Operator’s Playbook: Lessons from Aether in Going Global from Day One
Plus: Applications for $70m in AI funding open Thursday.
Kia ora Caffeinators,
Happy Tuesday! Hope you’re all well. This will be my last week writing your daily newsletters before jet off to Europe for a few weeks. Don’t worry though, my more than capable colleague Nick will be taking over and serving you all the Caffeinated goodness you need. We aren’t there yet though, so let’s get into one of your final Finn-curated Daily Shots for this end of the year.
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Operator’s Playbook: Lessons from Aether in Going Global from Day One
Applications for $70m in AI funding open Thursday
Labour unveils ‘Future Fund’
Viven raises $35m USD to create digital twins of co-workers
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
Operator’s Playbook: Lessons from Aether in Going Global from Day One
When I catch up with Aether COO Ursula von Keisenberg, it’s in between events at the mammoth SXSW festival in Sydney.
“I’m literally going to run to the next one straight from this chat. We’ve got a customer event with 25 CMOs,” she laughs.
It’s the kind of hectic schedule which comes with momentum. While the Kiwi-founded AI startup only recently emerged from stealth, it’s already scaling fast across hemispheres, time zones, and markets.
Officially launched in August, Aether uses AI to automate much of the manual grind in creating decks, slides and reports. By plugging into a data set and automatically generating slides using your branding, it can cut projects from days to hours.
It’s the kind of clear value proposition with a SaaS model that begs for rapid international expansion and that’s exactly the goal.
“In the last couple of weeks, we went over to New York,” Ursula says. “It was a bit of a discovery trip to understand if we had product-market fit.
The opportunity is simply bigger, not different, she explains. The brands she pitched to see the same problems that the ones in Australia and New Zealand do but on a grander scale.
“Typically, we’d take our time to scope out NZ, then Australia and beyond’.” she says. “But for us, the major takeaway was that the right time is right now. And if that means it’s a little bit hectic and we’ve got to get moving, that’s a very exciting problem to have.”
How to scale while building a team
Since leaving stealth, Aether has tripled its headcount. That rapid growth brings its own headaches - all of which are magnified by geography. The team spans three cities on both sides of the Tasman, forcing them to be intentional about culture from day one.
“Creating a sense of team culture and really embedding it is something we have to plan for. You have to be intentional when you’re not all in the same place at this early stage.”
“Team culture is just the people you have in the business and the behaviours they do every day. An amazing culture is about finding the right people who embody your values naturally.”
When you’re scaling people and operations quickly, the operational burden can become exponential.
Von Keisenberg stresses the importance of getting the foundations right early. Building the culture, the systems, the finance stack and the hiring structure all at once is a challenge but crucial when you’re scaling this quickly.
This is where tools like Airwallex have become a quiet but essential part of Aether’s operating infrastructure.
“In scaling teams quickly and scaling across different locations at the same time, Airwallex has genuinely made that super easy,” Ursula says. “It’s allowed us to set up payments, reimbursements, and cross-border expenses in a fraction of the time it would normally take.”
Building a serious AI product amid the froth
It’s an interesting time to be building in AI. Amid the hype, Aether’s product differentiates itself on something re: accuracy. Since it only uses your company knowledge assets, it eliminates the hallucination fears which come from more open ended generative products.
“Right now, people are looking for products that are accurate and reliable — all the things people worry AI isn’t,” Ursula says. “That’s where there’s real opportunity for something like Aether, which is all about source validity, to show up in enterprises.”
Informed by her former role as emerging markets sales lead at Xero Asia, the parallels to earlier waves of technological transformation are clear to von Keisenberg.
“It’s similar to my time at Xero,” she says. “When cloud accounting came along, it meant that more people got to enjoy the job they were doing - offering more strategic services.”
Aether, she believes, can do the same for marketers. “It will allows marketers to do the jobs they actually came to do and love doing. If we can remove some of the copy-paste grind from their life and reduce the hours spent pasting slide decks together, that’s only a good thing. It makes everybody’s lives better.”
She tells me about one senior marketing leader she spoke to recently. “She spends fifteen hours a week out of hours updating presentations,” Ursula says. “For her, it’s not even about saving time, it’s just about not having to do work at night.”
What other founders can learn
When I ask her what’s most exciting right now and what’s scariest, von Keisenberg pointed to the double edged sword of having this much momentum this early.
“The most exciting thing is the breadth of opportunity in front of us,” she says. “The scariest thing is making sure we make the most of it. There’s really good early traction but now it’s all about execution making sure we have the right playbook in place to execute really fast.”
That playbook is still very much being written but if there’s a theme, it’s speed balanced with structure. Move early, but don’t skip the scaffolding. Hire quickly, but codify culture.
Systems thinking is an unsung part of startup growth. Everyone talks about product-market fit or fundraising but your internal stack - how you pay, track, and manage the team culture decides how fast you can actually move.
Many early-stage companies delay implementing those systems until they feel “big enough” but by then, it’s too late - you’re retrofitting.
For Kiwi founders watching Aether’s rise, Ursula’s final piece of advice is simple: get on the plane.
“Honestly, I was blown away by how amazing the Kiwi community is in New York,” she says.
“Everyone there is hustling and people are so supportive of newcomers to the Kiwi network. Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Just go.”
Hear about Aether’s lessons in going global at our in person event with Carsten Grueber - former operator at Facebook, Google, and TikTok, and now Co-Founder & CEO of Aether. This Thursday in Auckland at 5:00pm.
Get your tickets here and remember your promo code CAFFEINEFRIENDS
Applications for $70m in AI funding open Thursday: As we covered a few weeks ago at the AI Summit, the Government is investing $70m over seven years as part of its New Zealand Institute for Advanced Technology to support innovative AI research and applications.
On Thursday, applications open (closing on 20 November) to give you a chance to get a slice of that pie. There was a handy webinar recorded here which is recorded here which covers the essentials, including:
An introduction to the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Technology (NZIAT)
Overview of the NZIAT AI Platform opportunity
Key dates and next steps for applicants
Q&A with the panel and programme team
Labour unveils ‘Future Fund’ as first major new policy: Well, it took them two years but we finally have some new policy from Labour. There’s a lot of detail still missing but the topline is a new fund which will sit alongside NZ Super but focused directly on supporting homegrown businesses and startups, compared with he just 11% of super which is spent on our shores.
The fund, at least on paper, seems to be aimed squarely at startups, with the policy document stating the fund is designed to make sure “the next Trade Me, Xero or Rocket Lab [to] grow and thrive here”.
The fund would be kickstarted with a $200m capital injection and a few crown assets, with dividends reinvested. Critics have been quick to point out that we already have investment entities, like NZ Capital Growth Partners, and that Labour has tried and failed with similar funds before. NZ First blasted it as suspiciously similar to their own Future Fund while ACT predictably wrote the fund off as Govt attempting to pick winners which they have a terrible track record of doing.
Personally, I can at least applaud the intention of the fund and will reserve judgement until there’s more detail of how it will actually work. See the policy announcement here.
Viven raises $35m USD to create digital twins of co-workers: I hear the term ‘digital twin’ a lot in the AI world and the latest to use it is recently unstealthed startup Viven, who last week raised $35m USD in seed funding. Their proposal is an interesting one, essentially unlocking the knowledge held by absent co-workers by creating a specialised AI copy of each employee based on all their internal work documentation which other employees can query and get answers from.
I can totally see how that would be a life saver for when a major project is looming and suddenly a few team members are struck down sick and you need access to some of their work but it’s hard not to extrapolate out to when the digital twin becomes good enough to do work on your behalf…
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