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

$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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

$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...

Rich Conway spent hundreds of thousands of dollars proving he was hiring the wrong salespeople. He was wrong about that too.

He was bringing in good people, then setting them up to fail with no systems, no metrics, and no structure to succeed. When he finally hired a sales manager who put that scaffolding in place, the same calibre of people started producing straight away. It's one of the more honest leadership admissions you'll hear from a founder. Rich is an introvert with imposter syndrome who built Pure SEO into the number one search agency in New...

Most founders sell a business once, with no idea what they're doing. Shivani Gupta refused to go in blind.

Before she sold her wellness business, Shivani tracked down more than 20 founders who'd already exited and asked every one of them the same questions. What did you sell for, did you use a multiple of EBIT, what would you do again, what would you never do again. She put every answer into a spreadsheet, found the three lessons that came up most often, and applied all three. It added 25% to her final sale price, with no broker. A...

The Comma Club is now open for founding members — a private community for NZ founders building toward a multimillion-dollar exit: https://www.joshcomrie.com/club

Shane Young flew to Sydney six times to get a single purchase order out of Woolworths. On launch day, he walked into the flagship supermarket to find his product had separated in transit and was leaking yellow puddles across the shelf. Four years of work, and he thought it was over in an instant.

It wasn't. This is a special episode of 2 Commas built around one question: what does it ta...

The Comma Club is now open for founding members — a private community for NZ founders building toward a multimillion-dollar exit: ⁠https://www.joshcomrie.com/club⁠

Grant Baker was sitting in his office on credit watch with BNZ when his phone rang. Eric Watson was calling from Palm Springs to say he'd sold Blue Star for a hundred million dollars. The deal had been done on a golf course in the dark. Grant thought he was joking.

He wasn't. Ninety million came in shares. Six months later, when the lockup expired, those shares had doubled. Blue Star h...

Tim Wixon has put debt funding into more than 1,700 New Zealand tech companies. He has never taken a single share of equity in any of them.

As Head of Technology and Innovation at BNZ, Tim spent 11 years building a lending model most traditional bankers said was impossible. Debt against recurring revenue, interest only while you scale, no personal guarantees, and no dilution. His first deal set the tone: five million dollars to a zero-profit software company buying another zero-profit company, secured only against the software. His colleagues laughed when he said he wanted to fund tech. One...

KiwiSaver fees in New Zealand will hit a billion dollars this year. Sam Stubbs has been the loudest voice in the country saying that's a scandal and building something to prove it doesn't have to be that way.

Sam is the founder and CEO of Simplicity, an $11 billion KiwiSaver fund owned by a charity. It makes almost no profit. It is worth essentially nothing. It can never be sold. That's the point. When you ask people to trust you with their retirement savings, being unbuyable turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful thing. Before Simplicity, Sam was...

Carl Thompson flew to Singapore with $3,000, shared a pullout bed with his co-founder in a room so small he could touch the wall sitting up, and cold-called New York at 2am because that's when the market was awake. That was the start of TradeGecko.

He left the company two and a half years in, halfway through his vesting schedule, because he needed to come home for his relationships and his health. He split his role into five people on the way out. A few years later, Cam checked his spam folder and found an email from Intuit...

Lisa King had a goal from the very first day of Eat My Lunch: the business would be a success the day it became unnecessary.

She built it in 2015 to solve a problem she couldn't stop thinking about, kids going hungry at school in a country of abundance. By week 12 she was making 2,000 lunches a day out of her own kitchen. At peak, nearly 5,000, with police officers, politicians, and grannies in their sixties all buttering bread before sunrise. Then the government launched its own school lunch program, and Lisa did something most founders never do. She closed...

Most founders won't give up 80% of their business. The ones who did walked away with more than if they'd kept 100%.

Murray Schnuriger made the jump from 20 years advising founders on exits to actually owning the risk at 5V Capital, a mid-market PE fund across Australia and New Zealand. Toby King has spent his career at Cameron Partners, one of NZ's most established M&A firms, allied with Rothschild and Company. Together they've sat on both sides of more NZ business exits than almost anyone alive.

The Education Perfect story is the one that sticks. Two...

What if the most successful version of your company is the smallest one?

This week I sit down with Mark Zeman, co-founder of SpeedCurve, who quietly built one of the most unusual software businesses I've come across. No VC. No sales team. No marketing function. A team that never grew beyond seven people, paid two to three times market salary, and shared the monthly profit with everyone.

SpeedCurve had customers like Airbnb, the New York Times and the Guardian. They found him, not the other way around. And after 13 years, he exited to Embrace, not...

What if the biggest risk in your company isn't your product, it's whether your people are actually ready to lead?

This week, I sit down with Logan Yonavjak, founder of the Readiness Engine, to explore how AI can now measure leadership capacity at scale. We get into coachability, the grit myth, the early warning signs a founding team is in trouble, and my own method for testing resilience and values in the room.

Essential listening for founders, investors and operators.

Most of us have no idea what's actually going on inside our body.

