Global culture needed for startups

BY LANCE WIGGS

OPINION: I attended an "unconference" last weekend - BarCamp 4. Picture eight classrooms in a school taken over by a couple of hundred computer geeks and designers, with no agenda but a mandate to participate.

The result was a cacophony of 30-minute sessions with topics ranging from arcane aspects of code, to social design and even Wikipediaphobia in New Zealand schools.

Vaughan Rowsell, who has just launched an online cash register for retailers called VendHQ, and I led a session to try to understand how technology start- ups can successfully go global.

We hypothesised that New Zealand is a good place to incubate companies, and the group was quickly able to arrive at a laundry list of reasons why this is so.

However, we noticed fairly quickly that when we talked about foreign markets, we kept using the United States as the example foreign market. The US market for technology-based businesses is certainly the biggest but is it really the best market to target?

We all feel as if we know the US, as we interact with each other on their websites, watch their television programmes and follow their entertainment and politics.

But what we don't intrinsically understand, at least until we live there, is that the people who live in the US are not like us. They might look similar to us and speak, largely, the same language, but they behave in different ways, they consume products in different ways and they do business in different ways.

Their economy and politics are radically different, their cars unfathomably large, sense of humour perplexing and their food often inedible. Kiwi companies can struggle to compete in the US until they shift their business there and hire locals - in effect becoming an American company.

And when we do arrive, companies find themselves in the world's most competitive market, a drop in the sea of other, better funded and connected companies. It's similar in Australia, but what's worse is that the market size there is still too small for real critical mass.

There are other more interesting markets closer to home, within a few hours flying, and in much closer time zones. We have the markets of Indonesia's 227 million people, the Philippines' 90 million and China's 1.3 billion. We even have free trade agreements in place with China, Malaysia (27 million), Singapore and Hong Kong.

Technology startups, indeed all businesses, often ignore these markets as they seem too foreign. But that obvious foreignness, which is there but not so evident in the US and Australian markets, should make us prepare all the more.

So these markets are profitable, closer to home, often not subject to trade barriers and often relatively empty. So why are we failing to enter these markets first?

The answer is that we do not think about them, as we do not know about them, and all because we are not working with people from those countries. So there is an opportunity to match fast-growing local firms with people who are from these larger free markets, even bringing them on board as co-founders.

We are, for example, blessed in New Zealand with a large, young, smart and educated recent immigrant Chinese population. They are New Zealand's best chance of increasing our exports across all sectors to the world's fastest growing market.

They are Kiwis, and they are Chinese, often wanting to live and work in both places, and with the ability to switch between locations as required.

We have employment legislation that allows smaller companies, and soon larger ones, to take on staff for 90 days risk-free. We have companies frustrated at their inability to launch overseas.

In short, we have all the elements required to understand and enter foreign countries with very attractive markets.

The New Zealand company of the future will be multicultural, multiethnic and multinational. We have here the immigrant population to form and build these multinational companies even before launching overseas.

It's not easy working together with people from different cultures, and doing so will change the culture of any company. But successful companies have a global culture that transcends national boundaries, and successful New Zealand multinationals will have a Kiwi culture at their core and incorporate the values of all of their leaders and staff.

So let's cease the dependence on English-speaking countries, seek out opportunities closer to home and increase New Zealand's exports. Give an immigrant a chance and start hiring.

Lance Wiggs is a consultant to industrial, media and internet-based businesses. He is a director of several companies and a regular blogger on his website lancewiggs.com.

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