The Spinoff’s award-winning business podcast is back. Host Simon Pound tells the Business is Boring story so far and shares his hopes for its future.
When Business is Boring launched nearly six years ago we had a contract for six episodes. We’re now 250 guests and more than half a million downloads deep on our mission to show business can be creative, interesting and exciting. Today we relaunch the podcast with a new partner, Spark Lab, a refreshed style, but the same kaupapa – to look into the future of Aotearoa through the stories of its entrepreneurs.
Listen to Business is Boring on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.
The podcast was originally designed to help Callaghan Innovation, the government organisation charged with growing innovative New Zealand businesses, fan entrepreneurial culture and get more people choosing to work in start-ups and high growth exporters. One of their problems was that creative people perceived business as boring. So we set out to hit that impression head-on in the title and make a podcast that was anything but.
For me, it was an unbelievably lucky chance. I started as a media reporter, where I learnt that what you read in the business section on Monday is often front page news on Friday. And business was something very personal too, being the co-founder of a fashion company and working with many other businesses on their communications. I saw business as a vibrant world of endless challenge, creativity and optimism – not all of it warranted. But little of this seemed to make it out to the wider world.
On the podcast we set out to showcase the best of business, and only cover things we thought were interesting, new, important or useful. We wouldn’t be doing take-downs. We’d give people a forum to tell their story, so the listeners could form their own impressions. We’ve particularly tried to cover people helping change our economy. We try to spotlight cool people doing cool things.
But that can sometimes be complicated. Often these interviews share the hard times, the failures, the mistakes made along the way. But in talking to people that have made it through, it can add to survivor bias and become part of the fetishisation of the entrepreneur struggle, contributing to burn out, unhealthy culture and myth making. We try hard to talk to people at all stages of the journey to counter this, but it’s important to acknowledge there’s a lot of privilege in business. Being able to be an entrepreneur, to fail and restart, is not open to everyone. If you’re helping pay your family’s bills, instead of the other way around, you don’t have the luxury of failing fast and celebrating it.
So part of what we’ve tried to do is bring some honesty, get past the PR lines and show more experiences. We’ve had an even gender mix, and we’ve worked to have people that represent the way New Zealand is today. We don’t call this diversity, rather, it’s accurate representation. There’s always more to be done, and we’re always keen to be introduced to more people, especially women, non binary and those of underrepresented experiences, who have great stories to share. We get about three PR pitches a week for white guys with apps. But it often takes three introductions to get people to come on from communities where media interest has sometimes been something to be wary of, rather than court.
And we’ve tried to show what business is really like: the highs and the lows. Which has been more personal than I’d expected. In the course of doing the podcast I’ve been part of businesses that have been on the front pages for their success. I’ve also been on the front page as the poster boy for early Covid business failure at the company I co-founded and manage with my wife, Ingrid Starnes.
We’d tried to expand to open a new store – signing up and doubling our production just weeks before Covid first appeared. That first long lockdown delayed that new store and closed the other ones; as a non-essential business we couldn’t sell a scrap. It seems bananas looking back now, but as everyone was out bubble-walking and washing their groceries, I was doing many of the things I’d spoken to our guests about – trying to crowdfund, pivot, trying to sell our house, planning to move our family of five above our Ponsonby store. And then, when nothing worked, having to negotiate out of leases, make staff redundant, and let people down.
If not for the uncharacteristic kindness of massive landlords we would have been actually, literally bankrupt. Over two years, and thanks to the support from the community around the business, we’ve paid down most of the debt and are now out of the worst of the hole. But the bottom was pretty bleak.
There’s often a narrative of business being about individual success, everyone out for themselves. But we’ve all seen business at its best when it is a community, with people choosing who they support and what they value. That community has never been more important than over the last two years.
Business owners – especially small businesses – are generally optimists trying their best, people with a bit of a dream and learning as they go. Over these last few years, keeping that hope alive has taken a lot out of a lot of people. It’s something we at Business is Boring tried to cover over the Covid period, to show the many realities, and where and how to get help.
That’s at one end of the ride, but I’ve also been lucky enough at the same time to be part of some better business stories. For the first few years of the podcast I was at Vend, the retail tech company that last year sold for $500m. To know what it‘s like to grow so fast, go backwards sometimes, grow again, and change, has helped add useful perspective.
Through the last four years of the podcast I’ve been at innovation studio Previously Unavailable. We get to work with many of the most exciting ventures in New Zealand like Simplicity, AF Drinks and Timely. Watching these businesses from the front row has added some understanding of what it takes to survive and then succeed, and given me a very real interest in how these companies and people do what they do.
The reception to the podcast has been awesome; the listeners have become a community. It’s always amazing to me that there are other people as unusually interested in this stuff as me. We’ve had well over half a million downloads. Guests have won deals, found staff and investors, and grown their businesses on the back of their episodes. We’ve hosted live events, seen particular episodes added to innovative apprentice programmes, received a book offer, and last year won best business podcast at the New Zealand Podcast Awards, which was such a cool way to wrap up the run with Callaghan Innovation – a partnership that truly delivered on its mission.
And it’s great to now be back with Spark Lab as our new partner. They care about the same things we do, like representative personal stories, changing the face of business, and using technology to make life better. And with Spark Lab on board we’ll be able to do some new things with the podcast and its community. It’s going to be an exciting year.
It also seems like the right time to come back. It feels like we’re between old and new worlds. There’s the revolution in work forged by the pandemic. And the rise of web3 and crypto, full of possibility and often perplexing. Aotearoa, always needing to be nimble and adaptive, is at the front of this change. And doing it our way, with the increase in values in business, especially those informed by the role of mātauranga Māori. Some of our best chats have been with people working with their values at the front of what they do, like Rachel Tauleilei, Tim Brown, Lisa King, and Brianne West, well known leaders, and also people coming up like Jon Reed of Compostic and Morgan Maw of Boring Oat Milk.
As well as continuing to cover new stories, we’ll be catching up with some of the 250 odd great guests we’ve had before. The first episode back is with Brooke Roberts, co-founder and 3EO at Sharesies. When we first spoke in 2017 they had 2000 users and big dreams. Today they have half a million New Zealanders on the platform. How did they achieve something like that, and what does such an extraordinary journey like that mean personally? It’s such a privilege to ask questions like that of entrepreneurs at so many stages.
Thanks to the team at The Spinoff and Spark Lab that make it happen, but most of all, thank you for the opportunity. Thanks for listening, to the people who come up and say hi, and to anyone who’s checked out a podcast, or shared one, and all the people who also think business is many things, but certainly not boring.
Listen to Business is Boring on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.