Good morning Sunrise!

More than a dozen years after they were first uttered, the words of the late Sir Paul Callaghan rang out yesterday in Auckland as a rallying cry to founders. 

‘We have to change the way we live in New Zealand. We have to change the way we employ our young people,’ Sir Paul said in his famous mythbusting speech, delivered in 2011. ‘We have to tell the stories of what is possible here, and the evidence is here that it is possible.’

Blackbird partner Samantha Wong quoted the legendary Kiwi physicist and visionary during her introduction at startup festival Sunrise Aotearoa, which she said was all about telling these very stories – of just what’s possible to create from our shores. 

“Telling stories is the ‘how’ that generates the people power that changes the mindset of a nation,” said Wong. “Collective belief in our own potential is the invisible force that propels humanity forward.”

This year’s Sunrise speaker lineup included Allbirds’ Tim Brown, Sharesies’ Brooke Roberts, VeVe’s David Yu and Canva’s Cameron Adams, among many others. Speakers came from industries as varied as fashion, fintech, entertainment and enterprise software.

“Collectively, their companies have generated billions of dollars of revenue and employ tens of thousands of people,” noted Wong. 

An 800-strong crowd gathered for the day, and Caffeine got amongst them to catch the morning sessions on Sunrise’s main Sunroom stage. Here are some of the highlights:

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Confidence and humility 

Allbirds co-founder and co-CEO Tim Brown kicked off the day’s storytelling, which included recalling an encounter with a professor while taking an entrepreneurship class in the early days of developing the shoe brand.

“He called me into his office and said, ‘this is the worst idea I have seen. And trust me, I've been working in this space for a long time. This is by far and away the worst’,” recalled Brown. 

The professor urged him to ‘just put it on Kickstarter or something so it can fail quickly and then you can get on with the rest of your life knowing that it was a bad idea’.

It spurred Brown to do just that – and with the help of his brother, $700 and a script written the night before, he shot Allbirds’ Kickstarter video (replayed for the Sunrise crowd) that turned out to be just the push Brown needed. The campaign generated $125,000 worth of sales in four days. 

“It was the beginning of traction,” said Brown. “The lesson there is, this was an idea – an idea even that had been criticised – but sometimes you've just got to start and you've got to put it out into the world.”

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Interviewer Ed Cowan was keen to dig into the elements of Allbirds’ success that could be attributed to its New Zealand origins. Our wool industry heritage was an obvious one, noted Brown, but when Cowan asked what role the typically humble Kiwi nature played in his founder journey, Brown had a less-obvious take. 

“I think there has been a lot of talk of the limitations of that; I'm sure it'll come up in this conference – that we need to be more ambitious or global, more assertive. And I disagree with that completely. I think we've got to understand that confidence and humility can coexist,” he said.

“I think there's a sharpening of edges. And I've certainly learned, having lived in the San Francisco ecosystem, a little bit of an ability to see confidence as a partner of humility so that we can be more assertive about what we want and more confident that the things we build can have global impact.”

Brown also shared how storytelling plays a key role in Allbirds’ culture, explaining that a company’s values need to be connected to a set of behaviours, which then need to be connected to stories as a way to bring them to life.  

“And don't just tell the stories about what went really well,” he said. “When did you make a mistake? When did you ask too many questions or you didn't act? The meat on the bone around this is the ability to take the stories and bring them to life within an organisation. That is culture; that is how you actually shape an organisation – so people feel something.”

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Facing up to challenges

As in Allbirds, Sharesies’ founding team set the company’s values in its very early days, recalled co-founder and co-CEO Brooke Roberts, who was the Sunroom’s second speaker of the day. 

Sharesies’ six co-founders actually didn’t know each other that well when they first established the company, said Roberts, but within the first couple of weeks they sat down together in a cafe and talked about the kind of company they wanted to create.

“That was one of the most productive and best meetings we've had because, as Tim mentioned, your values are intrinsic to how your culture flourishes,” said Roberts.  

Founders constantly encounter naysayers and other challenges, she noted, so Roberts shared three main things the Sharesies team does to counter headwinds.

The first, she said, was to learn to ‘surf the wave’.  

“No matter what business you're in, you're signing yourself up for challenge. And that's why you do it – that’s the fun of it. You're figuring out something new, you’re problem solving and your passion is leading you through creating that change.”

“I've found a way within myself to surf the waves … to just calm down and just surf it and know that it's a luxury to be able to deal with these kinds of problems and challenges and opportunities.”

The second was “injecting a winning feeling on a daily basis”, by ensuring wins were constantly celebrated, while the third was to surround yourself with supporters.

“It's just really great to have that community around you. When you normalise those hard times you're going through, you realise, ‘oh, it's not just me that's finding it hard to raise capital’ if that's the problem or ‘it's not just me trying to figure out how to communicate in a better way that brings people on board’ – or whatever it might be.”

“That's something that really nourishes me and has definitely helped me in the most challenging times.” 

Audience questions for Roberts included asking how the company manages having six co-founders and three co-CEOs (or, as Sharesies calls it, their 3EO). 

Roberts noted the complexity of Sharesies’ business made a large co-founding team, with diverse and complementary skills, essential. And the 3EO model made for quicker decision making, she said. 

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Wise heads

The idea of putting heads together was later put into practice on the Sunroom stage during a live ‘office-hours’ session, in which three founders and Wong got to ask their burning questions of highly experienced tech industry leader Jon Gelsey. A former CEO of Xnor.ai, a computer vision and machine learning firm acquired by Apple for a reported $200 million, Gelsey was also founding CEO of Auth0 Inc, an identity‐as‐a‐service platform, which he grew from three to 300 staff in four years. 

When Blinq founder and CEO Jarrod Webb asked how to scale from 30 to 100 employees, Gelsey advised “shooting really high” and hiring the best people possible. Marketing roles were often difficult to fill, he later noted, saying that the best marketing hire for a complex technology firm was sometimes a subject-matter expert, whose marketing skills could then be developed.

MenuAid co-founder Elise Hilliam was keen to know how to balance time spent operationally in the business with time spent more strategically working on the business.  

“Think of the time you’re working in the business as gathering data to inform how you’re going to spend time on the business to be able to scale,” advised Gelsey. 

“Your number-one job as CEO of a fast-growing company is to figure out how to obsolete yourself from all the things you’re doing right now, because you need the space for all the new stuff that’s going to happen next month, or next year.”

And given his extensive M&A experience, Gelsey was inevitably asked about navigating the road to exit.

“In the end you’re better off not chasing M&A; companies are bought not sold,” he said. 

Gelsey instead said that over time founders should develop relationships with any companies that approach them about potential acquisition, and have conversations around the value they and their technology could potentially add to the potential acquirer. 

“You really want to have been doing a lot of groundwork so the atmosphere, when you do have to pull the trigger for an acquisition – either because you’ve run out of money or you’ve got a good offer on the table and you want to make competitor enquiries, whatever your reason is – you’re not an unknown quantity.”