Phil Thomson: Auror (CEO and Co-Founder)
Paul Spain is joined by Phil Thomson, Co-founder and CEO of Auror, to explore his journey from a career in law to building one of New Zealand’s standout global tech success stories.
Phil shares the early influences that sparked his entrepreneurial drive, the key decisions that shaped his path, and the realities of scaling a software company from New Zealand into major markets including Australia, US and UK. Phil offers candid insights into startup culture, global expansion, and the discipline and resilience required to grow a high-impact business.
If you’re interested in ambitious thinking, scaling globally from New Zealand, and the personal journey behind entrepreneurship, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
Special thanks to our show partners One New Zealand and Gorilla Technology.
Listen to the Podcast Here:
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Paul Spain – CEO, Business & Tech Commentator, Futurist
You can keep current with our latest NZ Business Podcast updates via Twitter @NZ_Business, the NZ Business Podcast website.
Episode Transcript (computer-generated)
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I’m Paul Spain, futurist and chief executive at Gorilla Technology. I love seeing individuals and their organisations thrive. This is what the New Zealand Podcast is all about, helping you learn from other tenacious, effective and innovative leaders. On this episode, I’m joined by Phil Thomson, co founder and chief executive of Auror we’re, which is one of New Zealand’s standout tech success stories. With their work tackling retail crime at scale, we delve into Phil’s backstory through to building Auror from nothing to a half billion dollar global technology firm that supports thousands of law enforcement agencies and minimises crimes for the largest retailers in the world. New Zealand Business Podcast proudly brought to you by One New Zealand and Gorilla Technology. Before we jump into the interview, if you work in a mid size or smaller organisation, I have a quick question. Are you sure your company has its house in order from a cyber security perspective? If you’re not fully confident, get in touch with Gorilla Technology today for an advisory session.Paul Spain:
Welcome along to the New Zealand Business Podcast. Phil Thomson, great to have you on the show. Thanks.Phil Thomson:
Thanks for having me.Paul Spain:
I always like to sort of start with a bit of the, you know, the early stories, so maybe, you know, tell us where you were born and where you grew up.Phil Thomson:
Yeah, born in Wellington, born and raised, you know, pretty, pretty normal upbringing really. You know, got an older brother, younger sister. From an early age there was interest in business there. And partly, I think it must be like 11 getting my first job and dad had me out of his business sweeping the floors of the factory where he worked. And from then it was always just looking at different opportunities, whether it was a garage sale all the way through to every holiday, figuring out where I could work to make a bit of money. And from there I think that’s where the love of business caught on.Paul Spain:
Fantastic.Phil Thomson:
Ever since then, just been thinking about how do you create a company? It’s sort of taken a little while to get there through university, but it’s been interesting sort of reflecting on that over the last couple of years.Paul Spain:
Yeah. And when you look back at those times growing up, were you having business type conversations, you know, around the meal table or, you know, what were the things there that you think kind of pushed that, or was it just how you were wired?Phil Thomson:
I think partly how I was wired. I think we always had good conversation, you know, at the dinner table, just around what was going on in the world. I think there was never a strong push into business itself. But, you know, I think when I was just before I left to go to university, I think dad went out on his own as a consultant, started his own business that way as well. So I think it sort of just got ingrained in me almost through osmosis.
Paul Spain:
Yeah. Great. Now tell us about going to university and, you know, what you picked to study and how that came about.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I think it was always a bit of a natural progression of, you know, you go from school to university. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do, but in the last two years at high school, I did a business studies course and I was actually having a look through some notes there out the other week that I got sent up from my parents and I’m actually first in business studies in my last year. So I feel like that was a little bit of a premonition of what was to come. But yeah, I didn’t have any real idea of what I wanted to do when I, when I was older back then. And one of the, one of the segments we did as part of business studies was on law. And my teacher at the time, Mr. Ballantyne was explaining how it’s really, you know, a really core part of what you need to do to run a business is actually understanding, you know, the legal side of things as well. So post school I went straight on to Otago University.
Phil Thomson:
I wrote down, I’ll do, I’ll still do law at university. And then psychology was the other option I chose because, you know, what’s better than understanding the human mind as well. So that was sort of me going into university probably three, three and a half years into university. Everyone else was busy filling out job applications for some of clerkships and I didn’t quite know what everyone else was doing and so I sort of told that’s what you do once you get a law degree. So filled out an application, got one interview and one job offer and sort of found my way into the law. But it was never really a thing that I set out to do other than the fact that I thought it was a good step on the way to business.
Paul Spain:
And where were you studying?
Phil Thomson:
Down in Otago. So yeah, left home when I was 17, out to see the world and followed in mum’s footsteps down to Otago and five incredible years actually. Met a lot of really interesting people from across the country. Many friends I still have today. We’re born back then, you know, 20 plus years ago now. And yeah, it’s an incredible environment to grow up, you know, personally, you know, you’ve got to figure out who you are in the world as part of that. And then yeah, post Otago decided that wasn’t going to go back to Wellington and wanted to sort of see more and got the job offer up in Auckland so made the move up here.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So what did that first work look like, you know, for you?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, so first job was as a summer clerk at a law firm and then that transitioned into a full time job after fifth year at university and I got into the, initially the commercial side and then focused on IP law. So intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, privacy. And that was super interesting for me because it was less about the law and more about the creativity. You know, how do you help a business understand the value of their brand marks, what intellectual property that they’ve got and how do you not only value that but then how do you protect that as well? And so normally you do two rotations and after the first sort of three months I said no, I think this is for me and to convince the partners then it says to keep me on rather than move on to another part of the law firm and end up spending four and a bit years there. But one of probably the best parts of that team, other than the culture which was actually great through there was, was we had a lot of people leave on the OE and so that middle, you know, middle part of a team. And so in my first and second year I was doing jobs that probably you wouldn’t normally get your hands on because that’s when sort of the, you know, three to six year type lawyers would do that. But we didn’t have that. So suddenly, you know, it was thrust upon me to spend a lot of late nights figuring out learning.
Phil Thomson:
But it was an incredible sort of ride just to, you know, probably what I learned in those first couple of years was more they would have done in 10 years elsewhere.
Paul Spain:
Wow. And how intense was that? If you’re being given work that’s normally given to people with a lot more experience, how did you keep up with
Phil Thomson:
that, yeah, I think a lot of it was just around at the time. It was almost expected probably for working at a law firm. It can be long hours and hard work, and so sort of most days eight to eight, you know, if not longer. And. But again, I just found the more that you said yes to things, the more opportunities that you got and then you figure out how to do it. And, you know, at one point in time, one of the partners said, hey, I’m writing a book on. On social media. Because back at the time, it was sort of still a fairly new thing.
Paul Spain:
Yeah.
