Six Four

In 2014 Xero was experiencing exponential customer growth. But they were about to hit a wall.

Unless they did something drastic, and soon, they would be unable to continue to scale their platform to handle new customers. 

This episode tells the story of probably the largest cloud migration undertaken by a SaaS company in NZ.

When you have built your culture on family what happens when you have to break it up?

Vend started off in 2010 and by 2013 they were bringing awesome sauce and chuck taylors to the tech scene in Auckland. Vend sprang back into the collective tech community attentions last year by being acquired for 350M USD by Lightspeed. 

This episode is a story of growing the Vend family.

Vend started off in 2010 and by 2013 they were bringing awesome sauce and chuck taylors to the tech scene in Auckland. Vend sprang back into the collective tech community attentions last year by being acquired for 350M USD by Lightspeed. 

Pushpay emerged quickly to become a fixture of the NZ tech. Valuation at over $2B and with revenues >$250M Pushpay is still growing steadily after hypergrowth periods during 2014 and 2015.

This episode talks about the influence of founders, CEOs and the discipline of product management.

Pushpay emerged quickly to become a fixture of the NZ tech. Valuation at over $2B and with revenues >$250M Pushpay is still growing steadily after hypergrowth periods during 2014 and 2015.

This episode discusses attracting and growing talented product and engineering teams.

Pushpay emerged quickly to become a fixture of the NZ tech. Valuation at over $2B and with revenues >$250M Pushpay is still growing steadily after hypergrowth periods during 2014 and 2015.

This episode outlines near death experiences and discusses how to navigate extreme growth

Our first 2 episodes in this series told the story of M-Com’s founding and then growth story.

This episode looks at some of the areas that M-Com did particularly well- including their US market entry. We look at why M-Com succeeded where subsequently higher profile organisations failed in the same endeavour. We also discuss other factors that contributed to the company’s success

Our previous Six Four episode focused on M-Com's founding story: a story of scrappiness, pivots and poor timing that eventually brought M-Com to product market fit and then on to explosive growth.

This episode discusses this period of growth and what lessons were learned during that time.

In 2000 the Nokia 3310 debuted and become one of the most successful mobile phones of all time. It was also then that the NZ startup M-Com was founded. 

M-Com went on to develop a mobile banking platform that is used by 1,000s of global financial institutions and millions if not tens of millions of users.

The full interview with Andrew Tokeley, Xero's first Product Manager. 

Today Xero is an often cited example of success in NZ tech. However in 2009 with just 6,000 customers + 1M of revenue this success was far from guaranteed. It was then that today’s guest joined the team. Over the next 6 years he had a front row seat to see customers grow to nearly 500,000 and annual revenues surpass 150M