Building a Māori-Owned EdTech Company: Why the Vision Didn’t Change

There is a difference between changing your vision and changing your strategy.

I have had to learn that while building Iconic Games.

The bigger vision has always been ambitious: gaming, learning, technology, connection and, eventually, physical spaces where those things can come together.

For a long time, I thought the biggest version of the idea had to come first.

It did not.

The original vision was bigger than the resources available

Physical spaces are expensive.

Buildings, fit-outs, technology, equipment, insurance, staff and ongoing operating costs create a level of capital requirement that is difficult for an early-stage founder to carry.

That does not mean the idea is wrong.

It means the sequence matters.

Through Te Aka mentoring, one of the most useful questions became: how can Iconic Games prove the kaupapa digitally, build credibility and create momentum before trying to fund the capital-heavy version of the vision?

That reframing was significant.

The goal stopped being “find enough money to build everything”.

The question became:

What can I build now that proves where this could go?

Entrepreneurship under uncertainty is rarely a straight line

There is research language for some of this.

Entrepreneurship scholar Saras Sarasvathy describes effectuation as a way of making decisions under uncertainty that begins with available means rather than a fully predictable future. Instead of asking only, “What resources would the perfect plan require?”, effectual reasoning also asks what can be created with what is available now.

Another concept, entrepreneurial bricolage, describes how resource-constrained firms create new possibilities by recombining resources already at hand.

Neither concept means planning does not matter.

They point to something more practical: early-stage entrepreneurship often requires action before certainty exists.

That feels familiar.

Building creates evidence

A working prototype tells you things a pitch deck cannot.

Do people understand it?

Do they play?

Do they come back?

Where do they get stuck?

What do they enjoy?

What sounds good in a strategy document but falls apart when a real person tries it?

Those answers are valuable.

That is why the digital-first direction is not simply a cheaper version of the physical vision.

It is a way to create evidence.

Mīharo: Escape the Arcade tests cooperative play.

The Showdown tests social multiplayer entertainment.

Te Reo Quest tests short, repeated and interactive language learning.

Mīharo Ahau and Mīharo Kura are testing a much larger idea: what happens when learning sits inside a persistent game world rather than outside it as a separate activity?

Each project teaches us something.

A Māori-owned technology company should not have to copy somebody else’s path

There is another part of this that matters to me.

A Māori-owned EdTech company in New Zealand does not need to look like a Silicon Valley startup transplanted into Aotearoa.

The ambition can be large without the identity becoming generic.

Place matters.

Whānau matters.

Relationships matter.

The communities the products are intended to serve matter.

The way we build should be allowed to reflect that.

That does not mean using culture as branding.

It means understanding that a business can be technically ambitious and still be grounded in where it comes from.

The long-term vision still exists

The physical dream has not disappeared.

If anything, building digital products first gives it a more credible pathway.

A future Iconic Games space would be stronger if it was connected to a functioning digital ecosystem, a community of players, tested intellectual property and a brand people already know.

Digital does not have to replace physical.

It can help make physical possible.

That is the part I did not understand at first.

The order now looks different

The current order is much more practical:

Build something useful.

Put it in front of people.

Listen.

Improve it.

Build evidence.

Grow the audience.

Strengthen the business.

Then take on larger bets.

There will almost certainly be more pivots.

That word does not scare me as much anymore.

A pivot is only a failure if it moves you away from the problem you actually want to solve.

Sometimes it is simply a better route.

The vision behind Iconic Games is still big.

We just stopped pretending we had to build the final version first.