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Welcome to another episode of the Digital Debrief. In this episode we speak to founders of Winely, Abbe (Chief Product Officer) and Jacob (CEO). Winely is an Exocule company and AI-powered precision fermentation solution that optimizes tradition while deepening the connection between the wine and winemaker through real-time, deep learning-based data collection and analysis. They are passionate in the belief that biology can solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Jacob confidently leads the vision and strategy for Exocule’s technology, thereby making scale possible for alternative-protein production. Through Winely's deep tech and proprietary AI-powered physical sensors, Jacob, Abbe and the team are helping winemakers and alternative food manufacturers gain real-time insights into the state of their vintages (or batches), eliminate dangerous and time-consuming manual sampling, and scale their production in an eco-friendly way while also saving them time, labour, money, waste, and many unnecessary interventions.

Welcome to another episode of the Digital Debrief. I’m your host Ben Rose, and today we’re speaking to Carolyn Luey, Chief Digital and Publishing Officer at NZME. Carolyn is a strategic business leader, that brings a depth of experience and a strong track record built over 10 years leading large marketing, sales and operational teams in the telecommunications, technology and media industries. Prior to NZME, Carolyn worked at Vodafone and also MYOB. She is a passionate driver of change particularly where she sees opportunity to drive benefits for customers and leverage the best of digital to create amazing customer experiences. She is a collaborative leader who loves to bring together diverse teams to deliver positive change and turn strategy into brilliant execution and commercial results.

In this episode we speak to our very own co-founder, Mitchell Pham. Mitchell is a serial entrepreneur, senior executive, board director and strategic advisor with expertise in digital transformation, new innovation and technology ventures.

In this episode we speak to Luke Campbell, Co-Founder of VXT. Luke Campbell & Lucy Turner founded Vxt in 2018 at Uni after identifying a problem that most people can relate to, that voicemail sucks. They released an application used by tens of thousands of people globally to help manage voicemail and have grown the business from there. Vxt is a smart communications platform that leverages rich communication data to automate the work no one wants to do; admin. Since launching in March, Vxt has grown to serve customers all around the world who make thousands of calls every week, connecting to CRMs and record-keeping systems so that notes, time, and other details from calls can be recorded automatically, which helps firms grow revenue and mitigate risk.

Zeald was formed in 2001 by three young guys from the small New Zealand town of Mangawhai Heads brother David and Brent Kelly and their cousin Hamish Bradick. Now, Zeald is the largest SME website design and digital transformation agency in New Zealand and has clients throughout both New Zealand and Australia. Jarra established and leads Zeald’s commercial agency in Tauranga and was a key part of the team, together with co-founder David Kelly, that developed Zeald's social impact initiative, GEM (the Get Ecommerce Movement). GEM is an ecommerce-driven digital transformation initiative aimed at helping SMEs get started on their digital journey and trading online, which they launched in NZ in March last year in response to Covid's impact on SME businesses. The technology has since grown with a number of developments and partnerships established, as a result. Jarra is now spearheading the rollout of GEM in Fiji, and is part of the architecture team that developed the Digital Cluster Initiative, a partnership between Zeald and Bank of New Zealand (as members of the Digital Boost Alliance).

As founder and creator of one of New Zealand’s most successful ever start-ups My Food Bag as well as Au Pair Link and now Tend Health – Cecilia is a serial innovator and one of New Zealand’s leading entrepreneurs. Cecilia is passionate about helping women in business and solving the everyday problems of working mums and dads.

In this episode we speak with Jordan Thoms, CTO and Co-Founder at Kami. Kami was founded in 2013 by Auckland university students Hengjie Wang, Jordan Thoms, and Alliv Samson along with Bob Drummond, looking for a way to digitally streamline their note-taking. Their digital classroom tool was built to transform documents of any kind into an interactive and more collaborative learning experience. Kami is used by over 30 million educators and students across more than 180 countries, enabling a more engaged and collaborative learning environment both in the classroom and online. Kami was recently named the fastest-growing company in New Zealand in the Deloitte Fast 50 index, and famously celebrated by giving each of its staff a $10,000 bonus. In this episode Jordan talks to us about the company, and the role technology has played in their success.

Recently a finalist in the 2021 CIO of the year awards, Andrew is a customer-focused technology leader who has spent most of his career in the IT and Telecommunications sectors, working across fixed and mobile technologies serving business, wholesale, government and end-consumers. Originally from Melbourne Australia, Andrew spent eight and a half years with nbn building and running Australia’s wholesale broadband access network in a number of senior leadership roles. His time at nbn included the IT implementation for the HFC rollout, leading the Systems Engineering team of 1300 resources and kicking off their Field Services transformation program. Andrew also led the agile strategy and transformation that brought business and technology people together into cross function teams aligned to key business processes and covering all technologies. He moved nbn’s software engineering capability to a 100% on-shore model and merged the network and software engineers into the same squads to achieve end to end outcomes for the business, rolling out a Scaled Agile Framework across the organisation. Andrew moved to Auckland to join Vodafone NZ as Chief Information Officer in 2019 in the same month Vodafone New Zealand was sold by Vodafone Global, and has taken Vodafone on their journey towards engineering excellence, agile ways of working and a brave new world of self sufficiency and independence. And today, we’re lucky enough to have him on the show.

Dil is on a mission to grow NZ's emerging startup ecosystem. She has worked in various roles from investment to hands-on operational leadership roles at many tech start-ups. She is also Startup Genome’s Ambassador for NZ, a Programme Manager & Business Coach with Catalysr (Australia, NZ), an accelerator for migrant and ex refugee entrepreneurs. She was one of EY’s 2015 cohort of Entrepreneurial Winning Women. In this episdoe Dil chats to us about Athena X Ventures, which is a digital incubator for women and diverse founders in tech, science, arts, and media. Providing them with the resources and information they need to thrive, and guiding them through New Zealand’s start-up ecosystem.

Ruby is part of the CEO Collective and Product at Joyous. Joyous is a Kiwi Tech company helping large organisations include their people in making change happen. The way they do that is with their two-way conversational feedback platform. They are known for taking employee feedback, making it open instead of anonymous, using it outside of just HR topics and giving people a voice that actually gets heard. Prior to this, Ruby helped other Kiwi startups achieve global success within the engineering and product functions. She is also the co-authr of Joyfully, a book about shared leadership, modern organisational structures and a new way of working for product and engineering teams.

Sonya has experience in global marketing and product management. She worked in the tech scene for a number of years, most recently at Xero and Kiwibank. At Sharesies, Sonya’s main focus is to lead the best user experience and outcomes, in the product and in marketing. Along with her co-founders, Sonya saw an opportunity to make investing more accessible, providing everyone with an equal chance to grow their wealth. In this episode Sonya will be talking about the digital transformation that Sharesies has been a part of, providing the first digital platform for everyday kiwis to learn and invest in the NZX, ASX and US exchanges.

Sam’s a thought leader, storyteller and creative technology innovator. She’s spent over 20 years bringing stories and experiences to life, starting with digital and extending into exhibitions, and augmented and virtual reality. As co-founder and Managing Director of award-winning creative tech studio Method and AR/VR studio M Theory, Sam is on a mission to foster greater collaboration within the tech and creative industries, with the goal of showcasing local talent and attracting international projects. In this episode Sam talks to us about an interactive tool they worked on for the University of Auckland’s prospective students. Your World, Your Way was developed with the goal to engage prospective students in a new and refreshing way.