Dave provides the following services:
Governance: Dave is a Chartered Director and serves on a number of boards of companies of various sizes, including Jaipuna, Xerra, and Metservice. He has strong experience in strategy development, technology, capital raising, international expansion, compliance, and negotiation. He likes being the board member who can translate what the geeks are saying into common business-speak and vice versa, holding both sides accountable. He’s not afraid to ask the hard questions, ensuring that both board and CEO are doing their bit.
Startups and innovation: Dave has run over 25 Startup Weekends, been involved as a mentor in nine accelerator programmes, and been on numerous judging and selection panels. He hasn’t seen every mistake that’s ever been made, but sometimes it seems like it. His empathetic approach combined with driving hard for success based on treating business as a data-driven scientific endeavour is both popular and effective. Dave runs workshops on various topics related to innovation, such as “Lean Startup in a Nutshell”, “Lean Innovation in Government”, “Startup Weekend in an Hour”, and “Technical Due Diligence”. In addition to directorships, Dave is an advisor to a number of startups.
Public Speaking and Facilitation: Dave has appeared as keynote speaker and on panels at a number of local and overseas conferences. He enjoys group facilitation, and has run workshops and unconferences in a wide variety of contexts, to help draw the best ideas out of a group and back them up with achievable action plans.
Lexicography IT: Dave is New Zealand’s “dictionary database guy”, having worked on the Online Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language, the He Pātaka Kupu monolingual Māori dictionary, Victoria University’s Dictionary of Legal Māori Terms, and a number of other dictionaries in Māori and other languages.
Contact Dave if you’d like to to consider him for a governance or advisory position, engage him for consulting services, or run a workshop for your organisation that’s entertaining, insightful, and productive.