, developing a wide-ranging portfolio spanning marketing, brand, technology, and digital innovation.
Kris is an expert on emerging technologies, exploring early AI use cases, leading digital transformation projects, and critically, seeing first-hand how startups struggled to sell into corporates.
“Founders often know their product inside-out,” Kris says. “What they don’t always know is how to sell it into the environments they’re targeting. They can explain the problem they’re solving, but they don’t understand the pain points of the counterparty. Without that, the pitch falls flat. That’s the gap we can fill.”
Together, Naomi and Kris describe themselves as “two halves of a whole.” Naomi brings decades of founder-level experience and market-shaping insight. Kris brings contemporary expertise in technology, sales, and innovation inside large organisations. That combination allows KNK to speak fluently to both sides of the founder’s challenge: visionary strategy and practical execution.
What KNK Is And Isn’t
The Ballantynes are quick to stress what KNK is not.
They don’t run methodology-heavy strategy workshops. They don’t generate glossy reports destined to gather dust. They don’t operate as a proxy for executives who want to outsource difficult decisions.
In other words, not part of the powerpoint industrial complex which churns out slideshows which are heavy on slick presentations but light on actionable insights.
Instead, KNK offers something far more founder-friendly: access to entrepreneurial brains on tap. That means listening to a founder’s “weird ideas,” playing devil’s advocate when needed, helping frame strategies in ways boards and investors will actually buy into, and providing a sanity check in moments of crisis.
“Every founder will tell you how lonely it is,” Naomi says. “You’re expected to know everything, keep everyone calm even when you’re panicking, and carry the weight of decisions that scare everyone else. What we do is fill that hole. Not by telling you what to do, but by giving you the confidence, perspective, and challenge you need to do it yourself.”
This approach makes KNK distinct from other consultancies and even from accelerators or angel investor networks. Those models often come with high costs, rigid structures, or narrow scopes.
KNK, by contrast, provides flexibility, relevance, and lived experience. As Kris puts it: “We’re the kind of support you couldn’t otherwise buy.”
The Value Proposition: Strategy as Operating System
One of the most interesting insights I heard in my chat with the Ballantynes was how many founders confuse strategy with tactics and the dangers of mixing the two up.
The former is what charts your course, the big picture informing the why of your business. The latter are the every day actions which implement that strategy.
“Strategy isn’t a list of actions,” Kris explains. “It’s the operating system your business runs on. It’s the philosophy and direction that informs every decision. Without that, you’re just throwing darts and hoping something sticks.”
Naomi adds: “For me, strategy has always been about changing the market. It’s about why your business exists, how you’re going to be different, and what lasting impact you want to make. Tactics flow from that. Most people get the order wrong.”
By reframing strategy as the upstream driver of every downstream decision, KNK helps founders avoid the trap of short-termism where they’re chasing monthly metrics, investor pressure, or the latest technological fad.
KNK specialise in companies that have secured early funding, built a product, and are now wrestling with the transition from founder-led to scalable business.
Often these are Series A-stage companies where the founder is still wearing every executive hat — CEO, head of sales, CTO, and chief strategist rolled into one. That’s the moment when the cracks start to show, and when founders most need external perspective.
KNK gives them access to the kind of high-level thinking and seasoned judgement they couldn’t otherwise afford in-house. In effect, it’s a fractional but fully-experienced executive team: strategic challenge without the overhead.
Despite their impressive credentials, Naomi and Kris emphasise their ordinariness.
“We’re very down-to-earth people,” Naomi says. “There’s no pretension, no judgement. People sometimes tell me, ‘You’re really ordinary,’ and I take that as the highest compliment. It means founders can talk to us without fear of looking stupid.”
That accessibility matters. Impostor syndrome is rife among founders, and the consultancy world can feel intimidating or transactional. KNK’s proposition is deliberately different: peers, not judges. As Naomi puts it: “It’s like having a couple of mates around to chat about business. The difference is those mates have built billion-dollar companies.”
For New Zealand’s startup ecosystem, KNK represents a new kind of support structure. It’s not an accelerator, not a consultancy, not an investment arm. It’s a direct line to people who’ve been there, done it, and are willing to help others do the same.
