Greg identifies a number of areas where Kiwi companies wanting to make it overseas need to improve:

• Exploiting the Internet and e-commerce to give ourselves a much larger footprint, and make us seem to be local
• Pitching ourselves – we tend to undersell ourselves and don’t tell simple enough stories
• Acquiring enough capital to go offshore – it always takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you expect
• Governance – we tend not to have strong independent boards

Watch the video – it’s Greg’s experience with 160 companies distilled into five crisp minutes.

This fact has far-reaching implications for the media, how we conduct democracy, and how we are all involved in creating, telling, consuming, and ultimately mashing up the stories that become history.

I applaud the trend, and am delighted to be part of it, as I have become increasingly weary and wary of the traditional media’s approach to generating news.  Having low or no barriers to entry empowers anybody to become a reporter tell their story; competing against free services, established news enterprises are on a hiding to nothing to maintain their markets and revenue streams.  At the same time, the lack of recognition and respect for the authority and provenance of information means that it’s all to easy to conflate opinion and fact and get away with it.

The trick for media entrepreneurs and investors will be to develop business models that deliver information that’s of a high enough quality to drive a real value exchange between the information consumer and producer … in other words, how to make a buck out of delivering quality.