Growing internationally successful tech businesses from Christchurch

@phildriver that's the classic "it must be better if it comes from overseas". I've always found the bigger the NZ company you're trying to sell to the more likely they are to dismiss your product because its made here. Even trying to sell into Australia gets you the "surely we do a better product here". However go a bit further afield like Asia or the UK and suddenly the message changes to "wow, your from NZ? You guys are really innovative down there, what have you got?". How do we fix that? Well I'm back to my "promotion/PR" message. Look at how the tech sector is now viewed after the high visibility success of Xero, Wynard, SLI etc, we need more promotion - national and international - around the little guys (riding on the coat tails of the bigger success stories) to get other that impression that its better if made overseas.

I found progress generally easier for high tech business in the UK. From my experience as UK Trade & Investment's Head of Trade for the East of England, I saw that what has made Cambridge so successful has been an emphasis put into assisting entrepreneurs to improve management ability and hire knowledge workers/executives with the right commercial skills. This has been both through government as well as local business networks. Access to both angel and VC funding has been important as have the various innovation centres such as St Johns where co-working spaces, networking and collaboration abound, as Phil has experienced in Oxford. What is also very striking is the culture of Cambridge where people go out of their way to be helpful and share knowledge - through networking and mentoring. None of this " if it comes from overseas it must be better". The Cambridge Network (a membership organisation- www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk) brings people together - from business and academia - to meet each other and share ideas, encouraging collaboration and partnership for shared success. For the small business the benefits are many - access to information and the ability to find staff particularly remote workers.

So the New Zealand (or ideally the Christchurch, New Zealand) brand is something we can successfully sell far-afield but closer to home the brand, along with the culture here needs some tweaking? What does the Christchurch brand look like I wonder? Where is our point of difference from our competitors - like Wellington...?

I don't think we should give up on the local market. It's the nursery in which young companies grow build strength to withstand the rigours of overseas markets. The way procurement is done by local and central gov't and agencies is badly broken: we need to work to convince gov't to alter those practices. I recommend that all Chch-based (NZ-owned) IT firms join http://nzrise.org.nz so that our voice is heard by gov't.

Let me chip in with a couple of thoughts, some already touched on by others above:
1. Culture - failure in NZ is still generally seen as something that carries stigma and shame. This drives risk adversity, which in turn stifles innovation. A Bay Area VC is unlikely to listen to you until you've already failed a couple of times....
2. Capital - getting better but nothing like the playing field in, for example, Cambridge Ma. And it's not just money, it's having your ideas (product innovation, service innovation, business model innovation) scrutinised and critiqued by experienced investors, many of whom started out with their own start-ups.
3. Management skills - New Zealand simply does not have the critical mass of large corporates (and support institutions) to tip out internationally competitive management skills (strategic, operations, performance, people management). I doubt we're much better than Australia in that regard and they're not that flash;
http://worldmanagementsurvey.org/wp-content/images/2010/07/Report_Management-Matters-in-Australia-just-how-productive-are-we.pdf
4. Access to a customer base you can use to empathise, iterate, co-create and validate your ideas with.
I don't believe any of these are show-stoppers for a Christchurch (or even NZ) tech sector, but we do need to figure out how to mitigate their impact.

I see amazing innovation coming out of New Zealand and in particular Christchurch and am very proud of my home town for this. Having been based internationally now for over 17 years in Australia, USA and Asia there are a few things that really stand out for me where NZ has to get better.

1. Capital (discussed here at length already)
2. Sales and Marketing Investments to Build Channel (I see this as a weakness with NZ companies, not all but many) - may be due to (1) but I also think it's a prioritization problem of world class engineering vs world class sales and not balancing those effectively as we should.
3. The Pitch and Message - I see a lot of pitches every day, some are amazing but in the majority we can really improve the way we message what our products solve as business problems and why that is important and useful to said customer/investor.
4. Local Business/Government buying NZ tech and startups. One of the great reasons about why the Bay area is successful is local companies and government are very supportive of buying their own and encouraging startups by purchasing their solutions. I think we need to do a much better job of getting local businesses and government to buy our own to help bootstrap our companies with cash flow and customer credentials they can then use more effectively in (2).
5. NZ and Christchurch are brands and it's good to be proud of where we come from, international buyers however are looking for solutions to their business problems whatever they are. Where you come from is less important or can even be an Achilles heal so balancing that message is vital. I like to give the example of Israel, they produce some amazing technology, I have seen that understood by customers but in some countries the stigma of buying from there makes it a challenge for them so they often dress themselves differently to focus on the outcomes they can drive for customers and that differentiation helps a lot.

