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Kiwi Landing Pad: Amazon Activate Partner

5/6/2019

Kiwi Landing Pad is all about solving problems for New Zealand startups, helping them focus on building great export ready businesses. We noticed a lot of Kiwi tech companies build on Amazon Web Services, so we partnered with them to provide the resources you need to get started on AWS.

Being an Amazon Activate Partner, we’re pleased to offer Kiwi companies that are part of the Kiwi Landing Pad community $10K AWS credits and $5K tech support.

To apply for the program:

Join the Kiwi Landing Pad community here
Follow this link to Amazon Activate, and enter your details.
Enter our organisation code (1FUqB) when prompted (as shown in the picture below) Please note: the organisation code is not a promo code, so make sure to enter it into the Organization ID box (pictured below).

There are no conditions to apply. However, if you’ve already been allocated/used this volume of credits you won’t be able to apply through this link. If this is the case, your application will have to be reviewed on a case by case analysis.

If you’re experiencing any problems, or have any queries, Amazon have a team of people to support you. Simply email them at aws-anz-startup-enquiries@amazon.com

Just a reminder this offer is available to KLP community members, so remember to join us. Welcome to the KLP Tribe!

Visiting San Francisco with Kiwi Landing Pad

5/5/2019

Kiwi Landing Pad is located 981 Mission Street in SoMa at our new awesome coworking space Covo.

If you’d like to use Covo, just turn up and let them know that you are a guest of the Kiwi Landing Pad. You can do this regardless of if we are around or not. If the Kiwi Landing Pad seats are full for the day, hourly coworking starts for as little as $4 an hour.

You’ll have access to wifi which the community team at reception can set you up with.

You can book meeting rooms through the liquid space app.
They also have a coffee, wine bar and food available.

Also check out the events that the team host weekly from member lunches to Friday happy hours.

Expanding? Questions to ask yourself.

5/5/2019

Am I ready?
How much do I know about the market I'm going to/into?
Do I have sufficient resources? (capital and team and plan?)
Who has done this before that I might be able to talk to?
Are there any conferences in this space that I could attend?
Where do I focus?
Have I learnt enough from my recon trips?
What don’t i know?
Do I have a market map? Eg: who invests in my space? Partners? Competitors?
What do I want from the Kiwi Landing Pad?

Q: Can you talk about resilience, perseverance, mental health and looking after yourself?

8/29/2018

Siobhan Bulfin
CEO & Founder
Melon Health

A: I harp on this a lot, because people often ask what you need to start a company and stick with it. And there are two things to me that are the most important things. You need to be persistent. There are very few overnight successes. Jeremy Moon, Icebreaker, it was 10 years before they made a profit, and that’s retail. So you need to be ready to do it for a long time. You need to love it… because you’re going to be doing it for a long time.

When I meet CEO’s of larger companies I usually ask ‘if there’s one bit of advice to up and coming CEO’s, what would it be? And it’s always two things. One is, get rid of people as soon as you know you need to get rid of them. In other words, don’t continue carrying someone just because you don’t have the guts to let them go. You need a good performing team. But the other thing is to just keep showing up. And I remind myself of that sometimes, because that’s actually not that hard. Everything else is hard, but I can just keep showing up. I can do that.

So that’s persistence, and resilience is something else. We can train ourselves to be more resilient. You have to be resilient because it’s just extremely hard a lot of the time. And you just get kicked back and kicked back. Pandora the music station pitched to 333 investors before they got a dime. So you just have to get kicked off the horse and get back on it time and time again. So resilience is really important.

So persistence and resilience would be the key things, and looking after yourself. It’s hard to do that obviously if you’re working crazy hours most days of the week. But for me I run and I do yoga and I meditate everyday. And I swear by it. That’s what works for me.

Partnership: Stripe Atlas & Kiwi Landing Pad, Incorporating in the USA.

7/3/2018

There are lots of questions when establishing your business, and most don’t have black and white answers. We know these are serious decisions you’re making, and believe that the bureaucracy of business shouldn’t be a roadblock. We want to arm you with the tools that you need to get your company’s foundation right, so you can focus on the important stuff. This is why we’re proud to partner with Stripe, to bring you access to Stripe Atlas.

