Greg Shaw

Since when am I a global speaker?! Surreal to be invited to share the Serious Play Conference stage with the likes of Unity VPs, Epic Games execs and Yale University professors working at the cutting edge of digital health tech to talk about Manana Interactive. For those who think this invite fell out of a coconut tree, it didn't. A few months ago, I started a practice I call 'Lucky Hour', where the goal was to increase my surface area for luck to strike, as Batko would've put it. Essentially, I've been blocking out one hour per week in my calendar to reach out and swing for the fences on opportunities that meet a certain criteria: 1) They feel too intimidating, and 2) They make me start daydreaming Project Lucky Hour started pretty much immediately after I had a realisation that while I am supporting others' growth, resilience and wellbeing through my work, I actually still need to do the same for myself too. (Groundbreaking, deeply profound stuff, I know.) And as we all know, resilience isn't just about our ability to adapt to and overcome negative stress, it's also about expanding our capacity to take on life's big and exciting challenges. It's taken over a month to share the news because, well, I'm still growing and practising this skill over here. Like most of us are.

Manana Interactive will be in Amsterdam for the next few days to see what’s happening at the frontier of European tech. Thanks for the invite, Hello TomorrowHello Tomorrow. My calendar’s open for coffees.

The hard thing about hard things is, if you realised the magnitude of the challenge, you'd often never even start. This relates to our innovation journey and why P2P hasn’t yet made a return in the work of live streaming. We went into this with a lot of industry knowledge and a world class team, and we have remained light hearted in facing the challenge.  Here’s a theoretical conversation between two “experts” just to illustrate just how “simple” what we do is. "So, P2P video distribution? Totally doable now with WebRTC right?" “Yeh cool. Love it 🙌🏼” “That scales to millions of concurrent users, right?” "Oh, sure. You just need something that can orchestrate a dynamic user graph across heterogeneous networks for millions of concurrent devices. In real time."  “You mean advanced training and inference work and proprietary algorithms that take eons to hone” “Yep, nothing a few PHD’s can't conjure in these heady days of AI” “And of course it needs to handle ridiculously volatile user behaviour like thundering herds arriving to watch and inevitable rage quits when Man U go 3 nil up.” “Hmm.. yeh.” “Right. And adaptive bitrate with multiple renditions?” "Obviously. Goes without saying." “Cross-device support? Connected TVs, sticks, pucks, mobile, browser?" "Okay. That's... that's a lot of testing surface area but I think… with time." “Different media players on those devices”. "My word" Looking pensive. "You've got this though, right? Oh — and latency. Has to be genuinely low. It's live sport." "Holy moly dude." “HLS, DASH, Media over QUIC. Obviously.” "Obviously." does not look like they knows what QUIC is. “DRM. Multiple flavours. No rights holder puts Tier 1 sport on a system without it.” "This. Is. Really.  Quite a lot." “It is......... isn’t it” Wry smile. “Watermarking of course. Piracy is rife.” "Okay I’m gonna need a minute here, but that’s it right?” “Yep that’s most of it” “What” Looking positively aghast. “Well obviously the whole model is ad-funded. So ad-insertion. That's table stakes.” "..." “And not to overlook Multi-CDN. It has to run seamlessly alongside existing CDN infrastructure simultaneously.” "I mean. This is borderline insanity” “Yeh and just one more thing.” "What? Who are you…. Columbo! Please don't." “Less re-buffering, with totally foolproof fallback....errrr are you okay?” "I'm fine. It's fine. Everything is fine." (It’s not). So yeah. Intelligent peer assisted video delivery for live sport at scale isn't an engineering problem. It's a plethora of engineering problems, all of which need to be solved and none of which is a “nice to have”. And that’s the thing about hard things. You keep at it using first principles thinking and disciplined engineering. You keep peeling the onion with watering eyes on the prize. Ultimately you get to make the best french onion soup ever! Or in this case, the world's first broadcast grade intelligent distribution network. #livestreaming - Rilla

Congratulations to all NZ Hi-Tech Awards finalists and winners from Friday! 🥂 A few notable shoutouts to our portfolio companies who won: ▪️ Calocurb - Hi-Tech Emerging Company of the Year ▪️ Kara Technologies - Hi-Tech Startup Company of the Year ▪️ Partly - Most Innovative Hi-Tech Software Solution Also celebrating Vaughan Fergusson for taking out the Flying Kiwi award, and Lucy Turner, CTO and Co-Founder of VXT, for winning the Hi-Tech Young Achiever award. 👏 Here are a few snaps from our pre-awards celebration. 

AI platforms are getting better at recognising when someone is struggling. The harder question is what happens next. The NZ Herald covered our story this week – link in the comments. Today, ThroughLine powers crisis support for the world's leading AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. For most people struggling, it's just too hard to find the right support. And fear stops many from reaching out at all. For the Trust & Safety teams, advocacy organisations, helplines and governments tasked with providing help, it often means overwhelmed teams and too many cases slipping through the cracks. The answer is context: understand what someone is actually struggling with, then connect them to the right support – whether it's a referral, guided self-help or relevant information. That's what our AI care navigation experience is built to do. Designed by clinicians and completely configurable, it's now live and supporting users in dozens of countries and languages. If you're trying to make it easier for any audience to find the right support or information for them, I'd love to talk.

