$20k past the post & get to know Alex 😎
This blog was distributed to our first 200+ backers via email.
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Kia ora!
Exciting news this week, a few insights about the team and more updates in the mix.
Feel free to sign into the app to top-up or check your balance here
Alex is one of the legendary team, we thought we would share with you a bit more about what makes him tick 🤓
A lego kid growing up he would build, create and "bust" his lego day in day out. One of his favourites was a Lego Technics Formula 1 car that he received one Christmas. Reflecting over the years he once believed it was stupid how F1 changed the rules and didn't get "why" they did that. After reading a book called Winners by Alistair Campbell whilst travelling around Europe in a van he realised that there was purpose in constraint and that through constraint comes creativity and innovation. After spending the last 6 years in technology and innovation Alex now intimately appreciates design thinking and getting creative with less.
The most recent book Alex read was Siddhartha by, Herman Hesse. An avid audiobook reader on most things innovation, tech and business he has been aiming to pick up less practical works and enjoy the pleasure of reading. A quote that struck him from Siddhartha was;
"A happy knack, calmness, equanimity, the art of listening and making a good impression on strange people... The art of business."
There are 32,370km of unsealed roads in New Zealand. Alex has traditionally taken the road less travelled and enjoys exploring these roads via an Adventure Motorcycle.
Regularly doing trips across the North and South Island he is grateful to frequent high country stations, forestry roads and back country blocks, going places most kiwi's never go. He has seen first hand the importance of land use management and diversity of our landscape we call Aotearoa.
Crossing the divide at Black Forest Station looking towards Lake Benmore, South Island, New Zealand.
Alex believes that if you're not learning or growing then you've either got the wrong mindset or are in the wrong environment. A diverse set of experiences has kept Alex on his toes over the years. Looking back he appreciates these diverse experiences have more often than not been at the intersection of finance, technology and natural capital.
One of the biggest learnings he took from studying Engineering Geology at the University of Canterbury was the capacity to walk down a river, look at a section of rock (a slither in time) and understand what was happening in context of earths history across 4.6 billion years. This capacity to zoom in, zoom out and understand what's important now and how that applies to the wider vision or context is what he believes is one of his superpowers.
You will mainly find him surfing on a 9ft longboard. Living in the Mount, the swells usually a bit fickle, fat and often smaller than it is big. Growing up Alex always thought that when he was 60 he would buy a longboard and be one of those old dudes that steals all of the waves out back. His poor short board has barely got any wave time in the past few years.
His surf philosophy is a belief of - Catch more waves + maximise ride time = maximum fun. It just so happens that a longboard on the east coast of NZ more often than not makes this his go to.
The craziest job Alex once had was as an explosives engineer for a mining company. Yeahp, quiet literally blowing shit up. After working on Gold exploration projects in Ecuador and Aluminium projects in Australia he returned to work in NZ for an explosive company.
One of his biggest learnings from working in mining is that humans are ever increasingly disconnected from where our resources come from. And as humans we often don't understand that this very screen you are reading this blog through required precious metals such as gold and aluminium to be mined from this very earth. Nor the road you drove to work on today required tonnes of explosives to blast the rock from the earth to be crushed, transported and laid as a beautiful smooth network for you to commute on.
After realising that going to work day in day out and literally blowing up his work wasn't generative, building or creating he quit to pursue work that mattered.
Since stepping away from mining Alex has a diverse set of experience across technology, finance and natural capital.
Some expressions of this have been educating 50,000 Kiwi kids on environmental education at Squawk Squad, attempting to re-direct $800 million dollars of electronic card transaction fees going offshore with Choice and more recently leading a special project at Halter on Regenerative Agriculture in New Zealand.
His biggest learnings across these projects are multifaceted.
Firstly from Squawk Squad he learn't that "you can't be green if you are in the red" and that no matter how great the kaupapa, if your team is spending 50% of their time getting the money from charity or philanthropic causes vs. doing the real work then that's not sustainable.
At Choice he understood the challenges of working with regulation and how incumbents are definitely not set up to create change nor are incentivised to do so. During this time he has worked at a high level across major financial institutions and has engaged with most if not all government regulators across FMA, DIA, MBIE, RBNZ, DoC, MoE, you name it, he has probably touched base with them. He resonates with the quote;
"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on creating the new." - Socrates
Halter gave him the capacity to further his network across leading researchers, scientists and Regenerative practitioners. Here he truely got down to the nuts and bolts of leading regenerative practices worldwide and increased his knowledge about the "carbon problem". It was after this body of work that Jonny & Alex collided with similar interests and questions about the future of our planet and what we could be doing to create a better future from that we were seeing.
Alex's vision is to increase human connection and believes technology is a great way to engage, mobilise and shift the dial in creating a better future for our current and future generations. His experience and passion run deeply through Regenerate NZ and is the main reason why he is backing this kaupapa.
We have some exciting progress to share with you later this month so keep your eyes on your inbox
Best,
Jonny & Alex
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This blog was distributed to our first 200+ backers via email.
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