Open AGM 2025

Public accountability and stewardship report

Document Details

• Entity: What Founders Want (WFW)
• Period covered: April–December 2025
• Publication date: January 2026
• Document type: Open Annual General Meeting (AGM)
• Status: Public record

1. Why What Founders Want Exists

Starting and growing a company in New Zealand is difficult not only because information is fragmented, but because many of the questions founders actually need answered are not answered anywhere publicly.

There is no shortage of startup-related information - funding lists, programmes, advisors, tools, and templates.

However, this information often fails to answer the questions founders are trying to resolve in the moment, such as:

• Which of these options actually applies to my situation?
• What should I do first – and what can wait?
• What mistakes do people commonly make at this stage?
• What does this look like in practice, not theory?

These questions tend to sit between institutional boundaries. They are too specific for government sites, too contextual for generic blogs, and too practical for traditional advisory content.

As a result, founders rely on informal conversations, hindsight, or trial and error - often repeating work and mistakes that others have already experienced.

What Founders Want exists to reduce both discovery friction and knowledge gaps.

It brings together:

• what exists in the ecosystem, and
• structured, experience-based answers to questions that are otherwise missing from the public internet

WFW is built as founder infrastructure:

• not media
• not a community platform
• not an education provider
• not an advisory or brokerage service

Its purpose is simple:

Reduce the time it takes for a founder to move from a question to a clear next step.

The platform organises information around the three decisions that dominate company-building at every stage:

Save money → Make money → Raise money

2. Market Context (Important Clarification)

New Zealand’s total population (~5 million people) is not the relevant market for WFW.

The core design group is much smaller:

• approximately 2,500 active startups
• approximately 5,000 founders

WFW is also used by:

• ecosystem operators and builders
• investors and advisors
• students and aspiring founders
• SMEs navigating startup-adjacent decisions

Founders remain the design centre.

Ecosystem use is intentional and secondary, reflecting WFW’s role as shared infrastructure rather than a closed or gated product.

Uneven support by business model

A disproportionate share of visible startup support is designed for a small subset of venture-capital-fundable companies.

That path is important — and comparatively well served.

However, the majority of founders are not building VC-scale businesses.

For many of these founders:

• viable pathways exist
• but they are poorly documented
• inconsistently surfaced
• or effectively invisible without insider access

In some cases, founders face decisions for which no clear, public guidance exists at all, despite resources existing locally or internationally.

WFW exists to make all viable startup pathways legible, including:

• bootstrapped and capital-efficient models
• services-led and revenue-first businesses
• regional and non-urban ventures
• founders operating outside traditional VC patterns

The role of WFW is not to replace existing support, but to surface it, structure it, and fill the gaps where answers are missing.

3. 2025 in Review — Use, Reach, and Efficiency

Launch: April 2025

Time in market: Approximately 9 months

Distribution & Use

• Approximately 65,000 sessions
• 100% organic distribution
• $0 paid marketing

Growth was driven by:

• the initial launch
• contributors sharing work they were involved in
• ecosystem organisations sharing resources within their networks

Usage increased around releases and then settled into a steady baseline.

This pattern is consistent with tools people return to when needed, rather than content designed for habitual consumption.

4. What Was Built in 2025

In 2025, WFW evolved into a structured discovery and knowledge infrastructure, designed to reduce friction across recurring founder decisions.

Expert Editions

Structured contributions from experienced founders, operators, and investors.

Their purpose is to answer founder questions that are repeatedly asked — and difficult to find clear, practical answers to elsewhere.

They focus on decisions, trade-offs, timing, and execution rather than opinion or theory.

WFW Monthly

A monthly, time-bound list of:

• funding opportunities
• grants
• programmes
• incentives
• upcoming deadlines

Its purpose is to help founders quickly see what matters now, without monitoring multiple sources.

Kiwi Startup Case Studies

Documentation of real New Zealand startup journeys.

In practice, this surfaced the need to organise learning by decision and milestone, rather than narrative alone.

Discovery Infrastructure (Directories)

Directories became the most consistently used component of WFW.

These include:

• funding sources
• government support
• accelerators and programmes
• startup perks and credits
• regional and demographic ecosystem support
• startup setup and compliance guidance

Across all directories, success is measured by decision clarity and speed, not engagement time.

5. What Was Learned in 2025

What Worked

• Orientation comes before advice
• Structured lists outperform narrative explanations
• Directories drive repeat usage
• Trust-based sharing outperforms promotion
• Expert knowledge only scales with structure
• Contributors are willing, but time-constrained
• Founders value answers to questions that are otherwise missing

What Didn’t Work — and What That Revealed

• Recruitment is too high-touch to scale
• The problem is not recruitment — it is matching

The opportunity is routing and gap-filling, not managing outcomes.

Additional learnings:

• More information without structure slows decisions
• Case studies need to be decision-oriented
• Ecosystem connectedness is uneven

These learnings define the constraints for 2026.

6. Operating Constraints (What WFW Will Not Become)

To remain neutral, scalable, and useful, WFW operates within clear boundaries.

