Three months, three minutes, one summit
I coached three founder teams as part of Creative HQ's Aurora Climate Accelerator again this year. Different structures, different stages. Kat O'Sullivan at Snap Power. Sam Kivi at Grid Share. Ashleigh Adair and Graeme Merrall at DataLoom.
What stood out wasn't the differences. It was how much came back to the same basics.
Being clear on the problem you're solving. Knowing what you're offering and where you're heading. And being able to say all of that simply enough for someone outside your industry to get it straight away.
None of this lands in one session. It built up over three months of working alongside each team, asking the same questions in different ways, and slowly earning enough trust to get them to tell me what they didn't yet know.
The summit
It all came down to the Aurora Climate Tech Summit, run by Creative HQ. Teams pitching, panels, conversations that kept going well past when they were meant to.
Three months of coaching came down to three minutes each on stage. Proud of how far they'd all come, and proud to watch them land their pitches.
Humbled that this became part of my fractional work and genuinely work I looked forward to.
Thank you to Kat, Sam, Ash and Graeme for letting me be part of it. And I can't forget my fellow coaches, so good to work alongside Pip Wheaton, Sandy Isaac, Holly Beals and Chris O'Neill again this year.
Every team on stage was chasing a different piece of the same problem: getting more clean energy into the system and using what's already there more wisely.
The room had connectors, politicians, investors, and the curious and passionate, all supporting climate tech in New Zealand. The political panel was spicy and revealing. At one point I said to someone that I thought central government was missing from this puzzle when it comes to supporting the startup sector. They pushed back: the government of the day's job is to set the box. The founders' job is knowing how to work within it, and around it. Still sitting with that one.
Wellington's a village. Familiar faces, a few new ones, and I'll no doubt run into most of them again before long.
