Tait Communications Hi-Tech Hall of Fame - Flying Kiwi

It started with a Sega SC-3000 that his mother brought home. He spent hours copying lines of code from magazines into a rubber keyboard, pressing run and hoping something would work. That early curiosity set the tone for everything that followed.

The Sega became a Commodore 64, then a PC, then two PCs wired together, then a modem. BBS servers followed, and the first real sense that software could connect him to other people. Eventually, one of New Zealand’s earliest internet connections, and suddenly that connection reached everywhere.

He left school at 16, but a teacher intercepted him on the way out and encouraged him to sit an entry test for AUT’s new business computing programme. He scored 99%, enrolled, tried to fit in, dropped out, returned, and dropped out again. Traditional education didn’t suit the way he learned, and for a long time, he assumed he was the problem.

As he left AUT, the dean passed him a job posting that became his first role in computer telephony, at the exact moment the industry was shifting from dial tones and DTMF to modem handshakes. It marked the start of a career spent repeatedly building ahead of mainstream adoption.

Over the next three decades, he worked on e-commerce systems replacing telephone banking, online mapping and travel platforms while fax machines were still common, and cloud software before “cloud” became a term. He would later describe it simply as “doing things on the internet,” driven less by timing than impatience with waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Across multiple start-ups, some successful, some not, he developed a conviction: people who don’t fit the template, who think differently or feel out of place, often create disproportionate value.

He built a company around that belief. Vend’s culture encouraged people to bring their full selves to work, long before that idea became mainstream. It grew to serve 25,000 retailers across 130 countries and exited in 2021 for half a billion dollars.

While building Vend, he also founded the Pam Fergusson Charitable Trust, named after his mother, who raised him alone from a wheelchair and shaped his understanding of resilience and possibility. For over a decade, the trust has supported tamariki and rangatahi into science, technology, and entrepreneurship, including programmes co-designed with Māori communities.

He has also backed early-stage New Zealand founders, deliberately investing in people who don’t look like the traditional version of a tech entrepreneur.

Today, with his partner Zoe, he runs a lodge in Raglan, a space for founders to build ideas and speak honestly about the emotional cost of not fitting in. He never stopped being a “weirdo.”

He just spent thirty years proving it was an advantage.