Between Two Beers podcast: Sir Ian Taylor on revolutionising America’s Cup coverage; the ‘fine line’ of mental health and entrepreneurship

Sir Ian Taylor took an unconventional path to becoming one of New Zealand’s top business leaders.

Sir Ian Taylor’s life has taken an unconventional path. He was the lead singer of a rock band, he served in the army, worked at a brewery, studied law, became a kids presenter, then a
TV star, before setting up his own production company. Today, he’s one of New Zealand’s top business leaders. His team at ARL have revolutionised how the world watches sport, and he’s earned a knighthood for his services to broadcasting and business.

In this week’s wide-ranging chat on the Between Two Beers podcast, Taylor shares all the best stories and insights from a truly unique mind.

When did you last go and lie in the hull of your waka?

That’s a very left-field allegorical question Sir Ian Taylor — founder of internationally renowned Animation Research Ltd — is fond of posing to chief executives and businesspeople when it comes to considering business plans and plotting a path forward.

Speaking on the latest Between Two Beers podcast this week, Sir Ian explained how he drew on the navigational traditions of waka hourua (Māori migration canoes) and particularly the experiences of Hoturoa Kerr, captain of the ocean-going waka Haunui, to understand and crystalise his own decision-making in the sphere of computer animation, where his company is a world leader in 3D television graphics for the America’s Cup, cricket ball tracking and golf.

“They train young Māori navigators and the whole navigation was understanding and learning about how you use the sun, stars, sun and ocean currents,” Taylor said. “They all go together.

“He [Kerr] told me about training this young Māori guy, and how they went out for their three-day training. The clouds were over and he could see he was a little bit worried, a little bit confused.

“And he [Kerr] said, ‘Look, it’s the sun, stars and ocean currents. Go lie on the waka, and listen to it, feel it’. And he went down, and some time later he came back up. ‘I know where we are’.

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“It’s a great story,” Taylor concluded. “But for me, it’s a message to all business owners. When I look at animation research … it’s my waka. And I never realised that until I heard this story. I have always laid in its hull and felt where she was taking us, not where I was going.

“You feel that, and then you knew. I’d go up the stairs and say: ‘She says, it’s this way. That’s why she’s going that way’. And you knew you had the A crew to help her go that way.

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“For me, that’s one of the reasons why just about everything we’ve done is a world first — because you lay on the hull of the waka.”

It helps that Taylor has of course metaphorically dipped his paddle into numerous other pursuits before emerging as the quintessential Kiwi entrepreneur.

Born in Kāeo to a Pākehā father and Māori mother, before being educated at a Catholic boarding school in Masterton, Taylor joined the band The Kal-Q-Lated Risk in 1967 as lead singer, and later graduated with a law degree from the University of Otago.

He also worked as a television presenter for TVNZ, notable for Play School, Spot On and New Zealand’s Funniest Home Videos, before establishing television company Taylormade Productions in 1989.

The company’s formation offered a real insight into some of Taylor’s more-unorthodox methods of work.

He had been offered a job on a current affairs show in Wellington, but preferred living in Dunedin — even though shortly afterwards TVNZ announced it was closing down its Dunedin studios.

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“There were 340 people there, we made 30 per cent of all the television that was made in the country and now they’re closing it down because it wasn’t economic.”

Taylor, who was hosting Funniest Home Videos at the time, reckoned television was all he knew how to do, so took the initiative and phoned TVNZ chief executive Brent Harman.

“I said, ‘Look, you’re closing all that stuff down? What would it take if we were to buy it? Because if you give us just one show, we’ll make it and see where we can go from there’.”

However, he needed $500,000 to do so, and here he called upon “Māori mate”, accountant Phil Broughton.

“Phil’s in bed on a Sunday morning and I knock on the bedroom window. He pulled the curtain and I said ‘Phil, I need to borrow half a million dollars, so we need to talk’.

“When we go into the kitchen table, we sit down and he gets all these papers out and says ‘right now we’re gonna have to do a business plan, cash flow this that if you could if you go in to the bank manager’.

“I looked at all this and said, ‘Phil, we’re Māori, we don’t write things down — we talk, we tell stories. I’m just gonna go and ask the bank manager on Monday’.

“And he said ‘good luck with that’. But I went down to my bank manager, Andrew Wilson — he had my bank account in front of him and you could see it only had about $500 in it.

