Up & Coming in May: Jams, Capital Raising & Webinar with Kiwi Founder Rod Drury

With May officially upon us and a big month ahead, it’s time to give you some brief highlights of what’s coming up at the Kiwi Landing Pad this month. April was great; we fully kicked off our webinar series with an event every week, we’ve had over 1,000 people join us from 90+ locations and collectively answered over 200 questions.

We are starting the month with a deep dive on capital raising, a topic we have typically stayed away from, but now, given the landscape and our new AMA format we are going to be answering all those burning capital raising questions which is timely given that my boss and the Kiwi Landing Pad chairman/founder just raised a round with his new(ish) startup: homes.co.nz – the recurring theme for this month seems to be centred around those who have indeed ‘been through the process’.

John has just walked the talk; watching his journey growing and scaling a company and getting to over 1 million in ARR(annual recurring revenue) in just under a year (that’s quite hard to do) has been quite amazing and humbling. With the calibre of founders and talent we have sharing this month, perhaps you’ll pick up some of the nuggets and wisdom of how you can achieve this for yourself.

This coming Sunday (May 7th) our super talented Sales & Marketing Jam speakers arrive in New Zealand to deliver an action-packed week of quality, curated information and connections to the New Zealand technology community, you can check out the details here.

Our Sales & Marketing Jams brings Silicon Valley right to your Kiwi backyard for half a day, learning from people who have done what you are trying to do scaling businesses and teams (product, marketing, sales) with experience in the US and Australian market as a benefit. We’ll deep dive into topics that each audience in each location have said are the number one priority right now, as well as what we’ve observed over the last six months of meeting with entrepreneurs and startups. We hope that before people jump on a plane to visit or expand in market; that they’ll stop by one of these events first and learn best practice as well as build capability in the general art of entrepreneurship and growing businesses (as well as get connected!).
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As John Holt likes to say:

It’s all about inspiration and aspiration for these budding New Zealand entrepreneurs and business owners. We want you to succeed, and this is our way of showing you how.

This month we are doing only two webinars seeing as most of our community will be getting the real deal with our Jams in person. However, I thought that TechWeek wouldn’t be complete without chatting with arguably New Zealand’s best entrepreneur who has built one of our most successful technology companies.

Our Kiwi Founder for May is none other than Xero’s CEO & Founder – Rod Drury. I’m personally super excited to be able to host Rod and chat about all things Xero, being an entrepreneur and the journey so far, his approach to business, advice for the future generations of New Zealand, achieving key milestones such as getting to 1 million customers and how they plan to 10x that. Over the last year I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Rod and the Xero team a lot more, I never actually appreciated the size of Xero or the machine that they have built, nor do I think New Zealand realises the sheer size and scale of the company. Overnight success stories are usually many years in the making contrary to popular belief. Xero is going on 1,700 staff globally, and on a pathway to profitability. If you think Xero is ‘just’ accounting software, this is a webinar you need to watch.

Featured in May:

• May 5th 9am NZT: All Things Capital – Monthly Kiwi Landing Pad AMA, exploring money matters and raising capital with the Kiwi Landing Pad team.
• May 8th: Wellington Sales & Marketing Jam – Growing your bases.
• May 9th: Dunedin Sales & Marketing Jam – Growing your bases.
• May 10th: Christchurch Sales 7 Marketing Jam – Growing your bases.
• May 12th: Auckland Sales & Marketing Jam – Growing your bases.
• May 24th 2pm NZT: Kiwi Founder Series – Rod Drury, CEO & Founder @ Xero.