John Bessey has been in the room for three major tech exits as CEO of Merkle (Davanti), head of revenue at Introgen, and on the executive team when Gen-I sold to Spark. He's also a certified metabolic and health coach who reckons most high-performers are flying blind on the things that actually matter and he's got the blood work to prove it.

In this episode, John and I get into the overlap between building a high-performing business and building a body that...

Ken Crosson nearly became a dairy farmer milking one cow in mid-Canterbury, instead, he walked into the Christchurch Town Hall at 16 and never looked back.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Ken, founder of Crosson and Co, one of New Zealand's most quietly celebrated architects, as the firm approaches its 40th year. We cover the pivot from farm kid to globally recognised designer, what it actually looks like to build a 40-year practice from scratch with no business training and one very young first hire, and why Ken still shows up to the office...

She was asking people if they wanted Botox before most New Zealanders knew what it was, and they were asking her if their face was going to fall off.

Dr. Catherine Stone pioneered cosmetic medicine in New Zealand in 2001, set up her first clinic in Vulcan Lane for $13,500, and built one of the country's most recognised aesthetic brands from scratch. In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Dr. Cat to unpack what it looks like to front-run a trend before anyone believes in it, build a high-end boutique in a space that didn't exist, and...

Rafael Niesten built a nine-figure exit, woke up at 5:30am to watch the money land, and celebrated by going to Indian for $62 and buying three USB-C cables.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Raf, founder of PropTech Labs, to unpack what it actually looks like to build, acquire, and sell a portfolio of PropTech businesses without an investment banker in sight. We cover three strategic acquisitions in 18 months, five months of due diligence with a giant US corporate, and why timing the market ended up mattering just as much as building the product.

He cold-called American trucking companies from a dark office in Auckland at 2am — New Zealand accent and all — and built a nine-figure SaaS exit out of it.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Tim Boyle, co-founder of Whip Around, to unpack what it really takes to go from a commercial real estate career and a half-baked idea to a fleet compliance platform operating across the US with thousands of customers. We talk about the accidental pivot to DVIR compliance that changed everything, the decision to plant their sales team in Charlotte, North Carolina, and how...

He pre-sold a SaaS product for $150 before it even existed — then discovered it was harder to sell the real thing for $30/month once customers could actually touch it.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Yuan Wang, co‑founder of Studio Ninja, to unpack what bootstrapping really looks like when you choose customers over investors. We talk about the early crowdfunding-style pre-sell (including taking card payments over the phone), the painful first launch that landed with silence, and the rebuild that came from obsessive customer feedback and iteration.

Yuan also breaks down how Stud...

Most founders think selling a business is a transaction. Find a buyer, get a multiple, sign the papers. In reality, it’s an identity shift, a relationship test, and a stress event that shows you what your company is really made of.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Vivian Bryant‑Taukiri, founder of Brand Spanking, to unpack what it takes to build and scale an experiential marketing agency over 20+ years, and then exit it cleanly. We talk about the shift from “promo girls in Lycra” to modern brand experience, why this is ultimately a people-a...

Most founders hear “AI” and think they get it. Smarter emails. Faster content. A few basic automations. In reality, that’s a jet engine being used as a desk fan, and it creates a dangerous illusion of progress.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I lay out why 2026 is a once-in-a-generation land grab for Western businesses, and why “power is never given, only taken”. I share the moment that snapped this into focus for me, the traps that keep smart operators stuck (the free-tier trap and the tool-shopping trap), and the real shift that’s happening right now: from assista...

Founders often think they can tidy things up when it’s time to sell. In practice, the value is won or lost earlier—depending on how much complexity, weak infrastructure, and preventable errors are allowed to accumulate.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Jeremy Moon, founder of Icebreaker, to unpack what it takes to build a global brand from New Zealand and then execute a successful acquisition. We cover international expansion, why the “New Zealand advantage” is often a myth offshore, and why hiring local teams matters more than most founders expect.

Jeremy a...

Most founders assume they will be able to sell their business when the time comes. In reality, many are unprepared and lose significant value during the process.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with M&A expert and CPA Holli Moeini, author of Finding the Missing Millions in M&A, to unpack why deals fail, how diligence erodes valuations, and what founders must fix long before going to market. We discuss financial readiness, working capital traps, balance sheet risks, and the factors sophisticated buyers evaluate beyond revenue growth.

This is a practical conversation...

Selling your home to fund a business is a decision most founders only talk about in theory.

In this episode of 2 Commas, Rick Agraval shares the real story behind that moment and the journey that followed. After co-founding his business with his wife, Rick made the bold call to sell their home in order to finance the next stage of growth and keep full ownership of the company.

What began as a scrappy, self-funded venture evolved into a fast growing digital marketing and ecommerce growth business. Along the way Rick immersed himself in the mechanics...

50 million mandarins processed every single day.

In this episode of 2 Commas, Nigel Beach shares the story behind Compac, the New Zealand engineering company that quietly became a global leader in automated fruit sorting.

Nigel spent more than two decades inside the business, starting as a graduate software engineer and eventually becoming a shareholder as the company expanded across the US, Europe, and South America. What began as a small engineering firm grew into a global technology company processing millions of pieces of fruit every hour.