Stripe Atlas is one of Stripe’s newer products; the platform allows you to set up in the US, both as a Delaware C-Corporation or as an LLC. They also allow you to open a business bank account with Silicon Valley bank, and open a Stripe account immediately. Now, you’ll never need to leave your garage or coffee shop in New Zealand to have a full US entity and bank account; something no other company in the world offers.

In addition to this, Stripe has built a full suite of tools around post-incorporation. The legal entity and bank account is not where it ends, so they make sure early-day legal, tax and accounting processes can be managed through the platform. With Stripe Atlas you do everything from issue founder stock, to sort your corporate and Delaware franchise taxes. Stripe also partners with legal and accounting firms to provide straightforward advice for a much reduced cost, and tools like Gusto and Xero to provide straightforward advice and a well-lit path as you think about the necessary post-incorporation steps.

There are also the Stripe Atlas guides, which are a series of ‘encyclopedia entries’ to help you understand exactly what you need to do as you’re thinking about everything from hiring, to paying your taxes, to incorporation. This set of guides is available free to anyone here.

Being an entrepreneur is hard but access to tools is not. That’s why we’re proud to partner with Stripe to bring you the tools you need to grow great global businesses.

Follow this link to join Stripe Atlas using the Kiwi Landing Pad invite. Alternatively, you can find more information about the product here.

watch the recap

Q: What was your approach to funding Spotlight Reporting?

2/20/2018

Richard Francis
CEO & Founder
Spotlight Reporting

A: “We bootstrapped those first three years as I mentioned. We had a successful consultancy so had little bit of money we could throw at. The little nugget of genius we had was seeing a gap in the Xero ecosystem shortly after we’d launched Spotlight Reporting. We were chatting to Hamish Edwards, the co-founder of Xero, and thought we could build workpapers that are online. So we built the first workpapers set - which is about as exciting as it sounds - but is a very useful tool for an accountant. Rod [Drury] basically said ‘we need that don’t we. Name your price’. It was very early stage so we settled on - public knowledge - $800K, and put that money back into Spotlight. So Julie [Richard’s co-founder, and wife] and I have put everything into it. We had the big mortgage, and all that stuff.

When we were talking to Xero about potentially being acquired, I thought ‘why don’t we raise a similar amount of money and really go to that next stage?’ We ended up getting some great early stage investors, and 3 years in did a seed round of $1.3M. David Wilson, Vend director and major Xero shareholder was one of our backers, as was Craig Winkler, MYOB founder and major shareholder Xero, and so was Graham Shaw, Director of PushPay, Gentrack, Rightway. So we had these cool guys - there is lots of others I can mention - who got in early and that allowed me to hire the next 10 people to seed offices in the UK, San Francisco and Australia more thoroughly.

My accounting background has been useful in understanding the SaaS metrics. I understand the formula that drives our business and I’m very clear on our strategy. But I’ve also got that fiscal management thing going on. The beauty of that is we’ve looked after the money. We do lots of cool things, spend a lot on events and all that. But shareholders money matters. It’s other people’s life savings. Get a CFO in. Get an accountant. Make sure you look after shareholders money. There is a guy at SaaStr who said ‘every dollar of shareholders money matters. And every dollar we spend I want to see ROI’. It might sound extreme, but I think that’s quite important. We’ve all seen founders do a round, and blow the money on shit, or lose it through really poor or loose management. The business either goes under, or needs emergency funding, or a down round. A lot of that is not actually down to the company itself or the product not being that good. But it’s just drinking the kool-aid and getting out there and spending the money on shit.”

Q: What were some of the scaling and operational mistakes you made (at the time of adding 20 employees a week)?

8/9/2017

Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire
(acquired by Google in 2012)

A: There were so many. In particular, our desire to stay ‘flat’. We hated anything that had any slight smell of bureaucracy or ‘large company-ness’. But [we learnt] when you’re growing at that rate you need leadership. We kept the organisation too flat. When we did need leaders we promoted people, leaving capability gaps.

Our sales organisation was a good example of this. We needed managers to support our sales people, so we promoted some of our best salespeople. This worked well for the most part. Except we lacked the depth for active salespeople to move into managerial roles. We saw a drop in sales for a few months until we got a handle on that.

