Ever wondered how to transition from a corporate career to thriving as a serial entrepreneur? Kat Webber, the founder of LiveRem and ResolvePay, joins us to share her journey of resilience, creativity, and relentless pursuit of her entrepreneurial dreams. From her early ventures in dog walking and a spray tanning business, to launching an innovative Christmas tree enterprise in university, Kat's story is a testament to the power of self-belief and a strong support system. Discover how she turned her corporate experience into a stepping stone for bootstrapping successful SaaS businesses.
Curious about the nuts and bolts of building a bootstrapped SaaS business from the ground up? Kat reveals her strategies for understanding customer needs, balancing multiple priorities, and maintaining flexibility without external capital. She provides candid insights into the trials and triumphs of managing three businesses, raising young children, and even building a house amid financial constraints. We'll also explore the valuable lessons she's learned about progressive hiring practices, addressing unconscious bias, and the Know Your Gap initiative focused on gender pay gaps and representation.
Kat’s deep connection to her Irish heritage and her journey from city life to a peaceful coastal existence add another layer to her inspiring story. We discuss the importance of community and how remote work and a supportive tech community have enriched her life. Kat’s experiences underline the significance of embracing failure as a learning opportunity, choosing the right business partners, and fostering a balance between motherhood and entrepreneurship. Whether you're navigating the startup world or balancing personal and professional responsibilities, Kat’s story offers practical tips and inspiration for achieving success under demanding circumstances.
Connect with Kate personally or via ResolvePay or LiveRem
Ever wondered how to transition from a corporate career to thriving as a serial entrepreneur? Kat Webber, the founder of LiveRem and ResolvePay, joins us to share her journey of resilience, creativity, and relentless pursuit of her entrepreneurial dreams. From her early ventures in dog walking and a spray tanning business, to launching an innovative Christmas tree enterprise in university, Kat's story is a testament to the power of self-belief and a strong support system. Discover how she turned her corporate experience into a stepping stone for bootstrapping successful SaaS businesses.
Curious about the nuts and bolts of building a bootstrapped SaaS business from the ground up? Kat reveals her strategies for understanding customer needs, balancing multiple priorities, and maintaining flexibility without external capital. She provides candid insights into the trials and triumphs of managing three businesses, raising young children, and even building a house amid financial constraints. We'll also explore the valuable lessons she's learned about progressive hiring practices, addressing unconscious bias, and the Know Your Gap initiative focused on gender pay gaps and representation.
Kat’s deep connection to her Irish heritage and her journey from city life to a peaceful coastal existence add another layer to her inspiring story. We discuss the importance of community and how remote work and a supportive tech community have enriched her life. Kat’s experiences underline the significance of embracing failure as a learning opportunity, choosing the right business partners, and fostering a balance between motherhood and entrepreneurship. Whether you're navigating the startup world or balancing personal and professional responsibilities, Kat’s story offers practical tips and inspiration for achieving success under demanding circumstances.
Connect with Kate personally or via ResolvePay or LiveRem
No wasn't an option for me and like that's kind of been a thing throughout my whole life. It's okay. So if someone says no, I don't really accept that. It's kind of like okay. So how can I work my way around this to get the outcome that I want?
Speaker 2:Kat is the founder of LiveRen and ResolvePay and actually, I think, a little bit of a serial entrepreneur when you look into her background.
Speaker 1:And you know sometimes there's compromise in that, but it's bringing the right people together to help us get the outcome that we ultimately want.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's that attitude, isn't it, that gets you through. Hey everybody, it's Greg Sheehan. Welcome to my podcast, where you will hear from a range of guests, including those from the startup world and those that have had incredibly interesting lives and some stories to tell. I would really appreciate it if you could hit the follow button and share this amongst your friends, but, as you know, time is limited, so let's get on with it and hear from our next guest. I want to tell you a little bit about desk work.
Speaker 2:Desk work is your offshoring option. If you want to save around 50% of your total headcount cost for equivalent talent across accounting, marketing, sales, your operations or your admin, then check out desk work. Honestly, if I was looking to start an accounting firm again, it would be a no brainer for me to use desk work. I've used offshoring teams before in the past. I got past my skepticism on being able to do it and it was so phenomenally successful. Go have a look at desk-workco backslash, greg, and book yourself a free discovery call to learn more about it. Better still, yourself a free discovery call to learn more about it. Better still, mention my name and get yourself some discounts. Check it out. Now back to the show. My guest today is Kat Weber. Kat is the founder of LiveRem and ResolvePay and actually, I think, a little bit of a serial entrepreneur when you look into her background. Welcome to the show, kat.
Speaker 1:Hi, nice to speak to you this morning.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, and it's bright and early because I'm recording this actually from Sydney, where I'm actually doing this, from an Airbnb where the lighting is not great and Kat's putting up with looking at me in suboptimal light, but it's really lovely to chat to you today, thanks for having me. Yeah, I love starting these conversations by just understanding a little bit about you so before we get into the startups, keen to talk about your origin. So you're a Baradine girl and an Auckland.
