Icehouse Ventures Mobile App Launch

Script from the launch of the Icehouse Ventures mobile application at the Annual New Zealand Startup Showcase at Spark Arena on 21 August 2025. We had some tech issues on the night, but it was great to share what we’ve been working on with so many people, and so far the reaction from users has been great.

Good evening everyone. My name is Peter Thomson, and I’m the CTO at Icehouse Ventures. I have what I think might be one of the best jobs the country because I get to spend my time with all of these great startups we’ve heard from tonight and all of you as investors. It’s like Showcase all year round.

I’m particularly grateful to our early adopters many of whom are here tonight like Maurice Maclaren, Richard Reynolds and Ian Holland. Who’ve given us such great feedback over the years.

At Icehouse Ventures, our greatest strength has always been our community of investors, founders and operators. The great startups coming out of New Zealand can become even more unstoppable with a large & engaged network backing them.

But to be engaged, you first need to be informed. And that’s what we’ve been working on for the last five years with our custom-built Investor Portal. When we started on this journey, there wasn’t any software available that could connect a large network of investors with a diversified portfolio of startups, to deliver an immersive experience, while maintaining institutional-grade reporting and security. It didn’t exist, so we had to build it.

But now it’s time to take things up a notch. We want to supercharge your ability to support these great companies. And to do that, we’re going mobile.

Tonight, we’re proud to introduce the Icehouse Ventures Mobile App (available now on iOS and Android). This new app is your window into the people, ideas, and companies building the future of New Zealand. We’re putting the brightest New Zealand companies in your pocket. With a host of new features, you can be engaged with these great companies, not just at Showcase, but all year round. Let me walk through just a couple of the features before I hand back to Robbie.

First, Discussions and Co-Investment. Imagine getting to tap into the experiences & connections of 3,000 fellow investors. With this app, you can now read Investment Memos on the go, ask questions of the founders and participate in due-diligence discussions. It’s the professional investing experience that we’ve always delivered, made portable.

Second, Notifications. These days, startup investing can move fast. Whether it’s a new round opening up, or a capital call. You don’t want to miss out. And recently, Halter’s follow-on round was over-subscribed within a matter of days. The app will help keep you in the loop.

And third, Show & Tell. If you’re in this room, you already know that there are great companies, doing great things here in New Zealand. But not everyone sees what you see. We want to give you a window into their world, one that you can share with your family, your friends, and your colleagues. We want to bring you short, sharp videos direct from the startups so you can stay up-to-date and share their stories.

What I love most about this asset class is how it can inspire the next generation, Our seven year old, Isabelle has recently started getting interested in tech companies and it’s not because of the TVPI or the IRR, it’s because she and I started watching videos together about what the companies are up to. She saw when OpenStar first sparked plasma in Wellington. And she came along for the ride along as Dawn Aerospace took off for space. This isn’t doom scrolling, it’s a front-row seat to history.

Our growing tech platform is built to give New Zealand an unfair advantage. And pursue our mission of making investing in Kiwi startups: transparent, engaging and rewarding. The mobile app was built in-house by our Principal Engineer, Ian Patel and it runs on same core system that powers our main Investor Portal. So we all benefit from the years of hard work by Harry Fakir, Logan Gubb, Nikita Deva, and the rest of the Icehouse Ventures team.

So tonight, we invite you to download what we believe could be a world-first: The chance to have an entire VC firm in your pocket. Please, use the app to amplify the stories of these great companies within your own networks, because the startups are already doing great things, and with your backing, they can be truly unstoppable.

Top Laracon Conference Presentations

Laracon is an ongoing series of conferences and events about the Laravel software development framework. We use Laravel pretty heavily at Icehouse Ventures because it powers our Investor Portal. I’ve learned a lot over the years from the various Laracon conference recordings. The topics range from basic coding best-practises to advanced systems architecture, database design, all the way through to user interface design. The talks I get the most out of switch between broad theoretical best practises but then back it up with practical live coding examples. I’ve made a list with a few of my favs and some notes on how they influenced view of what’s possible with Laravel…

SOLID Design Principles

This talk with Katerina Trajcevska covers the basics of the SOLID coding principles. SOLID is short for:

  1. Single responsibility principle,
  2. Open-closed principle,
  3. Liskov substitution principle,
  4. Interface segregation principle, and
  5. Dependency inversion principle.