Phil Thomson:
And, you know, we’d love to write a chapter on copyright law. Can you help me out? And so, you know, it’s been, you know, weeks on end, just working very late nights to figure out what was going on in the rest of the world in this space. And even at the time I remember that I wrote down there was 500 million users on Facebook, but they couldn’t print that because every other week it was changing as well. So, yeah, I just think you just take the opportunities that were in front of me and always just figure out how do you fit that in around what you’re doing?
Paul Spain:
And what did you learn about running an organisation in those years? Because obviously you were working really, really hard. You must have been enjoying yourself and growing and learning to have stayed there and not jumped off in another direction or decided to go overseas like others
Phil Thomson:
had probably started a little bit before then, obviously with growing up and doing a lot of holiday jobs. And again, one of my most common jobs while at university, but when I was back home for the holidays was on the back of a delivery truck. And so delivering food and meal prep to bars and cafes right across Wellington. And so that was early starts and just hard work. But then at last year of university, I ended up running the law student society there. And the thing that taught me was actually, how do you encourage a team that you didn’t choose yourself? Because everyone was sort of voted on, but everyone was volunteers, so you couldn’t hire and fire or pay people more or less. You had to figure out how do you actually bring and create a culture of team unity, mission to do that. And so that was my first real taste of one running.
Phil Thomson:
I think at the time, we’re probably turning over a quarter of a million dollars a year as a society, so how do you run the books, run events and that sort of stuff. And then when you look at into the law firm, it was, you know, probably many different teams as part of one firm, you know, Every, every area or every partner had a different culture to a degree. And so it taught me a lot around again, how do you build teams, how do you build culture, how do you encourage work across a wide range of different areas? And so, you know, taking some of those lessons really helped figure out, well, what do we want to create as a company? And when I, when I left there, some of the things, the good and the bad, I sort of took with me. You know, how do you, how do you not do the bad things and how do you double down on the good things?
Paul Spain:
Yeah, what would you say the good things are that have really stuck with you?
Phil Thomson:
I think having fun and having an enjoyable place where you want to go to work with the people you work with is a critical component. It’s almost easier when you’ve got at the time 300 plus lawyers. You can find those pockets of that across an organisation. And then on the flip side, I think there was very much a work hard, play hard culture as well and see how do you balance that out. And I always remember that the values that the law firm had were pretty typical of most probably big corporates where they didn’t mean a whole lot. And when they did change, there was no discussion around it and it wasn’t sort of drilled into your day to day around what that actually meant. So I remember when they brought out a new set and people first was the third value, I was like, well, shouldn’t it be first if it’s people first? The only reason we knew about it was because they stuck it up on a piece of paper by the photocopier and it’s like, great, we’ve got new values. Well, what do these mean? How do we use them? And so I’ve taken that into building a culture.
Phil Thomson:
And over 13, 14 years now, when we do think about, well, what’s the next iteration of for us, the guiding principles, but those values of a company, how do you make it so that they’re actually ingrained that they used day in, day out and aren’t just ones that you sort of throw away and that any big corporate could use?
Paul Spain:
Yeah, maybe we can come to that a little bit later. Definitely keen to delve into that a little bit more. And then the psychology side of your study, what were the things that you think you really came away with there?
Phil Thomson:
I think just understanding a lot of the fallacies of humans and their minds and how they work is interesting. And I think I’ve continued exploring that area over the last decade or so as well. Just around People ultimately are simple in the sense of we’ve got brains that direct us to almost the most basic thing. And we also. The whole fight or flight mentality means that we often think the worst in situations. And so how do you use that psychology to try and train or trick yourself out of that yourself? And then how do you use that when you’re engaging with someone else, whether it’s a teammate, a customer, a partner, to try and get the best out of the situation. But yeah, it was really interesting just understanding and studying that for a good couple of years around how the brain works, how it doesn’t work, but also the things that you can utilize from that. Again, when I apply it to business, just around how you’re thinking about sales, marketing, and then team as well.
Paul Spain:
Yeah. What was the trigger to finish up your work? Sort of focused on intellectual property there with Simpson Grayson, I think it was
Phil Thomson:
in my very first year there. I asked one of the partners, well, how do you become a partner? Because I was always looking at that, well, what does it. What does it take to get to get to the top? And it was a mixture of hard work, building the right network, and obviously being competent at your job, and then a big dose of luck of when is someone else going to step out of the partnership? That sounds like it’s not something that you can necessarily influence yourself. And I think over time, it also. The industry was seeing longer and longer from going from a junior to being a partner and then really having a seat at the table around, how do you want to run the firm? And a lot of the partners in my time, they’d done four years of really hard work and they became a partner. But suddenly it was 10, 15, 20 years before you actually could become a partner. In this day and age, that’s a
Paul Spain:
pretty different equation, isn’t it?
Phil Thomson:
Very much so. I love the fact that it taught me a lot about hard work, but I do think there was a bit of a mentality of like, well, we did hard work, therefore, you know, the junior should do that as well. But to your point, that time was very different. But I recognized also because of the opportunities that I had that I mentioned earlier on around, like, getting two, three, four years ahead of where I was in my first couple of years, I realized it was probably gonna be five or 10 years of doing the same thing day in, day out before the next real challenge came along. And so I. And I was still interested in what, you know, what building a business would be like, because that was ultimately my first goal. And from there, you know, I started to think and play around with a couple different ideas and nights and weekends. And this is one that I sort of dragged into from a hey, is this even possible to do? And you know, using the legal side of what I understood to help in that space.
Phil Thomson:
And I just made a decision. I just said, like, if I’m going to do something, why not do it now? At the time I was 25 and I said I want to leave my job, you know, a safe career path While I’m still 25 and then throw myself into it and you know, jump off the edge and see what happens. And so I resigned. I said I retired from the law because I didn’t want to have something to fall back on. And I thought I’d just figure it out.
Paul Spain:
What does that look like, retiring from the law?
Paul Spain:
What did you do?
Phil Thomson:
Mainly a psychological trick, right? It was mainly just to say that, so it wasn’t a hey, you know, and everyone said, oh, that’s fine, you, you’ll probably be back as a lawyer in a year’s time. I wanted to tell myself that this was me leaving that part of my journey. And then, you know, it’s the classic, you know, burn the boats, there’s only one way forward and that’s, and that’s doing your own thing. So I hadn’t quite figured out, you know, which of my different ideas that I was, I was playing around with was the one to go for. But I just knew that I needed to and put myself out there and figure it out from there.
Paul Spain:
And so what were the ideas that you had on the table? What are some of the ones that you ended up throwing in the bin?
Phil Thomson:
For instance, when I say throwing in the bin, probably just on a very long term hold. Two of my favorites. One was actually around co ownership of art, artwork and digitising that. And I think there’s a super successful US company that’s done that now with multi billions of dollars because that’s a great idea. Didn’t, didn’t work on that one for very long. And then the second one, I was actually creating a New Zealand Bailey’s alcoholic drink. So taking all the best ingredients of, you know, New Zealand milk powder honey and actually built and made a sample of it and it was delicious. But realized I didn’t have, you know, the marketing chops because I realized that actually in that space it was all about that brand marketing, everything else.