Speaker 1:University girl.
Speaker 2:It doesn't strike me as somebody that would have gone off into entrepreneurship. You, lawyer, doctor, somehow you got there.
Speaker 1:But tell us about your background. I don't really define myself, I guess, by the schools that I went to. I started my life that I went to. I started my life. My parents are Irish well, my mum's Irish. My dad is Kiwi, but Irish heritage as well, and they have always kind of instilled in us that you can do whatever you want, like if you really put your mind to it and you work hard, do whatever you want. And they've supported us with that.
Speaker 1:But, brothers and sisters, and but my very first introduction into working life was I was 10 years old and I started walking dogs. I had a couple of dogs myself and I was at the park and the woman said to me do you want to make some money and walk my dog as well? And I basically built up this quite successful dog walking business and saved all this money and could do all this travel like. I went to Sydney when I was 13 to see my auntie and I figured out that people would actually pay me to do stuff that they didn't want to do, which was quite mind-blowing for a 10, 11-year-old. Then I kind of saw some more opportunities. I started a spray tanning business when we got to the years of school balls and again people were like, oh, I need this problem and I could solve it. And with my little spray tan thing that I'd throw in the back of my V-Dub golf and, you know, roll around and spray people's bodies all over town sounds weird when you say that out loud.
Speaker 1:And then I went to university and did Christmas tree business like a Christmas tree business and you know it wasn't just like a side of the road hustle, we had a real operation going on. We had like deals with local cafes where you could, if you bought a Christmas tree with us, you'd get a free coffee or if you were from one of the local schools, you get, you got cheaper Christmas trees. You know we were kind of like trying to be really innovative instead of just being a Christmas tree seller. We had F-Off, which was a huge thing and into when I was early 2011 or 2010 we would have done that so it was.
Speaker 1:So it was like all the stuff.
Speaker 1:We tried to be different, like my parents and my family and, you know, even the schools that I went to were always very supportive of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.
Speaker 1:And then I also had this like real self-belief that if I gave it a try, there was always a wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.
Speaker 1:And then I also had this like real self-belief that if I gave it a try, there was always a way to do what I wanted to do. It didn't always work out the way that I wanted to, but it definitely kind of learn as you go through these things, don't you? And went into the more corporate world after finishing my degree and learned, I guess, my stripes a little bit in those spaces, working in banking and one of the big four consulting firms, and you learn a lot in those environments. I also learnt that wasn't really the environment that I wanted to do long-term and some amazing people and some amazing lessons, but for me, I think, being able to carve my own path and to be able to solve the problems in the way that I wanted to solve them rather than having, I guess, to tick boxes and follow the big organization strategy. And that's how I started in Resolve, payspace, and nearly five years ago, yeah it's really interesting.
Speaker 2:If you look into your background you can see the entrepreneurial sort of DNA in there early and then when you hear about your story, there is almost like if I was a betting man and I was placing a bet on your career at the beginning. You could tell almost early on that you were going to get uncomfortable in a corporate or consulting or government environment and that you needed to be able to set your own path, build your own businesses and those sorts of things. It's sort of, in a way, no surprise, and the Christmas tree business is an example of that right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I got quite frustrated in those corporate environments because I could see that there was some really cool stuff that was happening, but the way that they were going about doing it didn't really make sense to me. I was like we could do this so much better and so much smarter, with a better outcome for our customers and cheaper. And that's, I guess, kind of where the result piece really was born. It's internal audit effectively. We look at compliance to the holidays act so we make sure companies understand how to pay people when they take leave. It's not the best barbecue chat, honestly.
Speaker 2:You go around and you're like how did you get started in something like that? I mean, there is a pain point there, but did you just go right, I want to do a startup, and what's the problem? Or did you just sort of fall over it?
Speaker 1:I fell over it, like when I was working at EY. We did a lot in that space and they still do a lot in that space and they still do a lot in that space a big full consulting firm but their model at the time and this was nearly 10 years ago was using a very manual approach. They had 400 people that they outsourced it to in India to run their recalculation approach for when people get their holiday at the front. I left there and had my first baby and, rather than wanting to go back into working in another kind of corporate environment, I thought I wonder if we could do something in this holiday pay space. That's different than how everybody else is doing it, and I was at the time contracting to NZTA and Jonathan Morgan, who's now a co-founder and both results and library, was working there.
Speaker 1:He's like one of those tech geniuses who you ask him to solve a problem, he says no and then he fixes it two days later. He's amazing, and so every day I'd be like to him. I want to do this and I've kind of like written the algorithm for it, because I did stats in my degree and I kind of knew how it should go, but I'm not a coder and I'm not a details person to really understand and write code. And so, jonathan, can you find someone who can help me do this? Basically pissed at him every day for six months and then he was like fine, I'll build it. And we built resolve pain. And we knew that it was a problem that people needed to solve, but you know know, they didn't have the big four budget really. So we thought, if we build it and we make it accessible for everybody, then hopefully that's something that you know people would want.
Speaker 2:And they did how does it work? So I've got a limited understanding of some of the challenges in holiday pay I used. Well, I'm still a chartered accountant. I used to be in practice, so I kind of have some broad understanding that it's complex. But is this a product that plugs into payroll systems, or who's your customer? Give us a bit of picture of what it does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So with ResolvePay it's kind of like consulting that's powered by tech would be the best way to describe it. So we have consultants that will go in and work with our customers to help them understand if they've got a problem, and then, when we know that they do, we can use our technology. We built a tool that basically does all the recalculations. So basically, if they get it wrong, they have to go back and recalculate for seven years-ish or more if they want to, every instance of leave, every employee, to make sure that they've been paid correctly, and our toll just runs that through very quickly.
Speaker 1:I guess what that exposure in that business showed us is there's so much value in payroll data and people don't have the ability to easily tap into that knowledge within that data set, which is where live rem was born from. We're like we understand how to get the data out of payroll systems. We we understand how to make it make sense. So how then do we use that to help our customers in a different way? And so we started having conversations around what is it that people want and need and where are those pain points in that space? And with LiveRam, it's all very well wanting to go and hire someone, but what should we be paying them and what's the market rate for that person today, not six months ago? And so we built the direct integration into payroll systems to give real-time salary data for people on how much someone's role is really worth.
Speaker 2:Which is really cool, and that is something that's common across both the consumer or the employee looking to know what they're worth, but also from an employer perspective, trying to figure out how much to pay, and so you integrate then into payroll systems as well, which is very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, payroll and HR systems. Yeah, it's a real-time value, real-time platform, so it's reliant on our customers sharing their data in. We anonymize it and aggregate it, but then give a view back to all our customers of how much their role is worth in the market and a whole lot of other pieces that we do with that. And mapping roles making sure that they are actually mapped to a role that makes sense, not just on a job title basis. And now we're getting more into the insights piece. So, okay, what's your gender pay gap, for example? Or what's your gender pay gap, for example, or what's your turnover? And you can start to use this data to really diagnose the health of your organisation. Why has this department all of a sudden had a real increase in turnover and it's a turnover in women or your organisation as a whole is trending down on your turnover? Is that a good thing? And you know you start to actually ask questions based on data rather than just feeling so what's the bigger picture play for you guys.
Speaker 2:If you're building out a data play for employee-based data, where can you see this going? What would you like to do?
Speaker 1:I think I think the opportunities are huge in this space. Obviously, new zealand is a great market, but even being able to kind of look up across Australia and beyond as well, around how we so at first, we primarily give people their information on their own company, but then the second part of that is we benchmark it. So okay, your company's going like this, but what does that actually mean? Is another company performing in the same way? And then how does that look beyond your industry or your region or your country, so you can start to give our customers some real value? I guess like a target or a marker on how they're performing, or very well to have your own data, but how do you know if you're actually doing well?
Speaker 2:And so how did you get started with Jonathan? So you sort of bugged him day in, day out and then he starts to build the code. At what point did you sort of leave your day jobs and jump into this?
Speaker 1:I took the leap first. We basically have always had the model with both ResolvePay and LiveRamp, that we won't build something unless someone wants it. So we sold some work to our first customer with ResolvePay and then I think I left. About that same time my contract with NZTA finished and I didn't really go back into it. I didn't look for any other paid work sorry, I should say paid employment because I was getting paid by ResolvePay but not by anyone else and I think it must have been about a year or 18 months of me just selling work and doing it Jonathan working in the evening, if I needed his help and then we got to a point where we'd won some pretty big contracts.
Speaker 1:We were starting to win work off the big four. We you know a couple of NZX listed companies. It wasn't just you know your corner business anymore. We're actually starting to make a real impact in the market. And I got to a point where I was like I need you out. The working late nights is not working for us to grow this business sustainably. So he finished his role at Way Beyond and came and worked full time where we've been doing it ever since.
Speaker 2:That's a big move, and so you've bootstrapped it all the way through, or have you raised no external capital?
Speaker 1:No, we have been quite clear in our vision of how we want to grow organically and use our own money effectively. To do that, it's been tough at times. I think it's. One of the hard things about bootstrapping is you do have to make sacrifices. I haven't really worked in a company with VC funding for a long time of going let's just have more capital, so I can't pass judgment on that, but for us it was very much. We want to do this ourselves and we want to be able to make our own decisions and we want flexibility and the lifestyle as well. I've got a four-year-old and a two-year-old. I want to be able to pick them up from kindy or go on a kindy trip or be able to be home if they're sick. I don't feel I could probably get that in the same way if I was taking external funding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really interesting, and I don't know whether it's just me, but I'm becoming more aware of companies that are bootstrapping not just out of New Zealand or Australia but globally. Now, whether that's some sort of response to what's happened with venture capital in the last few years it's got kind of overheated and then valuations have come back or whether it is just this push for a better lifestyle and people are looking to just literally row their own boat, that's hard to know. So you got started and then basically you're building a services revenue. At the same time, you're building the tech to support it, which is it's very smart.
Speaker 1:I mean, the consulting is what I've kind of always done. It's what I did when I came straight out of university, so I'm very familiar with the consulting space. Honestly, the live room stuff has probably been a bigger shift for me personally, because we're selling SaaS effectively and that's a totally different ballgame. I can go I'll quite happily go and stand in front of a boardroom of a whole bunch of people and pitch my services for ResolvePay. I'm much less comfortable in this space than selling a fast product, which I don't know if that's weird, but yeah, it's very different.
Speaker 2:It's very different, isn't it? They're very different sales processes, very different ways of marketing. So with ResolvePay, just to try and paraphrase and to help me understand, you're going into meeting rooms, you're meeting with companies that know they may have a potential problem or have identified they have got a problem. You go in there, identify the size and scale of the issue and then go and look at fixing it. So it's a B2B, almost an enterprise sales process, whereas in the world of SaaS for live REM, it's a very different proposition. Who's your customer with live REM?
Speaker 1:Is it the employee or the employer, employer and actually a lot of the time it's the same customers as Resolve Pay it's. You know well, I kind of target customers, companies over 100 people, but effectively we could have any company size from any industry who's interested in understanding what to pay people and how that compares to the rest of the market. So far our customers have been very much in the tech space retail, media, agencies, construction, which I think was quite interesting to me.
Speaker 2:So, like civil engineers and actual construction companies as well and those who may be already using a benchmarking service but want that real-time data and that ability to get real, valuable benchmarks and how have you sort of gone about building a business in sass, if I presume I don't know about jonathan, but if you hadn't built a sass business before, how have you sought help? Who's helped? How's that worked?
Speaker 1:Jonathan has been in this space before, so he worked for E-Road and way beyond, so he's kind of worked in that SaaS world. I have a lot of conversations and when we first started I guess we had a lot of conversations with HR professionals around what they needed and what they wanted. I don't know if I've directly asked people around how to build a SaaS business.
Speaker 2:But you're doing that right, you're out there and you're just making it happen and in that sense, because I think there'll be a lot of people listening wherever they're listening New Zealand, australia and more broadly around the world, who are in a day job and they maybe haven't worked in SaaS. They would like to start a SaaS business. So, for those who don't know what SaaS means software as a service, so basically subscription-based software and listening to your story, I'm thinking, well, kat has done it and Kat and Jonathan have made this work. So how did she do it?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, just talking to lots of people, of people, the networks, yeah, I think just no wasn't an option for me and like that's kind of been a thing throughout my whole life, it's okay. So if someone says no, I don't really accept that. It's kind of like okay. So how can I work my way around this to get the outcome that I want? So I wanted to start a SaaS company. What's the basic fundamentals? Well, we need a product that people want, so so how do we know people want it? We'll talk to a whole lot of people and basically design a product. And I'm not an expert in design I'm not really I would say I'm really an expert in anything but I think I'm quite good at finding people who know how to do stuff and helping them help me to get what I want ultimately.
Speaker 2:Would you say that's your superpower? Is that like if you were to be asked the question you know what is your key strength here? I hate the phrase, but I use it a lot the zone of genius Like what are you really good at and how does that help what you do?
Speaker 1:I think that's probably what it would be Not taking no and then, if we do get a no, finding a way to get a yes. And you know, sometimes there I have that attitude in all parts of my life. I think my husband would say I'm very tenacious.
Speaker 2:And you have to be to be a startup founder, right? You just have to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's funny, my daughter's nearly five and they always say it's really hard to parent a mini version of yourself and I'm definitely finding that with her a bit like the negotiations at bedtime, like, oh, am I actually like that in how I operate in my day-to-day life?
Speaker 2:because I think I probably am allows you to be self-reflective yeah, I think I like to think that I'm really good at finding people to help us achieve a goal and help them be the best version of themselves, and doing that as well yeah, I think it's interesting because, you know, I often talk to either wannabe startup founders or early stage startup founders who are struggling and always say to them look, the reality of doing a startup is it's like having to solve a Rubik's Cube and you get a new Rubik's Cube.
Speaker 2:That's sort of all messed up. Every single day there's a new puzzle or problem to solve, and generally you're doing it while almost the shop clock is running down or while a heat lamp is on. You Like it's really hard and you've got to do that for probably a decade. That's just the sport you've chosen right. So being tenacious is exactly what you need. And are you somebody that would say that that strength is something you should double down on, or are you somebody who would rather kind of look at your weaknesses and then start addressing your weaknesses? People have different views on this. I'm interested in double down on your strengths or improve your weaknesses.
Speaker 1:I'd probably double down on strengths All four. If you're good at tennis and bad at maths, get a tennis coach, not a maths tutor. Yeah, absolutely yeah. That's probably me, like what's going to get us there fastest? And also I want to enjoy what I'm doing as well, not to say that I don't work on my weaknesses, and I think I try to be reflective, but I think the double down would be for me.
Speaker 2:I think it's really important for people to think about that, because I think if you focus on your weaknesses, all you're really doing is getting back to average. So you're bringing yourself back up to par, and nobody that's ever done anything really world changing is average. They're just not.
Speaker 1:Or get someone to help you do it, like there's some stuff that I'm really not good at. Sometimes it's a hard pill to swallow that I'm not good at it because I think I am. And then I look at the result and I'm like so you know, get someone in to come and help you that will talk to someone about how to do it and you know they might teach you something that you didn't know and you might then be able to do it yourself, or you can get them to do it for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and tell us what's been the biggest challenge in working for yourself, building both services business professional services business backed by tech, and then a SaaS business. What's the hardest challenge that you've had over the last four or five years?
Speaker 1:I think the very first thing was the fact that you've had over the last four or five years. I think the very first thing was the fact that you were like a move from a regular income to no guaranteed income and I feel really lucky that we've been able to build something that people want and will pay us for, both in Resolve, pay and LiveRam. The juggle is really real and I feel like I say this a lot to people. You know, I've got two young kids. I've got two businesses, my husband's also self-employed. We have a lot of juggle and we have a lot of risk. We're comfortable with that, but it is hard some days of going. Okay, there's a lot here that we're trying to figure out.
Speaker 1:I think the hardest part was probably we had a 12-month period where it felt like everything was going wrong. We also decided to build a house, which at the worst possible time to build a house, when prices were skyrocketing. So we had like a three-year-old, a one-year-old, basically three businesses and we were building a house and we had a build company. That was a real shocker to deal with. So that was a really hard 12 months of going. Oh my God, I feel like we're not getting any relief in any space.
Speaker 1:The kids are sick. You have to be up all night with them and then get up in the morning in front to this massive client about how you've done all this work. Go in and pitch your new SaaS company and think about the strategy of what's going to be our go-to-market strategy on that. Or can we pay our bills next month, or you know all these different priorities that you have to try and work through, and there were definitely days where I was like this is really hard. Yeah, I'm finding this really really difficult and I can't see a way through with a lot of it as well. But I think we just picked it off one little bit at a time and I thought the highest priority today and what can we win today, rather than trying to solve all of the problems at once.
Speaker 2:Were there times where you wanted to give up, where you just wanted to go back and get a paid role, or did you go? No, I've got this.
Speaker 1:I don't think there was any time where I was wanting to go back and work in a paid role. There were definitely times when I was like I really wish that this was over right now and I don't see how it's even not going to be like this. But I really believe in what we're doing with Resolve, pay and Live Rem, so I knew that it was the right thing to do. It was like we need to just solve these problems to be able to get through it and, honestly, a lot of this stuff was more around the wider personal stuff that I had going on with. You know the reality of having young kids and, yeah, it's building a house, it's challenging.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think for those listening who are thinking about doing a starter, your 20s are a great time because if you generally don't have children, or if you do, you know it's kind of rare. So you know you've got no dependents, you've probably got no income and not a lot of money, but you don't have that kind of that issue of raising children, buying houses. Your 30s and 40s are nuts because you're raising kids, you're building houses, there's little kids running around. It's really challenging and it's not till your 50s like old guys like me, where the kids have all grown up. Life is a little bit easier again. So the 30s and 40s are almost like a valley of death. You know they're really hard. It's like going for a run and you're putting weights on your back while you're doing a startup.
Speaker 1:So it's challenging because I think the other thing that people I didn't really comprehend prior to starting this is like you don't get any leave, you don't get mat leave I don't take mat leave with either of my kids and you don't get sick leave and you don't get holidays. You're committed to this, just like you're committed to kids.
Speaker 2:There's no off yeah, there's no, there's no off ramp, yeah yeah yeah, and tell us a little bit about know your gap like there must be some really interesting insights that you're starting to get there. It was gender and gender pay gaps, etc. Tell us a bit about that yeah.
Speaker 1:So the know your gap in science is basically a free insights dashboard for any company to be able to know and understand their gender pay gap, and it's something that has always been a really passionate area for me of having equality in the workplace for men and women. It's something I saw in my more corporate life, you know, working in banking and working in consulting firms. This tool gives the insights to the company so that they don't really have any excuse to not do anything about it. We also see some really interesting insights. A lot of it is actually less about people being paid the same amount for the same role.
Speaker 1:I think in New Zealand, in a lot of spaces, we're actually doing really well in that regard. It's more around the representation at the level. So, okay, you know everybody in the same company might be. You know all the junior people are on the same amount and the senior people are on the same amount, but how many women are sitting at your exec table, how many women are in your middle management? And that's, I think, where we've got a lot of space to improve or opportunity to improve in.
Speaker 2:Hey, just let me pause you there for a second and tell you about some help that's available for startup founders. One of the biggest reasons startups fail is that the founders give up. They just burn out through struggling with aligning all of their people to what it is they're trying to do. It doesn't have to be like that, though. Jess Dahlberg is an expert in startup performance and she works to align your team to the performance you need so that you, as founders, can get on and scale with confidence. Simply head to jessdahlbergcom. Backslash scale up. That's jessdahlberg D-A-H-L-B-E-R-Gcom backslash scale up. Use promo code scale up 2024 and start removing those headaches. Let's get back to the show. It's such a fascinating area. I've I've got two daughters who are young adults now. We've had this conversation around the family dinner table for a decade or more how do we improve this like, how do we make this much, much better? What are you seeing companies do to change this and make sure we are getting full parity?
Speaker 1:I think a lot of companies who are being quite progressive in this space are being really conscious about it by doing things like ensuring that they interview both men and women for every role. As an example and jonathan actually speaks to this, he they did this way beyond. When he worked there they introduced this policy to interview a male and female for every role and they ended up hiring people they never would have interviewed. So it was a real eye-opener for him around. Maybe there is probably an unconscious bias that people don't even realize that they have and on paper you might have someone who doesn't necessarily tick the box, but when you interview them they might be suitable for a role. I think there's also, speaking to friends of mine, they will be hesitant to apply for a role unless they feel like they tick every single box. So I don't know how we do this necessarily, but encouraging people to step outside of their comfort zone and also making it easier from a company perspective to look for women who may not necessarily automatically apply for a job.
Speaker 2:That is a really interesting insight and I've seen that before and where, let's say, there's 10 requirements for a job. If a boy has two of them and I'm speaking from personal experience and I've got a son if he has two of those 10, he's like well, I've got what it takes, I'll go do it. The two daughters. If they don't have all 10, they don't think they've got what it takes, Yet they've got a very strong mother, a very strong grandmother both professionals, and yet they look at the world that way.
Speaker 1:How do we change that? Yeah, I know it's something I think about about a lot. I've got a son and a daughter as well and we're talking a little bit before we started on this call about we live near the beach and we've got a skimboard and my daughter looks at it and she assesses all the risks and she's like, okay, is the wave coming? Is who's walking down the beach and am I going to be able to do it? And she runs and she nails it. She can really far.
Speaker 1:My son is two and he's like I see a board, I see a wave, I'm going to go for it. Like he doesn't have that kind of same cautiousness about him. I'm not saying I don't think she should have cautiousness. I think it's great that she's aware and assessing the risk. But I don't know how we change that around, making our girls and our women feel comfortable to push themselves outside their comfort zone and like what's the worst that could happen. You know, in that case she falls over and we get back up and we we do it again and I think that's probably something that I feel really lucky with my parents of going.
Speaker 1:Well. You know, as I've grown up, what's the worst thing that could happen. They were always there to pick me up. You know, three o'clock in the morning if I got stuck trying to get home from being in town or if I was unwell and I needed help, they'd come and help me. Put in that security around women to go. It's okay to fail and you'll learn something Some of the hardest things I've ever done. I look back now and I'm like do I regret that? No, I don't. Would I do it again if the same opportunity presented me? Absolutely not. But I've learned from those lessons. But I'm glad that I experienced them as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, there's obviously so many things we could touch on here around conditioning of boys and girls and that sort of thing, but the comment you just made is it's okay to fail. Whether you're a guy or a girl, you know, it is okay to fail. It's life and it's the journey of life and there's no shame in failing, right like it's just give things a go. Now you touched on the fact that you live near the beach and, as you said, we were talking about that. You know, prior starting recording this morning, you made this shift from the big smoke up to country life. How does that go with being a startup founder and living out in the country?
Speaker 1:I found it really hard the first six months that we moved up here. I'd never lived anywhere like without being right in the middle of a city. You know, I lived right in the middle of Auckland. I moved to Sydney and I spent some time, you know, in Europe and I was never country. But we moved up and it's been the best thing that I could ever ever recommend to anybody. And the biggest part for me is actually just being able to have complete separation from that hustle of the city, to get perspective.
Speaker 1:So I go for a walk in the countryside every morning and this morning it was completely foggy. I kind of walked over this hill and you could see I was like above the fog and the sun was shining. This is just the best way to start the day. We walk on the beach. My husband also works from home. We walk on the beach most days. It's just I find that really grounding and you know, then I go into my hustle and you can do that now. Thank you, covert, to be able to be more remote. So that's one thing that's been really great for us. We're the whole pain library. We're both 100 remote companies, so we do have the tools and ability to work forever. So yeah, yeah and what?
Speaker 2:is there much of a supportive tech community? You and I chatted a week or two back about people we know in common and you're up in Northland. Is there much of a group?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've got a great community here. We've got a little tech community group Josh, who's been on your podcast before, from Makahu, he's up here and there's a couple of GD1 in the Gatiney she's just down the road and our kids all play together and they all go to school together, which is quite cool, and there's lots of different people working in that tech space. We probably need to catch up more than we do. Honestly, I think we're all quite busy, but it's nice to just have those touch points and people who understand what's going on. We have a. I had an article a couple of months ago that came out and instantly the WhatsApp group pipes up going hey, congratulations, because it can be quite lonely working from home and not having that vibe and all those people around you that you might be more used to in a different working environment. So the community up here is fantastic and I fully underappreciated how amazing that would be compared to living in the city before we moved up here yeah, and look, I am also a huge advocate for country living.
Speaker 2:I did that for 20 years, raising our family and and doing startups at the time, and so it was super challenging, but that small country environment was just fantastic, absolutely fantastic. And you are also somebody who is quite close to your Irish heritage. As you said, your mum is Irish. I yeah a long time ago. I am of Irish descent. How do you get involved with your Irish roots in New Zealand?
Speaker 1:so I am not as active as I used to be, but I used to be quite involved in the St Patrick's Festival, which is basically a celebration of Irish heritage that is run in Auckland every year. There's also the Irish Business Network which I don't go to as often Festival, which is basically a celebration of Irish heritage that is run in Auckland every year. There's also the Irish Business Network, which I don't go to as often as I should since moving out of the city, as they do a lot of breakfasts, but just some really beautiful people who get together to, I guess, celebrate the Irish heritage but also to kind of share values and knowledge and business contacts and celebrate what it is, I guess, to be Irish.
Speaker 1:It's really funny, growing up as a Kiwi, I consider myself to be a Kiwi, but with parents who have very strong connections to Ireland. I mean, my mum's accent is so thick Half the time I think my husband even is like what did you say again? So she's very, very, very Irish. So you kind of live in this in-between of having this really beautiful connection back to Ireland and it's an amazing place and I've spent quite a bit of time there. But then I also feel very New Zealand Kiwi as well, and I think there's actually a lot of similarities between the two cultures.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because I think, as humans, we all have a really deep need to connect with our tribes and our ancestry is a huge way of being able to connect with where we came from, if you like, our whakapapa, using the Maori term and understanding your cultural heritage is really, really critical. It's a source of identity. It's just such a beautiful thing to be a part of and, honestly, nobody does it better than the Irish. Like the Irish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're incredible. Right, they really are. And I think it comes back to and you know, the real similarities, particularly between the Maori culture and the Irish culture, is that family and people and the importance of looking after your people and looking after other people as well. And I think that's been instilled in me throughout my life and something I try to teach my own children is you know, we could have all the money in the world or we could have nothing, but we should still treat people with the same respect and build those communities around us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Building a startup like this, as you've touched on, is challenging, like it's really, really tough. And you are living out in the country. How do you get inspired, like, what is it that you do, whether it's something that you read, or whether you get out into nature or go for a run? How do you recharge? Because you, you know you need those batteries filled for being able to do what you do.
Speaker 1:I try to walk every day. Love, love, love walking. So that's probably like my number one thing and spending time with my kids. I learn so much from them and the questions that they ask or how they see the world. We went down a couple of weeks ago and we just did. We had the best time and I turned my phone off and like those kind of little and often touch points with them to really, you know, get some energy and be able to take on the day and you know, like I said before, just going for a walk in the morning before I do anything else really helps. But I don't actually read a lot anymore. I used to be a real avid reader.
Speaker 1:What I read now is pretty trashy romance novels and yeah, watch Bridgerton or Below Deck or something like that, just like totally disengage. I will, you know, if I'm driving down to the city, I which I do somewhat often, not as much as I used to I'll try and listen to a podcast to get myself in the zone. And you know, I've listened to your podcast before and I've, you know, another, a few other kind of founder-inspiring or business podcasts. Jonathan often gives me books on business. He probably doesn't. I don't know if I've even told him that I haven't read many of them. They kind of just sit there. So, yeah, I think I take more of the inspiration from just checking out and having that headspace to let things kind of come to life in my own head.
Speaker 2:I don't know if anybody can hear in the background, but I have recently moved to Sydney and the bird life honestly, the wildlife in this place is just nuts. I can hear these birds going crazy, so I don't have a parrot for anybody that can listen or can hear that Now you are a mum and you've got young children and you're doing a start-up. That's super challenging, like really really hard, and there will be some women out there who would love to go and do a startup and maybe they've got young children. Any tips or thoughts on how to go about doing that that you've kind of discovered?
Speaker 1:I think two things. For me have, if can have, a really amazing support system and for me, like my husband has been, I would not be able to do this without him Like he's just exceptional. He just really picks up a lot of the slack with the kids.