“I said, ‘Andrew, I need to borrow half a million dollars’. And Andrew said, ‘Ah, let’s go for a walk’.

“We walked the full length of Dunedin and back and I told him what I was going to do. And when we got back he gave me half a million dollars.”

Taylor was always confident if they could get a shot at it, there was no reason to shut the studio down.

“We got a TV show that had quite a decent budget with it as well … And so that got us going.

“We just had to back ourselves to say, well, one year will turn into two or turn into five.”

Taylor was soon impressed with the computer graphics development occurring at Otago University, and on a handshake he put four students in an office and started doing stuff with ray-tracing software.

Amalgamating Taylormade Productions with the computer science division of the University of Otago heralded the birth of Animation Research.

“Suddenly, we were able to do things with commercials that no one else could do at the time,” he said.

Ian Taylor as lead singer in Kal-Q-Lated Risk.

The first commercial his company made came about after Taylor had been impressed with a groundbreaking ad featuring flying deck chairs made by US director David Green.

“I looked at what our people were doing and I thought he would understand what we’re doing, so I just found his address and sent it to him and he came down and had a look.

“And he said, ‘that’s really interesting. I’ll be back one day’. A year later, he rang up and he had this ad for United Airlines out of America. He said, ‘I think your team are the only ones who could do this’.

“So he came down, we had to buy a new computer that cost us $15,000. It was 1 gigabyte and it took 14 minutes to render a single frame. We’re talking about a 60-second commercial with 25 frames a second, so it took a long time to render after they’d done everything.

“We used to take turns. One of my jobs — the only job because I couldn’t do anything else — was to sleep under the desk at night, just in case the computer stopped, so I could ring someone up. You couldn’t afford to stop because it would be another week gone past.”

Animation Research successes included an award-winning animated ad for Bluebird potato chips featuring water-skiing penguins that aired in 1994-96.

“Our guys had designed some of the first computer-animated water in the world that could splash. I mean, it didn’t happen, but they did that.

“This was a commercial that was originally designed to be hand drawn. It was kind of one of those that no one would have thought that you could actually turn it into a 3D.”

Meanwhile their graphics for the America’s Cup in 1992 were a world first.

“We had discovered that New Zealand was in this and we’re going to have to watch this boring stuff on TV. That was America’s Cup, where boats disappeared for hours and didn’t come back.

“And it was like, what do we do to make this interesting?”

New Zealand take on Italy during the 1992 America’s Cup. Animation Research’s graphics during the event were considered to be a world first. Photo / Getty Images

Then came golf and cricket, while outside of sport, Animation Research has even built air traffic control simulators since 2004 as the company’s reach has grown.

“It wasn’t in any business plan, but we’ve just finished building airports for the airport in Kathmandu, and now started a contract for five airports in Croatia, that are going to be operating and the air traffic control simulator we built.”

Even less known these days is Taylor’s sideline involvement with Tech For Good, an international movement of innovators that runs events and workshops for the use of technology with social impact projects in the community.

One of these projects is designing programmes to teach numeracy and literacy in prisons.

“From a Māori perspective, we’re over-represented in prisons. But from a bigger perspective, when I look at my moko [grandchild], they’re unlikely to ever end up in prison because they’re loved and engaged, they do things.

“A lot of these people were somebody’s moko, as well, and they ended up down this path that took them to a place that was inevitable.

“So what do we do to give them a chance? Because if you bring them out, and they still can’t read or write, they’ll be back.”

Sir Ian Taylor (left) in Spot On in 1977.

Taylor and his cohorts designed a “virtual garage” where participants go to class, put on headsets and find themselves standing in the street. Part of the numeracy and literacy challenge then is how to get the doors open, because inside are cars and they then have to read instructions on how to hot them up.

“What what was really interesting, the first day we took it down was a bit scary, really. The first prisoner comes in, puts on the headset, looks around, goes, ‘whew, bro, we’re out’.

“And if you think about that, that is a thing that technology just did. It transferred them from ‘there’ to ‘out of there’ to learn.

“Whereas if Jimmy was doing his normal class, they’d be sitting in a classroom, in a prison with a board with some papers. Here, they were gone. And everybody turned up, they kept turning up. So that’s a Tech For Good.

“And we potter away with that, hoping one day government will step up and go, ‘Right, here’s some funding to make it accelerate’. Hasn’t happened yet, but we’ll just keep plugging away.”

