eccuity Podcasts

eccuity.com

Podcast series's for curious individuals who want to build wealth and become more informed in the world of finance, entrepreneurship and business!

  1. Why He Left America and Never Looked Back, with Marcus Nelson

    2D AGO

    Why He Left America and Never Looked Back, with Marcus Nelson

    This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Marcus Nelson, co-founder of UserVoice, the feedback tab that sat on the side of Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft Xbox before most people knew what customer feedback software was. He sold the company last year and moved to New Zealand as a single father with his youngest son.Marcus raised $900,000 during the GFC when only five companies in all of Silicon Valley closed a round that quarter. Three weeks after the money hit the account, UserVoice was breakeven. He wishes he had never raised a cent. That one decision, and what it cost him, shaped how he thinks about capital, ownership, and what founders actually need versus what they're told they need.After two decades in Silicon Valley, he packed up and moved to New Zealand. What he found when he got here surprised him in ways he hadn't anticipated. Not the ocean or the lifestyle, those he expected. It was the things he had been trained to fear in America that simply didn't exist here. And it was the startup ecosystem he walked into, full of clever people building great things, almost entirely invisible to the networks and capital that could change their trajectory overnight.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Marcus here Learn more about Marcus's company here #waystowealth #siliconvalley #uservoice #startup #venturecapital #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #saas #ai #capitalraising #branding #immigration #bootstrapped #wealthbuilding

    29 min
  2. The $185 Billion Problem Under Your Feet, with Manu Caddie & Kenny Au

    3D AGO

    The $185 Billion Problem Under Your Feet, with Manu Caddie & Kenny Au

    This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Manu Caddie and Kenny Au, co-founders of GEMS, an asset management platform built for the people who keep New Zealand's electricity, water, and critical infrastructure running. Both spent decades inside the industry before deciding that the tools they were forced to use were not fit for purpose. The process was always the same: pull data from one system, paste it into a spreadsheet, run calculations that would inevitably get corrupted, do it again, pass it to a colleague who would question every formula. That was the job. Manu decided to build something better and brought Kenny in to co-develop it from the engineering side. The problem they are solving sits underneath everything. New Zealand's infrastructure is ageing, and the figure to modernise it sits somewhere around $185 billion over the next decade. The people responsible for deciding where that money goes are still working across disconnected systems with no unified view of what's healthy, what's failing, and what needs replacing next. GEMS is designed to change that. This conversation covers what it's like to leave a stable corporate career to bootstrap a startup with savings and sweat, why the barrier to building software feels lower but the barrier to selling it is higher than ever, and why two very different personalities might be exactly what a technical product needs to become something real people actually want to use. Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast: www.eccuity.com/podcasts Check-out Kenny on Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenny-au/ Check-out Manu on Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manucaddie/ Learn more about GEMS here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gemsassets/ #waystowealth #infrastructure #nzbusiness #startup #assetmanagement #utilities #water #electricity #engineering #bootstrapped #saas #entrepreneurship #criticalinfrastructure #wealthbuilding

    30 min
  3. Is Your Business Costing You Your Family? with Anne Cullen - Ways to Wealth EP159

    MAY 13

    Is Your Business Costing You Your Family? with Anne Cullen - Ways to Wealth EP159

    This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Anne Cullen, a relationship advisor who works with entrepreneurs and high performers navigating the overlap between business and family life. Anne spent the first half of her life in the US and the second in New Plymouth, New Zealand. She started out working with kids and families before realising that the parents she understood best were the ones who thought like founders. The ones building something while raising someone at the same time. Her perspective is that business and family are not two separate challenges to balance. They are one system, and when that system breaks down, it usually starts in the gap between what a couple says matters and how they actually spend their time. She sat in university classrooms hearing peers talk about their absent parents who were off building empires, and she now works to make sure her clients don't become that story. This conversation gets into why pressure is an internal signal that something is misaligned, why the people with the most decision-making power are the ones who most need to pause, and the question that sits underneath everything Anne does: if you had to choose between your business and your family, you already know the answer, so why aren't you acting like it? Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts Check-out Anne’s website here: https://www.annecullen.com/  #waystowealth #leadership #entrepreneurship #family #parenting #cofounders #relationships #intentionality #burnout #nzbusiness #businessowners #worklifebalance #couples #wealthbuilding

    26 min
  4. Why Children Are Opening Up to AI Before Their Parents, with Will Zhang - Ways to Wealth EP158

    MAY 12

    Why Children Are Opening Up to AI Before Their Parents, with Will Zhang - Ways to Wealth EP158

