Another statistic that motivates the Toro team is that by 2040, Gisborne's Māori population is forecast to be 70 percent of total.
“Could you come back here to live without seeing all that challenge around you and not lift a finger?” asks Soutar, who has Ngāti Porou whakapapa.
“It's a moral crime.”
“There has been a lack of technology resources coming into the country until recently and the borders have been closed,” says Cowie, who is based in Auckland.
“Technology is not being picked up by young people, particularly young Māori, who are 4 percent of the national tech workforce.
“So we're here for two reasons: to bring tech to Gisborne, and to empower young Māori to work in the technology sector, bringing opportunities they would never have had if we hadn't come to town.”
If you're an aspiring young person in Gisborne, they say it is “difficult to be what you can't see”.
If you can't see it you can't aspire to it, unless you're exceptionally unusual, so as well as Toro's distributed workforce in Austin, Texas, an office in Auckland and 100 engineers based in Bangalore, India, they have an office on Childers Road in the heart of Gisborne.
They admit building a tech-led company from Gisborne is extremely challenging, but they're taking it in their stride.
“If it was just focused on Gisborne, we'd be dead in three minutes,” Soutar says.
“We have to focus on international dollars to make money. We saw an opportunity for a new business model, and what we're finding is that the demand for tech services, systems integration and software development is ridiculously high.”
At the heart of Toro's business is IT systems integration and software development — basically making software work well for companies — and its clients as well as its staff are around the world.
“We work ‘distributed', but Tūranganui-a-Kiwa is where our heart is,” Soutar says.
“If you want to bring Māori into tech, why not bring tech into the most Māori place in the world?”
And as for New Zealand being a little out-of-the-way place at the bottom of the world that some major players in the tech world claim they've never heard of, that's not a problem.
“New Zealand is very well positioned to work with the east and west coasts of the USA,” Cowie says.
“We are selling Tairāwhiti internationally as a technology story — ‘we see tomorrow first'.”
“We can't sit around and wait for government to provide leadership,” Soutar says, “because leadership doesn't come from government. We're making our contribution to help create leadership.
“We have a serious challenge around leadership. It has to reflect demography, and if we don't engage and empower Māori in this region to step up to leadership . . . that's a problem.
“One of the things we are doing is bringing in young Māori so they can step up and be leaders.”
There are two Toro businesses in Gisbnorne — Toro Technology is a digital tech and software engineering company. Toro Studios is a creative content and animation company. They are sister companies and Barry Soutar is involved in both.
Work Toro Technology completed recently for two Gisborne businesses was signed off by the young tech developer as “Powered by Terry-Jo (Straight out of Manutuke Hard)”. This embracing of Tairāwhiti humour symbolises the real-world approach Toro Technology encourages.
It sounds like a company with a vision. Even the company name is an East Coast Māori term for the scouting party that goes ahead of the war party to forge a new path forward. That's the company ethos, to bring people together to find a new way ahead.
“We are working for corporates in the USA — that gives us more capacity to build a circular economy in this region and creates opportunities for young people here via employment pathways and workforce development,” says Soutar.
Yet another calling for the management team is working with SMEs — small and medium-sized enterprises.
They say we are facing the “digitisation of everything”. For example, all banking can now be done on an app on your phone and you literally no longer have to go to a bricks-and-mortar bank.
“Local businesses understand they need to move down that route, but they find it difficult to know when and how to go, and difficult to engage the skills to do that without engaging big companies,” Oakley says.
The pandemic has had a massive impact on businesses, and some were reeling as they dealt with the problems staring them in the face, such as absenteeism. That had pushed other smaller problems to the background, until those smaller problems built, causing “death by a thousand cuts”.
“When the pressure goes on and the marketplace starts to change, it can get tough,” Soutar says.
“A big part of New Zealand SMEs is funded by people's homes, and we have a moral obligation to work with them.
“We've built an international business in Gisborne — that's how we naturally roll.”
Toro is full of enthusiasm for the challenging and exciting future ahead, and it's clear they are bringing people together to find lively ways of dealing with new and old problems.
Nothing is too big or too small — although Soutar admits they “probably” could not land a spaceship on Mars. They might leave that to Elon Musk.