The other learning was around the things that you think suck. Your employees want performance management and to get regular reviews. You think they suck, but they matter to your employees. [We made mistakes with] the some of the things that relate to hiring and developing your employees. Along with firing them at the right time!

Q: How did you figure this all out? The lifetime of the business was four years. You were busy scaling the business, getting customers and hiring four hundred people. It doesn’t leave you that much time to learn. What did you do as a founder to figure

8/9/2017

Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire

A: We did a lot of 'on the fly' learning. I remember the first day back at work each year. I'd say ‘okay, my new year's resolution is to spend more time reading in the business’. I’d spend the first week while it was still kind of quiet doing lots of reading, and it felt amazing. Then week two rolled around, and everything was chaos again. You're making decisions on the go and all that flies out the window. So, the truth is I didn’t spend a whole lot of time reading management books or blogs. And I also - to my detriment - didn’t spend an awful lot of time cultivating mentors. I didn’t feel like I had the time for it. I wouldn't advise that, it was just me.

We did work well as a team. There was a lot of smart people in the room. When challenges came along we had the kind of culture where we’d sit down and hash them out. If you have a few smart people in the room and you’re willing to listen to each other it’s amazing what you can figure out. We also made lots of mistakes along the way; you have to when you’re moving that fast. We made mistakes, reacted, fixed them and learnt from them.

Q: Can you talk about doing business in Japan? The ethos, and what it is like to do business there?

6/28/2017

Jonny Hendriksen
Founder & CEO
Shuttlerock
Previously ValueClick

A: All in all I ended up in Japan for 21 years, so a long long time. 21 years in Japan has taught me a few things. The Japanese are always very much team first. Take the Japanese football team, it’s taken many years to be good at football. They always famously used to pass the ball around in front of the goal, because no one wanted to step out of the group and score. They used to bring in Brazilian coaches, and the biggest thing they were having to teach the Japanese was to go on their own. There is a time and a place to forget the rest of the group, and go score a goal. I guess the same can be said with regards to Japanese society and groups; that they’re very aware of the team.

Because there is so much history in Japan there are a lot of rules in society. I think Japanese find it very relaxing to come to NZ or go overseas because they’re not so constrained. In Japan there are a lot of rules to abide by, so when you first arrive in Japan for a foreigner you can wonder whether you’re doing the right thing or not.

They’re very big on communication. Even for us, we’ve got a wonderful team in Japan but it’s all about going and meeting someone in person; it’s very much face to face. It’s going to be very difficult to do business in Japan through a website or from afar, because it’s really all about relationships. After 5pm business is huge, so you’ll be going out quite regularly with clients. You really build up some long term friendships. The Japanese will do business and do business for a long time but I think they don’t jump into relationships as quickly as we might do in the West. I think they do want to find out more about you as a person. It means a lot to them to know who they’re doing business with. So they really spend the time to understand who you are, and based on that they’ll build a relationship.

Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

5/24/2017

Rod Drury
CEO & Founder
Xero

A: Building a mental model of your industry. How things work. Who the key people are. How you get to see them. With Aftermail, we knew getting on the Gartner magic quadrant and having the analysts understand what we are doing was really important. So who are the analysts? Ring them up. Are they speaking at a conference? Can you meet them face to face? Can you ask them out to lunch?

I was pretty ruthless at that networking. I remember going to the angel investment conference before we raised any money. I was thinking where’s all the money? Oh, all those people are together, they have a conference. They had an event at Black Barn and when I got up to speak I said I’m so disappointed there’s no cheeky founders here. Any cheeky founder would have done the mapping and worked out that all the money was going to be at an event in Hawkes Bay for two or three days, that’s where you want to be to build that relationship. The money you want to raise in New Zealand will come from people in that room. So working out how to get in there.

Kiwi Landing Pad is a not for profit community, that focuses on supporting the best New Zealand Founders global growth aspirations. We've been around for ten years, with a twenty year vision to make a meaningful and sustainable contribution to the New Zealand entrepreneurial community and, in doing so, positively impacting economic growth, export income and the wellbeing of New Zealand.

Proudly supported by: The Bank of New Zealand, New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, Sam Morgan, Stephen Tindall and the Holdsworth Family.