2 Commas: The $multi-million exit show with Josh Comrie

On the 10th of April 1968, a radio engineer climbed off a sinking ferry in Wellington Harbour, picked up his case of samples, and turned up to his sales meeting the next morning anyway.

That’s Angus Tait, and he’s one thread in the 100th episode of 2 Commas, the secret and occasionally ridiculous story of how a tiny country at the bottom of the world learned to build billion dollar technology companies. I start at a table in 2013 where an extra $2,500 became $775,000, then go back 45 years to trace the whole table that made it possible. Crystal factories under houses, a dial-up hack that bought a Ferrari, and a couch project that sold for the equivalent of a billion dollars.

We get into:

• Why a tiny domestic market became a training camp, not a handicap
• The first big software exits, and what they cost the founders
• How TradeMe changed the way the country saw technology wealth
• The $1 that bought the name Navman
• Why Xero backed itself on the public market instead of Silicon Valley

This is part one of two. Next week, the New Zealanders who built their biggest companies without ever building them here.

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In 1985 I was a kid with a paper round, and I used my spare cash to buy shares in a roller coaster. Or so I thought.

That company, Rainbow Corp, turned out to be a corporate raiding vehicle that got swallowed by the biggest financial machine New Zealand has ever built, run by Ron Brierley. This is the continuation of the Gallagher story, and for once it’s worth going past the lazy “asset stripper” headline. Brierley was a Wellington schoolboy sorting stamp grab-bags who found a repeatable way to make money from badly allocated capital, built a $12 billion empire, lost it, and then proved the whole method all over again with a smaller fund.

We get into:

• How trading stamps became a corporate raiding playbook
• Why “worth more dead than alive” made him rich
• Why every investment strategy eventually hits a ceiling
• The capacity trap that turns founders into passengers
• Why he built a business he couldn’t escape, twice

Every strategy has a size it stops working at. The hard part is knowing yours before the market tells you.

A note: this episode also covers Brierley’s later criminal conviction, addressed directly and without detail.

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Most finance companies live or die on keeping you. Sasha Lockley built one that wants you gone as fast as possible.

She’s a trained classical singer turned forensic accountant who left corporate finance to start Money Sweet Spot, a lender built to get Kiwis out of debt rather than keep them in it. No fees, no default interest, and rewards for improving your financial literacy. In this one she’s honest about the identity shift of becoming a founder, why businesses fail to scale past the person who started them, and New Zealand’s consumer debt problem that nobody wants to say out loud.

We get into:

• Why her lender measures success by the customers it loses
• The borrower story that beats the credit risk curve
• Why founder identity quietly caps how big a business can get
• New Zealand’s debt reality, including the 49% rate still on offer
• Where she’s taking the business, and why it isn’t a bigger loan book

Build something good enough and one day it has to outgrow you. Here’s what that actually takes.

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Connect with Sasha Lockley

A few years ago I bought a new website from a stranger. My own IT company could have built it. They just never told me they did.

That small story is the whole problem in miniature. Your customers can only buy the thing they know exists, and the adjacent work you'd love to win keeps slipping off to someone else. In this solo episode I make an argument most founders won't enjoy: the relationship you're proudest of is exactly why you've got no plan for it. I get into the research, the A/B/C system I use to sort accounts, and the three questions that turn a warm relationship into real revenue growth.

We get into:

The two forces that stop founders selling more to their best customersWhat 38 years of sales research says about being the likeable oneThe A/B/C system for sorting accounts before you planThe three questions every account plan actually needsWhy your customer base is the real moat before an exit

Most founders are sitting on half their next year of growth and don't know it. Here's how to find it.

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$20 and a fax machine. That's what Steve Dunstan started Huffer with.

Twenty-six years later, he'd built one of New Zealand's most recognised streetwear brands, scaled it to around 200 people, survived the GFC, wrestled with a US expansion that didn't go to plan, and lost a co-founder along the way. In this one, Steve is straight about the part founders rarely admit: what happens to your identity when you and the brand become the same thing, what it takes to sell a business you built from the ground up, and how you rebuild yourself once it's gone.

We get into:

• The $20 start and why the constraint helped
• $35k to over $1m in four years, no outside money
• Surviving the GFC as a fashion brand
• Why belonging became the thing that drove performance
• The exit after 26 years, and what came next

Would you know how to stop being the business, the day you finally sell it?

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Connect with Steve Dunstan

In 1937 a horse kept scratching its backside on a farmer's brand new car. That horse accidentally started a company now closing in on a billion dollars a year.