Phil Thomson:
So while I was playing around with that what is now aura was also on the table and we were again doing that didn’t know obviously where it would get to. And so just had a few different irons in the fire. And once we got a initial customer saying, this looks really interesting on the aura side, I was like, all right, this is, you know, put the focus on that instead.
Paul Spain:
Right. So had you built something at the stage that customer came along that was usable? How far into it did you get before you won a customer?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I mean, barely usable. We were more focused on the idea itself and understanding the problem space. And, you know, so back then, what, what really piqued my interest there was an article in the paper. You know, $2 million every day was being stolen from retailers across the country. And, and some, you know, friends brought me and said, this is the concept we’re thinking about. Like, you know, how do you capture this information? How do you give it to police? Is it even legal to do? And I was like, hold on a second. This number seems wrong, feels wrong. Let’s go out and speak to some retailers, understand that? And that was sort of the genesis of where we started.
Phil Thomson:
And it turns out, yes, a huge problem. So a billion plus dollars a year here in New Zealand.
Paul Spain:
Globally.
Paul Spain:
It’s.
Phil Thomson:
Globally, it’s huge, isn’t it? Depends on where you look at it. But I think if you put like, crime, if crime was a country, their GDP would be like the fourth largest in the entire world. So we’re talking retail crime, specifically retail crime. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars every year that’s been taken. And it’s always just been seen as a cost of doing business. And so, yeah, it became interesting from a, from a problem set of going, okay, well, no one seems to be doing anything about it. Businesses think it’s like a cost of doing business, but it’s quite a high cost when you look at the dollars where. And how could technology play a part in that? And the further we dug into it, the more interesting it got.
Phil Thomson:
And again, it starts to bring in. Both the legal and the psychology side of my brain are going, well, why does this happen? Who’s doing it? Why is no one’s trying to stop it? And when you went to talk to retailers, it became a, oh, we don’t even really report it anymore because it takes too long and nothing happens. So then spent a whole lot of time talking to police about it and going, well, surely, you know, it’s crime, it must be important. And they said, well, it takes too long to investigate. And when we do, nothing really happens either because, you know, the manager’s not there to get the video footage or the evidence we have or the descriptions we get are terrible. So it actually costs more to investigate it than what it’s worth. And for me, I was like, all right, there’s definitely something here and there’s no one else in the world doing anything about it.
Paul Spain:
Wow. How long did it take you to sort of join up the dots to, you know, what the early offerings should look like and to actually put together, I guess, an initial minimum viable product to sell?
Phil Thomson:
It’s probably about a year of exploration, you know, talking to a couple of customers. We spent a bit of time looking at communities and what we realized was that those sort of small stores, which we actually did a trial here in Auckland over in Newmarket, and they were. They loved the idea, but they actually only had one or two events in those stores each month. And so quite quickly I was like, okay, they’re going to forget their password or it’s not going to be high use. And then we realized that it’s actually the larger chains that have the high volume and obviously then the high value probably more willing to pay for something. So we pivoted and transitioned more to that side. And I think the beauty about New Zealand is that you can literally ring up anyone here or get a connection. And for us, we rang Woolworths or Countdown at the time and said, can we speak to Bruce and Loss prevention, please? Because we found out who the person, the owner was, and they said, one minute we’re going to put you through, and so the next minute you’re on the phone saying, hey, we’ve got this really random idea.
Phil Thomson:
What do you think of it? And he was great. He said, do you know what? Come in and see me off the back of that. Got introduced to his team again, spent a fair bit of time on the road with his team talking to stores and the background. We started to build off the back of that. And we started with four stores in West Auckland as a trial. And this is late 2013 now. And then by March 2014, we had enough, I wouldn’t say data, we had enough feeling that the customer agreed with it. There’s something there that he gave us the opportunity of rolling this out further than that.
Phil Thomson:
And so we sort of raised capital off. Off the back of that as well.
Paul Spain:
Fantastic. So break that down for us in terms of what it was that you were going to the market and offering,
Phil Thomson:
then at that point, quite simply just recording a crime event. So if you think about every shoplifting, theft, fraud, assault that happens in a retail Store back then it was generally paper based forms that they’d reported on or emails, phone trees. And there’s some primitive software, often pretty much Excel based type stuff. And so we first we just replaced that and we also then I think the AHA for us was these are not separate events. And so like, you know, you’d have, you know, a shoplifting at different stores and they’re always treated as just different things both by retailers and police. And we went, well, it’s possibly the same people doing that. So how can you start to connect those individual, you know, crimes to the same person or group?
Paul Spain:
Right, so one person might go and hit half a dozen stores in an afternoon or a short period of time and yeah, do you look at that as half a dozen random different things or as one thing?
Phil Thomson:
Exactly. And traditionally when you report that to the police, it would be seen as half dozen random isolated events because it would be a different person, different store reporting it in a different area. And so nothing got joined up. And so that was one of our hypotheses was around is this the same people doing it? And we saw within the first couple of months, well the first couple of weeks we saw people in stores in the same area and we thought it’s interesting, not unheard of. With the first couple of months we saw people traveling from Tauranga, Hawke’s Bay all the way up to Auckland offending. And so that was when we knew there’s something more there than just crime reporting. It actually became how do you start to make those matches and links? And then secondly, how do you get that information to police so they can do something about it? Because it’s all good if the retailer knew about the problem. But how do they actually report that they don’t want to do the same? Spend an hour on the phone to police telling them the same thing they’ve already written down once for themselves internally.
Phil Thomson:
So it was all about how do you build that network of stores, retailers and then law enforcement?
Paul Spain:
What would a crime incident tend to look like? What were you able to log, what retailers able to log in terms of information and so on? So you can join those dots up?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I mean the most common, if you take a shoplifting, someone walk into a store might be one or two people and they would target particular products and so they’d throw up their bag or their trolley and they’d walk back out the front door or walk out through checkout and not pay for their goods. And that’s your classic shoplifting. And again, most people thought that was opportunistic. What we started to see in the data quite quickly is people were targeting particular products. And so I can remember vividly there’s a couple of key offenders back then. One was known just to target council rubbish bags. So the only thing they would ever go and steal is rubbish bags and they’d have a place where they knew they could sell those things. There was people that only stole Manuka honey, that was their thing.
Phil Thomson:
And some people only stole bacon. So it wasn’t a fill up the trolley because you need to feed yourself. It was people taking $200 to $1,000 at a time. But then doing this across multiple stores and then ultimately with multiple people became quite an interesting. A different discussion both of the retailer who again they went, oh, we normally do a stock take every six months to a year. And so we know when there’s an issue with products but it’s almost too late and we’re flagging up, hey, your honey has been targeted in the last two weeks. And so they could make immediate changes on their product protection. They’re taking products off the shelf.
