Escape to New Zealand With Its New Visa Program (If You Don’t Mind a Week in a Yurt)

Another unusual thing about New Zealand’s visa program is it wasn’t conceived by New Zealanders. Three overseas transplants—an Ethiopian, Yoseph Ayele, and two American brothers, Brian and Matthew Monahan—came up with the Global Impact Visa from a rural compound the brothers own near Wellington. The property has yurts, geodesic domes, composting toilets, and something called a “Zen Den,” all nestled on hundreds of hilly acres of grassland and forest. It’s gorgeous. Twice a year, the place fills with crowds of new Global Impact Visa holders who camp and discuss their plans for world harmony. Imagine a verdant Burning Man with lots more global utopianism, and you’ll get the idea.

To acquire a Global Impact Visa, you do not woo bureaucrats with their elusive but prized rubber stamps. Instead you’re interviewed and vetted by a committee of four people who try to find the right mix of candidates based on their backgrounds, talents, and ambitions. They hand out about 70 to 100 of the visas per year and will keep doing so until 2020, when the government will reevaluate the program. The visa is good for three years, during which time you can basically do whatever you like in New Zealand and then opt for a path to permanent residency. Those who are picked receive the title of Edmund Hillary Fellows, in honor of the Kiwi explorer and climber of Mount Everest. “We carry the mantle of Sir Edmund Hillary—be a bold and humble leader,” Ayele says. “You have to be solving a problem that really matters in the world and that New Zealand can play a role in.”

New Zealand’s open-mindedness about immigration puts it way out of sync with its closest allies. The U.K. has embroiled itself in Brexit melodrama. The U.S. is going medieval with its quest to build a wall along its southern border. In Australia, rhetoric against Asian and Muslim immigrants and their influence on the Australian way of life, whatever that means exactly, has been on the rise for years. New Zealand is not immune from the same tensions—a point made horrifically clear in March when an Australian gunman killed 50 people at a mosque in Christchurch. 

Although New Zealand has both pro- and anti-immigration camps, the current government has embraced foreigners as a means of diversifying the economy and rethinking the country’s collective goals. Politicians and businesspeople have been pushing to attract talent that will build new industries, which could carry New Zealand past its dependence on agriculture and tourism. Beyond that, there’s a growing desire to make New Zealand a role model for a more modern, enlightened capitalist economy. 

The country is an ideal petri dish for this type of human lab work. With 5 million people, New Zealand is a two-degrees-of-separation place where a key government official or bright engineer is a phone call away. This connectedness lets small groups of people get surprisingly big things done. A local named Peter Beck, for example, founded a startup a few years ago called Rocket Lab, which more or less created New Zealand’s aerospace industry and has become an important part of the emerging commercial space industry. The country also takes the environment and climate change seriously. In 2014 the government began honoring the traditions of its indigenous Maori people—who call the country Aotearoa—by bestowing legal rights on seas, rivers, forests, and mountains. If you harm a river with chemicals, you are, in the eyes of the law, assaulting a person. The government’s rhetoric about the annual budget has also shifted to prioritize “people’s well-being and the environment” over gross domestic product growth as a measure of success. 

To that end, the Global Impact Visa, unlike many other work visas, focuses less on business success or a particular set of skills and more on demonstrated dedication to completing worthwhile projects—the more unusual, the better. “I think it’s the best visa in the world,” says Michelle Dickinson, a scientist and media personality in New Zealand, who helped shape the program and pick candidates. “It bets on the people and what kind of change they can bring and not on how much money they have made.” 

One day in November, 39 Hillary Fellows and their families arrive at the Monahan compound, having committed to spending a week in a yurt village. There are some unyurtlike comforts: electrical outlets, makeshift closets, and twin mattresses with electric blankets. The main inconvenience, other than lack of plumbing, is the yurts’ tendency to collapse when there’s a lot of wind, which, it turns out, is often.

The new group includes people either looking to bring technology to the country or to run from technology and do something else. Boyd Multerer, who used to head Microsoft’s Xbox Live division, has moved his whole family to New Zealand as he tries to develop a new operating system for small computing devices. Josh Whiton got rich on tech startups and now runs MakeSoil, which aims to be the “Tesla of composting.” Faumuina Felolini Tafunai, a Samoan, pursues numerous projects to bring Pacific Islander traditions and ways of thinking to the uninitiated.

Each morning, the fellows make their way from the yurt village to the cafeteria tents, where they eat vegetarian meals. Then they head to a geodesic dome draped with white sheets, where a dramatic chandelier made from tree branches hangs overhead. Here they conduct exercises. One requires the fellows to reveal their biggest fear in life, then act out that fear in front of the group. In another, people take turns telling everyone what they’re up to and how the group can help. One person wants to use drones to monitor dolphins and keep watch against illegal fishing. Another hopes to apply blockchain technology to the garment industry to monitor the flow of materials and check for human- rights abuses. Yet another has a mindfulness consulting firm. The atmosphere is both casual and intense. There are lots of bare feet and comfy clothes; when the attendees like something they hear, they snap fingers and nod.

