2nd March, 2025
🚚 Publish, 📢 Shout, 🚧 Build
Photo by Victoria Vincent, Cover design by Imogen Greenfield
🚚 Publish
What do French sculptor Camille Claudel, a rubber chicken, Edmund Hillary, the Ship of Theseus, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Slough Trading Estate, BMX Olympic silver medalist Sarah Walker, Father Christmas and broadcaster Corin Dann all have in common?
To find out, you’ll need to read my book How To Be Wrong: A crash course in startup success – which officially launched this week!
The process of writing, editing, designing, printing, distributing and launching this has had quite a few unplanned twists and turns. I’ve ended up doing much more of it myself than anticipated at the outset, but it is a genuine delight to get to this point.
It always takes a team
I initially committed to this project with a traditional publisher - I thought that would mean I could somehow avoid doing many of the hard bits. I should have read my own content. That didn’t work out, but it got me started. In the end I hired Toby to edit, Imogen to design, and Anna to proof directly, and they helped me make it great. Having more control throughout the process let me do it my own way, and (to some extent) on my own timetable, which probably suited me better in the end.
At one particularly discouraging moment, I spoke with a distributer - somebody whose job is to take books from publishers and promote them to book stores (and having convinced them, deliver the physical books to them). He couldn’t really have been less interested. He recommended I print no more than 500 copies and said he thought he could maybe get them into book stores later in the year.
This week we’ve shipped over 1,000 copies, including the “First 500” which have been individually signed and numbered. Most of those were purchased directly through our online store. That’s definitely an approach that doesn’t scale, but I’m glad we took the time to do that for the people willing to purchase even before the books were printed.
I took this photo yesterday at Unity Books in Wellington. There were two copies left in the pile, and it was flattering to see the titles it was sitting alongside. Shortly after that I got an email from them ordering some more. We’ll ship those tomorrow.1
As always, I say “we” - this book wouldn’t exist without the support of many others. My name is on the cover, but all of the really important people are listed in the Acknowledgements, so I hope you’ll take the time to read that too, when you get right to the end.
Untold stories
All the time I was working on these businesses I’ve written about I was always keen to soak up whatever stories and patterns I could find to apply to the problems I was trying to solve. But, they were all stories of people and companies in far-away places. There isn’t really a category for this book - there are just not many New Zealand business books published. We’ve proven we can start and build these sort of businesses here. We just need a lot more people to realise that is possible and do the same. Hopefully, in a small way, by publishing this I can inspire and encourage those who are brave enough to try.
I wrote this book to be read, and I can't wait to hear what you think. If you've already gotten your copy, please get in touch with your feedback.
Whether you're after Pure Fun or Deep Fun (you'll understand this reference once you read the book), I hope you'll find value in these stories and lessons. Enjoy!
If you don’t have a copy yet, you can buy one today. We are sell the paperback directly, with options to also buy in bulk and save 10-20%. Or you can buy from BookHero.co.nz for next day delivery.
The ebook version is available in all the places you normally buy books for your device: Amazon Kindle; or Apple Books; or Rakuten Kobo; and many more.
Or, if you’d like to pick up a copy in store you should find them at The Open Book in Auckland; at Unity Books in Auckland and Wellington; at Poppies Books in Hamilton or at Scorpio Books in Christchurch and many more.
If you sell books in your store please get in touch and we’d be happy to send you some copies. If anybody reading this knows the book buyers at Paper Plus or Relay - I’d love to have it for sale in those stores too. Tell them what they are missing out on!
📢 Shout
The launch has involved an omnibus of media interviews and podcast recordings. After spending so much time writing, reading and re-writing the words, it’s been a pivot to be suddenly talking out loud about it all.
Several people have questioned the hypocrisy of writing a book containing a chapter all about “The quiet ones” while at the same time seemingly never shutting up about it.
Well… as I say:
It’s not enough to just have a good idea for a startup. To create value we have to execute it. Every founder needs to confront a fundamental question: how will you overcome obscurity? While many worry about others stealing their ideas in the early stages, a much more urgent concern is confronting the reality that most people don’t care or (worse) don’t even know about us at all. Every day startups die of starvation, due to lack of customers. Very few ever die of drowning from a deluge of customers they can’t cope with.
That’s a quote about my experience starting and trying to build up Flathunt - my first startup prior to working on Trade Me (it was eventually acquired by Trade Me and incorporated into Trade Me Property when we launched that vertical - which is how I came to be a Trade Me shareholder). But it applies equally to any new thing that we do - including publishing a book.
