What is the Māori economy and what is its true potential?
Plus: BNZ rolls out AI-driven Growth Academy nationwide.
Happy Thursday!
Kia ora Caffeinators, hope everyone is blitzing through this wet and dreary week. We have a good spread in our Daily Shot today from a new report unpacking the Māori economy to a great resource from our partners over at BNZ rolling out nationwide.
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Work ‘on’ your business, not just ‘in’ it: BNZ rolls out AI-driven Growth Academy nationwide
What really is the Māori economy and what’s its true potential?
Event: Scaling Without Selling Out: The Systems and Stories of Scale
Meta to build data centre roughly the size of Manhattan
Pod Pick: Business is Boring: How AF Drinks is leading their space in the US
Grok debuts ‘A.I companions’ and I am very concerned
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
Work ‘on’ your business, not just ‘in’ it: BNZ rolls out AI-driven Growth Academy nationwide
This week, ambitious founders should be sure to check out BNZ’s Growth Academy which can give you the tools and insight necessary to take you to the next stage of your startup journey.
The BNZ Growth Academy
Whether you’re planning a significant change or looking for the next growth opportunity, the BNZ Growth Academy can give you the skills and resources to help develop your business’s full potential. BNZ is offering more than a thousand BNZ businesses free access to the BNZ Growth Academy. The online workshops are led by our partners at D/srupt. Dates and availability vary. Apply here.
How it works
The BNZ Growth Academy is facilitated by D/srupt, the strategy expert behind many of New Zealand’s successful businesses.
Online workshops
D/srupt’s high-impact workshops consist of four 1.5 hour weekly online sessions. To get the full value of the workshops, you’ll need to attend all four sessions, as each session builds on the last.
Intuitive online tools
The BNZ Growth Academy gives you access to D/srupt’s growth platform software. This comprehensive online tool allows business owners to identify opportunities, gain insights and resources to help develop growth strategies.
The BNZ Growth Academy is designed for small to medium business owners who want to gain clarity and confidence in making growth decisions. Workshops are free to successful applicants.
Who should apply
Applications are open to BNZ customers who run:
a young company seeking to scale-up rapidly
an established business that hasn’t yet achieved its full growth potential, or
a well-established business looking for the next growth opportunity.
If you’re not a BNZ customer and would like to know more about the BNZ Growth Academy, you can email: bnzgrowthacademy@bnz.co.nz
This article is solely for information purposes. It’s not financial or other professional advice. For help, please contact BNZ or your professional adviser. No party, including BNZ, is liable for direct or indirect loss or damage resulting from the content of this article.
What really is the Māori economy and what’s its true potential?: As we’ve covered a few times here on Caffeine, the Māori economy in NZ has been surging.
As shown in The Te Ōhanga Māori 2023 report, Māori entities grew from contributing $17 billion to New Zealand's GDP in 2018 to $32 billion in 2023. The Māori economy asset base grew from $69 billion in 2018 to $126 billion in 2023.
A new report Released on Wednesday by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aoteaora, the Amplifying Māori approaches: The transformative potential of Māori economies report asks a simple question - what is this economy and what is its real potential?
As the report notes, orthodoxy says economies revolve around assets being worked by waged labour and exchanged on markets. These things can be measured and quantified, often in monetary terms. Māori perspectives suggest economies revolve around taonga with labour organised through mahi and reciprocal exchanges based on utu.
Some of these cannot be measured and quantified. In the contemporary context, Māori economies do all of the above: wages and mahi, assets and taonga, markets and utu. This report moves from the dominant framing of the Māori economy recognised in conventional terms, to a framing that takes the diversity of Māori economic practices seriously, and seeks to amplify all of these.
It’s an interesting read which adds useful context to the relatively simplistic ‘number go up’ analysis that often accompanies reports strictly based on asset values and GDP figures. Give it a read here.
Meta to build data centre roughly the size of Manhattan: I remember being in the newsroom when Facebook became ‘Meta’ and bet the future of the company on our shared virtual future and put up the billions to back that bet. While it’s arguable how much progress has been made toward realising that dream, Zuckerberg is now racing toward something which feels more tangible - reaching ‘super intelligent’ AI by rapidly scaling Meta’s A.I infrastructure. That looks like two massive new data centres, Prometheus and Hyperion, the first of which is expected to come online next year and the latter to follow.
Hyperion will take up about as much area as Manhattan and eventually draw down up to 5 GW of power. That’s as much as as a small country draws of its grid at a given moment, with NZ drawing 6-7 GW at peak times. The energy hunger of these data centres is genuinely mind boggling. Some estimates for data centre use in the states suggest up to 12% of the grid could be used to power them by 2028. It makes me particularly interested in founders and startups who are focused on solving for energy demand because that truly seems to be upstream of so much of our future economy.
Scaling Without Selling Out: The Systems and Stories of Scale
Join us for an insightful and revealing fireside chat with James Hurman (Previously Unavailable) and Shannon Scott (SVP, Global Head of Product at Airwallex). Together, they’ll unpack the hidden infrastructure behind scale: payments, workflows, capital flow and the equally essential brand scaffolding: positioning, emotional resonance, and customer connection. Perfect for founders wondering how to scale both what they do and how they’re remembered.
Date and time
Wed, 30 Jul 2025 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM NZST
Location
The Assembly at Britomart 11 Britomart Place #level 10 Auckland
Cost
$55 but free for Caffeine community + 1 with promo code CAFFEINEFRIENDS
Pod Pick: Business is Boring: How AF Drinks is leading their space in the US - For those who simply couldn’t get enough of Lisa King, founder of AF Drinks, following our Caffeine conversation (available here) she has now joined the always exceptional business is boring pod to discuss launching with purpose, building credibility in a new, huge market, and how the company is redefining what it means to celebrate without alcohol. It’s a great listen.
Grok debuts ‘A.I companions’ and I am very concerned: As much time as I spend talking about the oncoming wave of A.I and its radical effects on the economy, I think the social impacts will be felt first and could be just as disruptive. Grok is now providing access to A.I companions for those on its premium tiers, companions like the anime girl above, and there’s been some disturbing reporting at how easily she will become sexual when prompted even when on Kids mode’.
CNET reported on some interesting data recently that over half of US teens are using AI companion chat bots. I think A.I companions are inevitably going to be a large part of our lives in the very near future but I can’t help but feel that all the issues of isolation and loneliness highlighted by the social media age are just going to be super charged by having a perfectly sycophantic character in your pocket who will always tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether its good for you or not.
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