There’s a revolution underway. Deep within the Auckland Viaduct lurks the beginnings of our own tiny Silicon Valley. At GridAKL, more than 50 startups, in industries as diverse as medicine, robotics and augmented reality, are running the entrepreneurial gauntlet looking to build a high-growth business – or at least a get a second funding round.

In On the Grid, a sponsored series with Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), we tell their stories. In this, the second instalment, brain-reading software developers Thought Wired.

It’s easy to forget among the fears of big data and the death of attention that technology is actually an incredibly powerful force for good. From prosthetic limbs to anesthesia, technology has always made life easier for those who suffer. Now, with the help of New Zealand entrepreneurs, it’s giving a voice to those without their own.

Thought Wired, an Auckland-based startup, design software with which to bridge the gap between brain activity and communication. Harvesting the patterns of thought, their software Nous interprets brain data collected via a simple headset and provides tactile visual or audible feedback, allowing complex interactions with existing platforms like Facebook and onwards out into the world

Founder and CEO Dmitri Selitskiy is one of those most rare of capitalists – he genuinely wants to help people, starting with the ones nearest to him. We spoke at the GridAKL tech cafe one Tuesday afternoon last month.

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The Spinoff: How did you identify an opening in the market for a product that’s almost like something out of science-fiction?

Dmitri Selitskiy: It wasn’t so much about looking and thinking ‘well what doesn’t exist?’, it was more out of necessity and directly seeing the need. I have a younger cousin who is paralysed and, because of his condition, none of the existing solutions really worked for him. None of the technology that requires physical interaction worked for him, even stuff that’s specialised. Six years ago I saw a demo online of a device that allowed you to translate brain activity into actions on a screen, moving a box and so on, so I just connected the two things together and started looking into it. I saw that there were these devices that you could buy, but you needed to build software to make them actually useful and to actually do these things. Still to this day there is no solution that’s commercially available that does what we’re trying to do.

Obviously there are commercial advantages to being first in the area, but what about challenges?

There are two equally significant challenges. On one hand, technology, actually making the thing work, because no one has figured it out. It’s not like creating a new app that does something slightly differently, it’s a completely new way of interacting with things. Everything from what happens in the person’s brain to how you present things on the screen or through audio, and then ten steps in between, it all needed to be figured out. It’s a massive technical and scientific challenge.

And then on the other hand commercially, especially when we were just starting out, especially here in New Zealand nobody had even heard of technology like this. Most people were like ‘no, it sounds crazy, it’s impossible and if it is possible it’s going to take 100’s of people and millions of dollars’. When it came to figuring out the commercial aspects of it, people would just say ‘no, too hard, too complicated, don’t wanna touch it.’

But all the while we’d get heaps of encouragement because of what we were trying to do, so you end up in the middle between these two disconnected paths of what you’re hearing. One is like lots of people going ‘what you’re doing is awesome, it’s going to help so many people’, but on the other hand ‘that sounds way too hard, impossible even.’

What gave you the confidence to think it even would be possible?

In the very beginning? Because it was something I didn’t have any experience in. I didn’t have experience in any of this, I just fell into it because I saw the tech and how it could be applied, but I didn’t know much about it. Not knowing and being overly confident and ambitious was helpful. It was like ‘yea, how hard could it be?’

Once we came together we very early on figured out that we were all passionate about not just building tech but actually specifically working in this space and creating accessibility tools. Trying to make a difference to people with disabilities. That was the big driver and as we went along we could see that it was possible, and that we were making progress. Even when we had to do some of the biggest challenges technologically, just spending a couple of hours with someone who is a potential user , seeing what problems they have, and the potential for what we’re building was like, ‘wow, it’s still worth it.’

Most of your team are alumni of the University of Auckland. Are there advantages to being from the same institution and programs?

Either initially or at some point. When we were starting out I was still studying as was my father. We were both at the business school doing different degrees. Then when we got a little bit more serious and took on an engineer, he was doing his PhD in the engineering school. Our fourth co founder was originally from Massey, but when we started she actually enrolled in a psychology PhD at Auckland, working on some of the aspects of what we were building.

Over time as we were doing things we realised that we wanted to do it differently compared to how academia in general does things. It reinforced that trying to do it independently and as a company was the best way forward. Motivation for doing things is different in academia, and time scales are different, especially for things getting out from the lab to the real world applications. And so I guess in that sense being in academia, in different phases of academia, kind of helped us to see that.

Obviously you have this shared motivation of wanting to help people with disabilities, but were you all on the same footing in terms of ethical concerns around profiting off the disabled and so on? Did you share values and direction?