I have been working with CDC and members of the local ecosystem to bring down Bill Reichert, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures and Adiba Barney, CEO of SVForum, the oldest and largest entrepreneur network in the Valley, to Christchurch for 24 hours, 5-6 May. We are hosting an event for the local tech community at EPIC on 6th.
Whilst visits like this can raise the profile of an ecosystem with some key Valley players, it is what we do to follow up that matters. I look forward to working with CDC and other members of the ChCh team to see how we can establish a pathway for early stage tech companies to connect into Bill & Adiba's networks once the visit is over. Networks like those can begin to address some of the issues raised in this thread.

@sheraleemacdonald - "how could we better lift the profile of the local tech sector and success stories and who could be doing this? How could tech companies better promote themselves?" - Good questions and I'm not sure I really have the answers, perhaps someone here with a background in PR / mass comms might be able to chime in? Here are some observations of mine though:

1/ NZ businesses need to think bigger than the Australian market where, if they attempt entering will find themselves working with a NZ handicap from day 1. Do what Flight of the Conchords did (and what Split Enz should have done) - go straight to the US instead of swimming against the tide in Australia. We need to encourage this mindset.

2/ I used to subscribe to the Business NZ newsletter. I unsubscribed after awhile because the underwhelming content coming from it was presented in a style which looked like it was designed in the 1990s. If people from a developed overseas market saw this - supposedly representing our nation's business community, I dare say they would similarly have unsubscribed. Showing up to the party wearing jandals isn't a good way to elevate a region's reputation for innovation. There is an opportunity to create a communications hub (website, EDMs, social media) focussing on Chch's tech sector specifically and do it properly with due attention paid to the design, content and brand. If Christchurch can distinguish itself and become a brand unto itself, there are opportunities in that.

@kylie - I'd love to know myself what this might look like. Hopefully we will get to find out..!

3/ As a whole we - as in, New Zealanders - are not exactly known for being strong communicators. I recall David Kirk saying something to this effect as a partial explanation for why NZers don't do so well in the Australian market, I see it everyday in my dealings and it was really drilled home last year when a mumbling NZ politician was featured on the US's Daily Show saying something incoherent about something being "pretty legal".. I would love to see Chch tech participants given access to business communication courses and resources so they can represent themselves better than that politicaian did... If Christchurch's tech people can confidently communicate, they can confidently represent themselves in markets like the US and UK where communication is key. Provide participants in our tech sector with the skills to win. Success breeds success - just as the Black Caps have shown this past summer.

@trevorlaughton with regards to the Bay Area VC attitudes toward failure this I think reflects the maturity of their VC market and aspirational risk-taking culture. It would be a good place to get to here and going by the comments on this thread it seems like we're heading in the right direction.

Even though it's harder, due to language and cultural barriers, I (speaking as a US/NZ dual citizen) think we should consider giving the US market a miss and heading straight to Europe and Asia. The US is a largely hostile (litigious and flooded with poor quality patents and patent trolls who gleefully destroy up-and-coming companies - see John Oliver's very accurate and pointed take on them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxcc3SM_KA) environment that's largely inward looking (the US believes it's the world leader in IT, and by some measures it is), and is already relatively mature and saturated. Surely the greatest gains are likely to be in markets with substantial commerce but less mature IT supply ecosystems. It just means we have to find people who speak the local language and know the local cultures! To me, that's a far more robust, forward looking approach.

Some good points there Dave - and another classic clip from John Oliver - no one does it better..!