Diaspora.nz

Society & Culture

Profiling the hidden gems and emerging leaders of the great Kiwi ex-pat community

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Episodes

Mike Forster, co-founder at Onfido, on startup pricing, big brand marketing and angel investing at the bottom of the world

Today we catch up with Mike Forster, Marketing Director at Yum brands in Sydney, and previously co-founder of the red-hot UK Fintech startup Onfido. Onfido now a dominant player in the identity space having raised over $60m USD. In this episode David and Mike chat about lessons learned the hard way and what Mike calls street fighting your way to series A, how the marketing landscape is evolving with big data, plus what Mike really looks for in Angel investments. Huge thank you to Dave Insull for...

Feb 19, 2019•19 min

Tom Harding, Co-founder & CEO of Mish Guru on the future of Snapchat and Building a Remote Team

Today we catch up with Tom Harding, Founder and CEO of Mish Guru, the startup leading the charge in helping brands effectively develop, monitor and monetise content through Snapchat’s platform. Before empower brands to tell better stories through Snapchat, Tom was co-founder of Sitesorted and has been involved in the Lightning lab incubator back in New Zealand after a dual degree in engineering at Canterbury. In this episode David and Tom chat about what they’re watching in growing their busines...

Feb 18, 2019•30 min

Steven Banerjee, Co-founder & CEO at Mekonos, on jumping from academia to medicine and enabling the next wave of genomic medicine

We caught up with Steven Banerjee, founder and CEO of Mekonos. After studying towards a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in Canterbury, NZ, Steven translated his research and passion to Mekonos—working on the edge of medicine, developing nano-needle arrays that allow the manipulation of cells at scale, helping reduce cost and time to develop cures. In this episode David and Steven discuss moving into highly specialized fields without prior deep background (in Steven's case going from mechanical eng...

Feb 18, 2019•18 min

Alex Kendall, Co-founder at Wayve.ai on Machine Vision and the Future of Autonomous Driving

We caught up with Alex Kendall, an ex-pat Kiwi currently living in Cambridge, UK, where he’s a research fellow Trinity College finishing off a PhD in computer vision and robotics. Alex is blending his research into a business with the launch of Wayve.ai. In this interview, you’ll hear about Alex’s path into the cutting edge of computer science, learn about what machine vision really is and how has accelerated development in fields such as Autonomous driving. Alex also drops a few gems for founde...

Feb 18, 2019•23 min

Campbell Brown, Founder of PredictHQ on the information economy and what it takes to crack the US

In this episode, David sits down with Campbell Brown, founder and CEO of Predict HQ. An events intelligence platform based out of San Francisco, Predict HQ helps clients ranging from big-name airlines to Uber better manage their supply and pricing. Since this episode was recorded, Campbell and the team have gone on to raise a further $15m round in funding from the likes of Rampersand VC and the SF-based Lightspeed Ventures. Huge thank you to Jon Davies for the intro that made this episode possib...

Dec 18, 2018•20 min

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