We love it when good people succeed, especially people like Mike Neumegen (there in that picture below). He was bred in Dunedin, did computer science at Otago University and now he's on his way to rub shoulders with the biggest names in Silicon Valley, California, for three months. He's 24.
Mike and his team have developed some website-building software that is aimed at web designers and it's getting a lot of attention in all the right places.
"At the start of this year I joined a business accelerator called Lightning Lab based in Wellington," he explains. "It's a three-month course and the first month they surround you with mentors – top New Zealand businesspeople. They give you direction and help you to validate your business and identify the next steps."
During that time Mike and his team pitched and refined their idea and he met John Holt who runs the Kiwi Landing Pad in San Francisco.
"He told me he liked what I was doing and helped me to get to San Francisco for a month," he explains. "During that time I met some awesome companies – I went to Google, went to Dropbox and met heaps of other entrepreneurs. I really loved the place."
He returned to Wellington and worked hard to grow his business and validate the assumptions he had from the first month. Then the third and final month of Lightning Lab was spent preparing a seven-minute pitch for demo day.
"They fill out Te Papa with investors and then we pitch to them."
Cloud Cannon was well received and it now has seven people working on it – four employees, two advisors and another director – and clients throughout the world.
"Then there is a whole other level of support of 50-60 people who have contributed in some way," Mike said.
He said that Dunedin had a good tech core, but the Wellington ecosystem was much bigger and that came with a bigger support network.
"Now that I have those relationships I think I can operate out of Dunedin – I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. Dunedin is a really awesome place to work out of, but we need some maturity and we need more people getting involved in the start-up space to make it grow."
Mike said his three-month stint in San Francisco was all about relationships.
"We'll get the chance to get a good feel for the place, meet investors, the leaders operating there and build some good relationships – that's the whole idea of going," he offers.
So is he making any money?
He laughs, "no, we're not making money yet! It's very early stages."
Mike admitted that he was more of a fair-weather surfer, which was lucky because it was hard to find waves this past week. We've topped up this week's collection with a few of our big-wave favourites from the past few months.
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS The OUSA Art Week Gallery Crawl is happening on Thursday night and the Box of Light Gallery is opening its doors. More info here. Come and say hi at 84 Filleul Street.
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