Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

Rod Drury
CEO & Founder 
Xero

A: Building a mental model of your industry. How things work. Who the key people are. How you get to see them. With Aftermail, we knew getting on the Gartner magic quadrant and having the analysts understand what we are doing was really important. So who are the analysts? Ring them up. Are they speaking at a conference? Can you meet them face to face? Can you ask them out to lunch?

I was pretty ruthless at that networking. I remember going to the angel investment conference before we raised any money. I was thinking where’s all the money? Oh, all those people are together, they have a conference. They had an event at Black Barn and when I got up to speak I said I’m so disappointed there’s no cheeky founders here. Any cheeky founder would have done the mapping and worked out that all the money was going to be at an event in Hawkes Bay for two or three days, that’s where you want to be to build that relationship. The money you want to raise in New Zealand will come from people in that room. So working out how to get in there.