{"id":106,"date":"2022-11-16T15:41:22","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T02:41:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/?page_id=106"},"modified":"2022-11-16T15:41:22","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T02:41:22","slug":"duncan-hawkesby-director","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/duncan-hawkesby-director\/","title":{"rendered":"Duncan Hawkesby, Director"},"content":{"rendered":"

Duncan Hawkesby<\/strong><\/p>\n

Director<\/strong><\/p>\n

HML <\/strong><\/p>\n

When I worked at a long-established transport and logistics business, I would look enviably at disruptive start-ups who were able to take advantage of emerging technologies at pace.\u00a0 The curse of incumbency meant our business was not as nimble as we would have liked it to be \u2013 and there seemed to be numerous hindrances to us embracing new technologies. What was once our moat: the size of our footprint and fleet; the investment in our IT systems; our ingrained and ISO compliant standard operating procedures and experienced staff \u2013 now all conspired against any radical change.\u00a0 It felt like we were running \u2018defence\u2019 in regard to embracing new disruptive technologies, while we tried to grapple with what was on the horizon and how we could pragmatically evolve towards that.<\/p>\n

It is a glib comparison, but it wasn\u2019t lost on us that Uber didn\u2019t disrupt passenger transport from within the industry \u2013 nor did they come to market by acquiring an existing player (taxi operator).\u00a0 The same analogy could be drawn with Air B\u2019n\u2019B and other new entrants into industries.<\/p>\n

I would suggest that any \u2018digital strategy\u2019 not only has to address the adoption of emerging technologies as part of continuous improvement, but also needs to address the \u2018culture\u2019 of self-disruption and the implications for your team, your customers and how you market your products and services.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to think of a single industry that isn\u2019t already being materially changed by the increasing cadence of emerging technologies, and the flow on effects of disintermediation (bypassing middlemen), democratisation (available to everyone) and dematerialisation (digital replacing physical).<\/p>\n

In the investment office I work out of today, one of the first lenses we look through when considering an investment opportunity is \u2018how will emerging technologies reshape this business and this industry\u2019?\u00a0 We knew what it was like to be in the cross hairs of disruption \u2013 but we didn\u2019t know what it was like on the other side of the fence, where you were the aspiring disruptor.<\/p>\n

So, we spoke with a number of tech entrepreneurs, investors and early stage founders \u2013 to get their perspectives and to learn what we could. Ultimately your best learnings come from \u2018doing\u2019 \u2013 so we allocated capital to investing in some disruptive, early stage businesses who were leveraging new technologies.\u00a0 We shifted some capital from \u2018defence\u2019 to \u2018offence.\u2019<\/p>\n

This required a significant shift in our investment approach, we had to set aside the financial fundamentals and due diligence framework that drove our traditional thinking and get up to speed with a different set of quantitative and qualitative analyses. We now look at a number of tech and early stage investment opportunities, from pre-seed to pre-IPO.\u00a0 We have invested in a handful of early stage disruptive businesses, in everything from online mortgages, to share trading platforms, to revolutionary pneumatic valve technology to SaaS businesses.<\/p>\n

By having skin in the game, we are hoping to learn (and earn) from these businesses, gaining insights into how they think, how they grow, where they stumble \u2013 and what differentiates the winners from the losers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Duncan Hawkesby Director HML When I worked at a long-established transport and logistics business, I would look enviably at disruptive start-ups who were able to take advantage of emerging technologies at pace.\u00a0 The curse of incumbency meant our business was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44853,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-106","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44853"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/talkbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}