Bringing Together New Zealand's Hidden Talent Pool

1 in 3 of New Zealand's Startup Talent Arrives Without an Existing Network

A startup ecosystem is not one thing. It's universities, accelerators, angel investors, government agencies, meetups, and, underneath all of it, the individual people willing to take a first step into building something. The conditions for innovation come from how well those pieces connect, creating the invisible grid of conditions individual founders need to build ambitious businesses for global demand.

New Zealand has a genuine advantage that doesn't get talked about enough: it attracts talented people from all over the world, and a striking number of them stay and put down roots, contributing directly to its talent pool. That incoming talent is a significant share of the country's potential founders, engineers, and early operators, who arrive without an existing network, without the university cohort, without the "who do I already know" shortcut that so much early-stage team formation still quietly runs on. That's the gap we at Noaur are stepping into with Lineup.

Why Does Lineup Focus on the Team?

In the early stages of building a startup, ideas change constantly, products get iterated, and the funding landscape shifts, so it is the grit of the founder that decides whether the startup is alive one year from now. We think team formation is the single most important thing to get right in the earliest stage of a startup, more than the idea itself. And that is also what investors bet on in the early stages. They believe that the right team will find a way to succeed.

So if you're a founder or future founder looking to start your own thing by bringing the right people together, we're working hard to make Lineup the place you can start from regardless of your location or background. Lineup is the first place to find a project you care about or an interesting person whose experience you'd like to tap into, and start a conversation. We're working hard behind the scenes to bring you the best footing to step on, on your way to building something world-class.

Some of the best potential co-founders in this country are sitting on the sidelines simply because there was never a visible way in.

- Amanda Aaltonen, Co-founder and CEO at Noaur and Lineup

Why Us

This is our way of contributing to the startup ecosystem in New Zealand with the skills and unique Finnish perspective that we're bringing in. We weren't the first to come up with a co-founder matching platform, but we want to be the one to make it work for this side of the world with its unique geographical strengths and needs. We're a founder led software company that builds for founders in Finland and New Zealand, and this is our initiative in contributing to the ecosystem we've chosen to be part of. It costs founders nothing to use and exists because we believe it can have a positive impact on the founders around us with ambitious goals to impact the world.

A Call for Collaboration

We're passionate about making better conditions for founders to take ambitious ideas off the ground to global heights. We're interested in working with universities and the organizations that meet founders at day zero, before an idea is validated, before anyone has decided they need to bring more people in. If you run a program like that and a founder in your cohort hits a wall because nobody in the room has the skill set they need, we aim to be one of the reasons why they do not lose momentum waiting for a match that isn't coming. To contact us, email: amanda@noaur.group