Shaken not stirred

On a fresh, late winter morning, Dunedin tech startup incubator the Distiller has just received a large and intriguing US Customs-stamped package. People gather round and the box is sliced open to reveal not an essential piece of 21^st century corporate hardware, or a bunch of contracts, but a classic Fender Telecaster. Well, of course. This, after all, is Dunedin.

Conceived by a group of Otago School of Business students as a cluster “designed by technopreneurs for technopreneurs”, the Distiller occupies a suite at Otago’s Centre for Innovation, where it rubs shoulders with established, multi-million dollar technology and biotech outfits like Pacific Edge and Blis Technologies.

Distiller co-founder Jason Leong says the conversation that seeded the idea began, naturally enough, in a bar.
“A group of us had just started up Pocketsmith (an online tool to help users manage their personal finances), but found we didn’t have many like minded people around us,” he explains. “Dunedin’s not like Silicon Valley where you can throw a stone and hit a startup, but we really wanted that here. We thought, ‘why not start something up like the Y Combinator in the US?’ (described by Wired magazine as a bootcamp for startups), with all that energy, the like-mindedness and community thinking and try to build products in a really short space of time. A few days later we walked in here looking for a base for a kind of startup camp for the summer and the manager Steve Bodmer said, ‘Look, there’s an unused suite upstairs you can use, just don’t tell anyone.’ That was three years ago.”

Clearly, there hasn’t been a lot of time or money for decorating. Guitars aside, it’s a sparsely furnished space — little more than a collection of desks and PCs with a couple of couches in a corner as a concession to comfort. But what it does have is a palpable sense of community and shared intent, something you begin to appreciate over the course of a morning.

One of the hopes for the Distiller was it would provide a reason for fledgling entrepreneurial talent to stay in Dunedin, Leong says. Business opportunities inevitably pull some north — a couple of his
co-founders have relocated to Auckland where they have opened a northern ‘branch’ at the University of Otago’s Queen St building — but there is a steady flow of replacements to keep the place humming.
People such as James Stradling and Benjamin Humphrey, who with a third partner are in the throes of launching a digital agency called Holotype. They all met at the Distiller.

“It wouldn’t have happened without this place,” says Stradling. “Working in IT you can tend to get isolated. There are a lot of people down here doing great things that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. And what I really like about the Distiller is that it’s a bit unstructured and organic — we don’t have a huge induction process or set of rules or formal mentoring requirement and people can come in then drift out again as they move past this phase of their business.”