It took 'massive self belief' for Carmen Vicelich to walk away from a senior corporate role and start her own businesses. She reflects on how she did it as part of RNZ's new series, RICH: The meaning of wealth in Aotearoa.
Twenty-three years ago, in a glitzy auditorium in central Auckland, 450 of the country's top political, business and academic minds came together for the "Catching the Knowledge Wave" Conference. Critics scoffed that it was just a "talk fest".
The goal was certainly ambitious: Plan how New Zealand could transform its economy from one predominantly based on agricultural exports to one driven by technology and knowledge. A blueprint from the conference called for greater focus on innovation, entrepreneurship, research and development.
That conference has lately been talked about by the likes of Warehouse founder Sir Stephan Tindall and tech sector researcher Greg Shanahan as a "seminal moment" for the now booming tech sector.
Shanahan's most recent report shows since The Knowledge Wave the tech sector has more than doubled in size. In 2023, the industry earned New Zealand a record $13 billion in exports.
Enter Aucklander Carmen Vicelich. The 49-year-old epitomises exactly the type of tech entrepreneur the Knowledge Wave advocates dreamt of all those years ago.
Vicelich - originally from South Africa - is a fearless businesswoman who quit her high flying corporate job and mortgaged her house to start not one, but three successful companies that now employ over 150 people and export Kiwi technology and knowledge to the world.
She's generating wealth for her family - and scores of others - on a commodity she describes as "the new oil".
"Data is oil, the new oil. But just like oil, if it's buried under the building and no one can access it, it has no value," Vicelich says.
"So you have to actually get it out. You have to transform it into petrol and you have to make it accessible."
An appetite for risk
In 2012, Carmen Vicelich had a decade of experience in the workforce, four children aged under nine and a highly-paid senior corporate role. About time to strike out on her own, she thought.
"I quit my very phenomenally well-paying corporate job to start a company," she says.
"When I was the income earner, my husband ran our house and kids. I had to buy all the data - which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars - to build something that no one had ever done before.
"And then I continued to reinvest my own mortgage money and that's definitely huge for us when you're the income earner. You do have to have a massive self-belief."
Carmen Vicelich speaks with RNZ's Corin Dann Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Her first start up was Data Insight, a specialist data company which helps large organisations such as banks, telcos and government departments make better sense and use of customer data. Next came Valocity Global which helps banks around the world access timely and accurate data on property valuations. More recently Vicelich started Generate Zero which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to measure carbon emissions.
After initially paying her own way, Vicelich has in recent years sought help from outside investors including PushPay investor Peter Huljich. In 2018, Huljich took a 25 percent stake in Valocity Global through the Huljich Family Investment Group.
A multimillion dollar grant from state-owned Callaghan Innovation supported growth of the businesses into Australia.
Vicelich says she's also benefited from mentoring and support from Huljich and other tech entrepreneurs in New Zealand, like Xero founder Rod Drury.
"I've got an expression. Go big or go home," she says.
"If you're making sacrifices, which, as a working mother of four children, I am, I may as well make them worth it.
"So, I explain to my children, 'you know, we've got this many lenders and there's this many people in New Zealand, and there's this many lenders and this many people in India. So, Mummy's getting on planes.'"
Vicelich is getting on planes to go to India because her property data company Valocity Global is making great headway on a new app that's being used by Indian property valuers. The app allows valuers for the first time to get verified data on house values and then pass it on to banks. This, says Vicelich, is a game changer for India, as it doesn't have street addresses like we do in New Zealand.
"So suddenly the bank is digitally getting the data that they never ever had before to start doing trend analytics and benchmarking. And we can create that for the whole market. We had a 75-year-old valuer coming into the federal branch in North India to download his tool for the first time ever and start doing valuations with technology, which is hugely exciting."
Vicelich won the 'Tech and Emerging Industries' award at the 2023 Entrepreneur of the Year awards. Jason MacGregor, a partner at consulting firm EY who runs the entrepreneur awards, says successful wealth creators like Vicelich are not as scared of failure as previous generations have been.
"They're willing to make bolder choices and bolder decisions," MacGregor says.
"Talking about Carmen, you know, that's a very bold move to go to India and try to completely reinvent the banking sector, which is what she is trying to do. That's an amazingly bold choice and that is a trait I see. People are more willing to give it a pump, they're more willing to give it a go and fail, rather than not give it a go at all."
Doing it from New Zealand
Vicelich credits the Entrepreneur of the Year awards for showing women what's possible.
"You can be a working mother and scale globally a tech company and a data company."
She says there is still work to do to encourage more women to be entrepreneurs in technology. But she hopes that through her work and the sacrifices she makes she's setting an example of how you can build wealth and lead a good life in New Zealand.
"It is really about the future that I'm creating, to leave the world in a better place and the example to set. To let them [her children] think well, you can do anything you want to do. You can live in New Zealand, the most beautiful place in the world, actually the world is your oyster, and you can build value and actually make the world deliver and pay."
She's not quite ready to say she can create the next Xero, but she does want to get bigger. Aside from having to get on a few planes, she doesn't see any major barriers to doing so.
"Until you get on the plane you don't recognise the opportunity that's out there. That's where technology is such an exciting opportunity because it's so scalable. I can sell the same thing multiple times and I don't have to increase my cost base and I can be anywhere in the world because I'm in the cloud."
* This story is part of a special RNZ series, RICH: The meaning of wealth in Aotearoa. Over several days, feature interviews by Corin Dann and Anusha Bradley with a diverse range of wealthy and powerful New Zealanders examine attitudes to wealth, ideas for making us a richer country and what to do with money when you have plenty of it.