NAME: Luke McIntyre
AGE: 20
COMPANY: YeahNah

What is your business? Give us the elevator pitch.
YeahNah is a mobile app and platform for the time poor and opinion rich. Right now we are gearing up for our launch early next year, so look out for us!

Unfortunately we can’t say much more at the moment as we are in stealth mode…shhhh. But if you want us to keep you in the loop, then go to yeahnah.com and sign up to be on our early access mailing list.

If you could time travel back to day one of your startup and have 15min with your former self to communicate any lessons you’ve acquired, what advice would you give yourself?Execution, execution, execution. When I first started out, I always thought the idea was the defining success factor for a company; the silver bullet that would make or break it. Turns out that’s only half the story (if not less). Surrounding yourself with the right people to make something happen is massively key. The old saying of it’s not what you know, it’s who you know rings true more than ever. When you have a great team who can execute well, stuff like funding, a solid product and a compelling business model tends to follow naturally.

List 3 qualities that you believe are essential to the character of an entrepreneur.
Passion
Resilience
Urgency

How does your job now compare to childhood dreams? Did you expect to be running your own company?
I’ve always had a strong interest in all things tech. From an early age I can remember having a keen hobby of breaking stuff apart and wanting to know how it worked inside – much to the concern of my parents (who’s many appliances I ruined!).

I certainly think growing up in the ‘digital native’ generation has served me well also. Once I got a bit older I started to see the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Morgan etc make it big in tech – there was actually a career in this.

At school I got involved in the Young Enterprise Program and although it was mostly an academic exercise, it really peaked my interest in the start up space.

It really made me think “this is what I want to do” and as I quickly got bored with school, I decided to leave at the ripe old age of 15 to make it real. I then kicked my first startup Omex.tv into high gear and after that there was no going back!

How do you feel about the startup ecosystem in New Zealand? Where do we excel and where do we need to strengthen?
NZ is great place to start a company, but a terrible place to scale one. In my opinion, the absence of ‘new money’ and the ‘smart money’ that is synonymous with it, has prevented a lot of the resources necessary for companies to compete globally.

Ideally we need a lot more education and advisory around the global startup scene. Too many NZ founders start No.8 wire style ventures only to realise down the track that they have taken too much local investment and that their business won’t scale.

There are lots of startup cities around the world facing the exact same problem and it’s not an overnight fix.

I think ultimately it will take several years and perhaps a bunch of high profile exits to really mature the NZ ecosystem to the point where it can provide some of those later stage support services startups desperately need.