Yea, and actually all of those sort of motivations, all the team dynamics stuff, we figured out quite early on. We did what used to be called the Spark entrepreneurial challenge, now Velocity, at Auckland University, it’s a business planning competition. We came second in that year’s competition and off the back of it spent some time at the Icehouse. The very first thing they did with us there was to figure out this team dynamic and the motivations of all the people in the founding team. We kind of unpacked it and figured out what was important: were we after making millions and billions of dollars, or was it because of the purpose of what we were trying to build?

We also understood that doing this as a for-profit company is probably the best way, and that we can prove that over time. Later on we went through a social enterprise accelerator, and through that we learned that there is actually a way of combining social impact with having a sustainable and profitable enterprise, and how the two can work together. That was really helpful to put frameworks around that, and drive that forward.

How did those discussions take place? Did you just sit around with a coffee and hash it out?

Pretty much, and at the time it was very unusual and weird. We were all just 25 or something, with the exception of my dad, and after working with each other for just a month or two, it was really strange. But looking back it was probably one of the most important things that we did, figuring out what’s important to each of us, questions around ‘what would success mean to you in five years,’ and things like that. So yea, it was kind of about talking through that stuff, writing some of it down, and really it wasn’t even so much coming up with answers but the process of talking through that was the helpful bit.

Those aren’t exactly natural conversations. They’re big questions.

They’re foundational things, even as fundamental as ‘ok, what are we trying to build?’ and ‘how are we going to make money?’ and ‘ok, why are we doing it?’, ‘how are you going to split the shares in this company?’ and even ‘why are we doing this?’

It’s about talking through those sorts of questions, and doing it early enough that you can have these open and honest conversations. Because we were guided through that process it seemed almost natural, and we don’t even think about doing it differently now. But then there are others who haven’t done that and ran into all kinds of problems later on.

Some of those questions and motivations are particularly important when you have people with disabilities involved, right? You’ve gotta take their rights into consideration. It’s much more sensitive than if you were just building an app for fast food curation.

Yes, but because we had that shared understanding of what we were doing and why, it was pretty much already part of all of those conversations. If not explicitly, then it was at least in the back of our minds. Once we figured out that we were all on the same page, it’s been a guiding principle, of course, in what we do. How we build stuff, what we do commercially, how we raise capital and from whom – all that sort of stuff. It’s just about keeping that in the front of our minds as the team is growing and, as we bring people on board, communicating those principles and making sure that anyone who joins us, in any capacity, shares that.

It seems to me that the big dream in the start-up world is to be the next Zuck, super famous, with a trillion dollars, motivated purely by capitalistic reasons. What does it change when you bring on this social responsibility?

It goes back to the same thing. For us it’s never been about building this up quickly and then selling it, making lots of money or whatever. It’s really…every time we’ve hit major roadblocks and we’ve looked at why we’re doing it, how can we change things, the decision has always come back to asking ‘if we change our approach, will it still line up to why we’re doing this?’

Along that path we tried slightly different things, trying to stay afloat and whatnot, and we’ve always just circled back later on and said ‘actually, it doesn’t necessarily line up with why we came together and started working on this, so let’s reevaluate and get back to what’s important’.

We’ve never had any massive arguments or disagreements around it, because everyone on the team came on with that shared understanding, and then we made sure that it was shared through those early conversations.

Are there advantages in terms of motivation? You have the knowledge that you’re helping people, directly changing their lives, and you can see the results of that even when you’re testing and the product has yet to hit the market.

Yea, there is. Every time we interact with people from the community who we’re testing the product with and getting input from that’s always a massive motivational boost, because yea, we just see why it’s important. And it’s almost like a natural filter for attracting the right kind of people to work with as well. We’ve seen that happen a number of times with people who join us along the way, either as advisors or mentors or contributors or contractors. Certain types of people gravitate to the purpose that we have, and then why we’re doing things.

At the same time it filters out people who have different kinds of motivations. Sometimes we have to be very explicit. People have approached us and said, ‘why don’t you, instead of doing this, go into gaming and entertainment and create a gaming product that could earn lots of money, and then you can come back and do what you’re trying to do?’, or a similar sort of discussion in an investment context, and it just comes back to that original motivation.

We actually believe in this, and we have proof that we can do it the way that we’re doing it.

As the CEO, how does an initiative like GRIDAkl make your job easier?

Many different ways. Probably the biggest is that it’s the hub of many different networks, and so making introductions whether it’s along the funding route or just telling the world we exist and what we’re doing, connecting us into different communities. And then more specifically around some of the initiatives that they’re involved in. We took part in one of the pitching competitions here. They highlighted several opportunities like that for us. Extending this network and doing introductions to people and organisations, that’s been massive for us.

