In this episode, our guest is Max Ferguson, founder and CEO of Lumin; a software leader, providing accessible, safe and intuitive tech products that enable seamless collaboration in the workplace. Max was an engineering student in Christchurch, New Zealand, working on the city’s post-earthquake rebuild. He saw a mismatch between old and new workflows: on construction sites he’d draw on paper blueprints, and in the office he’d email around digital plans. From that, Lumin was born. Within a month, they had one million people using it – today they have ninety million.

In this super insightful chat we covered Lumin’s global-from-day-1 mentality which saw Max relocate to Silicon Valley very early on, followed by his choice to return to Aotearoa New Zealand to set up Lumin’s global headquarters in Christchurch. We talked about the cultural differences between the US and NZ when it comes to building new businesses, NZ’s world-class tertiary education system, and how to support talent to stay here once they graduate.