Self-made millionaire Seeby Woodhouse has a few regrets.
The entrepreneur, gentleman adventurer, photographer and CEO of Voyager Internet (self-described on his Instagram accounts), has hit his 40s; there's grey in the beard and the doc's telling him to get his blood pressure down.
It's time to reflect, to look back on lessons hard learned. Top of the regrets list is selling internet provider Orcon for $25 million back when he was 29. Back then the million-dollar offers kept getting higher and once the "dollar signs flashed up in front of a poor kid from Glenfield" he couldn't resist.
"I was good at running the business but I missed the macro picture that it was going to get even bigger. I missed out on the $150m the business was worth a few years later."
Selling his $10m North Shore mansion for $7.5m after the breakdown of his marriage four years ago is another regret. So is the loss of the relationship itself.
And he regrets not going to school as a youngster, arriving at intermediate as a socially awkward kid who had no friends, couldn't kick a ball and couldn't hold a pen. The kids called him "retard".
Thirty years later there are still slight signs of that social awkwardness and he says his handwriting is still atrocious. At first meeting, Woodhouse seems a little guarded and doesn't engage much in conversation. A friend thinks he's simply shy.
But sit down for a chat about his life and there's no sign of reticence. He'll tell you anything – what he paid for things, business details, what he owns, where the money's gone.
Personal stories and uncomfortable memories pour out to the point where part of my job ends up filtering some of what he says, if only to save him from himself. He's Gladwrap transparent in an endearingly naive sort of way.
He talks about his father's recent suicide, his eccentric childhood, his views on women, relationships, money, his views on geo politics, Trump, the implications of Microsoft's latest A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), the madness of Burning Man in Nevada's Black Rock Desert which he attends regularly, the 300,000 photos he has taken as part of a new-found talent three years ago.
And business, a subject that's never far from his mind. He started Voyager with "a couple of million" investment in 2011, not because his restraint-of-trade had expired but because he was sick of the bad service he was getting as a customer.
Smaller, better, faster
He knew about running an internet company, about being "smaller, better, faster", and about how to take on the big boys. Where large companies might aim to have 90 per cent of customer calls answered within 30 minutes, Woodhouse says Voyager aims to have 90 per cent of calls answered within 30 seconds.
"If you want customers to stay with you, you've got to answer the phone."
Much like the way he built Orcon, Woodhouse reinvests in Voyager as it grows. It now employs 100 staff in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and has a $31m turnover but it's not making him cash-rich.
"Every time Voyager makes money we spend it on another staff member or whatever."
Woodhouse admits that the $25m from Orcon didn't go as far as he thought, particularly funding a lavish lifestyle. Not that he's crying poor. He's still asset-comfortable, owning the building Orcon still occupies, the Nelson St building where Voyager's Auckland office is based and an office building in College Hill.
Then there's the new multi-million dollar seven-seater helicopter - an Airbus EC130 T2 he owns jointly with US-based software company owner Charles Shrimpton. It's a sleek gun-metal grey machine, specced with a black interior and leather Recaro seats.
Back when he started Orcon, the 19-year-old Woodhouse asked BNZ for an overdraft. They said no, and he never asked again until he decided to buy a helicopter. This time the bank said yes.
The chopper's commercial earnings with Silver Fern Helicopters will cover the interest and
capital; and when the helicopter's not booked, Shrimpton, a helicopter pilot, and Woodhouse, who is learning to fly, will go on jaunts. Coromandel and Great Barrier are 15 minutes away, Woodhouse says. Eagles Nest in the Bay of Islands is 45 minutes.
The helicopter is part of Woodhouse's new life phase, a determination to enjoy the journey while still doing business. Right now the T2 is being shipped to Alaska so that Woodhouse and Shrimpton can tour Alaska and Canada for six weeks, sharing the flying.
Shrimpton has already had a bit of practice, flying the helicopter on a six-week journey from France to New Zealand.
Woodhouse's wild days might be over but cramming in fun is not. After Alaska he'll be off to Burning Man, a Nevada desert event he describes not so much as a wild party as a "spiritual experience" where attendees pay with hugs, not money, where being different is not only okay, it's encouraged.
Last year Woodhouse posted a month-long travel schedule on his Facebook page: Travel to LA; Burning Man, Nevada; Tech Crunch Disrupt Conf, San Francisco; Auckland for two days; Tony Robbins' seminar with Voyager staff, Sydney; Paradise Challenge, Jamaica; meet friends from South America, Aruba; friend's 40th birthday party, Las Vegas.
Here is a man who is wasting no time in achieving "life balance". There have been women in his life since his marriage, open relationships mostly, and he has a Russian girlfriend currently.
