The mayor’s 100 Days of Startups campaign signals how strongly he cares about the city as a tech and innovation hub – the same ambition that lays behind Auckland Startup Week, back for its second year this October.
Asked why Auckland is a good place to start a business, Wayne Brown responds by turning his phone camera around to show me the spectacular view from his office: 180 degrees of sun-kissed harbour on a perfect spring day; the waters of the Hauraki gulf sparkling violently beyond the roofs of the CBD’s corporate towers.
“Startup innovators all want to succeed and be rich. If you want to be rich, it’s a great place to be rich. I mean what better place to have a flash boat? I’ve got a couple and that’s why I live here. I take my boat out to Waiheke, out to the Great Barrier. There’s not a risk to life and limbs. If you’re in Sydney and you’ve got a flash boat, you can’t swim in the harbour because you’ll get ripped to shreds by a bloody bull shark and if you go out of the harbour, you’ll more than likely sink.”
These are the sort of unfiltered comments for which Brown has become well-known, and he is likely to be sharing more of them at Auckland Startup Week, an event next month (October 12-16) that brings together founders, investors and industry experts in the startup space. This year’s theme is “Celebrating the rebellion in our DNA”, focused on challenging established markets, disrupting traditional business playbooks and backing scalable, bold ideas.
This is Auckland Startup Week’s second year, following its successful first iteration in 2025, during which it pulled in more than 4,000 people, who made 12,500 connections across the week and injected $1 million in GDP into the local economy.
Brown says: “I remember some billionaire from somewhere overseas said to me [puts on VERY bad American accent], “Goddamn, this is really good. How many years have you been going?” And I said, “Oh, yes, we’ve been going for three months.”
Organisers are expecting this year’s event, at GridAKL and other central Auckland venues, to be even bigger, with events including workshops, networking, demo days, talks, validation labs and a spectacular gala dinner full of twists, turns and talking points.
Attendees get to build their own programme, selecting from events targeted at all stages of the startup journey.
Brown’s time to shine is a free breakfast event, Unfiltered Opportunities with Mayor Wayne Brown. Like all the best startups, it’s a risk. The promotional blurb reads: “Expect the unexpected in this no BS conversation with Auckland’s Mayor, Wayne Brown.”
Brown is aware of the risk: “That’s one of my problems. I am very unfiltered and I’ve already today got people telling me off for being too unfiltered. But oddly enough, I think that’s paid off. I had a landslide in the election because I’m unfiltered. I would say things that nobody else in their right mind as a politician would say. But I think people quite like to hear what I think, even if it’s wrong. And what I think is that it’s mostly built on my own business experience.”
Brown’s unparalleled attention-getting ability combined with his business experience and belief in the power of innovation makes him the ideal champion for Auckland Startup Week.
He’s three quarters of the way through his 100 days of startups social media campaign, in which he promotes a new startup each day by wearing the business’s T-shirt and posting a video talking about it. In one video, for women’s health product E-Leviate, he holds up a T-shirt with an image showing what appear to be microscopic human cells. The text reads: “This is a healthy vagina”. Brown says: “Ooh, I’m not quite sure I can wear that one, but thanks all the same.”
Of the 80 or so startups whose T-shirts he’s already worn, Brown says: “Clearly some of them are worth an investment. One or two of them are complete dogs with no chance whatsoever, but I didn’t like to tell them that. It’s likely I’ll be wrong anyhow.”
Marissa Brindley, head of investment at Auckland Council’s Economic Development Office, is the driving force behind Auckland Startup Week. She says she has two main goals: One is to change the narrative about New Zealand from Lord of the Rings, sheep and tourism to a tech savvy, future-focused place “doing amazing stuff on the edge of the world”. The other was to better connect the startup ecosystem – bringing together founders, investors and enabling organisations, for the benefit of all of us.
This year’s programme spans everything from getting a startup off the ground to scaling into international markets, with four tracks covering starting out, scaling up, collaboration and connection. There are keynotes, workshops, pitch competitions, networking sessions and the Challengers’ Expo, where founders can showcase their businesses to investors and the wider ecosystem.
The week kicks off with the Disruptors’ Dinner, a secret-location opening night bringing together founders, investors and industry supporters for an evening designed for good conversation, new relationships and a few surprises. The key theme of the Disruptors’ Dinner, like the rest of Auckland Startup Week, is simple: it’s all about connection.
“You’re connecting with investors, you’re raising awareness for your startup, and you’re connecting with other founders for that knowledge sharing,” Brindley says.
For Brown, there is no doubt that Auckland is the natural and obvious place to host a startup week. He wants Auckland to be the location founders think of when they want to start a business, particularly a tech business.
“We are kind of the tech hub of the South Pacific. And we’re only the tech hub of the South Pacific if we tell people we’re the tech hub of the South Pacific, and back it up.
“So that’s what we’re doing, we’re backing it up and backing what Auckland startups can do. The world is coming towards us and we’re showing them what we’ve got.”
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