PodcastsMarch 28, 2019

Jenny Morel on 20 years in the tech industry

Business is Boring host

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Jenny Morel, founder of Morel & Co, No 8 Ventures, and most recently, MORGO – an annual gathering of people building high growth companies going global.

Today’s guest started working in the tech sector 20 years ago, before many people knew New Zealand even had one.

Coming from investment banking, she first founded Morel & Co as an investment company to work with technology firms, followed by No 8 Ventures, the first US-style venture capital fund in New Zealand. On the side, she also founded Morgo, a high-energy retreat and recharge for CEOs building tech or high-growth companies going global from New Zealand or Australia.

To chat the journey, the industry today and her experience, Jenny Morel joined the podcast.

Either download this episode (right click and save), have a listen below or via Spotify, subscribe through iTunes (RSS feed) or read on for a transcribed excerpt.

So tell me first up, what got you to start Morel & Co and then not long after, No 8 Ventures? What was the state of the local tech scene then?

My background was in investment banking in the UK and in New Zealand, and for a while, before I started Morel & Co, I had been doing freelance corporate finance and had a number of company directorships, which comes into the story later.

I decided I wanted to start my own business and not just sell my hours, and the only thing I knew about was investment banking. So I started a small investment bank! In the meantime, I had formed another form of technology and initially, that was actually biotechnology through being on the board of AgResearch, the largest research institute in New Zealand. I thought ‘wouldn’t it be fantastic to help some of these biotech spinouts get going?’ I soon found that there was a very small biotech market in New Zealand.

But the characteristic of biotech companies was kind of shared by other tech companies – they’re based on IP, and IP crosses boundaries really easily. So if you’re not going to do it here, it’ll be picked up somewhere else in the world. They can scale very very fast, but they need money to do that. And the money is very hard to raise because they have intellectual property which is intangible. So all of these characteristics were based off biotech.

Our market research before starting on my market research, before starting Morel & Co was anecdotal. It was a friend from a multinational saying they wanted to buy this company, but they couldn’t get an advisor, so the negotiations were kind of difficult. And I went: ‘Oh, really? No advisor for the tech company? That’s wrong.’ It was really just anecdotal.

And so, I thought it would be fun. I did not have great market research, I just thought it would be fun and I thought I would hire one other person to do it with me initially. But instead, I found a real senior deal-doer and a really good junior guy. So we set out with three executives and one support person, and we had a lot of fun.

It was amazing. We started building then, a database of New Zealand technology industry and at the end of the first year, we had six hundred companies on that database. We didn’t know there were that many companies out there, we were just finding them, and a lot of them were small and local – we started doing studies in different sectors, like knowledge management companies.

We were trying for completeness – we wanted to get every company into this database. We had to give up that idea at the end of the second year. We had two thousand companies in the database.

That’s remarkable. And how soon into that journey of working with those companies was the need for capital and the kind of capital that understood the timelines and investing ahead for revenues, the difficulty of tech companies, or research companies needing to have patents in the work? Was there the capital market and support around it?

No, and there still isn’t.

Obviously, it’s improved enormously. When we set out with Morel & Co, I said we weren’t going to have a venture capital fund, and at the same time Caltech was starting a small fund and I gave them an investment, thinking this was good. We had an ecosystem of doing all sorts of things and in that first year of Morel & Co we raised money for three companies. But it’s horrible business, raising money. We’re putting our friends into these young companies.

You learn very quickly that all the investors need a portfolio. You love each one when you invest in it but not all of them are going to succeed, so the investors should always have a portfolio.

The companies all wanted help as much as they wanted money. So my senior deal-doer got 20% of his time sucked out for free advice from one company. And that’s an interesting staff training exercise, but it’s not a viable business model.

We actually made money by selling companies, mostly. But we did some company restructuring, we designed the first US-style employee option scheme in New Zealand, and helped people implement that. We helped people streamline, manage negotiations, and we did other things apart from the capital raising.

One year later, I was lying on the beach in January. I had a friend from the US, Don Campbell, who then was running something called Hambrecht & Quist Guaranty Finance, and Don said, “Jenny you gotta get yourself a fund.”

And then I realized Don was right. We’ve gotta do a fund. To do these things, the investors had a portfolio, you were actually being paid to get involved and give advice to the companies within the structure, and also you had access to follow-on funding. Every time a company wanted to raise more money, there was a six month stock with the company at the end.

And that was the beginning of No 8 Ventures.

Keep going!

PodcastsMarch 28, 2019

First grief, then change; Tayyaba Khan on what New Zealand does now

For Auckland

Committee for Auckland

For Auckland is a new Spinoff podcast of civic conversations with people working to create and sustain a better Auckland for all. In episode one host Timothy Giles spoke to Tayyaba Khan about the effect of the tragedy in Christchurch on the Muslim community, grief, identity, and what happens next.

In a period of shock and grief from the terror attacks in Christchurch, For Auckland had a special opportunity to speak to Tayyaba Khan about what it means for New Zealand. She is the founder of the Khadija Leadership Network, an organisation supporting women leaders in the Muslim community, she is a woman of faith and is a Kiwi leader with international experience in culture and community. She’s worked with the Red Cross and was the CEO the change makers Refugee Forum.

On the podcast she speaks about the way the Christchurch attacks have changed New Zealand forever, how this happened on our shores, and how now is the time to start accepting our differences and be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

“We are New Zealanders living in silos, we cannot deny that anymore. I am so frustrated with our use of the word ‘diversity’ everywhere when we haven’t truly accepted diversity in its purest of forms. It is not reflective in our organisations. It is not reflective of our leadership. So actually using it as a marketing stunt is doing nobody any good,” she says.

