Every year, many times over, a sharp young New Zealander finishes university, wins a scholarship or spots a great opportunity offshore, and gets on a plane. They leave. They thrive. They build extraordinary things. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the thread back home gets thinner.
It's a familiar pattern and not entirely a bad one. New Zealand has always punched above its weight globally because our best people are wired for adventure, comfortable being the underdog, and culturally incapable of accepting that something can't be done just because it hasn't been done yet. But for a long time, we watched the value they created from a distance. Proudly, sure, but from the outside. Two recent offshore investments I've been directly involved with suggest that doesn't have to be the case.
Hamish McKenzie grew up in Central Otago with a love of writing, cutting his teeth editing Critic magazine at Otago University and getting paid 40 cents a word as a freelance journalist, and 60 cents if he was lucky enough to crack The Listener. After university, he headed overseas the way so many of us do, zigzagging through Canada, Hong Kong, and Silicon Valley, with a stint writing for Elon Musk at Tesla, before meeting his future co-founders at a messaging startup called Kik.
In 2017, Hamish co-founded Substack based on a simple idea: give writers the tools to build subscription businesses and keep most of the money. No algorithms deciding who gets seen. No advertisers to appease. Just writers and the readers who care enough to pay. Today, the platform has five million paying subscribers, a valuation of US$1.1 billion following a US$100 million raise including Bond Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Icehouse Ventures, and a cultural footprint that has genuinely reshaped how ideas travel.
Alex Kendall grew up in Christchurch teaching himself to solder circuits, code and build drones in his bedroom, before winning a scholarship to study mechatronics at Auckland University, where he graduated first in his class. He then headed to Cambridge on a Woolf Fisher Scholarship to complete a PhD in deep learning, computer vision, and robotics.
Also in 2017, Alex co-founded Wayve on a conviction the entire industry told him was wrong but turned out to be right: that an end-to-end neural network (i.e. teaching a car to drive the way a human does, through experience) would outperform every hand-coded, map-dependent system anyone else was building. Wayve's Series D in February 2026 raised US$2.5 billion at a valuation of US$8.6 billion, backed by SoftBank, Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Stellantis and Icehouse Ventures. Later this year Uber will launch commercial robotaxi trials powered by Wayve's technology. From 2027, you'll be able to buy a car with Wayve's AI Driver built in.
Both are category-defining companies, and New Zealand DNA runs through them.
The conventional wisdom about New Zealand's talent drain is that it's a loss. Our best people leave, build incredible things elsewhere, and the value accrues to San Francisco and London. Spending time with both Hamish and Alex, it's hard to hold that view.
Hamish has said he hopes to remain a New Zealander in his ‘culture and disposition’ regardless of where he lives. Alex traces Wayve's origins explicitly to growing up here - to the culture of innovation he encountered, the sportspeople he was inspired by, the sense of adventure developed exploring our rivers and mountains. Neither of them lost the thread. They just pulled it a very long way.
The brain drain framing gets this backwards. We treat the departure of talent as a subtraction - a cost, a loss, something to be reversed with better salaries or cheaper housing. But look at what the Indian IT diaspora built in Silicon Valley from the 1990s onward. As Indian engineers rose to become CEOs, venture capitalists, and founders, they didn't just build American companies. They pulled India's entire software industry into the global economy, creating a feedback loop between talent, capital, and knowledge that lifted both countries. India's IT sector grew from around 1.3% of GDP to over 7%. That didn't happen because people came home. It happened because the diaspora stayed connected.
Ireland is another small, remote island nation that lost generations of its most talented people and eventually figured out how to turn the diaspora into a strategic asset, rather than a wound. The Irish systematically cultivated relationships between the diaspora and domestic institutions, treated people who left not as defectors but as ambassadors, and built a policy framework that reflected that. The result was an economy that went from one of Europe's poorest to one of its most dynamic in a generation.
New Zealand has a complicated relationship with scale. We celebrate our innovators, but we quietly prefer them at a size that feels relatable. A $50 million exit is a good story. A $50 billion company starts to feel like it belongs somewhere else. This isn't unique to us - small countries often struggle to hold onto the narrative of big ambition. But it has a practical consequence: the kind of contrarian conviction that founders need to build a category-defining company is hard to sustain in an environment that's sceptical of big bets. You can’t be what you don’t see.
Showing Kiwis (especially young Kiwis still deciding what's possible) that ambition at this level is achievable, and that it has a Kiwi face, matters. Every time Alex or Hamish is on the front page, some kid in Otago recalibrates what's available to them.
Both the Wayve and Substack rounds were oversubscribed and fiercely competed for by the world's best and largest investors. The reason we could participate is straightforward: both Hamish and Alex wanted New Zealand in the room. They wanted to strengthen their connection back home, to bring New Zealanders along on the journey, and to ensure that some of the value they were creating found its way back to the country that shaped them.
Wayve and Substack are just two examples - our portfolio includes many more Kiwi founders building remarkable things offshore, and we feel fortunate to be part of their journeys also.
The traditional model of New Zealand venture has been focused on how to take what we’ve built to the world. That model has real merit. But the expat Kiwi founder is a different proposition. They're already embedded in the world's most competitive innovation ecosystems, with the networks, proximity to capital, and market access that New Zealand-based startups spend years trying to acquire.
What they often want is a New Zealand anchor - an investor who knew them before the rest of the world did, and who holds a stake in what they're building. That anchor keeps founders connected to home, creates a bridge for future investment, and extends the reach of what this country means in the world.
When Icehouse Ventures invests in companies like Substack and Wayve, we're not just deploying institutional capital behind closed doors. Our investor base includes everyday New Zealanders through retail investment funds including Generate, Pie Funds, and Simplicity. Regular Kiwis contributing to their first home deposit or retirement, who most likely have never stepped foot in Silicon Valley, but now have economic exposure to the AI powering Uber's global robotaxi fleet and the platform rewriting the economics of media. That is what bringing the value home actually looks like.
The conventional answer to the brain drain is domestic: make New Zealand more attractive, raise salaries, build a better local ecosystem. All of that is worth doing. None of it is the whole answer. The less conventional answer is to follow the talent offshore – not to retrieve it, but to invest in it. To be a genuine participant in the ecosystems where our founders are building, not just a cheerleader reading the coverage from 12,000 kilometres away.
The value Hamish and Alex are creating with the brilliance they carried with them when they left now has a pathway back to New Zealand in a way it simply didn't before. The thread didn't break. Our job is to make sure we're still holding the other end.
Connect with Jo here.