Grounds Up by Caffeine Daily
Grounds Up is Caffeine's new podcast for the people behind New Zealand's most ambitious companies. Every episode is a real conversation with a founder, operator, investor or enabler about what building actually looks like — not the highlight reel. Because building is personal, and the story's always better than the press release.
Good humans, global ambition and reinventing before you have to, with Darrin Grafton
Darrin Grafton and Bob Shaw founded Serko in Auckland in 2007, after selling an earlier travel-tech business together in the 1990s. Nearly two decades on, Serko is a New Zealand-listed company (NZX and ASX) that powers corporate travel technology for some of the world's biggest brands, including Booking.com for Business, across 180 countries.
In this episode of Grounds Up, recorded at Serko's new Parnell headquarters, Serko House, Darrin talks with Court about what he calls Serko's third or fourth reinvention: building a company to go global from a tiny domestic market on day one, rebuilding...
Consistent storytelling without the PR price tag, with Barney Chunn
Barney Chunn graduated with a degree in philosophy and English, sent out CVs, and heard nothing back. "It was the market sort of telling me I was unemployable," he says. "So I had to go and create a job." That job was CONQA, a construction quality assurance platform he ran for close to a decade — and now it's Drumbeat, a PR and comms platform built inside Auckland venture studio New+Improved.
In this episode, Court sits down with Chunn to talk through why traditional PR retainers price out the high-growth companies that need coverage most, and the as...
Cheaper iron that happens to be very green, with Martin Hacon
When Martin Hacon first heard what Cullbeck's technology could do, his reaction was disbelief: "This is bullshit. No one can do what these guys are claiming." He's now the CEO, and Cullbeck has just closed NZ$20 million in funding, including a NZ$15 million capital raise believed to be the largest first raise ever recorded for a New Zealand deep-tech company.
In this episode, Court sits down with Hacon to talk about the hydrogen ironmaking process that turns an 8-hour-plus blast furnace reaction into one that takes under two and a half minutes, replacing coal...
Making it cheaper to save the world than to destroy it with Holly Beals and Ralph Chang
Climatetech is about more than sustainability. It's energy, industrial decarbonisation, sustainable food systems, and a dozen sub-sectors in between, held together by one idea: these are businesses that make money by cutting carbon.
In the first episode of Grounds Up, Court sits down with Ralph Chang (Partner, Motion Capital) and Holly Beals (Lead, Aurora Climate Lab at Creative HQ), the two people running New Zealand's main pipeline from early climate tech idea to investable company. They talk about Motion Capital's investment thesis ("make it cheaper to save the world than to destroy it"), what actually happens inside...
