Tim Calder

Prof. Brendan Gray , course director and Dunedin City Council Chair of Entrepreneurship, organised an excellent event where local business people that had been involved in the Masters of Entrepreneurship programme were able to celebrate with the graduating students an end to another great year of this highly successful masters course. Among the guests was former Dunedin woman Amanda Ellis, Senior Executive of the World Bank based in Washington DC, who spoke about the strong need for Entrepreneurship in the current state of the world’s economy. Other invited guests included the team from Pocketsmith who have produced a cashflow and financial forecasting web application to help people with budgeting. This event highlighted the support and encouragement that Dunedin provides Entrepreneurs over other cities in New Zealand.

Last night was a great success for our new web based entrepreneurs group ‘The Distiller’ as over 40 enthusiastic web developers, designers and entrepreneurs turned up to hear what we had to say. Jason did an excellent job of running the meeting as the concept of the group looked to be clearly understood and those that attended seemed excited to hear what The Distiller planned to achieve in the coming weeks. We were very grateful for the attendance and support of Steve Bodmer from the Centre for Innovation and Ryan Priemus from Kickstart, both of whom are integral people in the development of The Distiller achieving it’s goals.

The co-founders and I came away from the meeting with several suggested ideas that our new members wanted from The Distiller. If we were to break them down roughly into three key areas I would say they would be #1 Networking, 2# Support, and #3 Promotion. It was also very encouraging to see the positive response to the suggestion of making our meetings as regular as fortnightly. As a result it was then decided that our next meeting will be on the 13th of November at 5pm at South Bar.

If you think you fit the mould of a developer, designer or entrepreneur please come down and join us for a drink and some pizza. Also, keep an eye out for our Facebook group and website which should be up and running in the next few days. This will allow for everyone to keep track of our progress and benefit from the national and international profile we wish to create for web startups in Dunedin.

Well known Web Entrepreneurs Steve Adams, Tim Norton, John Clegg and Patrick MacFie have just launched the new website ‘Made from New Zealand‘.

The project aims to increase traffic to members’ websites, make them easier to find on search engines and help like-minded businesses to get in touch. The site was kickstarted last night with a television campaign, sponsored by Telecom. (By Jacqueline Smith, NZ Herald)

Steve Adams saw the opportunity to link the thousands of Kiwi businesses with websites through a stronger online “eco-system”. The website provides up to date links to the Latest Businesses, Top Contributors, Popular Businesses, and Popular Networks.

Keep an eye out for The Distiller’s debut on the Popular Network links, as our group plans to put Dunedin on the map as a strong base to take your web business global.

Last week I met with Pierre-Em and Jason over drink at South Bar to catchup with how our ventures are progressing. Pierre-Em is the co-founder of G-tours which is developing a cross platform software solution that combines GPS technology and data management on mobile devices for the tourism industry. Jason is the co-founder of PocketSmith which is an online cash flow management system used to help you budget for future purchases/savings goals.

At this meeting we talked about forming an ICT network of young entrepreneurs around Dunedin who would meet regularly to discuss our highs & lows, successes & challenges. We would also use this opportunty to allow people to network with other companies in related industries and to listen to guest speakers and angel investors. This would also provide people like us with a chance to discuss the support they require as many new business ventures are not aware of what organisations can help them.

One of the main objectives of forming this group would be to endeavor to gather together enough like-minded people that have great ICT ideas which need developing so that we can establish New Zealand’s first Y-Combinator which we would call The Distiller.

Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.

We invest mostly in software and web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.

The Y-Combinator has experienced huge success overseas with a range of great investor ready businesses coming out of incubation regularly. We believe this can be replicated in Dunedin as there is already the key components of this concept in place;

• Kickstart Entrepreneurial support,
• UPSTART Business incubator,
• New Zealand’s most valuable Angel Investor network,
• Otago University’s Centre for Innovation and research,
• and five supportive regional mayors which make up the Otago Forward Economic Development Strategy

In the next few weeks we will be approaching these different organisations and others to try to establish ways that we can all work together to achieve success. At the same time we need to start our regular meetings at the Dunedin Club where we have been allocated conference rooms and more importantly the bar.