Phil Thomson:
And that was the insights that we’re starting to see from that. But this was happening in high volume. We’re talking tens of thousands of incidents every month, every year. That was often going unnoticed, unreported. But we were to start with just going, how do you capture better information, better data on what’s going on? So there was nothing fancy, there was no camera systems, no, you know, none of that. It was actually purely a how do you make it easy to report a crime that’s occurred after it’s happened?
Paul Spain:
So no camera. I guess some stores have surveillance systems but you weren’t tying that into, into your process at that stage.
Phil Thomson:
Again, because we weren’t from the industry, we took everything from a first principles approach of why wouldn’t you just apply some of these other things? We’re seeing that we use our own lives to the problem. And so for me, like Dropbox is a good example. It’s like, why are they not sharing evidence digitally? So they do have, you know, video systems in their stores that’s recording and capturing information. When there was a crime event that would require two police to drive down in a police car to the supermarket, spend an hour at the supermarket, ultimately burning a cd and they do that today sometimes still across the world, or put it onto a USB stick to then take back to the police computer, hoping that they had the right software on the police computer that they could watch that, then download it and upload it again to their system. And we just thought that was wild, that you couldn’t do that in a better way. And so the naivety of us coming into this space really helped us because we just went, well, wouldn’t it make sense to take that thinking or that technology and apply it in this area? So we did that and also we said, well, why shouldn’t you be able to report a crime online? You can do other things online. You couldn’t report crime at the time. We ended up doing a pilot that helped for retailer to then click a button in the platform and it would send through a report to police.
Phil Thomson:
And this was before their 105 digital crime reporting any of that even existed. We what was actually happening in the background to start with is that they’d click the button, it would send an email to us, we would then reformat it, make a PDF and forward it to the police email address. You know, we’re man in the middle of the ad. Things you do when, you know, before you can scale. Yeah, but yeah, it’s an interesting place to play because ultimately you needed to provide the information to police to help them do their jobs as well.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So how did that, you know, start accelerating? Where did it go from there in terms of raising capital and so on?
Phil Thomson:
Once we had our first customer, and again we started with a handful of stores and what was interesting about that is we didn’t know the value of what we had. Neither did the retailer. The negotiation was slightly awkward for that fact. And they went, well, we sort of pay, I don’t know, we pay like a dollar a day for our alarm system. So maybe we’d put you in that sort of bucket there. And we had this quite interesting discussion because also they were quite used to buying physical products more so than software. And so the contracts were written more for how do you buy a lot of broccoli that they could put on their shelf versus actually being software that we owned the IP in. But from there we sort of scaled across a number of different stores and then at that same time we started to raise capital because we realized one, we were paying ourselves nothing.
Phil Thomson:
So I pretty much then spent a year not being in a job that was paying me any money.
Paul Spain:
How many of you were involved at that point?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, so five original co founders. One never joined the business full time, but helped bring the team together and one left a couple of years in. Yeah, we sort of just made it work. I think we won an Auckland University business challenge at one point in time. So I think we had $15,000 prize money. We made that last about a year and we did everything on the cheap. And I ended up actually moving into the office at one point in time to live in the office because it was finished up at my flat here in Auckland and I couldn’t afford the rent. So I spent six months in the back room of the office and first into work, last at work every day.
Phil Thomson:
So set a good rhythm. But yeah, certainly interesting. That was sort of the reason why we wanted to raise capital as well, is not just extra power sales. Our mentality has always been, how do you bring in more better people as part of it? And so we knew we had something there with that customer and that was the catalyst to then go, well, let’s raise a small round of capital. And at the time, the capital markets in New Zealand weren’t great. And so we took what we could and again made. I think we ended up with about $300,000 of initial capital and we made that last another 15 months as well. And so we hired some engineers.
Phil Thomson:
Our very first software developer we hired still works with us today over 10 years later as well. So it’s been quite the journey. But we knew we wanted to scale, we knew we wanted to grow outside New Zealand, and so raising capital is part of that journey. And we didn’t know a whole lot about building and running a business other than what we’re seeing and hearing online from what’s happening, mainly in the US actually. And we knew that capital raising was an important part if we wanted to go. Go hard and fast at it.
Paul Spain:
Yeah. And so what, in addition to the software developer, which, you know, great to still have that member of your team with you, what were the key things that enabled you to do and how did it also impact your thinking? Because when you don’t have much, you kind of think in a particular way, you know, suddenly you had access to some money. Might seem small in the context of the business today, but how did that help you, you know, re look at the business?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I think there’s definitely pros and cons of one raising money, but raising a small amount, because I think you’re right, we very much kept our frugality, which I think ultimately helped us in the long run. And so, you know, even when we’re out training stores, you know, we would fly into Wellington and get a rental relocation car that cost a dollar to return it back to Auckland, and we’d spend the entire two days driving up the country training stores as we went, because we had an Agreement with one of the customers that every store we brought on with training that they’d start paying for. And so we did things like that that obviously didn’t necessarily couldn’t scale, but we had that mentality of we just have to get things done. But the other thing it did, which on the positive side as well is it meant that we could start to look at international markets more than just desktop research. So we used a lot of that money to look at, well, okay, let’s figure out what’s happening in Australia, what’s happening in the the U.S. we probably spent four years flying in and out of the U.S. just to understand the market before we even went into it. But we needed to build more of a product, more of a team.
Phil Thomson:
So that’s where the focus was, that first sort of capital round. And from there we realized again, no one was doing this around the world. So in our view, how do we go faster? In retrospect, we probably didn’t go fast enough. But at the same time I think the, the hindsight and the benefit of time has allowed us to be where we are today as well.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And what other roles did you, did you hire for at that time?
Phil Thomson:
We had, we had a couple of product like product roles, the product management design. And again we knew that design was really important because for the end user of our product was actually the store manager, the checkout person, the frontline police officer. So it had to be something that was, you know, we call it consumer grade. You know, everyone was starting to get iPhones and things like that. So why shouldn’t enterprise software be the same versus what we’d seen elsewhere and what other systems that, you know, retailers or police had was, was very old school. So that, you know, it was an instant way to stand out for us is by having just a great user interface user experience. So we probably over optimised for that, which is ultimately benefited us. And then we hired a number of probably junior software engineers and again in our mindset was well, we can hire more people for less dollars.
Phil Thomson:
One of the reflections is probably like if you can hire one amazing person, probably a better investment. But these are sort of all the learnings we had along the way.
Paul Spain:
Yeah. Now just walking back, what year did you start the business and at what point was it that you raised that first capital?
Phil Thomson:
So started sort of end of 2012 and then first capital was March 2014.
Paul Spain:
And then you know, walk us through from there. Those visits to the U.S. what did they look like? You know, had you raised more funds at that point or were you still kind of, you know, stretching a very small number of dollars?