At some point during their stay, the fellows head to an open wooden structure hidden away among some trees and flowers. It’s there that Tamahau Rowe, an elder of a local Maori tribe, Te Ātiawa Taranaki Whanui, leads everyone in a ceremony meant to open a portal through time so people can communicate with their ancestors. Rowe, a stocky man with spiky hair, sings for a while and then instructs the crowd to follow him to the river. They all proceed down and join in the singing and continue the ritual by grabbing a fern frond, releasing it into the river, and then splashing themselves in the face with water. The singing stops, followed by weeping and hugging.

For someone such as Multerer, the former Microsoft executive, it’s all a bit more than he expected. “I’m still an engineer and don’t get into all the froufrou stuff,” he says, as his daughters, Indigo, River, and Tesla, hover nearby. Still, he’s on board with the program. “I have too many friends now focused on a big car and a big house and what company you work at,” he says. “That’s not me. The energy in Seattle has shifted, and I want to be where this energy is now.”

Others embrace the rituals as a means of personal rebirth and, perhaps, part of something bigger. There’s a consensus here around the idea that New Zealand represents a clean slate, a chance to do business with more heart and less greed. “There are things I have never seen tied to a visa,” says John La Grou, a tall, lanky man, says while speaking with a group huddled around a firepit. “I had to be vetted, entrepreneurial, conscious, awake.” La Grou comes from California and made a fortune in computing. Now he’s invented new high-end audio technology that he hopes will make its way to New Zealand’s film industry. “I think this visa is the smartest thing around,” adds Danny Lee, a new Global Impact Visa recipient and a partner with Blue Pool Capital, a hedge fund backed by Chinese tech billionaires. 

The idea for the program originated with Ayele. He’s a thin 31-year-old with a chill charisma that puts yurtfuls of people at ease. He was born in Addis Ababa during Ethiopia’s late-1980s famine, and his family lived in a 150-square-foot home with curtains for walls. He says he isn’t sure how it happened, but he ended up attending an Italian boarding school and did well. After graduating he spent a year working as a college consultant in Tanzania, helping top students in Africa get into American schools, then gave it a go himself—and was accepted to Harvard on a full scholarship. His first job on campus was cleaning dorm rooms. 

After graduating in 2011, Ayele took a job with a startup in Silicon Valley called Inflection, which was co-founded by Brian Monahan, a Harvard classmate. Among other things, the company ran Archives.com, which digitized and organized records from archaic city databases. Ayele got a job with Inflection, moved west, and began work as a college recruiter. Soon he was in charge of all hiring. “It was an incredible experience,” he says. “You test all your theories of what works and what doesn’t work and learn in a very fast way.”

Like many foreign-born workers in the Bay Area, Ayele needed an H-1B visa to stay in the U.S. But the feds decided his work and degree were not specialized enough to warrant the visa. Lawyers were hired; appeals were sent; congresspeople were asked for favors. Nothing worked. After about a year in San Francisco, Ayele had to leave, hide, or end up in jail. “That was the first experience I had where it felt like I’d done something wrong,” he says. “It was just this feeling of rejection. You gave me $250,000 in scholarships, and I can’t contribute back to the economy. It didn’t make sense to me.”

While contemplating his fate, Ayele came across a quotation from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” 

“That was a lightbulb moment,” Ayele says. He began plotting his next move with Monahan and his older brother, Matthew.

The Monahans grew up in Murphysboro, Ill., a corn-farming town of 8,000. They were academic all-stars, winning state championships in math, trivia, and scholastic decathlons. Even though they didn’t get a computer at home until Matthew was in high school, both boys eventually took to technology. Enrolled at the University of Southern California, Matthew wrote and sold SAT prep e-books. He dropped out in his sophomore year to pursue the business full time. “It was devastating for my parents, and my mom was crying,” he says. “She said, ‘What if this internet thing goes away?’” 

As the business evolved, Matthew and Brian, three years younger, began noticing other opportunities. People often searched online for things such as birth certificates, cemetery records, or a long-lost classmate, but Google didn’t seem to be pursuing ways to commercialize the answers, which were mostly stuck in city and county records departments with paper files or poorly digitized databases. The Monahans gathered the information and made it available for a fee. By the time Brian dropped out of Harvard, the business was doing $1 million in annual revenue. In 2012, Ancestry.com bought their records business for $100 million. “It was a cash infusion that changed our lives,” Matthew says. 

The Monahans had already been using proceeds from their company to visit New Zealand and buy up land. Their windfall made them start to think bigger. They began pulling out photos of their property and showing them to Ayele, convincing him that the farm should be his next stop, if for no other reason than to crash there for a while and clear his head. In February 2013, he moved there. 

