Rudi ever started at Vibe Communications as Chief Commercial Officer back in August, and he has been leading strong growth in the business. I’m delighted that he’s now the CEO – press release below: Vibe appoints Rudi Hefer as CEO Vibe is pleased to announce the apointment of Rudi Hefer as CEO at Vibe Communications. …
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
Define Instruments Expands into South Africa
It’s always great to see companies grow – and Define Instruments recently took their first big leap. The team has followed existing international sales by setting up a South African office. It’s the first of many new overseas offices we hope to see over the next few years, as we seek to expand distribution and direct sales. …
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Portfolio Disclosure Oct 2014
A prompt from Rowan Simpson (16 investments, $4m) and Ben Kepes (14 investments, $500k) led me to update my own investment Portfolio page. I’ve personally invested $780,000 into 10 companies, and have equity received as a founder in several others, totalling over 15. Overall I’m really happy with the private investments. They are relatively small amounts …
Set a high bar and never compromise
Laszlo Bock, Google’s SVP People Operations, shares three secrets for how Google recruits. He does this at the end of a presentation he gave at a Linked-In conference for recruiters. Action starts at 2m:40s. Laszlo doesn’t mention it, but these are exactly the same (with a bit more science these days) “secrets” that McKinsey and many other …
Tracking the performance of the 1 hour Xero model
DISCLOSURE: I hold Xero shares. Last year I built a very quick and dirty spreadsheet to analyse Xero, and wrote Valuing Xero – in one hour. The article was cross-posted to the NBR, where it attracted far more comments. More on those comments below. I used Xero’s September 013 earnings release (and only that earnings release) to feed the …
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Don’t cough on me
It used to be acceptable to go to work or travel with a cough or the flu. That’s been changing over the last 10-20 years, and people who cough and sniffle in public are increasingly treated like people who smoke in the same places. Good. But now the stigma of being sick in public is even worse: Let’s be …
SellShed shedding money?
This is not how you are meant to do it: Online seller SellShed starts up The seven-person firm has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars building a website and free iPhone app and was now on the hunt for “smart money” A very bad sign. Rasing money just to build a website and app implies …
A victory for great coffee
Source: Restaurant Brands NZ Ltd 2014 Annual report
Are you innovative enough?
I’ve been reading Peter Thiel’s excellent and short book – Zero to One. It’s resonating with a lot of people at the moment, and justifiably so. It reminds me a lot of Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship, published originally in 1984 and with very similar messages. My own take is that the art of business is …
Bonus growth for SaaS exporters
The currency fall has a wonderful effect for exporters, especially those who have most of their costs back here in New Zealand. As I write this, the NZD versus the USD has fallen about 10% since earlier this year. As an exampled of what this means I’ve made a simple spreadsheet estimating the impact on Xero. My take is that …
Sell your house privately in New Zealand – the book.
Over at 200 Square we help people sell their house by using the latest internet tools, and avoiding expensive print and high agent overheads like fancy offices. Our licensed real estate agents to the wheeling and dealing for clients, and are very successful and selling houses. The upside is that it costs just $4,500 to sell a …
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Time to change: Another Fatality at Lyttelton, Port of Christchurch
On January 6th 2014 I asked When will the next fatality happen at Lyttelton, Port of Christchurch?, after a near miss gave clear evidence that the Port’s safety systems were not in control. It was a prediction that was almost certain to become true if they did not make drastic changes. The sad answer is …
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The comics of climate change
XKCD elegantly sums up what we are facing: We really don’t know what that question mark will be, but it’s going to be scary. It won’t be this scary: But it’s pretty clear that the implications for global warming are very serious for humans – and other land mammals. It’s interesting to look at …
How do we solve the Gender Gap?
The #YesAllWoman Twitter stream is the latest voice about the serious issue of the gender gap. There is a lot of coverage elsewhere, but for my part I want to try to summarise what the #YesAllWomen Twitter stream is saying, then ask ourselves, as men what our right response should be. Three Themes I’m going to pick just three themes …
Signing customers – learning from Optimizely’s website
Optimizely are in the business of helping people improve their websites so they can sign up more customers or achieve other desired results. They just raised US$57 million, on the back of US$28 million last year, and are growing very quickly. So they must be doing some things really well – so let’s take look at their own marketing website …
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Lance Wiggs 