In a market where capital is increasingly available but experience is scarce, that could prove invaluable. As Naomi says: “Most founders know they need this. They just don’t know where to get it from.”
KNK’s answer: right here, right now.
Created in partnership with KNK
Sea-Flux secures nearly NZ$3 million investment: One of my favourite things in startup land is hearing someone solve a problem I didn’t know existed before. Like when I heard that New Zealand maritime technology company Sea-Flux just secured nearly NZ$3 million in strategic investment to scale up delivering a cloud-based vessel management app.
It consolidates compliance, safety, maintenance, and crew management into one system with offline capabilities. Unlike traditional server-based tools, it enables full-crew engagement via smartphones and tablets, reducing costs, risks, and administrative burden.
Founder and former superyacht skipper Tai Ellis created Sea-Flux after years of frustration with fragmented, manual systems at sea.
I have no experience with the frustration of running the complex logistics of a superyacht or any other kind of vessel but the moment someone tells me its hard I have a very easy time believing them. There’s also famously a fair amount of money at sea so feels like a slam dunk for a founder to start solving some problems offshore.
Sea-Flux now has more than 9,000 users over 1,300 vessels, including Coastguards, Harbour authorities, tug and barge, fishing and aquaculture fleets, ferry operators, tourism ventures, superyachts, and domestic commercial operators worldwide.
The funding was led by Punakaiki Fund and joined by existing shareholders, will support further expansion through New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and the Middle East, alongside investment in streamlining customer onboarding, international sales, and continued product development.
Tom Culley, head of Investor Relations at 2040 Ventures, Punakaiki’s fund manager, said the investment was directly enabled by the Active Investor Plus Visa programme. Interestingly, with the recent golden visa news, he noted investor migrants had brought in well over $10m across its managed funds, unlocking investment into high-growth NZ companies like Sea-Flux.
Congrats to the team, excited to see what comes next.
Event: Aotearoa AI Summit 2025 - You guys, I’m starting to suspect this whole A.I thing might turn out to be quite a big deal. If you’re of a like mind, definitely make sure to secure you’re spot at New Zealand’s upcoming and essential AI event.
This is the big one from Ai Forum and NZ Tech which unites industry leaders, researchers, policymakers, and innovators to explore cutting-edge advancements and real-world applications of AI. I am not sure if this will be a draw card or not but I will also be there nerding out. So if you see a man with too many rings on that looks like he should be at home writing a newsletter, come over and say hi.
Get your tickets here.
Time: Thursday September 18
Place: Shed Ten, Auckland
Pod Pick: This AI startup knows everything about you - While the title of the pod might make to terrified, the content of the ep is exceptional. The Startup Theatre podcast is back in action and putting out some banging episodes
(Stay tuned for episode 100 coming down the pike!)
In this episode, they sit down with Aaron Ward, co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry, the global startup turning workplace feedback on its head.
He previously co-founded AskNicely, a customer feedback SaaS that grew to Series B and raised over USD $50m, helping companies around the world rethink how they measure and act on customer experience.
With Huckleberry, he’s now bringing that same obsession with feedback and growth to the way we understand ourselves at work.
Huckleberry is the world’s first voice-based 360 feedback platform, designed to strip out the clunky surveys, save 90% of the time, and put your professional reputation in your pocket.
Think of it as the LinkedIn of feedback, a shareable profile that captures your strengths, work style, and how your team actually sees you.
In the conversation, Aaron shares how his team is reinventing one of the most broken parts of work: feedback. We explore the psychology of reputation, why most companies get it wrong, and how AI can transform the way we understand ourselves and grow our careers.
Listen to it here.
We’re finish with something genuinely heartwarming as well as artistically impressive - shoutout to the very talented Jacob Dawson. He attended our “I Wish I Knew” event last night, which we put on thanks to the fine folks at Vanta, and he produced this lovely piece of art which features all real people from the event - including our very own Georgia! Well, all real people if we exclude the Vanta lama. The lama is real to us, okay?
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