Here is the full media playlist from the last couple of weeks - find somewhere comfy and read, listen to or watch them all:2
Radio NZ Saturday Morning with Susie Fergusson
How to be Wrong: a crash course in startup successTVNZ Q+A with Guyon Espiner
Why Govt shouldn't be picking start-up winnersNewstalkZB Breakfast with Mike Hosking
"No shortage of capital": How to build successful businesses in NZ?NZ Herald with Chris Keall ($)
Rowan Simpson’s Three ways to be wrongNational Business Review with Simon Shepherd ($)
Rowan Simpson dispels some startup mythsThe Listener by Peter Griffin ($)
Are we too focused on fostering innovation in science?Spinoff: When the facts change podcast with Bernard Hickey
The startup savant behind Trade Me and XeroBusinessDesk: The business of tech podcast with Peter Griffin
Startups, being wrong, and near-death experiencesEveryday Investor podcast with Darcy Ungaro
From Wrong, To RichNZ Tech podcast with Paul Spain
How to be wrong: Nagivating Tech StartupsBountiful podcast with Sian Simpson
How to be wrong and still succeedCaffeine Daily by Finn Hogan
Veteran of Trade Me, Xero wants less startup 'theatre' and more startups
It doesn’t end here. Next week I’ll be in Adelaide speaking with Matt Allen at _SOUTHSTART. If you’re in the vicinity it’s not too late to grab a ticket - get in touch and I can send you a discount code.
🚧 Build
It is easy and quick, often instantaneous, to demolish things. It is hard and slow work to build new things, and often even harder and slower work to improve existing things.
In many of the media interviews I linked above I’ve been asked about recent government policy decisions - especially the decision to disestablish Callaghan Innovation. My experience working on and investing in Trade Me, Xero, Vend, Timely and other ventures gives me a rare perspective. I've seen the same patterns repeat and the same mistakes made, often because those implementing policies have never been in those positions themselves.
At the book launch events this week Toby asked me what advice I would give the Prime Minister and others who are (hopefully) currently thinking about what comes next.
What is the one thing they could do that would finally unlock the potential of the ecosystem?
My answer to that is simple: it’s the wrong question!
I would recommend these people read the whole book, obviously, but specifically the chapter towards the end called “The silver bullet”. Perhaps this might convince them that this search for a single thing - often an idea that has worked in a completely different context somewhere else in the world - is a mirage, and that anybody who is promoting those sort of magical short-cut solutions is probably trying to sell something that will mostly extract value.
We have been trying to build a startup ecosystem for more than a decade. We have thrown a large amount of spaghetti at the wall.3 But how much has stuck? We don’t really know. And, for me, that’s the most depressing part. We just hoped that spending all of that money would produce good outcomes, but never really bothered to test those assumptions or measure the results en route. And, then when it was eventually obvious that it wasn’t working, we were not honest about that, perhaps hoping that the results would turn for the better before they were exposed. As I describe in the book, that’s the worst way to be wrong.
After the announcement a few weeks ago I went back and added up the numbers:
As the graph shows, of the $2.8 billion various governments have spent on Callaghan Innovation since it was established in 2013, only $1.7 billion was distributed as grants. Meanwhile, over $1.1 billion went to employee and supplier costs - essentially the overhead of running Callaghan Innovation itself. Even putting aside the huge headline amounts, even that ratio of operating costs vs funds distributed to companies is eye watering. What do we have to show for it?
The most depressing bit about this for me is that it didn’t work. We desperately needed it to work. If the answer to “what now?” involves asking all the same people what they want to try next, then we should expect more of the same outcomes.
Here is the paradox. When I’m asked about the ecosystem I say that it is today in better shape than it has ever been. For me the ecosystem isn’t the government organisations and accelerator programmes and shared working spaces and venture funds (or funds-of-funds) or angel groups or business awards or innovation showcases … or countless other derivative things. It’s the crazy people who start these companies and the much larger group of less-well-known-but-still-vital people who work with them to grow the businesses and invest directly in them. That’s the hard grind.
Nearly everybody who talks about wanting a larger, more vibrant and more successful ecosystem misses this. They aspire to create multiple companies at once but don’t really know what it takes to create one. The companies that are created by this system are exactly what we should expect: fragile, precarious, and underwhelming.
While others were debating about how to build an ecosystem, and waiting for somebody else to do those hard bits, those of us who just got on and did it at companies like Trade Me, Xero, Vend, Timely and many others realised: the best way to grow an ecosystem is to create one great company. If enough of us did that we would have a much larger ecosystem.
So when we think about what it will take to unlock growth at this level, these are the questions they should be asking instead:
Who are the specific people we are trying to help?
What’s currently holding them back?
How can we remove that constraint?
How will we know it’s working?
I hope we don’t look back in another ten years and say: those are good questions, perhaps we really should have asked them at the time.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Learning a bit about shipping and warehousing and 3PLs (short for “third-party logistics”) has been an interesting, if sometimes frustrating, unexpected side benefit of this project. Making physical things and moving them around in the world has an entirely different set of challenges to building and deploying software.
Also check out the offical How To Be Wrong Spotify Playlist