The supply chain attack on the monorepo tool Nx, which compromised thousands of devices, is a stark reminder of the supply chain security risks in modern development. At Rilla, we deploy native dependencies directly to our users' users, a chain potentially impacting millions. This makes robust supply chain security paramount. While we'd been working to replace Nx for a couple of months, these incidents accelerated our migration to Bazel. Here's why we made the switch: 💡 Complex Cross-Compilation: We cross-compile Rust with native wrappers in TypeScript, Kotlin, and Swift. Nx couldn't meet our demanding requirements for multi-language cross-platform caching and builds. 📉 Loss of Trust: A critical, long-standing issue (https://lnkd.in/gBU5ewVS) made us question Nx's priorities. For any tooling vendor, Developer Experience (DevEx) and core principles must come before platform adoption. 🔐 Security Incident Response: The handling of the s1ngularity incident was the final factor that solidified our decision to move. Our transition to Bazel has already cut build times from ~30 minutes to under 10 and, crucially, reduced our dependency on NPM. The ecosystem that the same attackers targeted again (https://lnkd.in/g6NZBPPq).

We’re thrilled to announce Dominic Pym as Guest of Honour at NZ Tech Expo 2026. Dom co-founded Up Bank, was named Australian Startup Investor of the Year 2025, and invests through his family office, Euphemia which has backed 110+ companies and 23 venture funds. He doesn’t just back startups. He backs the platforms, funds, and people that power entire ecosystems.This is exactly the kind of thinking NZ's tech sector needs - and he's bringing that lens to NZ Tech Expo. 18 September 2026 · Shed 10, Auckland Waterfront nztechexpo.co.nz #NZTechExpo2026 #NZTech #DominicPym 

Friday musings of the mature founder: At this stage of my life, and as I have written before, I’ve realized that the most valuable currencies we have aren't found in a bank account. They are Time, Energy, Attention, and Choice. Every day, we make a trade. We give our attention, time and energy to “systems”, and in return, we hope for the choice to live the lives we want. We live in an era of Artificial Scarcity - In the physical world: We have an abundance of energy from the sun, yet we struggle with accelerating towards harnessing it efficiently because of the interests of a minority for whom the status quo is lucrative. We have an abundance of food, yet the distribution is fractured and people are still starving. In the digital realm: We have an abundance of storage and bandwidth, yet we pay "tolls" to centralized giants who have captured the value of our collective data, content, time, attention and connectivity. The resource is there. The abundance is real. The bottleneck is simply the way we’ve organized the "pipes” and built constructs where it is favourable for them to be owned by centralised infrastructure providers. That’s why I’m working at Rilla with my co-founders Hal Smith Stevens and Pul Bandara and a truly incredibly talented team. We aren't here to "overthrow" the status quo or declare war on the giants. We are here to augment the world as it exists today and steadily shift the centre of gravity toward something more equitable. How? By turning away from a consumer society and into a sharing / contributor / stakeholder model. Using cutting edge Reinforcement Learning and a complex real time graph management technology, we are building a world where your device isn't just a screen—it’s a node in a living, organic network. When we optimize the graph of these nodes, we aren't just saving companies money on CDN bills. We are giving people back their choice. We are creating a bridge from the centralized past to a decentralized future where the value flows fairly amongst the people who create it and that allows them to interact and transact at virtually zero cost. I get out of bed every morning to work with this incredible team because I believe the next 10 years should be about unleashing this global abundance. It’s time to stop paying the "toll" for consumption and start becoming an active shareholder in the infrastructure that we already own, together. #DeepTech #P2P #streaming #FounderLife #Rilla #Abundance #Decentralization

🔥 Mum… we’re on the front cover of Forbes Australia The cat’s officially out of the bag. Appetise has raised our Series A at a $52M valuation 🚀 After tripling revenue in the last 6 months, we’re doubling down on what got us here: 🍽️ Delivering unique, behavioural insights to 150+ FMCG brands across ANZ 📊 Building the world’s best grocery shopping experience for 120k+ consumers 🌎 Setting our sights on the US later this year Elise Hilliam and I are incredibly proud of this team. The last few years have been a rollercoaster. The highs have been high. The lows have tested us. But this moment belongs to every single person who backed us, worked with us, and believed in what we’re building. Special thank you also to Icehouse Ventures and OIF Ventures for doubling down again! Now? We strap in for an even bigger 2026 💥 We’re hiring across marketing, sales and customer success. If you love startups and want to build something meaningful, let’s talk. And if you’re a food brand wanting access to the highest-intent grocery audience in market, flick me a message 📩 Link to the article below 👇 LFG 🚀