More personally as a founder and CEO I found that having that network of other founders that you can share your experiences with, both positive and negative, which is often a lot harder and a lot of people don’t really talk about it, but it’s one of the big things that helped me and our team through the process. We’ve had some huge challenges technically and looking back, we’ve talked about it, if we weren’t going through that project with the support of mentors, advisors and other ventures going through the same process, we’re not even sure if we’d have survived that as a company at that particular time. So definitely doing it together with other people, even though they might be working on something different, just having that wider community of startups is huge. And it’s not even about the practical things like introductions or whatever, but really just even sitting down and talking about how crap your day or week or month has been, and knowing that ‘hey, it’s not just us, other people go through super hard stuff as well.’

When you read stuff in blogs or press or whatever, essentially you see the highlight reel of everyone else while living your own blooper reel, and you forget about that. But when you’re in this tightly-knit network, you get to see that it’s not just all big wins and successes, it’s actually…everyone else goes through hard stuff as well, it’s just super helpful to have that and see that, and even better when you share it with others.

But it’s exciting, and it’s worth it, because on the very long timescale we really see a potential for our technology to become a platform for the way everyone and anyone interacts and communicates through natural interfaces like the brain, as well as other ways that we have only read and seen in science fiction so far.

GridAKL is Auckland’s innovation precinct, located in Wynyard Quarter – powered by ATEED and run by BizDojo. New spaces are leasing soon – click here to find out more.

There’s a revolution underway. Deep within the Auckland Viaduct lurks the beginnings of our own tiny Silicon Valley. At GridAKL, more than 50 startups, in industries as diverse as medicine, robotics and augmented reality, are running the entrepreneurial gauntlet looking to build a high-growth business – or at least get a second funding round.

In On the Grid, a sponsored series with Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), we tell their stories. First, coworking pioneers BizDojo.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office has dreamed of not having to work in an office. At least not the traditional kind, anyway. Fifty storeys, every one a battery farm of cookie-cutter cubicles, water coolers, pinned pictures and shit coffee.

And then, with the rise of ubiquitous internet, a change occurred. Working from home became a realistic, real life option. No suits, no ties – no clothes, if you didn’t want them. It should have been the best.

“It used to be that everyone was going to work from home., We’re all going to be remote workers, that was the big thing,” says Jonah Merchant, co-founder and CEO of coworking operator BizDojo. “Working from home is cool, but there’s a missing piece, and that is that we’re all human beings, we’re all social animals, and we all want to be connected.

“We’re actually more productive when we’re working together well as a group. That idea of the individual genius working alone in his basement, that’s kind of the stereotypical view on innovation, but the reality is that probably 99% of innovation doesn’t happen that way. It happens with a whole bunch of people coming together, bouncing ideas off each other and experimenting and learning and doing new stuff. I think that’s where the secret sauce is actually.”

Merchant, like co-founder and chief entrepreneur Nick Shewring, speaks from experience. During the late 2000’s, the pair worked in an Air New Zealand incubator project called Hangar 9 on the Auckland waterfront. Following the model of IDEO, a global design firm from California, Hangar 9 was an amplifier for good ideas, heavily centered around multidisciplinary collaborative work across a diverse range of teams.

Under the leadership of Rob Fyfe, the project revolutionised the long-haul flight experience, and assisted Air New Zealand in its rebirth as a legitimate competitor in the multi-billion dollar airline industry.

“Nick and I were there when Air New Zealand went through a transition from a basket case airline that the government had to bail out to really stepping up and showing that you could be a globally competitive airline that was the best in the world, that could build innovative cool things – and do it all from here,” says Merchant.

“We came out of the back of that and thought ‘Whoa man, we’re pretty spoiled now’, because there aren’t many corporates in New Zealand who have that kind of culture and leadership. That’s when we looked a little bit further afield and thought you know, this shared space coworking model is taking off offshore, maybe we could kind of have our cake and eat it too.”

In 2009 the pair launched BizDojo,  New Zealand’s first coworking operator.

Built around a policy of curation and innovation, BizDojo took the best of what Shewring and Merchant learned at Hangar 9 and combined that knowledge with the most recent advances in coworking, itself a concept less than five years old. But whereas the focus in coworking at that time was on desks, chairs, coffee machines and other such infrastructure, BizDojo focused on creating value through fostering a very specific vibe and community.

“We’re all about diversity,” says Merchant “You need that collision of thinking. We’ve always been about curating a mix that gets you a cross-section of a lot of businesses. Our personal jam has always been about the crossover between creative and tech.

“We’ve had everything from artists and social enterprise to not-for-profits from the arts and culture sectors. We’ve had music festival promoters work out of our spaces, sustainability strategists, people like that, and it’s that kind of mix, those interactions, that really makes it interesting.”