Phil Thomson:
We went to Australia first because, and again there’s a number of New Zealand retailers that were obviously owned by Australian retailers. So there was some connections there we could go and, and explore. And we found the same issues that we heard and saw in New Zealand and Australia. So again we knew, okay, there’s something more and bigger here. So did a couple of trips there and then as we were going up for the US we raised another round which would have been middle of 2015 by then and again that was to start to explore further. We pretty much got to the point just as we closed that round, I remember we actually ran out of $0 in the bank and thankfully the investors actually did come through on that one. But we ended up deciding the capital round was closed, we didn’t have money in the bank and we had a conference in the US that came up and we decided rather than paying ourselves, we would take nothing for the first couple of weeks of that until the money came through and put that towards air fares and conference instead. So that was our big trip up to the US Got there and figured out that it was much bigger than what we expected.
Phil Thomson:
Again, yes, on the problem side, but actually on the whole like how does the industry and the market work over there? And it was a real eye opener to walk into our first conference and you know, we had a table at the very back of the hall and you know, we’d been to a few conferences in Australia and there’s sort of 10, you know, 10 vendors there in a little room. This was a full like four football fields long convention center and there were cranes in there erecting like proper two story things. And we turned up with a, with a computer screen and a pull up banner and we realized that we’re so out of our depth then and there. But again we sort of kicked into, into the how do we do this gear? And went straight to Walmart, bought a big 50 inch TV, bought a table and bought a sheet to go over the top of it and, and made the most of it. Yeah, but yeah, sort of the, the fun trips of figuring things out and figuring out what that market looked like. But yeah, like I said, we ended up spending a couple of trips every year just to go back there to see how the market was progressing and how we’d enter it when time was right.
Paul Spain:
And what would you say you got out of those initial, those initial visits and whether it’s relationships or learnings and so on, when you look back, you realize actually that was well worth it.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I think that the size and scale of the market was an easy one for us to learn quickly. But also I think what we learned was the core of our product idea was correct. There was no one again doing what we were doing in that market either. But the sophistication and the size of the retailers in the industry was next level. And so we didn’t have quite a the right product at that point in time to enter the market successfully. But we did meet a lot of people. I think it was very much a find out who’s who in the zoo, get feedback from them. One of the people we met up there ended up being one of our early hires into our U.S.
Phil Thomson:
team. When we actually entered the market there and then. So that was like super helpful to go and do, but I think it was our second or third trip. We came back and we just said, look, there’s something here, but we have to rebuild the product to meet the demands and the scale of the US market. So we actually spent 18 months rebuilding the entire product from the ground up in order to do so. So it was quite an interesting thing for us to take that. And at the time we were rolling out into Australia successfully, like our Net promoter score was plus 70. We had no churn.
Phil Thomson:
So on the metrics and the data, you’re like, well, why would you ever almost stop and do that? But we took our customers at the time on that journey and said, hey, you’re not gonna see a whole lot out of us in the next 12 to 18 months as we rebuild. It’s going to allow for a lot more and it’s going to be a whole lot better. But please trust us and come on the journey with us. And again, thankfully, they’ve stuck with us to this day. And the big thing that we really drove home with them both here locally in the US was just innovation. We were always up for taking on board ideas and feedback and then turning them into product that they had never thought about themselves before in that way either. So that sort of bought us a lot of brownie points, I think, with all of them, because we’re always coming up with this next idea, the next way of doing things. Every time we saw them, here’s a new design.
Phil Thomson:
And so they had this faith in us and that really helped us. When we finally did launch in the US market, we’d built up these relationships with people in the US by showing them the progress of the new platform. As we built it fantastic.
Paul Spain:
Now break down for us what it was about the size and scale of the market that you took away from those initial visits.
Phil Thomson:
A couple of things. One just, you know, we’re talking about retailers who have got thousands of stores. You know, the biggest retailer in New Zealand has 200 stores. And so we would classify that as a mid market retailer for us these days. But you know that size meant that there was a large volume of events. You know, some of our customers have a million chrome events that they know about, you know, every year. So just building, you know, from a technical like for the back, the back end and the databases to actually be able to handle that first and foremost. Foremost.
Phil Thomson:
Secondly, just like the spread of geography can make it complex around how do you start to make connections across that data set. And then thirdly, as part of that geography, the law enforcement market, which we know is important, you obviously need police to help stop and solve crime. We have one police force in New Zealand, we’ve got about eight in Australia, there’s 43 in the UK and then there’s 18,000 in the US market. And just knowing that again, okay, well how do we start to build some of that into the product itself? And also there was a huge amount of, call it red tape and bureaucracy with these large enterprises. So you know, the very first story around ringing up retailer here in New Zealand and getting straight through like you couldn’t do that in the U.S. right. And so not only do you have to make your way up to the right person in that company, but then you’ve actually got to meet with 10 other people, which is the IT legal privacy data. And so you’ve got to build a platform but actually you’ve got to build a company to be able to do that in the right way.
Phil Thomson:
And so we weren’t quite ready back then, but it took us a bit of time to actually build those things out.
Paul Spain:
So the US market really informed you about the sort of roles you needed and how you needed to build the company before you entered that market.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, and also just because of the like again you got retailers who are losing billions of dollars a year. They’re more sophisticated in how they’re going about those operations as well. And so we had retailers that had 100 ex FBI investigators sitting in a dark room looking at Excel spreadsheets, mind you, trying to figure out these connections. But because the prize was so high for them to actually try and figure those things out, we had to build out, well, how do you help them with those investigations? Which is super Complex touch, a lot of different areas of their business themselves also with law enforcement. And for us we needed a bit of time to also understand and learn. And I think one of the things that we’d done well up until that point was because we didn’t have this time pressure, partly because I don’t think we’d raised enough capital to have any real external pressure on us. And then secondly, back when we started, the focus from a technology point of view was on online fraud. E Com was the big thing coming through there.
Phil Thomson:
So everyone had sort of just forgotten about the physical crime happening in the real world. So we had a bit of time because no one else was in the space. But once we sort of got into the US market we then knew we had to go a lot faster from there. So we sort of took our time and then from there put the afterburners on.
Paul Spain:
Yeah. And so how did the capital raising sort of fit in alongside that? What sort of numbers were you raising at each stage?
Phil Thomson:
It was still small numbers back then. We’re talking millions of dollars at a time and it was almost enough to do another 18 months to two years again on a quite a small cost base. And it wasn’t until probably we’d broken into the US market that we raised enough money to probably put the foot down and do it, I’d say more properly than we have been doing it. And I think we realized that by that stage it was sort of must have been 20, 20, 21. We’re six, seven years into the journey then and we’d really been doing things not properly but we’d just been skimping on those areas which again we thought was good from a dollar point of view. But we had to start to invest, really invest in getting world class people figuring out how do we have people in market and how do we, how do we ensure we’re, you know, scaling the company in that way as well. And you know, it was, it was those early investors though, and a number of them are still on the journey with us today. Right.
