Five things you wish New Zealand would do to support the tech sector

• I don’t have five things, I have one thing. While I do think there is money in the system to fund start-ups  and I do see a lot of good businesses get funding, I think as a nation we are very conservative investors. Many of the riskier and big idea start-ups need to head offshore for their later stage rounds. On one level, this can be beneficial as offshore money typically also comes with international scale expertise and deep networks – both which are crucial to scale. My concern is that as a nation, this also means we lose a lot of the benefit when that company exits as the money stays offshore. So I would love to see more later stage funding of companies, especially those with unconventional ideas – ‘moonshots’ as we like to call them in the US.

Five things that can be done to support tech entrepreneurs

• Make the planes faster.
• Make the days longer.
• Make the caffeine stronger.
• Make the money go further.
• Make the customers say yes quicker.