“And what you can do is actually get to know your neighbour, [regardless of] whatever discomfort has been in the way for you not to reach out. Now is the time to go: ‘I’m gonna get over myself. I’m going to go over, I’m going to say hello and that’s all I need to do’. And actually, even if I don’t need to say hello I can sit with them in silence and be okay with that. I think it’s important we start really connecting with each other and if we can do that, that’s a good starting point for us.”

Listen to episode one of For Auckland on the player below, subscribe on iTunes, download this episode (right click and save) or read on for a transcribed excerpt. For Auckland is brought to you by the Committee for Auckland and produced by The Spinoff.

A member of Christchurch’s Muslim community stands across the road from the Dean Street mosque. (Photo: MARTY MELVILLE/AFP/Getty Images)

Timothy Giles: Tayyaba Khan, As-Salaam-Alaikum, kia ora, and thank you, in what is an incredibly busy and demanding time for you, for coming in to spend time with us. I want to begin by asking you how has Christchurch impacted you?

Tayyaba Khan: Well I think there are varying layers of impact. But I think I can speak for all when I say it’s just been so destructive. Really it’s changed New Zealanders forever. It’s brought us to a point where we really are questioning how this was possible right here on our shores. For me personally, it’s brought to the forefront so many things but most significantly it’s brought to the forefront the failure of, you know, my civic participation particularly post 9/11.

It was the failure of your civic participation? How? I mean you couldn’t be more involved in the community how is it your failure?

I think for me. Leadership means doing things for others that make an impact for others, you know. And I’m questioning whether everything I’ve done has actually made an impact for the Muslim community and I know that’s really difficult to acknowledge publicly but that is where I am. That is where a few of us are where we know we’ve gone out there, we’ve reached out across communities, we’ve talked about the faith, we’ve talked about the people, we’ve talked about normalising people’s differences, how they might look, and it’s okay to wear what you want, to do what you want and then this happened here. And as someone who’s lived and worked overseas you know being a proud New Zealander has been a huge part of my identity and one of the things I’ve constantly said when I’m overseas, which is you know the stuff that happens in Australia and the UK and the US that’s never going to happen here. That is not New Zealand.

So, so yeah, I feel like what I chose to do I’m questioning and maybe a lot of that is about my grieving process. You know, I continue to be really active I continue to want to do. But it’s really made me question how I need to do it.

So can we break that down for just a moment? I am interested in your vision and what it is that your leadership which is actually being of service to the Muslim community but…

To all communities. Yes, the Muslim community is one, but I’m very much about inclusiveness and I would love to talk about where that’s come from. You know it’s all about my own ancestry the displacement of my grandparents between the India Pakistan partition how my parents have raised me, you know. In the 90s, when we moved here and they would have experienced immense matter racism but they never ever shared that with us. You know, my father has voices always in my mind as I go through this time every single day where he talked about it’s so important for you to learn to be a part and parcel of this country to be fair to everyone to be inclusive of everyone to learn about others that is how you will fully be a New Zealander.

What I’m hearing as you’re talking is the conversation between “Yes I’m Muslim and I’m Kiwi and I’m actually Kiwi as,” I mean, so where are you at when you went away overseas? And I think for many New Zealanders that is the experience. They go overseas and then go “Oh shit actually,” right? And they get their identity as soon as New Zealanders.

Yeah. Yeah. I think. And it’s such an important process for us to go through it right. Because this whole thing has raised the conversation around our national identity, what is our national identity? Where do people sit in that identity? And I feel like I found mine when I went overseas. I was able to explore and express what was uniquely different about being a New Zealander when I was somewhere else. And if that’s what it takes well I would encourage others to do that. That’s where I learnt that actually, you know there are some unique things about us that we just don’t even talk about or reflect on whilst living in New Zealand. And it’s so important especially for our younger generation that we start doing that for them. That we start talking about what our collective national identity is. What we can be proud of and what we kind of really need to address immediately.

Identity and culture are created, defined, communicated, experienced by behaviour, by ritual, so it’s interesting to me the response that, you know, I went up the road to my local mosque right and had some conversations out there and I’ve been there most and I think the great majority, you know, what hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders have done that right, and then right across this city. It interests me then that there is. Who are we as New Zealanders? Right? And we are much more than the mainstream conversation is. I mean, you know, what Mike Hosking says is not okay. That level of ignorance. Right? But whereas what interests me is that you make conversation. I heard you saying “Will you please be supportive of Sikh New Zealanders?” What?

Yeah. Well. So like I said, post 9/11, the Sikh community overseas experienced a lot of discrimination. They were getting confused for, you know, Muslims, and we know that we now have extensive research around the impact of what 9/11 did to various different communities. And so I immediately went back to that experience. I immediately went actually we’re under threat. So are they, you know. The effect of a fair few people who wear visible religious symbols would be, you know, unsafe right now because the ignorant doesn’t know the difference, the ignorant doesn’t know about your grieving self.

You’re the people who are actually right most devastated and most victimized and most obscenely assaulted by this experience and yet you’re saying let’s look out for these guys right.

Yeah I am. Why not. You know why not. We’ve already lost our lives. Why would we not make the effort to save others. And actually that is my call to action for everyone. You know we’ve already experienced that loss. We’ve already started burying on dead. We already know that this is happening here and elsewhere. So why would we not stop and save as many people as possible. It is important to think of everyone. Yes, it’s happened to Muslims. I’m not saying that it isn’t just our pain but actually all pain is trickling to others as well. So why would we not offer care to them.