The farmer was Bill Gallagher. He wired the magneto off a motorcycle to his car, shocked the horse, and realised he had a business. His first electric fence was illegal, wired straight into the mains until an inspector made him rip it out, which pushed him to invent the world's first battery powered energiser. This is a solo episode on the Gallagher Group, from a Waikato shed to Buckingham Palace, British Gas, and four of the Five Eyes intelligence sites. It is one of the great New Zealand business stories and a genuine masterclass in diversification, succession, and turning what you already know into what you sell next.

I get into:

• How the 1984 Rogernomics reforms wiped out Gallagher's farmer customer base overnight
• The world-first pivot into perimeter security that saved the company
• Why the best diversifications sit where your capability meets a rising global tailwind
• Why they put 10% of revenue into R&D every year, good times or bad
• Why they handed the CEO role to a 24-year employee, not the next Gallagher
• Sometimes the next billion dollar business is just your old invention pointed at a new problem.

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Money that arrives fast doesn't fix you. It finds out who you already are.

Everyone assumes building real wealth takes twenty years. These three founders didn't wait. Seeby Woodhouse registered Orcon for $29.85 at nineteen, doubled it every year for nine years, and exited at twenty-nine, then spent $18 million on property six weeks before the GFC. Keith Davison failed at five companies before Cloud Conformity went from nothing to a $120 million exit in under two and a half years, with no founder taking a salary for most of them. Joshua Parsons was a cop at seventeen, cleaning pools at twenty-seven, and had built and sold two companies by his early thirties. This best-of episode is three honest accounts of fast money and what it costs.

We get into:

• Seeby doubling his company every year for nine years straight
• Why Keith took zero salary for two and a half years before a $120m exit
• How Joshua learned to sell as a cop before he ever ran a business
• What Seeby did with millions at twenty-nine and the GFC lesson that followed
• Why all three say the money was the start of the hard part

Getting rich young is a skill nobody teaches you how to survive.

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Dom Sutton hired three general managers to run the business he built. Two didn't work out, and he owns most of the reasons why.

Dom started Pumpt with his last paycheck, running cold calls from a tiny room next to the toilet while his two boys slept on a mattress beside his bed. He grew it into an advertising business putting 70 million items into NZ letterboxes a year. This is an unusually honest conversation about the founder-to-owner transition, the difference between delegating and abdicating, and why the lack of the right metrics let good months quietly slide into losses. He also tells the story of the toy business he bought on a lick-of-paint story that lost him a dollar a minute for two years, and how that exact disaster became StockTrim, the inventory forecasting software he now sells in 26 countries.

We get into:

• Why two of his three GM hires failed and what he'd do differently
• Delegating vs abdicating, learned the hard way
• The $1.2 million toy business mistake and the due diligence lesson behind it
• How that failure became a global SaaS
• Why he walked away from selling Pumpt before finally exiting to his own GM

Sometimes the business you build next comes straight out of the one that nearly broke you.

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81 days from "I think I want to sell" to the money clearing. No broker. No lawyer. Dr. Michael Filosi did the whole thing himself.

He sold the largest dental practice in Adelaide to private equity at 41, at a multiple well above the industry norm. Ten years earlier he'd bought it with a possum living in the wall, two chairs, and pen-and-paper appointment books, the practice nobody else wanted. He saw the busy patient base underneath the mess, took it from worst to first, and built it into a genuinely sale-ready business. That's why, when he finally decided he'd had enough, it sold at warp speed.

We get into:

• Why the sale moved in 81 days when most deals take months
• The buy-in structure that locked his purchase price years in advance
• What frictionless actually means to a buyer, and how he engineered it
• Why he refused to let private equity condition him down on price
• The four Ds model he used to get out of the chair and design the business

Build it to sell long before you ever want to, and the exit takes care of itself.

I'm building a community for founders serious about a real exit. Come find out what it's about, Click here to join the FREE Webinar.

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$100,000 in year one. $10 million by year four. When people ask Sarah Page how she did it, her answer makes them uncomfortable. She did nothing else.

Sarah is the founder and CEO of The Kindness Collective and the 2024 New Zealander of the Year for community work. What began as a car full of pantry cans driven to a woman's refuge during the darkest period of her life is now a charity supporting over 130,000 New Zealanders a year. This is a genuinely honest conversation about total focus and what it costs. Sarah has ADHD, which she's reframed from a source of shame into her greatest asset, and she's candid about the parts most founders won't touch: the brutal shift from founder to CEO, learning to give up control, and being told she's too much.

We get into:

• Why doing nothing but the one thing scaled the charity so fast
• How ADHD makes founders 400 times more likely to start something
• The founder to CEO identity shift and why it nearly broke her
• Learning to hand control to a board smarter than her
• The charity misconceptions that cost real people real help

The intensity people find uncomfortable is the same thing that built it all.

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👤 Follow Josh on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie/

🔗 Connect with Sarah Page → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahpagenz/