The chief executive of a Christchurch-based tech company says they've been able to take on the world by thinking of themselves as global, rather than local.
Seequent is a company that builds software to understand the underground, says CEO Graham Grant: "Why that's important, is that we are utterly dependant on the underground for our health, our safety, our prosperity, and in fact our very future."
Knowing what is beneath the surface is critical for everything humans do above ground, says Grant.
"To build on it, you need to understand it."
They have a range of major projects currently in the works, including involvement in the City Rail Link in Auckland and the High Speed Rail Network in the UK.
What makes them unusual for a Canterbury company is that 99% of their customers are offshore, so many New Zealanders will never have heard of them.
"When you look at where we've come from, we started from one employee in 2003, and we're now more than 700, serving [people] in 120 countries around the world, so that's an amazing growth story," said Grant.
"So we should unpack that growth story, see what we can learn from it, and help other New Zealand tech companies succeed, because there should be 100 other Seequents for sure."
Grant says he's never thought of Seequent as a New Zealand company, rather it is a global company based in Canterbury.
"Early on, we decided we were an international software company, based here. We weren't a Kiwi software company trying to export overseas. And that reframing changes how you see the world," said Grant.
"Kiwis have some positive attributes to our mindset – we're egalitarian, we care less about job titles, we have a go, and we support each other. But we're also small and a long way from the rest of the world."
Grant says there are three main reasons for the success of Seequent, starting with having a purpose.
"You need a reason to be, and you need a higher purpose that is beyond yourself. You don't want to look back on your life and feel that you didn't have a big impact and make a big contribution."
For Grant, that purpose is simple: "If we can better understand the underground, we can build a better world."
As an example of this, he discussed Seequent's "zero revenue" work in finding clean underground sources of water for Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, saving lives in the process.
He also said that successful tech companies needed to make products that solve "real problems", so that customers can easily see the value the technology gives them.
And his final lesson was to "hire amazing people – we've gone around the world and found the best people we can find, we've found the best people we can in New Zealand – people who are aligned to this purpose".
Q+A is public interest journalism funded by NZ on Air
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