WFW will not:

1. Provide advisory, opinionated, or personalised guidance
2. Broker or manage outcomes or introductions
3. Depend on founder attention for revenue
4. Require contributors to self-translate experience without structure
5. Optimise for content volume over routing quality
6. Treat activity as impact
7. Promote a single “correct” startup path
8. Optimise only for venture-fundable or already-networked founders

WFW exists to make all viable pathways visible and to ensure that missing answers are surfaced and documented.

7. Measurement Reality

In 2025, WFW did not track individual users.

There were:

• no user accounts
• no login-based analytics
• no end-to-end journey tracking

This prioritised accessibility and early adoption.

2025 confirmed that the platform is used.

In 2026, the focus shifts to understanding how much time and effort WFW saves, and where it most effectively helps founders move between milestones.

8. 2026 Direction — From Discovery to Neutral, Measured Coordination

With discovery validated, 2026 shifts WFW from proving usefulness to operating as durable, neutral infrastructure.

The priority is no longer visibility or adoption.

It is ensuring the system:

• remains neutral and free for founders
• improves through measurement, not activity
• condenses the time between founder milestones

This requires:

1. System-level coordination without path bias
2. Explicit measurement of time and effort saved
3. Revenue aligned with neutrality and infrastructure integrity

8.1 Revenue, Sustainability, and Neutrality

Revenue becomes a deliberate objective in 2026.

Not as a product feature, but as a requirement for durability.

Revenue exists to:

• cover operating costs
• support a small number of salaries
• fund continued improvement in coordination, measurement, and routing

All while keeping the platform free for founders — permanently.

To preserve neutrality, revenue must:

• not rely on founder time or attention
• not require advisory work or brokerage
• not introduce pay-to-play visibility
• not privilege any single pathway, provider, or business model

Revenue is treated as infrastructure fuel, not an outcome in itself.

8.2 Coordination as the Core Function

WFW’s primary role is system-level coordination.

Coordination focuses on how the ecosystem is structured, not how individual outcomes are managed.

This includes:

• reducing duplication across programmes and pathways
• standardising how opportunities are presented
• making options legible and comparable
• surfacing gaps where answers or pathways are missing

Coordination ensures the ecosystem can be navigated coherently without favouring particular actors or paths.

8.3 Matching as the Core Mechanism (Not Brokerage)

Matching is how individual founders move through the coordinated system.

WFW enables matching by:

• clearly surfacing which options are relevant to a founder at a given stage
• making non-relevant options easy to rule out
• supporting accurate self-selection without managed introductions

The objective is to reduce misaligned applications and conversations.

WFW does not broker outcomes.

It improves relevance while maintaining neutrality across options.

8.4 Measurement: Condensing Time Between Milestones

The guiding question for 2026 is:

Does this reduce the time it takes for a founder to move from one milestone to the next?

Measurement focuses on:

• time and effort saved
• reduced dead ends and misalignment
• return usage as founders progress through stages

Attention captured is not treated as impact.

Movement between milestones is.

8.5 Talent, Markets, Capital, and Outcomes

Talent, capital, markets, and outcomes are treated as matching challenges, not managed processes.

WFW’s role is to:

• keep experience visible, even when companies do not succeed
• improve clarity around viable next steps
• ensure founders can identify realistic paths forward without gatekeeping or path bias

As coordination and matching improve, founder efficiency compounds into system-level outcomes.

9. What Success Looks Like

Success for What Founders Want is measured by founder progress and return usage — not activity or attention.

If founders can move from one milestone to the next more efficiently, they return as their needs change.

If they return, the infrastructure is doing its job.

In practice, success looks like:

• founders using WFW to condense the time between Save → Make → Raise decisions
• reduced time spent on misaligned applications, conversations, and dead ends
• founders ruling options in and out more quickly due to clearer relevance
• WFW becoming a default starting point rather than a one-off resource

Return usage matters because it reflects sustained value: founders only come back to tools that continue to help them progress.

Sustained return usage enables WFW itself to be durable and self-sustaining.

By the end of 2026, success includes:

• revenue covering operating costs
• the ability to pay a small number of salaries
• continued investment in coordination, measurement, and improvement
• a platform that remains free for founders and neutral across pathways

Over time, founder-level efficiency compounds into ecosystem-level outcomes.

As coordination and matching improve:

• programmes receive better-aligned applicants
• government support reaches more appropriate companies
• experienced talent remains visible and reusable
• investors see a clearer, more qualified pipeline

In the long run, improved coordination increases the probability of startup success in New Zealand — contributing to stronger companies, more jobs, and greater economic impact.

The guiding test remains simple:

Do founders move faster — and do they come back?

If they do, WFW is working — for founders, for the platform, and for the ecosystem.

Closing

What Founders Want is often described as a set of lists or resources.

That is intentional.

The deeper purpose is coordination through better matching and gap-filling — turning fragmented information and unanswered questions into shared, reusable infrastructure.

Publishing this AGM openly reflects a belief that startup infrastructure should be transparent, accountable, and built to last.

The goal is not attention. The goal is time saved, better alignment, and a healthier startup ecosystem.