He's wary of American women who, he says, can pretend to like him as long as there's a chance of a Louis Vuitton handbag and the lifestyle that goes with it. New Zealand women, he says, are much more transparent.
Kiwi girls might be attracted to him because he's successful just as he might be attracted to them because they're "young and beautiful". As long as everyone is honest about their motives, that's fine with Woodhouse. But the marriage failure hangs over him and if there's one thing he could change it would be to "work harder to make sure that my marriage didn't fail".
It is a statement, he admits, that makes him sound like his late father, Nigel Best, a man he describes as a "tortured intellectual" who left Woodhouse's mother Helen Woodhouse, years ago and spent the rest of his life regretting it.
"My dad was so paranoid about wanting a perfect relationship that he stuffed up something that was 90 per cent good," Woodhouse says.
He agrees that "absolutely" that he repeated a mistake made by his father.
"The funny thing is you don't ever want to be like your parents and then somehow you end up being like them."
Two weeks before Woodhouse was due to address the media on stage at the Voyager Media Awards last month, his father took his own life. Woodhouse, an only child, threw himself into organising the funeral. He was grief-stricken but, he says, not altogether surprised. His father, Woodhouse says, had spent his life reading, thinking and questioning why the world had to be such a bad place.
As he aged, Best became increasingly eccentric, searching the internet for evidence to back up his conspiracy theories.
"He was very good at arguing why the world was bleak," Woodhouse remembers.
Woodhouse tried to help his father, inviting him to live with him after a breakdown. But after several years his father's depression took its toll on Woodhouse and he moved his father out. Woodhouse paid his rent and made sure they had dinner together every week when he was in New Zealand.
From a young age Woodhouse picked that his father was different. His mother, who ran the Takapuna Library, read him Winnie-the-Pooh books and young Seeby soon identified his father as the gloomy Eyeore.
It was Best who decided his son should not go to school. When a tearful 5-year-old Seeby arrived home from Glenfield Primary saying he had been hit by a teacher who thought he had thrown a paper dart, an infuriated Best refused to let him return. So started what were to be bizarre, isolating years at home punctuated by haphazard home schooling.
His father tried to teach him algebra but became frustrated when his young son didn't understand. "He was trying to teach me quadratic equations as a 5-year-old."
Home schooling was abandoned and Woodhouse largely taught himself to read through comic books. Left pretty much left to his own devices, Woodhouse spent his childhood reading. He read the dictionary several times and the Encyclopaedia Britannica up to the letter "k". It was at that point that Woodhouse, as a 12-year-old, realised he needed to get back to school.
Back to school
He arrived at Takapuna Normal and soon after Glenfield College never having played sport, never having socialised with children his own age. "I couldn't spell, or write or do maths."
It was a fear that he had somehow "stuffed up" his life that has driven Woodhouse since he was a young teenager.
Fuelling that panic was the October 1987 share market crash, an event that had a profound effect on him. Just like thousands of Kiwis in the late 80s, Woodhouse's father invested everything in the escalating share market, even extending the mortgage on the family home.
Then came the infamous Black Tuesday collapse, and suddenly there was no money. The shares were worthless and the mortgage had to be repaid. Woodhouse realised that although his father was intellectually smart – he would casually solve his son's complicated calculus homework years after he had learned it at school - he was not business smart.
The crash of '87 kick-started Woodhouse's burning drive to succeed in business, to become wealthy and keep control of it. By aged 15 he was obsessed, devouring more than 200 books on the subject over the next four years, starting with Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and Tony Robbins' Personal Power.
Woodhouse worked his way to become among the top students at Glenfield College, coming second only to the Dux and running three paper rounds to earn money. But that was never going to be enough. Woodhouse wanted to be the top scholar at the country's top school.
So he advertised in the North Shore Times for a benefactor to fund his seventh-form year at King's College, indicating that he would repay the money once he became successful. TV3 saw the ad and interviewed a naive Woodhouse at Glenfield College during which he explained why he didn't rate his current school and instead wanted to go to King's.
Remembering his red-faced school principal shouting at him in his office after the interview screened is one of few times Woodhouse laughs openly during the interview. (He has since been forgiven and has been invited back to address the students at Glenfield College's prizegiving).
The TV3 interview worked. A wealthy businessman rang Woodhouse at home and said he'd back him. And he would not expect to be repaid. A delighted Woodhouse handed the phone to his father, who convinced himself the man had ulterior motives and told him to get lost.
But in the end, the lack of a year at King's didn't matter. After flunking university, Woodhouse started Orcon, a business that would consume him for the next decade. He worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, sometimes sleeping on a mattress at the office, living off baked beans and Maggi 2 Minute Noodles.
