Secure your spot at Caffeine's (founder only) cocktail evening

Plus: Icehouse Ventures 15th Annual Investor Showcase is tonight!

Happy Thursday!

Kia ora Caffeinators,

Well straight off the back of our sold out event in Tauranga last night we are happy to announce the next in our series will take now take place on September 1 in Auckland. More details below but spots will be strictly limited so get in quick.

Check back tomorrow for a bonus edition of the newsletter where I bring you a wrap of one of the best nights in the startup calendar, the Icehouse Ventures Annual Investor Showcase.

Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:

• Caffeine Event: I Wish I Knew with Penelope Barton

• What’s happening in the NZ job market right now: Four key developments

• Event: Icehouse Ventures 15th Annual Investor Showcase

• 95% of AI pilots are failing - MIT Report

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

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Event: I Wish I Knew with Penelope Barton - Join us for cocktails and a raw and real conversation with a successful Kiwi operator Penelope Barton from Crimson Global Academy, who has taken hits, made calls, and kept showing up. This is about the stuff they wish they knew earlier – the kind of lessons that only come from doing the work (and a few things going sideways).

This event is for founders and we are only allowing one person per company, due to it being an intimate event. We screen all registrations to make sure appropriate criteria is met.

Date and time

Mon, 1 Sep 2025 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM NZST

Location

Dr Rudi's Rooftop Brewing Co.

Get your tickets and check out more details here

Event: Icehouse Ventures 15th Annual Investor Showcase - Tonight I will be heading along to one of the absolute highlights in the startup calendar and could not be more excited. The Icehouse Ventures Investor Showcase will see Spark Arena filled with the best and brightest local startups pitching their vision of the future to the largest group of investors in the country.

This is an amazing chance to hear from a selection of founders as they share their stories, progress, and plans for what’s next. From Halter to Sharesies to Crimson Education and Tracksuit, some of our most celebrated celebrated startups have graced the stage previously and I would bet a decent amount of money that a future unicorn will likely be in the spotlight tonight. Which is exactly the bet investors will be taking, of course. Check back tomorrow for my wrap of the highlights.

Check out a guest editorial from Ben Thompson unpacking the numbers from yesterdays Employment Hero snapshot of the job market.

What’s happening in the NZ job market right now: Four key developments - New Zealand’s official labour market numbers (looking at your Stats NZ and some of the larger hiring platforms) might look flat, but as with many developing trends - real-time data often tells a completely different story. We work with over 10,000 businesses and 70,000 employees across the country, giving us access to anonymised, real-time hiring and payroll insights that show what’s happening on the ground - sometimes months before official reports.

The numbers aren’t painting a picture of doom and gloom. In fact, if you look closely, you’ll even see some green shoots. As I often say, spreadsheet lag is real and the economy doesn’t wait for quarterly reporting cycles.

Here are four developments shaping the job market right now.

1. Green shoots in employment growth

Two interesting data points to compare are Stats NZ's unemployment rate nudging up to 5.2% next to our NZ customers who have grown employment by 2.4% on average to the end of July, with casual roles surging by more than 10 percent.

The strongest growth is in the South Island at 5.4 percent year on year, compared with just 0.6 percent in the North (sorry Aucklanders). What’s more, younger workers are leading the charge, with 18–24 year olds up nearly 14 percent.

These point to momentum building (albeit slowly in some regions) again.

2. Wages are climbing, albeit unevenly

Our payroll data shows median wages up 4.0 percent year on year. Part-time roles saw the biggest lift at 5.3 percent while casual roles fell 1.1 percent. Construction and trade services led the industry pack with 6.2 percent growth, followed closely and unsurprisingly by science and technology at just over 5 percent.

Regionally, the South Island edged ahead at 5.1 percent growth versus 4.7 percent in the North. With the living wage rising to $28.95 in September and pay secrecy set to be banned, employers will need to prepare for much sharper scrutiny around how their wages stack up.

The best talent will gravitate to employers who can prove they pay fairly and competitively.

Full guest editorial available below

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95% of AI pilots are failing - MIT Report: A bit of research providing red meat for the ‘A.I is overhyped’ crowd this week was a new study from MIT which found while billions are being poured into integrated enterprise applications of A.I, only 5% were actually returning millions in value while the vast majority contributed no impact on profits at all. The study points to the current brittleness of agentic AI and its inability to adapt on to context and learn from previous experience in the same way an entry level human can. I think research like this is an important pinch of salt for A.I doomerists (of which I can definitely be one, on occasion).

However, I think the failures of A.I pilots will often stem not from an underlying failure of the model’s capability but it being put to the wrong purpose by its managers. Every new technology has a learning curve before enterprise at large finds the best way to implement it and I would argue we are at the bottom of a hockey stick curve, not at the top of an A.I bubble.

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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