Phil Thomson:
We’re talking that they’ve been there for 12 years now. You know, they’ve, they’ve always backed us but it was important, you know, Even back in 2015 with us of a second round we had, you know, K1W1, so the Tindalls came on board then, which is great from a retail brand point of view. We had Sam Morgan at the time joining again. Good credibility for us as well. And then we are our first Australian investor as well. And so, you know, and again, that was reinventions of the Westpac Australia’s venture backed there. And again, incredible insights. They’re still on the journey with us as well, but they started to have a bit more push on us around.
Phil Thomson:
Well, here’s what, you know, here’s introducing us to other portfolio companies and founders who were, you know, you know, often a step or two ahead of us. And it sort of kept that ambition start to play through.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, great. And so where did you kind of really start seeing the acceleration and start seeing things move? Did that happen quite quickly after entering the US market, or what do you think the things were that really triggered that for you?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, so we entered the US market at the back end of 2019 and Tom, my co founder, moved up there and then Covid hit in 2020 and that really slowed and almost stopped us in that market for about a year, which was tough because we had these big dreams of building a large team and company there as well. But through that time we were actually getting a lot of traction in Australia and so I think we probably tripled the business that year across just our Anz base. So we knew we had something there that was going on well. And then once we got the US really kick started, that’s when it went a whole lot faster. But this is the fun thing, I think, about software companies and compounding growth is that every year it just looks way better than it did the five to 10 years before that as well. But it was definitely a slow burn to get there because like I said, we had to learn a lot as we grew, both from the industry point of view, but also just as founders and people and building a team. When you’re. When you’re 10 people in one room, it’s a lot easier.
Phil Thomson:
Part of our reason of moving into Australia was to work with larger customers, but also figure out how do you build a team across different geographies, how do you have meetings when not everyone’s in the same room? And that sort of just has scaled and the complexity has scaled with it, I think as well. Whereas now we’re in New Zealand, Australia, the US and the UK in terms of offices and people there. But we also now have markets in, you know, Europe and Canada and getting into Central and South America. So, like, it’s quite a. It’s been quite a cool part of the journey, but also, you know, a lot of just learning and figuring it out as we go.
Paul Spain:
In terms of your scale now you’ve got what is around 150 locally in New Zealand and then more than 100 on top of that in your other locations.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I think we’re about 260 people now across the world. And you know, New Zealand’s still our home both in terms of in our heart, but also our R and D home as well. I think we over optimize almost for New Zealand on that basis that we live and work here. And that’s about 90% of our revenue now is global, is outside of New Zealand. So US, UK are some of our very fast growing markets but we’re very much focused on how to make sure that, you know, New Zealand communities, retailers are all kept safe. And I think the great thing is that we can utilise those early customers who’ve got this high trust in us to also try new things here and take them to the rest of the world.
Paul Spain:
Now it seems you learnt quite quickly the benefit of, you know, hitting up a bigger retailer versus the sort of smaller retailers. How’s that played out for you on a global basis? Cause you know, often a company will kind of, you know, work their way up to the bigger players, but it seems like you’ve kept going for those, the bigger retailers rather than working your way up.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I think once we figured out that it’s the biggest retailers that have got the biggest problem we did, which is non traditional, most software companies and startups would start small and work their way up and we figured out that was our strategy was actually to go the other way around. And so entering Australia, I think Coles was our big first retailer there, largest supermarket chain. When we went into the us, we targeted Walmart and managed to get them on the platform. And again everyone says when you enter the us, choose a city or a state if you’re going to do it. And whatever you do, don’t go after Walmart first because they’ll eat you alive and understand why they’re an incredibly large, incredible, complex business. But for us, you know, incredibly large and complex problem that we thought we were best placed to solve. So that made a whole lot of sense. And then we took that same learning into the UK and so, you know, the likes of Marks and Spencers and Boots, like well known brands because for us it was about not just the customer being the right customer for us, but having that right network of stores meant that we could engage well with the problem and also with police in those different areas.
Phil Thomson:
And then there’s the credibility piece as well. Like having those brand names mean that the next time we get to the next customer they’ll take more Notice.
Paul Spain:
Right.
Phil Thomson:
If you’re working with those big brand names. And so for us, it became a core part of our strategy around doing that. And now we’re going down and figuring out how do we help the smaller retailers as we progress. But yeah, it’s meant there’s been often like long sales cycles. And when we went to the US market, as much as we had all these big brand names from New Zealand, Australia, they said, who? You know, one, where is that? And two, are you a U.S. company? And three, who are your U.S. customers? Right. So they didn’t actually care at all.
Phil Thomson:
So we had to start again, you know, in the us was starting from scratch. But the great news, when we entered the UK market, they went, oh, we know all those Australian retailers, we know those US brands, so welcome in.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And I guess all of that really proved out your approach to rebuild the software before entering the US market. So you didn’t get laughed out of the room or however else you might describe what would have happened if you hadn’t done that.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, exactly. And again, I think there’s still that naivety piece helped us because we were purely looking at it from a problem point of view and surely this makes a whole lot of sense. Why wouldn’t you want to help solve this problem? Retailer A. And almost that key humility helped us versus if you’re in the us, it’s quite hierarchical there. And so we use it to our advantage because we just didn’t like. We literally just wanted to understand and know more. And so we’d meet with anyone and everyone in that space and just pick their brains on what they’re thinking, how they did things. And also when we went back to meet with them, it wasn’t this sort of.
Phil Thomson:
It wasn’t like a weird relationship because we didn’t really know how we’re meant to act or behave and we’re still relatively young and so we just got amongst it. And actually one of the things that we kept bringing to the table at these conferences was we wanted to have a whole lot of fun while we’re building a business as well. And so we sort of got this reputation, a really good reputation of enjoying our prospects at the time. And now customers just enjoy hanging out with us and the team for doing so as well. And so it’s been quite cool to build those relationships like that. Rather than being purely what’s often as a solution provider or a vendor to the customer, you end up being on this much more mutual playing field of we bring innovation to you and you tell us how this would apply to your business.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s great. And what’s been your approach to culture within the business and creating an environment that that’s good that people want to stay for?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah. And that’s one of the big things I sort of took out of being in the corporate world was how do you encourage that view of on a Sunday night, are you excited about Monday morning and going to work? And hopefully the answer is yes. And that comes from having a great environment, both in terms of the physical environment like the office that you’re going to or the people that you work with.
Paul Spain:
You got a very cool office in Auckland, by the way.
Phil Thomson:
Thank you. Yeah, that was part of it. Right. But also how do you have a mission that people want to be part of and be on? And every day they see themselves being part of something bigger than that. And so for us, we’re lucky in the sense of it was natural having a mission around connecting communities to stop crime. And no one wants crime in the community, so. But a lot of people join us on the back of that as well. And when you start to understand and hear the stories of how we’re impacting on people in their day to day lives.
