The $185 Billion Problem Under Your Feet, with Manuele Messeri & Kenny Au

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Manuele Messeri and Kenny Au, co-founders of GEMS, an asset management platform built for the people who keep New Zealand's electricity, water, and critical infrastructure running.Both spent decades inside the industry before deciding that the tools they were forced to use were not fit for purpose. The process was always the same: pull data from one system, paste it into a spreadsheet, run calculations that would inevitably get corrupted, do it again, pass it to a colleague who would question every formula. That was the job. Manu decided to build something better and brought Kenny in to co-develop it from the engineering side.The problem they are solving sits underneath everything. New Zealand's infrastructure is ageing, and the figure to modernise it sits somewhere around $185 billion over the next decade. The people responsible for deciding where that money goes are still working across disconnected systems with no unified view of what's healthy, what's failing, and what needs replacing next. GEMS is designed to change that.This conversation covers what it's like to leave a stable corporate career to bootstrap a startup with savings and sweat, why the barrier to building software feels lower but the barrier to selling it is higher than ever, and why two very different personalities might be exactly what a technical product needs to become something real people actually want to use.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast: www.eccuity.com/podcastsCheck-out Kenny on Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenny-au/ Check-out Manu on Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuele-messeri-74563079/Learn more about GEMS here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gemsassets/ #waystowealth #infrastructure #nzbusiness #startup #assetmanagement #utilities #water #electricity #engineering #bootstrapped #saas #entrepreneurship #criticalinfrastructure #wealthbuilding