    This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Will Zhang, CEO of EmoX, an AI mental health companion that has grown to 450,000 users since launching in 2024. The idea started as a joke. A friend showed up late to coffee after the worst road rage incident of his life, and someone said: what if you could just scream at an AI instead? That conversation led Will and his co-founders into a much bigger problem. One in three New Zealanders face mental health issues, but there are only 15 therapists per 100,000 people. The gap cannot be closed by training more humans. It's too slow. What makes this conversation different is that Will is building an AI product while openly questioning how far AI should go. His team deliberately made the voice feature sound less realistic so users wouldn't form unhealthy attachments. They're working on making the AI more assertive rather than endlessly agreeable, because constant validation turns out to be its own kind of harm. And research his team conducted with the University of Lincoln found that children will share more with a robot than with their own parents or teachers. Will also talks about a side effect of AI that nobody in the productivity conversation seems to be addressing: when your team can research in two minutes instead of three days, you end up making 10 to 20 times more decisions per day. You might be creating more value, but your mental health is dropping. His closing advice is two words: just be human. Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast Check-out Will’s Start-up, The AI Health Innovation Hub #waystowealth #mentalhealth #aicompanion #emoex #healthtech #startup #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #wellbeing #autism #ai #loneliness #digitalhealth #wealthbuilding

    47 min
  5. The Truth About Silicon Valley, with Yashar Ahmedpour | Ways to Wealth EP157

    MAY 7

    The Truth About Silicon Valley, with Yashar Ahmedpour | Ways to Wealth EP157

    This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Yashar Ahmadpour, co-founder and CEO of Impressive, an agentic AI company based in San Francisco. Yashar was born and raised in Sweden to Chilean and Iranian parents, moved to California to study, and ended up in tech after a degree in literature and writing.He is building AI agents for businesses every day, and he thinks most of what the industry is selling right now is noise. In this conversation, he pulls apart a string of real examples: a startup that claimed $7 million in annual recurring revenue within two months and attracted investment from Andreessen Horowitz before the numbers turned out to be fabricated, a compliance platform that stole a partner's product and got kicked out of Y Combinator, and a $400 million revenue company whose doctor testimonials turned out to be AI-generated fakes.Charlie and Yashar also get into why nobody in corporate America wants to say the word recession even though the signs are everywhere, why companies are using AI as cover for layoffs instead of using it to scale output, and why both of them believe we may be heading back towards a more distributed, pre-industrial model where individuals build smaller businesses and keep what they earn.Yashar’s Linked-inCheck out Impressive hereEvery episode of the Ways to Wealth podcasteccuityTimestamps: 00:00 Intro00:42 The Ai Truth Gap05:19 The Ai Goldrush08:12 The Opportunity 09:59 Outro#waystowealth #ai #siliconvalley #startups #agenticai #recession #techscams #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #ycombinator #bootstrapped #futureofwork #impressive #wealthbuilding

    10 min
  6. From a Six Figure Debt to a 6 Figure Balance, with Jon Randles | Ways to Wealth EP156

    MAY 5

    From a Six Figure Debt to a 6 Figure Balance, with Jon Randles | Ways to Wealth EP156

    This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jon Randles, business coach, co-founder of marketing agency Mosh, and a man who started with a literature and classics degree, zero interest in business, and a student loan he had been spending on CDs and posters from an ATM machine.Jon's view of business changed completely when he got a job at the second ever Hell Pizza store in Wellington and realised that building a company could be creative, fun, and human. From there, he went to Japan, got into property, made $100,000 on a deal, thought he was going to be a property magnate, and then the GFC happened.He pivoted into business banking, co-founded Mosh in 2009, and spent years growing revenue without keeping any of it. When a business coach came in and helped them go from six figures in debt to six figures in the bank within 12 months, it changed how Jon thought about everything. Three years ago, he drew an org chart on a whiteboard, realised there was no circle that needed him, rubbed out his own job, and stepped away. Revenue went up.This conversation covers what it actually takes to remove yourself from your own business, why worrying is not strategizing, and why sales fixes everything, but only if three other foundations are already in place.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth podcast here. Check-out Jon Randles' website here.#waystowealth #businesscoaching #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #smallbusiness #mosh #leadership #burnout #profitability #gfc #businessgrowth #delegation #wealthbuilding #startuplife

    52 min

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Podcast series's for curious individuals who want to build wealth and become more informed in the world of finance, entrepreneurship and business!