Phil Thomson:
So we’re talking the frontline retail worker who feels safer. We’re talking about the police officer who’s helped solve a large retail crime ring all the way into now we’re helping with that digital evidence collection. We’ve helped with most murder inquiries over the last five years. And you see Zealand as well. And so you start to go, okay, technology plays a really important role. And so the people that are behind the desk or behind the keyboard who are building that many other organisations, they haven’t been able to see the impact of their work, but they get to actually hear and see that every day. And the great thing is our customers are really good at sharing with us some of those wins as well. And so when a retailer says, hey, actually you’ve helped us in this particular example, or we’ve just made a massive investigation particular become successful based on the product, it inspires them to keep thinking and building and working.
Paul Spain:
Now you’ve built, I guess a customer base that’s pretty impressive. Top retailers and multiple markets, I think, what’s it, 85,000 or more stores now that are using your technology? Law enforcement agencies, I don’t know what’s your reach on that side in terms of police and law enforcement?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, there’s a couple of thousand agencies now on that side and I think we’re the stores that we’re used in or the retailers we’re used in, I think there’s over 6 million people who work in those stores. So from a team point of view, we think about that. How many retail workers are you protecting every day by what you do?
Paul Spain:
That’s fantastic.
Phil Thomson:
And, yeah, it’s again, a core driver for us.
Paul Spain:
So you’ve got all of those good things, but being in business is not easy. What would you say have been the hardest challenges along the way for you?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I think there’s been a number of pivotal moments and often they’ll center around one deal or one customer particularly. Like I said, our view of taking on the world was every year we’d sort of live or die on one deal with those sort of big brands and a mixture of things being out of our control. I think our first Australian large retailer, we were the night before going live with their pilot there and their chicken rotisserie caught fire in one of their stores. Nothing obviously to do with what we were doing, but the impact of that was. Hold on a second. What actually happened was they were testing some new technology in those stores and that happened to cause the fire. And therefore they’re going to have to rewrite how they do technology pilots from now on. So that pause, when’s it going to come online again? That actually ended up pausing us about two or three years by the time we got back around to getting into that retailer themselves as well.
Phil Thomson:
So there’s things like that that happen. A big retailer up in the us, Our very first deal there, we actually lost out on that deal to start with. We didn’t quite get our market entry and pricing right before that. It took us another 12, 18 months to win that one back. But each of those sort of times, it was suddenly a hard stop in the business because we’d also been, again, with that sort of an opportunistic mindset, very optimistic of, right this is going to happen. And therefore it’s going to open up our world to whatever it might be, hiring more people, capital raising, changing what we’re doing in terms of our jobs day to day as well. And then it all sort of comes crashing down with one phone call, and so you sort of gotta pick yourself back up again, figure out, is it something that’s in our control, out of our control, how do we bounce back from that? And I think the great thing we’ve always done well is figure out how do we make the most of those bad situations, which is normally just means staying close to that customer. Giving them regular updates and taking the opportunity when it arises of stepping back in there and saying, hey, actually we can help you in the space.
Phil Thomson:
Give us another go. And whether or not we figure out how to do that to meet them or their team’s demands or what they needed, those are sort of like that sort of the pivotal points. And then I think just growing a team and doing that globally and spending a lot of time now on a plane. Again, pros and cons of building a company from here in New Zealand. And we knew from the get go that was sort of part of it. But it has an impact on. I’ve got an incredible wife and on the family as well, you know, as they hold down the Ford at home as we’re on a plane around the world.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. How does that play out family wise for you?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, it depends on how long I give between notice and getting on a plane. And you know, and some days literally as a, you know, one of our core customers has said, we need you there tomorrow. And so I’m on a plane that night. But yeah, and it was an incredible job. We’ve got five young boys at home as well. So it’s one of those things that, you know, obviously a bit of give and take, but you know, she holds down the Ford at home and, and really it just comes down to great communication and, and also, you know, she’s very, very supportive of the work that we’re doing and, and therefore supports me going, you know, going around the world at times for that benefit as well. But, you know, we’ve got some rules in place around, you know, ideally the less weekends out of the country, the better. And you know, so a lot of time it’s a Sunday night flight out and a Thursday night flight back in to get home for the weekends and be on the boys as well.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. It’s good to establish those sort of framings, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And working with your co founders, you know, I think there are different approaches. How has that played out for you, having a group of co founders, you know, not just you, not just you and one other, but, you know, a number of you. Yeah, I guess five initially and then that sort of downsized as well.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, yeah, started with five. And I think again, you always start with best intentions in mind and everything’s going to be great and generally everything’s going to happen very quickly. Right. We’ll be have built this business in three to five years and we’ll be best friends as part of that. And It’ll be done. So it’s a natural thing that most founders go through at some point in time. Start with five and we’re now down to two. And over time, people step out of the business for various reasons, whether it’s personal or, you know, I don’t know how we would have done it if it was a single co founder.
Phil Thomson:
I think having, you know, particularly James Corbett, Tom, myself, we always had very similar views on building a team, building culture and that mindset about how do we just build the best product for our customers. So that’s always sort of held us true. And, you know, I think we’ve learned a lot over the years just from each other. You know, we’ve picked up each other’s strengths and often they’ve been each other’s weaknesses previous to that as well. So it’s been quite good, actually, just to build a lot stronger off the back of those things. And now James and I very much again, focus on the innovation side. So it’s almost come full circle in a way, because particularly with the way the AI is going at the moment for us, we’re very much back on the tools around, what’s next, what’s possible. And it’s most of the funnest part of the journey now because we’ve spent, spent so long building the core foundation of the company and getting the chance to innovate and chat through some new ideas is heaps of fun.
Paul Spain:
And I’m curious about you being the only player effectively in the market when you started. Now, these sort of situations don’t usually sort of stay for long, and I guess the same for Auror. But, you know, how did that impact you when you realised, oh, it’s not just us anymore and others are coming after the same business that you want to win?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, I think we always knew our biggest early competition was just education because we’re sort of creating almost this new view of how we could solve the problem. And it took a long, long time just to help our customers understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, why we’re different and why their pay performance were no good for it. And then when we entered the US market, I think there was another competitor in the US that was about the same time thought, hey, there’s no one really doing this well in that space. Not exactly how we’re doing it, but they’re at their own way of doing things. So we ended up sort of battling them here and there. Our biggest competition is often actually the retailer themselves, so they’ll have their own IT team that wants to build their own product. And we’ve had at least three or four occasions where a large retailer has piloted with aura, seen some great results, and then their team have gone, oh, we can just build this ourselves. So I think we’re so far three from four around, actually getting them back as a customer after they’ve tried it themselves and realised what they’re missing out on by not being with Auror.
