Startup Theatre Podcast

In this episode, we chat with Jonty Hodge 

Jonty is a Wellington-based entrepreneur, co-founder, and CEO of Kepla, an emerging SaaS that makes it incredibly easy for any business to run incredibly effective digital advertising campaigns. 

Dubbed 'a digital advertising agency in your pocket'.   

Previously co-founded Aro Digital, a digital marketing agency based in Oriental Bay.

We chat about Jonty's journey from a cricket coach in high school to a founder of two companies.

In this episode, we chat with Owen Evans.

Since then he's gone on to help found a number of startups, including Xero, Hoist, 8i, Zapier, and JRNY, not all of them successful.

In this episode, we talk with Andrew Tokeley who helps successful NZ businesses build high-performance product leadership teams.

His name is Andrew Tokeley but most people call him Tokes.  

Tokes founded his coaching business in 2017 and is NZ’s only full-time independent product leadership coach. 

Since then, he has worked with over 60 companies ranging from start-ups to large corporations and even helped a few government agencies to adopt a more product-centric approach to their work.   

His work typically involves working directly with senior product leaders, executive teams, and founders to help raise the understanding and practice of product leadership. 

While he calls himself a coach, he is just as likely to provide advice to his clients, drawing from over 20 years of experience as both a technical and product leader himself.   

Tokes also works as a Product Operating Partner at Movac, providing support and guidance to a number of their portfolio companies.  

In 2015 he created Wellington’s largest product MeetUp, ProductTank, now boasting 2500 members, and he is a founding committee member of Product Aotearoa, a non-profit organisation supporting product leadership across the country.  

In his previous life, he has been a statistician, software developer, and banana picker.

In this episode, we talk with Kristen Lunman. 

For as long as she can remember, Kristen wanted to challenge the status quo, leading her to circles of like-minded entrepreneurs. Those that seek to deliver a vision of a different world. Her superpowers tend to lean in the area of growth and leadership. Until last year, it was at Hatch and more recently a new venture called Powrsuit. 

Powrsuit exists to amplify the impact of women leaders to shape the future of work. 

Previous to Hatch and Powrstuit and Hatch, Kristen was the Chief Operating Office for Wipster.

When she does have spare time, it’s spent with her teens or on a surfboard in freezing cold Lyall Bay.

Kristen was amazing on the podcast and talks about her superpower of "just saying yes!"

Please jump in and listen or watch this podcast. 

In this episode, we talk with Ben Pujji who is the CEO of Atomic.io a SaaS platform that helps companies engage their customers more effectively inside their apps. 

Ben's early career was in banking, creative agencies, and government, before joining Atomic in 2015. In 2018 Ben stepped into the CEO's shoes, pivoting Atomic to focus on its new Action Card platform.

Atomic helps businesses include their customer experience with web-based and in-app engagement. Its existing customers include ANZ, Foodstuffs, Kiwibank, and BNZ and its latest fundraising round is aimed at helping Atomic expand in Australia.

Investors joining the Series A round include well-established venture capital firms Movac and Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1, Xero co-founders Rod Drury (who also serves as a director of Atomic) and Hamiah Walker, and former Trade Me executives and shareholders Sam Morgan and Rowan Simpson via their investment vehicles Jasmine Investments and Hoku, respectively.

Ben talks about his journey into the role of a CEO that started as a school dropout.

If he sees two out of three pillars of an idea. He jumps in.

Mike Dawes founded and runs the IT Heavy Hitters charity boxing match, which has raised over $600k for charity. All proceeds from his events next year go to Voices of Hope. Mike is not usually one to put himself into the spotlight and would rather profile his charities.

No stranger to IT himself, his focus over the last 24+ years has been primarily delivering core infrastructure and technology service-orientated solutions, sales, and infrastructure design to delivery of network and server infrastructure, and leadership of infrastructure and operational teams, delivering quality solutions in large enterprise environments.

As someone who has gone through the IT Heavy Hitters fight camp, our host Troy Hammond is a massive advocate of others doing the same.

They'll take a group of IT professionals, provide qualified training and instruction and glove them up. The result is an evening of explosive boxing action. You don't need any experience to fight at IT Heavy Hitters, you'll be trained by professional coaches and helped with all aspects of theory and practical boxing.  On the night you'll choose your walkout song, step into the arena and put all of your training into 3x2 minute rounds, scored and refereed by qualified officials.

Sign up here to become an IT Heavy Hitter and help Mike, Voices for Hope and everyone involve K.O. suicide for good.

In this episode on the We F*@KIN love podcast, we speak with Simon Small who we literally pulled off the street to join us on the podcast.

He has also created some Mastermind Training programmes and throughout 2020 he began having a massive impact on SaaS Founders.