The Angel Association of New Zealand (AANZ) held its 14th Angel Summit at Ohariu Farm a short drive out of Wellington city. Given we're in the red-light setting due to Omicron in the community and the event capped at 100 people it was great to have four people there to represent Canterbury Angels and nearly ten of us from the Christchurch ecosystem attending as well as others from across the South Island. The late Gerald Carter, long time CA member and our good friend was in our thoughts as he attended many of these conferences.

Myself alongside Steven Moe one of our CA members have written together some reflections on the summit.

Walking into the room the energy and welcoming vibe was really exciting, to have so many likeminded people together it shows that collaboration and partnerships are the way of the future.

There was a wide range of people in the room, Angels from across the country to VCs, professional advisors and Government. Speakers ranged from founders and Angels to the Deputy Prime Minister and Adrian Orr who used the event to announce in his speech that the Reserve Bank would be launching a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency). Each speaker introduced themselves with their pepeha to normalise this and make it part of our everyday world.

The theme of the conference was “Go Big or Go Home” so there was an emphasis on trying things out and experimenting to scale start-us, all for the ultimate benefit of New Zealand. A few of the themes that stood out: 

• We need to stop writing more reports, and instead get on with it and encourage more investment to level up higher into the hundreds of millions (or more), while also increasing visibility of founders to encourage others to be entrepreneurs so the pipeline increases.

• There seems to be a new stage that we are entering with more money available for investing both from onshore and from offshore, valuations going up and increasing competition for good founders/companies to invest in.

• At the same time there is a need to support founders and make sure they don’t burn out (see below for more on this);

• Messy cap tables – show stopper or not? Here is an article Dave Moskovitz an Arch Angel wrote on after his chat, alongside others with a panel discussion.

• Woven through the talks was a feeling that those in the room generally are there for more than the profits. Sure, getting a good return is important but mainly that is to ensure sustainability and the impact and purpose of the companies are also becoming more and more part of the reason for investing. The talk by the Toha founders was an example of this as they shared about their fundraising journey to create a new marketplace to invest in environmental impact.

• We need to look after ourselves, and our fellow investors too – our wellbeing is important.

To give a sample of the sessions here is a summary of two sessions with the 45 minutes condensed to a paragraph each:

One session was called 'Go Big or Go Again', which had two founders who had to pause their companies or shut them down due to Covid – their perspective was helpful as they shared openly about the depression and difficult times that they had been through. It reminded Steven of an interview with Michael Mayell he did for seeds podcast where he shared the ‘failures’ he had before the Cookie Time success and said they were ‘compost from which the successful venture grew’. Too often we can hype and have unrealistic expectations for founders - this was a good reminder of a few basic human principles: build trust and communicate between founders and investors, seek mentors, be honest and transparent, don’t put on a front that everything is good all the time (as in reality we all have problems), support founders earlier in the journey not at the last minute, so as investors front foot the support of founders. Also, that it is OK to talk about failures and normalise talking about dips and challenges too. We need to change the narrative across the community, as ‘failure’ is the wrong word.

The final session was high paced from Dr Michelle Dickinson aka ‘Nanogirl’, about how we can support early education which ultimately will change our start-up ecosystem so as to be “Infusing our children with ‘go big or go home’”. The key theme was that very often successful Founders tinkered and played as children with their parents support so that they could find their passion young, make mistakes and then they become massive later on. Some stats were shared that in a one hour period while at school or preschool, a 4 year old asks 107 questions an hour, a 6 year old starts school and asks 2.5 questions an hour while an 11 year old asks no questions – is our education system helping stimulate curiosity? Or could we do better? “We’ve been trained to believe that we are supposed to have the answers … what we need is to have the questions.” We need to have freedom to fail and ask questions, like we do as very young children. Life is full of surprises - no one ever bought a ticket for a flat rollercoaster. Are we missing the magic? Probably - so stay curious….

Dinner out at Boomrock was an incredible experience, the buses navigating their way round the cliffs with the Cook Strait below really was something. The photo shown is the sunset from where we ate dinner, played extreme golf on one of the Southern Hemisphere’s most extreme golf holes and enjoyed a divine meal.

The next Angel Summit is going to be held in Queenstown on 27th/28th October, it would be great to have a CA team there, especially considering it is just down the road.