Speaker 2:And that's how it should be.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Go home. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:He loves it, yeah, but not just the kids, but just our life in general. Like he's kind of he's got his own business, he's self-employed in that, but at the end of the day, he's like what's going to be the best for our family, and right now for us, that's doing the lion's share of the work in terms of, like he cooks every night and he does all of the kids' stuff and he's 100% basically on them, which is really awesome and me, like I'll get to eat and he'll come in and he's like made me a delicious lunch. My God, it's four o'clock already and I haven't had lunch. So that would, I think, be the main thing. And then just be really comfortable with failure. You will get it wrong and not beat yourself up too hard about it and, honestly, most things are fixable and people's memories are short. I think People forgive you if you make a mistake and you own it. If you try and hide it, maybe that would be different, but I'm quite comfortable with saying, hey, I didn't do the right thing there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the reality is we all fail. Like every single one of us has never been a human alive who hasn't failed. Like that's just how we're made and that's what happens. And especially when we're trying hard stuff, you know, the harder the things are, the more likely you are to fail. But you're doing things that are different to other people. So absolutely, and it's not that failure should be celebrated, but it certainly shouldn't be punished. If you're trying something and you're doing it honestly, you know, give it a go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally yeah. I think kind of the other piece as well. So picking a partner in general, so other piece as well, so picking a partner in general. So you know, husband obviously extremely important. And then for me the business partner piece as well and, like Jonathan, is just awesome and we've got a really great relationship and we understand that some days our kids are a higher priority than the business and some days it's the business and you know we back each other up. So that's probably been a hard learned lesson for me with some other things that I've done in the past around picking people to work with. And I'm so stoked that Jonathan also likes working with me because I think we're a really great team.
Speaker 2:How did you make that work with Jonathan? Because have you got any advice for people in selecting co-founders? Because it's a tough relationship. We don't always get it right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have an immense amount of respect for each other and we're also quite comfortable having hard conversations and being like hey, you missed the mark here, but at the end of the day we have each other's back. You know he also has Irish heritage. There's some commonality there around. We understand the backgrounds that we come from. I think for me, gut feeling was really important. I mean, I knew him for a while before. We committed to doing Resolve Pay Together, so that helped In the past. When I've done things with people and it hasn't worked out, I kind of reflect on it afterwards why didn't that work? And I look back. I'm like I didn't listen to myself there. I knew that this was. I probably got like blindsided by the opportunity rather than really understanding was this the right thing to be doing with this person?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so interesting because I think it's very common for founders to have disputes. I had some advice actually from a guy I have huge amount of respect for and he's a much older guy. He's in his 80s now and he was in business for a very long time probably. In fact is still technically in business with a guy he started being in business with from his early 20s and he's now in his mid 80s and they're still in business together. And I said so what's the secret to that? And he said we don't overly socialize together, so we are business partners. And secondly, we just don't focus on the small stuff. We just don't get annoyed about small stuff. Let that go. And I thought that was great advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome advice and I think we would be the same. I mean, jonathan and I get on really well, but we don't really socialize. I don't even make my friends on Facebook. Our kids know each other and I know his life and he knows Tom and it's cool, cool. But I think that's a really good one, because otherwise you can just be too involved in each other's lives as well yeah, so we're two here for LiveRam and ResolvePay.
Speaker 2:Where would you like to go now, in the next couple of years? What are the goals?
Speaker 1:so I think, liveram we would love to be in Australia and then looking to go Singapore and Dubai, you know, in the next three years or even less, and then you know. So that's kind of like from a market perspective. From a product perspective, it's about building out our insights, creating more value for customers to be able to make better data-driven decisions, and so how do we look at creating, building out our dashboard, for example, or using kind of AI in a way to create more value around? What are the insights that people want and how can they access those really easily? The results paper is interesting because my dream for that company is that it doesn't exist, which is a really weird thing to say. But it should not even exist because we shouldn't have a problem with this legislation. It shouldn't be too hard for companies to be compliant with this legislation and ensure their staff are being paid properly. In reality. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Speaker 1:The last government had a working group to attempt to fix it. That has now been publicly said by the current minister that they're going to look at it again and probably do something different. I don't know where that's going. At the moment we still have a business. So we'll just keep picking along doing what we're doing, which is, you know, servicing people who need help in this space, I think, trying to make it more accessible to a wider range of companies. At the moment, we kind of do mid to large. We could do more, but it ends up hard for smaller companies to do this, so trying to figure out a way to make it easy for them as well.
Speaker 2:It has been a real honour chatting to you this morning. I suspect that in the next five to ten years we're going to see a lot more of you and as you build this business and start to get some success, I think offshore Australia. You know Australia welcomes you. I can say that because I'm sitting over here on the other side of the Tasman.
Speaker 2:I think you're going to do incredibly well. This is, I think you're somebody that we're going to see a lot of in the next decade as you build this business and maybe even future businesses out as well. So I also think you're an inspiration to people who maybe have young children, because, hey, you know, young children need to keep populating this planet. But it's tough, it's really tough. Having young children and doing a startup Like it's exceptionally hard, and you seem to be doing a great job in managing that. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Like I said, the joke was real, but there's always a way to solve a problem.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And it's that attitude, isn't it, that gets you through. So there's always a way to solve a problem Absolutely, and it's that attitude, isn't it, that gets you through. So, yeah, really appreciate your time today, kat. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for your time. It's been great.
Speaker 2:Hey, don't forget to check out Deskwork, the team behind you, being able to build high-performing offshore teams for your startups and SMEs. It's deskworkco. Backslash, greg, and go and save yourself some hard-earned money.