Says Woodhouse: "I literally sold my 20s. I don't regret it but what I do regret is that I didn't enjoy the journey more at the time."
When the $25m offer came in, Woodhouse took the dosh and went on a wild ride. He forked out $8.5 to buy Casa Del Mar, a six-bedroomed Castor Bay mansion with a home theatre and Olympic-sized pool. Woodhouse spent another $1.5m to turn it into a party house, including a night club, and party he did – non-stop for 10 years.
"I didn't have a childhood like most people and I didn't have my 20s like most people. So in my 30s I was like a teenager, a $10m house, lots of money, girls throwing themselves at me. Getting wasted all the time. "
The filming of New Zealand's Next Top Model and MasterChef made the party house even more famous, with Woodhouse at the controls - a Playboy-meets-Neverland attempt to jam in as much fun to make up for the years that weren't.
Four years ago, his marriage over and the mansion gone, Woodhouse took stock. Apart from a monthly board meeting he left his Voyager executives to run the company. He travelled, studied yoga and spirituality for nine months, and hooked up with Tony Robbins again, doing 18 courses around the world in one year.
And then he was done. "He [Tony Robbins] is amazing but I'm Tony-ed out now. Some people keep going forever and never do anything."
For the past year Woodhouse has been back at it, working hard, concentrating on business, spending more time in New Zealand. And there are signs he's settling down, swapping the glamour of a rented St Marys Bay address for life in the country and a run-down farm house.
He bought the 10-acre property in Whitford for $1.9m from an elderly couple who needed to move to a retirement home. Bought on a whim, he had plans to flick it. But something made him stop, smell the roses and decide to stay. The neighbour's three ex race horses graze outside and apples grow in the orchard.
Alternating between St Mary's Bay and the farm, he realised he was sleeping better, had more energy and was up earlier. Despite the added commuting distance, he was arriving at the office earlier. He's now wondering if three years of living and sleeping above a motorway has caused low level carbon monoxide poisoning.
And he's reading again, not novels, but the words of world leaders, analysts, global financial experts. "Last weekend I got through 2000 pages, four books. The amazing thing about books is that you can take 20 years of someone's experience and learn about it in a day."
His reading matter isn't something you'd find at an airport book shop. Woodhouse devours titles like Stress Test, Reflections on Financial Crises by former US Treasury Secretary Timothy F Geithner.
On his Instagram Woodhouse gives Ha-Joon Chang's book Economics a 9/10 while G Edward Griffin's expose book the Creature from Jekyll Island – a Second Look at the Federal Reserve gets an 11/10, with the comment "Possible the most woke book in existence".
Woodhouse muses aloud that he might hunker down for a year, read, think, get a bit "prepped". There's laughter in his voice when he talks about doing "the prepper thing" but the plans sound like they're firming up. He's already got rainwater and a bore, and a vege garden. (Woodhouse is a vegetarian.)
"I'm putting in solar and I've got an electric car. I want to be able to survive the apocalypse just in case. I'm not going hard-core prepper, just a little."
The apocalypse he's referring to isn't so much an end-of-the-world nuclear meltdown as a global monetary explosion. He's thinking about China and the US, about the US printing money to pay for China's goods, and whether the US$ will collapse, causing a "huge geo-political shift."
Big Brother
He refers to George Orwell's futuristic novel 1984 - written in 1949 - and its Big Brother themes of a totalitarian state. He worries that China has long-term strategic plans and the US doesn't, lurching between strategies and one president to the next.
Notwithstanding the likes of Kim Jong-un, the next arms race won't be fought with nuclear weapons, Woodhouse predicts.
"It'll almost certainly be fought with artificial intelligence tools."
He watches his American friends installing technology that can automatically turn off their lights and lock their homes. But what happens when that technology backfires, he wonders, or if a super-power takes control of it, shutting down the power grid, the
internet.
He thinks A.I. could become "the real superpower of population control" and that if there's a cyberwar, China will win. But in the meantime Woodhouse is determined to keep enjoying the journey. He thinks The Snowball, Alice Schroeder's biography of American business magnate Warren Buffett, is the most depressing book he's ever read.
It was one of the reasons he decided to "retire" at 30. Buffett might have been enormously successful but the austere way he ran his life didn't appeal to Woodhouse.
"All he does is read company reports and make money. That doesn't sound like any fun to me at all. Now I've learned that you can go to work and still keep enjoying yourself."
* Jane Phare is the part-time director of the Voyager Media Awards, of which Voyager Internet is the naming sponsor.
