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.