Nowhere is this more evident than at GridAKL, Auckland’s burgeoning innovation precinct on the Viaduct. Home to more than 50 resident businesses, GridAKL is the artists’ sanctum of the new age, combining specialists involved in projects as diverse as brain-controlled robots and drone assisted farming. Championed and funded by Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED) on behalf of Auckland Council, GridAKL is also the stronghold of BizDojo, who operate and lease the space alongside others in Wellington and Christchurch.

“BizDojo is a commercial entity,” says Merchant. “We have some ambitious goals around helping New Zealanders be more awesome, but we also at the end of the day want to turn a profit, and we want to be something that’s financially sustainable and delivers a good return for us.”.

“The factors that make our business really successful are exactly the same types of things that a council wants when they’re looking at a city. They say ‘Hey we want more businesses to be grown and we want more jobs and we want more innovation and more opportunities.’ Well, all those same factors on a slightly smaller scale are what make the businesses in our spaces at BizDojo successful. These guys are growing and they’re hiring more people and they’re building more cool stuff and there are more amazing stories about what they’re doing. It’s a feedback loop that makes our business really successful, and it’s the exact same feedback loop, on a slightly different scale, that makes Auckland as a city successful.”

While their goals are the same, on an operational level the organisations have entirely different skillsets. As an arm of the Auckland Council, ATEED have the vision and capital to catalyse the construction of an entire precinct, something it would be exceedingly difficult for a singular private operator, or even a collective, to achieve. However it’s up to BizDojo to ensure the project works on the ground.

“Right from day one as partners we’ve been really aligned on outcomes because the outcomes that help us also help ATEED. Being really clear right from the get go about what each respective party is actually good at has helped immensely. ATEED and the Auckland Council are great at setting some big picture visions in terms of ‘We want this to be the precinct, and we want to make sure that from an economic development perspective Auckland is going to really crank over the coming decades’.

“For us the benefit has been that we can amplify the impact we’ve had. When you start working on a precinct at a city level you realise you can impact a lot more people in a positive way. That’s great for the city – but also in the longer term it’s great for us because it allows us to continue what we’re doing.”

The evolution of coworking also continues, says Merchant. As the commercial property sector moves towards shared space environments, a greater level of sophistication and choice is emerging. To borrow a metaphor from Merchant, some people want a McDonald’s and others want an Ostro. But it’s about more than the difference between golden M’s and silver spoons.

“Physical environment, location, those definitely have key aspects to them, and those are the things that will attract people into your space. But then to make them stay is  actually a lot less about the infrastructure and the physical parts of the building,” says Merchant.

“You hear a lot about startups, accelerators, incubators and all this sort of stuff, and it all tends to be focused around the idea of growth in business. I think our point of difference at BizDojo is that we’ve always been about incubating people in our environments, so whether you’re a freelancer who’s sick of working from home and wants to come in and have a burn rather than working from their kitchen table, or you’re a traditional high growth start up, the Tim Nortons and 90 Seconds of the world, or even corporates who are wanting to learn how to make their staff think a little more innovatively or in a more creative way, that common element is always the people behind it.”

“Those people might have different needs and might sit on a different spectrum in terms of what support they need to get them going, but if you incubate them and develop them then business success will follow right across the board.  Get the people aspect right and then you get the business.”

GridAKL resident Rab Heath is perhaps the best example of BizDojo’s philosophy in action. Co-founder of Haptly, a drone-based pasture and dry feed management system, Heath first met Merchant at a BizDojo event, essentially inviting himself after seeing the name of coworking pioneer Alex Hillman on the bill.

“Rab had seen we were putting on this event with Alex Hillman and totally rang up out of the blue,” says Mechant. “He said, ‘Hey I’m Rab, can I come hang out and see what you’re up to?’ We met him and hung out, had a massive Friday night with him and Alex Hillman, and we were just like ‘whoa’. We couldn’t quite figure out where he fit, but we knew he was an awesome dude with a ton of energy and passion, and we knew we needed to keep in touch.

Eventually when we opened the prototype of this space, we were actually a bit short handed and thought ‘You know what, why don’t we see what Rab’s up to?’ He just came up – and this is totally Rab – he had nowhere to stay, threw his stuff in his car and drove up. He slept in his car for the first weekend on the roof of the carpark. He didn’t tell anyone, he just wanted to be involved. He got involved with OMGTech! off the back of that, got into a couple of different start up ideas and now he’s doing Haptly, which just won the Fukuoka start-up competition [in Japan]. He’s your classic cultural fit for us. High energy, passionate, wants the place to be amazing, wants Auckland to be great, wants us all to be doing cool stuff. It’s good. We need more people like him.”

GridAKL is Auckland’s innovation precinct, located in Wynyard Quarter – powered by ATEED and run by BizDojo. New spaces are leasing soon – click here to find out more.