Deep experience.
One conviction.

Andrew has been building and running serious technology since 1989 — from programming mainframes for meat processing plants to managing business-critical infrastructure for New Zealand's largest financial institutions, including BNZ, AMP and ASB: hundreds of servers, thousands of users, environments where failure was never an option.

Then he did something unusual with that experience: he took it home. Through Curve Technology (founded 2001) and Mua Digital, Andrew has built technology from Wairoa for more than fifteen years — including award-winning interactive touch-table software, recognised with the Living Hawke's Bay Community Contribution award at the 2019 Pan Pac Hawke's Bay Business Awards.

And he lives what Mariko builds: seventeen years off-grid — solar, batteries, sustainable living, and more than sixty fruit and nut trees. Resilience isn't a product concept to Andrew; it's how his household runs.

A committed data-sovereignty advocate who has spent his career connecting communities with technology, Andrew founded Mariko on a simple conviction: world-class resilient technology can be built from the regions — and the communities who generate environmental data should hold the intelligence, and the value, it creates. That conviction runs through everything on this site.

Roy has been a pioneer of virtual and mixed reality since the late 1990s — before most of the world had heard of it. With a Master of Science from the University of Auckland and a PhD in Engineering from Lund University, he founded the Virtual Reality Centre at Lund University in Sweden, then returned to New Zealand and founded Imersia, one of the country's first augmented reality companies, later serving as its Chief Research Officer.

Roy is an advocate of calm technology — the idea that the best technology works quietly in the background of life rather than demanding attention — and continues to shape New Zealand's emerging-technology thinking as an industry advisor and lecturer at academyEX, helping deliver the Master of Technological Futures, and as a Royal Society Café Scientifique speaker.

At Mariko, Roy is the creator of Reality2 (R2), the resilient communications fabric at the heart of the ecosystem — and the epistemological thinking behind Thurisaz: that a claim earns trust not from reputation, but by surviving honest attempts to refute it.

David has spent twenty-five years in project management, product development and business process transformation, with a specialty most consultants avoid: the unglamorous, foundational systems that determine whether a growing organisation scales or stalls. In his own words, he builds the "boring stuff" — because the boring stuff is what you have to get right to grow.

He has worked extensively with successful New Zealand companies, implementing the processes, systems and internal capability that made them leaders in their industries — always with the same progression: understand how the business actually works, design processes that fit its industry and maturity, implement the systems to support them, and build the capability so improvement continues without him.

David also gives that thinking away: since 2016 he has helped run Hardware Meetup NZ across New Zealand — a community for people who build physical products, dedicated to a future where any kid can pursue STEM — alongside his daughter Mikayla, a mechatronics engineer and twice BrightSparks inventing champion, who hosts and chairs it.

David's Business Operating System is the backbone of Mariko's AI Operations Transformation: the discipline that redesigns an organisation's information flows and decisions first — so AI has something coherent to operate across.

Arran is a chartered accountant of thirty-five years and a principal at Auckland advisory firm Gilligan Sheppard, with a background spanning accounting and law and projects delivered in more than thirty countries. From 2010 to 2019 he headed an Asia-Pacific business with $5.4 billion in turnover, and he has served as a director of around forty companies — including US-listed ones.

For twenty-five of those years he has worked with startups, helping New Zealand organisations — from hi-tech to horticulture — reach and win in new markets, particularly across Asia-Pacific, and connecting international investors with New Zealand opportunities. He has built a career on the belief that ideas born here can compete anywhere — provided the structures, relationships and market entry are done right.

At Mariko, Arran keeps the whole venture financially on the straight and narrow: governance, finance, and the commercial structures and market pathways that let technology built in Wairoa travel the world.

Patrick is Managing Partner of law firm Stace Hammond, advising across corporate governance, venture and investment structuring, banking and finance, international trade, intellectual property and innovation, agribusiness and social enterprise. His career ranges from devising New Zealand's first immigration-qualifying property-backed residential investment fund to representing clients before the United States Department of Defense in Washington D.C.

Just as significant is his depth in Te Ao Māori: Patrick was lead advisor to priority claimants in the 1987 Māori Council settlement, the original filing advisor for the Waikato River claim, and remains an advisor to charities including the Kaitiakitanga Charitable Trust. That grounding in kaitiakitanga and partnership matters at Mariko, where working alongside iwi, hapū, marae and communities is foundational, not decorative.

His approach mirrors Mariko's own: understand the objective first, then clear the commercial and legal path to it — practical solutions, not process.