Phil Thomson:
So that’s. Yeah, it’s like, it’s a good little trip on the shoulder to have, I think when they say, oh, we’re going to go and do this ourselves, like, well, you’re not going to be able to. And here’s the reasons why. Again, that’s the reason why I want to go back to them each time and say, hey, how’s it going? How are you finding this thing? Or we can’t do that thing. It’s like, great. So that’s probably our biggest competition is just around helping them understand that. And now, again, the UK market’s been our fastest entry to date and there’s a whole other smaller players in that market. But again, no one’s still doing it the way that we’ve done it around bringing retail and police together and then being smart around making the connections across the data, rather than just being individual events being reported through.
Phil Thomson:
And so that sort of kept us at the front of the pack.
Paul Spain:
And you’ve moved into facial recognition type capabilities. How is that changing the game? Because I guess it’s an area that probably freaks some people out. You’ve got to deal with different legal scenarios and different markets, so probably not
Paul Spain:
something you can just roll out across
Paul Spain:
the planet in one go and just say, oh, we turned on this new feature yesterday. How does that sort of fit in for you and the future?
Phil Thomson:
Yeah, we’ve been super deliberate about facial recognition technology. It’s something that we have been almost tracking since we started the company. The technology itself’s been around for a long time, but back then, a couple of things at play. One common question would get from retailers, from investors, from others is like, well, surely facial recognition just solves this problem? And we wouldn’t need aura because there’s no crime that’s going to happen, which we didn’t quite take on. But also what we’re seeing from the early use of it was that the accuracy wasn’t there. There was issues with bias as well. And so we’d been actively telling our customers that it’s not ready yet. We.
Phil Thomson:
We’d done things with other technologies like license plate recognition. So looking at vehicles instead, which is a lot higher accuracy and had some really good results in that space. We understood the technology itself and actually the workflows around. How do you put safeguards in place around such use? But about call it 18 months ago, there was a shift again in the accuracy rates and the technology changes there. But also we are seeing a lot of poor use of that technology. Our general preference is to integrate with other technologies rather than being build anything ourselves. And we were seeing a number of deployments across retail and across just industry generally that had us concerned around how they’re operating. And so we had a long discussion internally and actually decided that it was best for us.
Phil Thomson:
If someone’s going to do it, we’d rather do it the right way and put again, put the right guardrails in place. And so we set up a team to explore it to start with, had a number of discussions internally again because I think we were all concerned around the use of technology like facial recognition accuracy, public perception of that, how it could be misused, which was great because we crowdsourced all that from across our team, from customers, from the public and then figure out, well, how could we stop and mitigate all those things from happening. So we ended up building it in a way that actually it’s connected into aura. So you’re not having the scope creep that most people are concerned about. So it’s not a general purpose system that can send you advertising or help with loyalty and marketing programs. It purely is. If someone walks into the store, it’s looking for repeat high risk violent offenders. If it matches on that, it will send the alert to a person to then review and confirm that if there’s not a match.
Phil Thomson:
So if it’s a good honour shopper, no information has even captured. So it’s just utilizing the same system that’s already in the store in terms of a video camera for that. But there’s a whole lot of rules around, you know, what can, you know, who can even be enrolled in the first place. And they’ve got to hit a certain criteria that the organisation sets on the retail side, you know, no biometrics are actually captured, it’s used to match and then they’re discarded. So again, we’ve done a whole lot of work around that space because we wanted to make sure that ultimately what we’re trying to stop is that violent person coming into the store and attacking someone. And unfortunately that’s just the reality now of what’s happening in the retail Space because we’ve been able to show that 10% of people are doing about 60% of the crime. But those repeat people are four times more likely to be violent or aggressive. So they’re coming in with a weapon often, or they’re threatening to punch someone in the face.
Phil Thomson:
And so how do you get that information and their alert to the right person to then be notified of, hey, this, you know, this is a known high risk offender and which might change the way they actually interact with that person in the get go. But it all came down to, you know, again, using that sort of privacy law and everything else that’s in the back of my head from. From earlier career.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, super helpful.
Phil Thomson:
Yeah. How do you apply that? And then to your point around globally, like, how do you apply at a really high watermark? That means that if you’re using this elsewhere, you don’t have to change anything because you start with a really high bar and use it purposefully. Rather than being a technology that someone’s created and said, hey, you can use it for 10 different reasons and one could be marketing, one could be security, we’re saying you can only use it for this particular reason.
Paul Spain:
Sounds like a good approach. Now, as we wrap up all the numbers that I’ve seen that your growth is on a really strong trajectory, 66% year on year growth for North American market, you’re growing in other parts of the world as well. This must leave you with a lot of confidence for the future. Any tips that you can share with listeners that are at varying stages in their businesses that you can leave listeners with in terms of takeaways, I think
Phil Thomson:
you’re gonna surround yourself with ambition. I think if you’d asked us if we’d be where we are today when we first started, we wouldn’t have dreamed of it. But, you know, when I say ambition, it’s figuring out, where do you get that from? For me, it’s always been, how do you find that? From listening to podcasts and videos, other things of other ambitious people, which could be companies around the world who are doing these things. But then also, how do you have ambition pushed upon you? And so we’ve had some great discussions from our board. One of our directors, Danny Yelligan, he’s been great at this. Probably every three years or so we get this challenge of like, okay, great what you’ve done, but what’s next? And actually open yourself and open your minds to what’s possible. Because I think this is maybe a little bit of a downside of being from New Zealand is that we actually don’t have enough examples of that still yet in the business world, which means that you don’t end up thinking it’s possible to do, but you have people like Adani or someone else pushing you on these things and actually you go, oh, wow, hold on a second, we could be there. That’s not out of the realm.
Phil Thomson:
And therefore, for me, and for every three years, we get this sort of injection of ambition in the arm of going, oh, cool, great, what you’ve done. What’s next? And let’s go for it. And that’s served us really well. And I think the more we can create that across New Zealand as well, the better. And part of what we’re doing here and sharing some of these stories is hopefully the next generation coming through gets that from day one.
Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Oh, thank you so much, Phil Thomson. Really appreciate you joining the show.
Phil Thomson:
Thanks, Paul.
Paul Spain:
All right, cheers.
Paul Spain:
Well, thanks for listening in. I trust you enjoyed hearing from Phil Thomson, hearing his story and that of aura. New Zealand Business Podcast is brought to you by one New Zealand and Gorilla Technology. Be sure to listen in to our other episodes featuring many of New Zealand’s most incredible leaders, including Brooke Roberts of Sharesies, Sir Peter Beck of Rocket Lab, Cecilia and James Robinson of MyFoodBag, Sir Stephen Tyndall and many, many more. And be sure to share this episode with a friend or colleague who you think will get something out of it. And before we go, quick question. Are you sure your company is solid from a cybersecurity perspective? If you’re not fully confident, get in touch with Gorilla Technology today for an advisory session. Well, thanks for listening.
Paul Spain:
This is Paul Spain signing out, and I’ll catch you on the next episode of the New Zealand Business Podcast.