However, it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Taylor.

In 2008, 17 years after starting his animation business, he lost a huge cricket contract in India. This would have concentrated the mind of the best waka captain, given it threatened the very future of the company.

Animation Research was one of the first companies in the world to do cricket graphics, but it was really expensive and not very accurate, so they initially decided nobody would want it.

However, English company Hawke-Eye launched and Animation Research quickly lost all their cricket contracts — something Taylor said stands as a valuable lesson as they start to look at artificial intelligence.

But then, in 2007, Taylor got a call from James Rego, director of broadcast services with the Indian Cricket Board asking him to do ball tracking for the IPL.

“I had to develop the software from scratch in eight weeks, in Dunedin in the middle of winter, so that meant I knew we were going to have to spend money.

“For the first time I did a budget, and it was over $1 million. And I remember thinking, ‘we don’t have a million dollars’…. So what we thought was, why don’t we spend the money so fast the bank doesn’t notice. Then we’ll go up to India, when the contract comes back, show them the contract, borrow the money off token, pay it back.

“That’s the idea — it actually doesn’t work that well, but that’s another story. But anyway, we did that. Long story short, they designed this amazing, amazing system and we went up and we got the contract.

“Cool and we’re off. But about a year and a half into it, with all big loans and the America’s Cup having just been cancelled … the guy who is running the Indian cricket BCCI did a deal with Hawk-Eye for the IPL — and that deal involved getting rid of us.”

Sir Ian Taylor: “I’ve always said to young people that it’s really important to have dreams.” Photo / Jason Oxenham

Taylor described it as the worst four months of his life.

“I remember ringing my wife from a grandstand in Mumbai at about 1 o’clock in the morning, just saying, ‘it’s all over’.

He then spent 3-4 months trying to figure out a way around it, but there was none.

“I never thought of it as mental health, but as I look out at those steps, I understand this fine line that you walk, where you can take a step to one side and suicide as a result. I could feel myself getting to a stage where you know, ‘they’re better off without me’.”

Ultimately, Taylor and wife Liz decided they had to close the business. But on the morning they were about to call staff together, the Otago Daily Times’ lead story was about Fisher & Paykel closing its operations at the North Taieri site with 480 jobs lost. It prompted a rethink.

“I looked at Liz and said, ‘We can’t do that today’. And we didn’t, and just to put that in context, if Fisher & Paykel hadn’t closed that day, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you having that conversation.”

The following week Taylor came up with “a crazy idea that I hadn’t thought of before” that ensured survival.

“I had enough money to pay off all of our debts, which was important. Then we had enough money to run the company for two months.

“I called everybody together and said, ‘Right, we’ve only got enough money for two months so now’s the time to start looking for other jobs’.

“And everybody went, ‘Yeah, let’s just give it a shot’. Nobody left.”

If that was a nightmare experience for Taylor, at the other end of the spectrum he is also fond of talking about the power of dreams.

“I’ve always said to young people that it’s really important to have dreams. The reason for that is you don’t have dreams, but the opportunity pops up, you might miss it. You won’t see it.”

This he related to his time in the late 60s singing with The Kal-Q-Lated Risk.

“The first movie I ever saw, in black and white, about 1955, was Bill Haley and the Comets’ Rock Around The Clock. I remember it so clearly, I know my parents didn’t come and the neighbours took me to this thing.

“I can still see it all in Kawakawa and I remember going home and thinking, ‘That was cool. One day, I’m going to be in a band’.”

But Taylor never did learn an instrument or do anything about it — until he was at university in Wellington doing a business degree.

Then one day Bernie Carey from The Kal-Q-Lated Risk turned up and told him the band’s vocalist, Carl Evenson, was joining The Fourmyula and asked him to be replacement, given they had the nationally broadcast Battle of the Bands at the weekend.

He had to learn only one song — and so began Taylor’s musical career, singing I Started A Joke.

But much later it was his 8-year-old son Ben who fine-tuned his thinking about the power of dreams, before Taylor having to make a speech at his school.

“He [Ben] said, ‘Well, you can have all the dreams you want, but they’ll come to nothing if you don’t get out of bed’.

“And I’ve never forgotten that. Now if anybody asks, ‘what have you done at your company’? the answer is: ‘We got out of bed’.”

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