By Lane Litz, Founder & Platform Architect, What Founders Want
There are no incubators running in New Zealand.
Not the traditional kind: long-term, community-based, no fixed cohort, no demo day, no equity required. Just founders building at their own pace with real support around them.
I said this on LinkedIn a few months ago and got more comments than likes. Almost every reply was the same: "yeah... where did they all go?"
Here's where they went:
Almost everything in our startup support system is measured on one number: capital raised. So we put our best people, spaces and programmes behind the companies that are already fundable, and call picking them "backing winners." Accelerators, cohorts, demo days. All built to find the founders most likely to raise, fastest.
But pouring more into the ones you can already see doesn't make more of them.
There's also a belief here that the good ones will figure it out. We treat the earliest stage of building a company like a vetting process: survive on nothing, navigate the uncertainty alone, and if you emerge with traction, you've proved you're worth backing. That's a philosophy of selection, not creation. It gets the same result every round: the same handful of founders get more support. Useful, but it isn't the same as creating more founders who could succeed in the first place.
Incubation was the opposite bet, and it disappeared. A year instead of twelve weeks. No tidy raise to point at. In New Zealand, "incubator" quietly became the place you sent founders who didn't get into an accelerator. Then it stopped existing at all.
So the gap isn't at the funding stage. It's at the top of the funnel: the moment someone has an idea, wants to build it, and doesn't know where to start. Get past that, and you land somewhere just as unsupported: alone, at your own kitchen table, with no one to check your thinking against.
That's the gap What Founders Want and HackAotearoa are built to close. It's also why we didn't leave the second half of it to someone else.
What Founders Want handles the knowing: free, neutral guidance so founders don't waste money, time or equity on the wrong call. That part could live online, at close to zero cost, and it has: roughly 75,000 sessions since April 2025, no paid marketing.
The doing is different. You can't fix isolation with an article. Someone has to be in the room, city by city. So instead of building something that only works in one place and hoping the rest of the country finds its own way, we're taking HackAotearoa national: in person, every second Friday, at no cost to anyone who shows up, in every city we can get it running.
That's the actual bet: if the gap is real, you don't fight harder over the founders you can already see in one place. You build the environment that creates more of them, everywhere. In the room, not just on the page.
Auckland proved the format works. Wellington is where the national rollout starts, and it won't stop there. Vote for your city, or raise your hand to run it, co-host, or offer a venue.
HackAotearoa.nz · RSVP on Luma · HackAotearoa on LinkedIn
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