Kiwi Foo Camp was my way of finding and support great technical talent in NZ. Last week I realized that NZ’s critical shortage isn’t in technical staff, it’s in business staff. This goes beyond the widely-deplored lack of VC experience—where are our deal-making CEOs, the well-networked bizdev gurus?

I ask because t’s the rare geek who successfully runs a company; even the Google boys needed adult supervision in the form of Eric Schmidt. Building a business takes different skills than building a product: salesmanship, attention to the accounts and to corporate structure, insight into finance and business metrics. These are all things that geeks tend to throw up their hands and put aside in favour of an interesting Javascript bug.

The ideal CEO and bizdev person has same love of sales, business, and management details as a technical geek has of operating system, programming language, and API details. And where are they in NZ? Where are the people who ran and sold their last company and are looking for the next one to start? I’d even take the people who have built a solid reputation within a big company and want to start their own. Rod Drury is the first name that springs to mind, but I challenge you to find a second. Rowan is investing in but not joining companies. Sam Morgan is still at TradeMe.

Leave the names as comments or mail me as nathan AT torkington DOT com. I’d like to invite more of these people to Kiwi Foo as part of my new mission to find and support more types of talent.