From Velocity to moonshots: learning to fail successfully

A decade after entering the University of Auckland’s Velocity entrepreneurship programme, Hayley Yu has built a career in some of the world’s most ambitious technology environments.

Since graduating with a conjoint Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Arts, Hayley has worked at Microsoft and Google, and spent several years at X, Alphabet’s experimental innovation lab known for tackling large, complex problems.

Through it all, she says the most important lesson she has learned about innovation has little to do with technology.

“The biggest barrier to being comfortable moving in unknown territory is your ego. When you’re working on an innovation to solve the world’s biggest problems, there’s probably, by definition, going to be very few experts.

"That means you need to have the mindset of being willing to try, and test, and iterate. You have to become comfortable with the idea of failing, then trying again. The times when I’ve seen people get stuck on their ideas and be unable to move forward is when there is a lot of ego involved.”

Hayley says resilience was instilled into her from her days at Velocity and as a young entrepreneur for her first start-up, Clove, a crowd-sharing food security platform connecting home chefs.

The venture went on to win the Microsoft Imagine Cup in New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region, opening the door to Hayley’s first role at Microsoft in Melbourne, and then Google in Sydney.

“We’re very scrappy in New Zealand and we do have that number 8 wire mentality,” she says. “When you grow up working in start-ups here, you learn to figure things out with limited resources. You learn to make cold calls or approach strangers and create your own opportunities. You’d be surprised how often people will say yes if you just ask.”

One of the opportunities that Hayley seized with both hands was the chance to work at X, a development facility often referred to as ‘the Moonshot Factory’, operating under Alphabet, Google's parent company. X has been behind the development of companies like Waymo (autonomous vehicles) and Verily (precision health AI solutions).

Hayley’s interest in addressing global issues saw her join X’s project Chorus, which aims to improve visibility across global supply chains. Through the Covid-19 pandemic, Hayley’s work was focused on tracking vaccine shipments in New Zealand. The system monitored deliveries from arrival in the country through to pharmacies and hospitals, helping ensure that vaccines remained within strict temperature limits.

Outside of vaccines, the data Chorus has gathered on global supply chains, combined with its analytics and machine learning models, enables any company involved in global logistics to operate more efficiently.

“The goal is to reduce waste,” Hayley says. “Waste of time, waste of resources, and waste of goods.”

When the project, now named ChorusView, launched as an independent company in 2025, Hayley took the opportunity to step back from X and consider her next steps. Since then, she has travelled ​the world ​and completed a three-month stint at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, where she is now based.

She’d like her next move to combine her passion for using innovative technologies to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. That was what initially drew her to X.​​ ​

“That’s where Clove came from; a desire to bring healthy food to communities.”

Hayley’s enthusiasm for a new direction comes from that same resilience and willingness to continuously learn that has fuelled her previous successes.

“To me, true innovation is as much about being willing to reinvent yourself and challenge what you think you know.

"At 32, going to culinary school and working in a kitchen means starting from the bottom again. It’s a long way from launching a product with Alphabet, but I want to be open to new ideas and to the process of being a learner again.

"That’s when you’re the most creative. Wherever I end up career-wise, I hope I continue to be open to different people, ideas and cultures.”