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Hot Topic Long reads
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Why Shopify chose Wellington over Auckland, Sydney or Melbourne

Analysis: NBR sniffs around the corporate welfare question.

Chris Keall
Fri, 13 Jul 2018

When Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify announced it would hire 100 people in Wellington, it sent my corporate welfare radar dinging.

After all, the announcement had come from council agency Wreda (the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency) – the same crowd that bankrolled last year’s effort to draw offshore IT workers to the capital (read: 'Handful’ were hired under $850K LookSee promotion, Wreda says). 

I voiced my suspicions on Twitter, then gave Wreda a call (I know, I know – those events probably should have been in the reverse order).

But it turns out no money was involved, in this instance.

“There were no incentives, no kind of investment from the Wellington ratepayer – other than a couple of craft beers and Mojo coffees,” Wreda chief executive Lance Walker said.

There was no bidding war over tax breaks, as we’ve seen recently with Amazon, Tesla, Foxconn in the US, as they’ve played off states against each other to host their new headquarters (Amazon) or factories (Tesla and Foxconn). 

So what swung it?
Mr Walker says after it learned Wellington had made it onto Shopify’s shortlist for its first Oceania hub, he assembled a group of tech entrepreneurs and business influencers to show the company’s global support director, Marcie Murray, and other Shopify scouts around.

The hosting crew included Trade Me alumni turned professional director and NZTE adviser Mike O’Donnell (pictured above wearing some sort of hipster apparatus on his head, "Mod" sits on the boards of RNZ and Kiwibank, plus hot tech startups Serato, Timely and Raygun.

Montoux, Common Ledger and Wipster director and M-Com veteran Serge Van Dam also joined the party

So did reps from Weta Digital, Xero, BizDojo, Springload, TouchTech, Collect, Creative HQ and Star Now.

“It really was a situation of the fit being really right, once we got into that conversation and showed them how the ecosystem works,” Mr Walker says.

Ms Murray says the close-knit Silicon Welly gave her a good first impression. She says it was a really “authentic” tour, and that she was really impressed with the business networking and networks – one of the three criteria Shopify was looking for.

The other two elements were more meat and potatoes.

Shopify has a work-from-home model and will have no permanent physical office but Ms Murray says the 100 staff (who will be hired over the next 12 months) will still meet regularly. Thus, she was looking for a liveable city, meaning a CBD that was easily accessible and walkable, plus a population that was large enough to recruit from but not so big and far-flung that the Shopify staff could get literally lost in the crowd.

All content copyright NBR. Do not reproduce in any form without permission, even if you have a paid subscription.

Chris Keall
Fri, 13 Jul 2018
© All content copyright NBR. Do not reproduce in any form without permission, even if you have a paid subscription.
Why Shopify chose Wellington over Auckland, Sydney or Melbourne
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