We explore how machine vision transformed the fruit...

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Stan Murphy to unpack how he turns underperforming businesses into high-growth companies — and why momentum is the single biggest driver of enterprise value.

From qualifying as a fitter and turner in Whakatāne to scaling JR Wholesale Meats to $65M in revenue before its sale to Foodstuffs, Stan shares how he identifies distressed assets, restructures broken systems, and engineers growth in mature industries.

We explore how businesses spiral up or down, why exit strategy should shape decisions from day one, how diversification protected the company during COV...

The M&A market is moving again. The question is... who’s ready?

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Neil Millar, Partner of M&A at MinterEllison, to unpack what really happened in 2025 and what it signals for 2026.

Global deal volume surged back toward $5 trillion, international buyers are re-entering New Zealand, and private equity still has significant dry powder. At the same time, succession challenges, health-forced exits, board hesitation, and slower processes have shaped a complex local market.

We explore what’s driving renewed activity, why some deals stall while othe...

He bought 51% of a business that was already going down the gurgler… then the GFC hit.

In this episode of 2 Commas, Ray Delany shares the full story behind turning a struggling technology services company into a 5X+ exit. What followed the acquisition wasn’t momentum. It was cash bleed, lost customers, leadership doubt, a global financial crisis, and significant personal upheaval.

Ray walks through what actually changed the trajectory. Shifting from chasing growth to building profitability. Taking full ownership rather than leaning on inherited thinking. Rebuilding credibility with customers. Attracting the right people. Moving early to c...

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Joaquin Cordero to unpack one of the defining moments of his entrepreneurial journey and the lessons it shaped for everything that followed.

Joaquin has built businesses across twelve countries, often entering industries he’d never worked in before. We talk about how trust is built and broken in partnerships, what happens when misalignment surfaces too late, and how founders learn to assess risk beyond contracts and spreadsheets.

The conversation moves through building in emerging markets, navigating fractured partnerships, stepping out of operations, and designing businesses that cr...

He started as a police officer, nearly lost everything in his first business, then built and sold a capital-heavy security company before going again.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Joshua Parsons to unpack a founder journey shaped by early responsibility, hard-earned judgement, and an obsession with solving problems properly. From policing at 17 to bootstrapping Crosbies Security, learning the real difference between revenue and cash, and building a business that could run without him, Joshua shares the lessons most founders only learn the hard way.

We also explore how one unresolved failure...

Strategy only works when it’s anchored in something that actually matters.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I continue the strategy series by going deeper into direction, long-term objectives, and purpose. We start with why self-awareness on its own isn’t enough, and why founders need a clear North Star that aligns with the kind of challenge they are built to take on.

The episode explores how BHAGs fail when they’re vague, generic, borrowed, or never truly communicated. Using real examples, including OpenAI, Juicero, and Quibi, I unpack what happens when purpose gets replaced by pro...

Trying to build a business without clarity is like heading into the bush without a map.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I unpack why so many founders feel stuck, exhausted, or uncertain even when the business is moving. Not because they lack effort or capability, but because they haven’t clearly answered two foundational questions: what they want from the business, and what they’re willing to sacrifice to get it.

We explore the patterns that show up when ambition and sacrifice are misaligned, why businesses tend to stall at predictable points, and how different foun...

Before getting into goals, it’s worth pausing.

This first 2 Commas episode of 2026 is a curated compilation of insights from Linda Jenkinson, Jessie Stanley, and Debra Hall, drawn from different conversations and connected by a shared focus on mindset, ambition, and long-term thinking.

The discussion stays away from tactics and frameworks, and instead returns to the internal side of building. How founders think under pressure. How ambition changes as responsibility grows. Why clarity becomes more important over time.

A reflective listen for founders setting direction for the year ahead.

This business started with eczema, a barbershop, and a lot of trial and error.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with Shane Young to unpack the long road from mixing hair wax in a flat to building, scaling, and ultimately selling a multi-brand consumer business across haircare, skincare, and natural beauty.

We talk about solving your own problem first, learning manufacturing the hard way, surviving near-disasters in new markets, and why owning the hard parts of the value chain became the real source of leverage. Shane also shares what made the business attractive...

Most founders fear board meetings. Marc Stöckli documented more than 200 of them and turned the lessons into a playbook for builders.

In this episode of 2 Commas, Marc walks through the lived reality behind Totemo’s two-decade journey. It is a story of rebuilding after a fractured founding team, competing early in a market no one understood, narrowly avoiding a disastrous sale to a Ponzi scheme, and finally exiting into a global cybersecurity group.

We dig into what strong governance really looks like and why so many founders underestimate the emotional and strategic weight of the...

Some exits happen fast. James McGlinn spent twenty years earning his.

In this episode of 2 Commas, I sit down with James to trace the long arc of building Eventfinda — from coding websites as a teenager, to taking on a government-funded competitor, to ultimately selling into one of the world’s major ticketing groups.

We talk about the realities founders rarely share: staying alive when you are under-resourced, the power of one well-timed hire, the discipline required to play a long game, and the emotional shift that comes when you finally hand over the thing you buil...