KiwiSaver fees in New Zealand will hit a billion dollars this year. Sam Stubbs has been the loudest voice in the country saying that's a scandal and building something to prove it doesn't have to be that way.

Sam is the founder and CEO of Simplicity, an $11 billion KiwiSaver fund owned by a charity. It makes almost no profit. It is worth essentially nothing. It can never be sold. That's the point. When you ask people to trust you with their retirement savings, being unbuyable turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful thing. Before Simplicity, Sam was at Goldman Sachs listing Chinese companies on the New York Stock Exchange, flying on the Rolling Stones jet, and having lunch at the Ritz in the same room where Princess Diana dined the week she died. He made all the money he needed by 50, felt nothing from it, planted trees on an island for three years, then came back to take on the finance industry from the inside.

Simplicity now gets between $5 and $16 million in member contributions every single day. It gives $10,000 to charity daily, builds 1.3 houses a day, saves its members $100,000 a day in fees, and gets 10% of new signups directly from AI engines with zero advertising spend.

We get into:

• Why the finance industry is a priesthood and how they've kept it that way for decades
• The deliberate bank lobbying that set NZ open banking back 10 years
• Why KiwiSaver heading toward $1 trillion by 2070 is the most significant economic event in NZ history that founders aren't paying attention to
• How KiwiSaver funds could become the exit buyer of choice for NZ baby boomer business owners
• What Sam would say to any exited founder wondering what to do next

If you're building something and wondering what it looks like to take on a billion dollar industry with almost no marketing budget and a model nobody thought would work, this one's worth your time.

Carl Thompson flew to Singapore with $3,000, shared a pullout bed with his co-founder in a room so small he could touch the wall sitting up, and cold-called New York at 2am because that's when the market was awake. That was the start of TradeGecko.

He left the company two and a half years in, halfway through his vesting schedule, because he needed to come home for his relationships and his health. He split his role into five people on the way out. A few years later, Cam checked his spam folder and found an email from Intuit saying they wanted to buy the business. The acquisition closed at $100 million US.

Carl has ADHD, has been cycling in and out of burnout for 20 years, and now runs SortMe, a money management platform built around the uncomfortable fact that 60% of NZ households can't cover a $1,500 bill without borrowing. His clients aren't struggling. They earn $150K to $500K a year and spend every dollar of it.

We get into:

• Why he walked away from millions in unvested equity and whether he regrets it
• The dopamine science behind ADHD and why he thinks it's a competitive advantage for founders
• How a spam folder email became a $100M acquisition
• What lifestyle creep actually looks like at high income levels
• What he did with the exit money the day it landed

If you're building something and wondering what it looks like to choose the life over the money and keep building anyway, this one's worth your time.

Lisa King had a goal from the very first day of Eat My Lunch: the business would be a success the day it became unnecessary.

She built it in 2015 to solve a problem she couldn't stop thinking about, kids going hungry at school in a country of abundance. By week 12 she was making 2,000 lunches a day out of her own kitchen. At peak, nearly 5,000, with police officers, politicians, and grannies in their sixties all buttering bread before sunrise. Then the government launched its own school lunch program, and Lisa did something most founders never do. She closed the business on purpose.

Before that happened, a media story accused her of personally profiting off hungry kids, at a time when she was being paid less than she'd ever earned. She had to show a reporter her payslip to prove it. We talk through what that period actually felt like, what New Zealand's tall poppy syndrome did to her willingness to talk to press afterward, and the identity crisis of letting go of a business that had defined her for five years.

We get into:

• How Eat My Lunch scaled from 50 to nearly 5,000 lunches a day
• The media smear and what it actually cost her personally
• Why she built the business to make itself redundant from day one
• What closing your first business does to your sense of who you are

If you're building something with real purpose behind it, or wondering what it takes to walk away from your own success on your own terms, this one's worth your time.