The SOLID jargon can seem heavy at first, but it actually fits nicely into good Laravel coding practises and Katerina lays things out simply and clearly.

Curing the Common Loop

This talk probably changed my approach to coding more than any other talk. The idea of using chained functions, scopes and collections aren’t that revolutionary by themselves, but seeing Adam collapse whole pages of complex nested code into a single line is just magical. The elegance, power and simplicity of Laravel collections when they’re used properly blew my mind.

CRUDDY by design

Another mind-bending talk from Adam Wathan. CRUD is short for:

  1. Create
  2. Read
  3. Update
  4. Delete

I do not necessarily agree with everything this talk, but the mental exercise of trying to see everything in a modern web application as a CRUD operation is a matrix shifting moment of clarity. We now heavily use Laravel’s built in “Resource Pattern” to link models, views and controllers into common CRUD functions.

Eloquent Performance Patterns

Eloquent is the data modelling ORM (Object Relational Mapping) tool built into Laravel. It’s an amazing tool, but Jonathan comes from a ‘bare metal’ background and like me, learned MySQL years before he learned to code in a modern framework. As such, he thinks in raw database queries. Laravel’s ‘Query Builder’ is the database layer that gets things from the database before passing them to Eloquent (to wrap the richness around). This talk is all about speeding up Eloquent by doing more in the database.

Laravel Performance Optimisation

Kasia Zien takes a pretty detailed and hard-core approach to performance optimisation, but it’s eye opening to see her logic for how to squeeze the best performance out of Laravel.

Software Design Patterns in Laravel

“Design Patterns” are best-practises or standard approaches to common problems in programming. Not every design pattern is a good habit (the repository pattern can over-complicate a project fast). But when used carefully, the various software design patterns make for better and more consistent code. We use the Presenter Pattern at Icehouse Ventures to tidy up data before sending it to our Vue JS front-end.

The Laravel Way

Jeffrey Way is one of the original gangsters in the Laravel community. As an OG, he’s been working with Laravel so long that he’s drawn out the broader mindset of what I think of as the “Laravel Way”.

Chasing Perfect Code

Yet another Adam Wathan talk, but honestly every one is a level-up in terms of how I write code. Adam goes through ‘code smells’ and things to tidy up. Things like nested-conditionals may technically work in a solo project or a university code exam, but in the real world our code needs to be read by other developers or by your future self. This presentation taught me to make my future self’s life easier with code that is simple, readable and clear.

Diving Deeper

One of the things I love most about Laracon is being exposed to more advanced topics in software engineering that I might not have otherwise discovered. For example:

  1. Database Indexing – The art of indexing a database is kind of obscure, but the pursuit of fast queries and ‘groking’ database indexing stretched my mind and reminded me how much I love MySQL.
  2. Denormalisation with Eloquent – The Icehouse Ventures investor portal calculates pretty advanced ‘professional investor grade’ maths and charts like IRR, TV/PI and other venture capital finance metrics. Many of those are too complex to run on the fly so we tried caching them. But with thousands of investors and hundreds of metrics our cache became a mess. Database normalisation saved us but also forced me to learn about cache warming and cache invalidation. This is the Laracon talk I wish I has watched before we built our Entity Stats table by hand.
  3. Resisting Complexity – When I dive into the Laravel core code (the stuff we’re not really supposed to see and can’t edit) I’m always surprised by how small each function is. Each function does one thing, then passes it onto the next atomic unit. At first it seems wasteful, but Adam walks us through how breaking big functions into small ones makes them cleaner, clearer, more re-usable and more testable.
  4. Clean Code – Uncle Bob invented the SOLID principals and is a legend in software development. Not Laravel specific, but a great reminder of the wider context of why clean code matters.
  5. Design Patterns that pay off – Matt Stauffer lays out some advanced design patterns and boils them down into simple good habits for good code.

I’ve saved all these Laracon presentations as a YouTube playlist so it’s easy to find them, play them and refer back to them in the future: Laracon YouTube Playlist