Told She Couldn't Be a Pilot Because She Was a Woman, with Deborah Crowe | Ways to Wealth 168

This week on the Ways to Wealth podcast, Charlie is joined by Pamela Guo: brand consultant, mum of two, and proof that your most valuable asset isn't the money in your account.

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Ben Nichols, an entrepreneur and industry builder in padel, the fastest growing sport in the world, and the founder of an ecosystem of businesses built around it. Ben Nichols is an entrepreneur and industry builder in the padel world - advisor to some of the sport's biggest brands, founder of Insider 22, co-founder of the Anglo American Padel Cup, and executive producer of Travel Racket, soon to launch on a major global streaming platform. He writes and speaks on the business of the New Padel World through his platform, The 22.A new padel club opens somewhere in the world every hundred minutes, with somewhere between twenty and thirty five million players globally and Olympic status potentially within reach. But Ben has built a business connecting the corporate world with it. He argues the sport isn't really a sport at all, but also a social operating system, a third space between work and home where people are meeting friends, romantic partners, and business partners. He's also refreshingly honest about the risks. Sweden built too many courts too fast and became the poster child for padel's boom and bust, and Ben draws a sharp parallel with what happened to squash in New Zealand and the UK. This is a conversation about spotting a wave early, why the biggest brands are still hesitating, and why he's moving to America to chase a market he believes is exactly where the UK was four years ago.

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Dr. Shalini Divya, CEO and founder of TasmanIon, a Wellington deep-tech company building rechargeable aluminium-ion batteries, batteries designed to be cheap, made from abundant materials, and crucially, unable to catch fire. The headline is simple: a Tesla Powerwall costs somewhere between nine and twelve thousand US dollars. Shalini is building something that delivers the same energy storage for around $4,500, aimed first at the millions of households in India, Asia, and beyond who could never afford a Powerwall in the first place. For Shalini, this is personal. She grew up in energy poverty herself, and her ultimate goal is to see a safe, affordable battery in every home like the one she came from. What makes her approach so refreshing is how clear-eyed she is about the endgame. She doesn't want to build the next Tesla or Samsung. She wants one of them to acquire TasmanIon, because they already have the distribution and the R&D budgets to take the technology further and faster than she ever could alone. As she puts it, a billion dollars is just a number, what she really wants is for the tech to reach everyone. After nine years, from a PhD in a Wellington lab to validated prototypes and an open seed round, Shalini is honest about the hard truths of deep tech: that the hardest part isn't inventing the battery, it's the years of commercialisation, safety testing, and timing that come after, and why, through all of it, the biggest lesson she's learned is to be bold. Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts Learn more about Shalini here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalini-divya/ Learn more about Shalini's company here: https://www.tasmanion.com/ #waystowealth #batteries #cleanenergy #deeptech #startup #energystorage #tasmanion #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #innovation #sustainability #powerwall #womenintech #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Craig McAlpine, founder of MyCareerBrand, a career coaching and outplacement business operating in around ten countries, and Pitch, a tech startup rethinking how people sell themselves into their next role. Craig's big idea will change how you think about applying for a job. He came from a background writing professional bids and proposals, and he realised that when a company advertises a role, it's really issuing a request for proposal, an invitation to prove you can solve their problem. Yet here's the mismatch: a business bidding for a hundred-thousand-dollar contract will happily spend a whole week on its proposal, while a job seeker chasing a role worth a quarter of a million dollars over a few years thinks putting in a single day is a big effort. So Craig flips the whole approach. Instead of listing what you technically do, you lead with the value you create, the problems you solve, and the gold you'd leave on the table if they don't hire you. His tools even let you design the ideal role you want, then go to market with the evidence that you can deliver it. This is a conversation about treating your career like the business it actually is, why he bootstrapped his own product rather than chase easy money, and the hard-won advice he'd give any founder: understand the problem before you build, back yourself completely, but always be willing to walk away.

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jam Mayer, founder of two companies, the AI automation consultancy Conversologie and Divergity, a learning platform built for neurodivergent minds. Jam is neurodivergent, with ADHD and dyscalculia, and she's open about how that shapes the way she works and builds. She makes a compelling case for something the data backs up: a strikingly high number of founders and creatives are neurodivergent, and it's often not because they set out to be entrepreneurs. It's because the traditional workplace, the nine-to-five, the rigid systems, the one-size-fits-all expectations, simply isn't built for the way their brains work. As she puts it, the goal isn't to work around neurodivergent people. It's to work with them. A recurring idea in this conversation is what Jam calls a personal operating system: a way of designing your work around how you actually think, then using delegation and AI to offload the things that drain you, so your energy goes to what you're genuinely good at. It's the philosophy behind Divergity, which throws out the rigid step-one, step-two model of learning in favour of something adaptive enough to meet very different minds where they are. This is a conversation about building a business, and a life, that fits the way you're wired, rather than forcing yourself to fit someone else's system, and about why understanding that difference isn't a limitation, but often a genuine advantage.