The Monahans now own about 1,200 acres on the North Island of New Zealand. Their holdings include a regenerative cattle ranch with 200 cows, a forest with 150,000 trees, 100 acres of native wildlife reserve and several homes for family and employees. It’s all located on the hilly fringes of a city called Upper Hutt, known for its chilly weather, middling economy, and recent spates of gang violence. It’s beautiful, but it’s not the first place a multimillionaire might pick as the headquarters for an idealistic, change-the-world operation. “The Wellington people think we’re crazy,” Brian says.

When Ayele first arrived at the property, he had to fend for himself, as the Monahans were still running their company and splitting time between New Zealand and the U.S. He shadowed the neighbors, learning how to plant trees, chop wood, and start a fire. He also went into Wellington to meet with people in the technology and business communities and research startup hubs at a local university. 

Ayele and the Monahans began inviting their friends from California and elsewhere, eventually turning these visits into an annual event they called New Frontiers. Twenty to 30 people would show up and camp for a couple of weeks, eat food grown on the land, and talk, generally about creating a new model for entrepreneurship. Kiwis started turning up, too. Eventually a guy from the government arrived uninvited. “I met him at the event, and he’s like, ‘I’m Matt Hoskin from immigration. Where are you from?’” Ayele says. “My first reaction was, ‘What have I done wrong?’ That’s how my mind had been trained from the U.S.”

Instead of being harassed, Ayele was co-opted as a de facto immigration recruiter. A few months after meeting Hoskin, he traveled to Austin for the South by Southwest conference, where he ended up manning a booth on New Zealand’s behalf, pitching the country to techies. Things moved to the next level in 2015, when Nigel Bickle, then the head of immigration for New Zealand, visited New Frontiers and started a conversation about a new immigration program. A year later, New Zealand’s government approved the introduction of the Global Impact Visa. In May 2017, the first batch of 311 applications arrived from 55 countries.

The visa was designed to solve a few problems. People applying to start a business in New Zealand must often prove upfront that they have the funds to sustain the operation. This is tricky for those who aren’t quite sure about their business prospects and might exclude some of the riskiest ventures. Also, New Zealand is a very long way from Silicon Valley, New York, Berlin, or any other major tech hub, which makes it more challenging to persuade people to pack up their life and give it a go. With the Global Impact Visa, foreigners can treat their New Zealand adventure almost as a thought experiment. 

Not everyone has been a fan of the visa, or of Ayele and the Monahans. By the time the visa was established, New Zealand had become known as the favored spot for tech billionaires looking to build doomsday bunkers, and Kiwis didn’t like the idea of rich outsiders buying their way in. The strange domes and other structures going up on the Monahans’ land didn’t help. In June 2017, Stuff.co.nz, a news site, published a two-part investigative piece on the brothers called “The Americans.” The article quoted neighbors who said they were sure the Monahans, who now live on the property full time, were secret jerks. 

 “People on the outside don’t really understand it, and I don’t blame them,” says Denise, the Monahans’ mom. “But I think the concerns will move away once they understand we’re here to stay.”

The visa be-in used to remain confined to the Monahan property, but it’s grown into something larger. The visa holders do their thing among the yurt for a few days, then close out their time at a three-day conference. It’s the same New Frontiers idea from the old days, only now it’s a mega event that hundreds of people from New Zealand and around the world attend as well, making it one of the country’s biggest tech conferences. The latest Hillary Fellows have a chance to lay out the projects they intend to pursue in front of a wider audience, which includes potential investors and collaborators. 

This supersize version of New Frontiers, held at a faded horse racing track, begins with a traditional Maori invocation ceremony. The visa holders take their seats first, in a large auditorium with the men in the front rows and the women behind them. As the other attendees make their way into the room, the yurt people rise from their seats and begin chanting, stomping, and shaking their hands wildly. This goes on for some time, followed by speeches and other greetings. Then everyone breaks for tea and biscuits. After an hour or so, the conference begins in earnest, with a welcome from Ayele and the presentations from the visa holders.

Rowe helps guide the fellows through the proceedings, reminding them of the words to songs and the meaning behind their actions. This is the first group of Global Impact Visa holders Rowe has worked with closely, and a week with them has left him impressed. “It’s been awesome,” he says. “There’s a total openness to understand and connect in authentic ways. I have total belief that it is what it is when they say that this is a really good garden to plant and to nurture. We are all about accepting people into Aotearoa, as long as they can develop an understanding of the land and its importance to the indigenous people.”

Soon, Ayele and the Monahans will welcome a new crop of Hillary Fellows to their farm. Some of the program’s first alumni have already built up substantial operations around new space technology–Spacebase, for example—whereas others have excelled in the arts. Ayele admits it will take a long time to figure out whether this experiment will have the desired effects on New Zealand’s culture and business, but he remains hopeful it will become a model for others. “Entrepreneurial success has been extremely skewed in the direction of building monolithic companies where the winners take all,” he says. “It’s stifling creativity and innovation when there’s no room for new ideas and things to emerge. I don’t know if we can reverse that as a society, but we’re trying to help plant the seeds of doing things a different way.”

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