eccuity Podcasts

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 here [www.eccuity.com/podcasts]Learn more about Marcus here [https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusnelson/ ] Learn more about Marcus's company here [https://aiformainstreet.org/ ] #waystowealth #siliconvalley #uservoice #startup #venturecapital #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #saas #ai #capitalraising #branding #immigration #bootstrapped #wealthbuilding

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

Why Our Kids Can't Cope, with Jase Te Patu - Ways to Wealth EP160

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jase Te Patu, founder of Hauora Aotearoa and a man who has spent 33 years in wellbeing work, driven by something deeply personal. Jase started this charity because his brother passed away and left eight kids behind. When he asked his 12-year-old niece how she was doing, she told him she couldn't sleep because every time she closed her eyes she wanted to be with her dad. That conversation broke something open for him and set the direction for everything that followed. But this isn't just a story about helping other people. Jase has had two bouts of suicidal ideation himself, lost five friends to suicide, battled alcohol addiction, and spent most of his adult life chasing external validation to prove his worth to an absent father. In the process, he became exactly the kind of person he was trying not to be. It took him until his 50th birthday to feel settled in his own skin. The most powerful moment in this conversation is the contrast between two teachers. When Jase was six, Miss Watt told him he could be anything. His younger brother got told the opposite. That gap is what Jase has built his entire life's work around closing. #waystowealth #mentalhealth #suicide #youthwellbeing #hauoraaotearoa #māori #aotearoa #sobriety #teachersmatter #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #leadership #healing #wealthbuilding

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 [https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts] Check-out Anne’s website here: https://www.annecullen.com/ [https://www.annecullen.com/]  #waystowealth #leadership #entrepreneurship #family #parenting #cofounders #relationships #intentionality #burnout #nzbusiness #businessowners #worklifebalance #couples #wealthbuilding

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 [https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts⁠] Check-out Will’s Start-up, The AI Health Innovation Hub [https://www.eahih.org/⁠ ] #waystowealth #mentalhealth #aicompanion #emoex #healthtech #startup #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #wellbeing #autism #ai #loneliness #digitalhealth #wealthbuilding