Mind MiddlewareA Mind Middleware conversation
⚠️ Content warning: This article includes reflections on suicide, childhood abuse, domestic violence, grief and cancer. Please read with care. In Aotearoa New Zealand you can call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.
🪶 Te reo Māori terms are used throughout, as Dan uses them. A short glossary sits at the foot of the episode show notes.
I'd been wanting to record this kōrero for a long time. Dan Walker is someone I admire — not for what he's done in tech, though that list is long, but for the way he carries himself: with heart, intention, and a connection to his identity that nothing seems to shake. He opened our conversation not with a CV but with a karakia, and an acknowledgement of Matariki, of the loved ones he's lost this past year, and of the gifts still in front of him — three healthy children, his wife Michelle, his whānau. "Only the living can plant seeds for the future," he said. That's the spirit the whole episode is planted in.
The kid who didn't know where he stood
Dan grew up in Christchurch, the son of a Māori mum and a Pākehā dad from Scottish and Irish lines, a long way from his Taranaki roots. On paper, plenty of kids have that story. What it meant for Dan was an identity crisis that quietly derailed his school years. He didn't have a strong connection to his language, his tikanga, his marae — "these really important things that help connect you to who you are." He felt like the other: mokemoke, not quite belonging in te ao Māori or te ao Pākehā. An awkward kid, an easy target for bullying. And, as he puts it with hard-won clarity, "you can only reject your identity for so long before it starts playing out in negative ways."
The way it played out, for Dan, was work. He adopted corporate culture as his culture — "that was my religion, my be-all and end-all" — and out-worked everyone. It carried him from a part-time job at Dick Smith Electronics up through store manager, area manager, national sales manager, then Samsung, Dell and Microsoft. The work ethic is still there, and he's honest that it's double-edged: "It's almost a beast within me. I can work until I drop, get no sleep, and just keep going."
Redundancy as a doorway
The first crack in that religion came when Samsung made him redundant. He'd been national sales manager for consumer electronics, his second son had just been born, and he and Michelle were straining to save a deposit for a house in Auckland. "No matter how hard I'd worked — and I was putting in the hours — they laid it on me: nothing you can do." It was the first of many redundancies he'd experience in global tech, but the first one cut deepest, because it exposed the lie at the centre of the work-as-everything bargain. "There's more to life than working 24/7." That was the start of him searching for something bigger — and finding it where he'd left it, in te ao Māori.
What he found wasn't nostalgia. It was a wellbeing framework, ancient and available to everyone: a Polynesian inheritance of connection to the moana, to the world, expressed through karakia, waiata, and a relationship to place that turns Western assumptions inside out. Business, Dan notes, treats land as a resource to buy, subdivide and profit from. The Māori and Indigenous view starts somewhere else entirely: imagine that land is your grandmother, and that you descend from her. You don't own her; you protect her for the generations to come. "I can't own my mountain, Taranaki. I can only own my connection to it." It's not just philosophy, either — Taranaki Maunga has now been granted legal personhood, so that, in Dan's words, "no one can own it, because it owns itself."
Unapologetically Māori
By the time Microsoft came calling, Dan was nearly 40 and "comfortable enough in my skin" to make a decision: "I'm going to be unapologetically Māori. I shouldn't hide it and cover it anymore." He tested it in his final interview with the country manager, Vanessa: "I can't start here unless I have a pōwhiri." To his surprise, she said yes, and organised it. He started in the right way, welcomed with his whānau onto the company.
That openness led somewhere remarkable. Dan helped grow Indigenous at Microsoft from a few dozen people to over four thousand globally, and chaired it for three and a half years. It also led to breakfast with Satya Nadella — and to Dan, against every instinct, gifting Microsoft's CEO a pounamu. He nearly talked himself out of it a dozen times, right up to the morning. But he did it, with a few words about what greenstone means and where it comes from, and he could see it land. "When we embrace culture truly, it connects at a deeper level. It surpasses all the financial, share-price stuff. It hits them in the heart." The next day, at the airport, an email arrived — from Satya, just to Dan — saying he'd cherish it. Dan wants to frame it. Two months later, at a company all-hands, he watched the CEO wearing the pounamu, making no fuss about it. "A piece of New Zealand on him."
There's a leadership lesson tucked inside that story, and it cuts both ways. Dan is quick to say he doesn't know what the gift meant to Satya — but he knows exactly what it meant to him. "Koha is more about the gifting than the receiver. To be able to give someone something — that's about mana for you." Good leadership, it turns out, is partly about letting people give.
The morning the water resets
Ask Dan where he goes when he hits a wall, and the answer is literal: the sea. He lives five minutes from the water at Stanmore Bay, and most mornings he gets in. "If our first mother is the land, our first father is the water." It's a cold hit and an energy boost, but mostly it's about being in the elements. He acknowledges the atua — Ranginui the sky, Papatūānuku the earth under his feet, Tangaroa and Hinemoana the sea, Tāwhirimātea the wind on his skin — and the maunga: Rangitoto across the water, Taranaki his mountain, Aoraki where he grew up. Then he sets an intention for the day. "The water can take away our mamae. It drains out of us into the water and dissipates. That's the healing power of water. And it's free."
He's careful not to prescribe. Therapy, retreats, counselling — all good, all different for each person. What he's describing is a structure for purging what weighs on you, and he knows mine is making music, and someone else's is a walk in the forest, or a call to a friend. Those, for Dan, are multipliers stacked on top of the base ritual. But the deeper point he makes is about protecting your moemoeā — your dreams — from forces that quietly rewrite them. Social media, television, even a well-meaning friend who tells you you're looking old: "all these things that make us feel we're not enough." Sit with where your aspirations actually come from, he says, and you'll often find they were never yours.
The waka, and the whānau on board
When I asked Dan for a metaphor for his relationship with work — the question I ask every guest — he'd come prepared, having heard me spring it on Frazer. His answer is a waka hourua, a double-hulled canoe, tied to the Aotea waka his ancestors arrived on some 600 to 700 years ago. He anchors himself in a whakataukī from Turi: "I'm never lost in this world, because I'm a seed born of greatness, descended from a line of chiefs." When he walks into rooms that make him wonder what he's doing there — breakfast with the CEO, say — he switches into it. "I'm never lost. I am who I am, wherever I am."
But a waka can capsize, and Dan is honest that his nearly has. "It's choppy right now, losing so many colleagues." His whānau are on the waka with him, and as captain, if he doesn't tend to them, it goes over. That's led to a quiet revolution in his marriage. He and Michelle run the household like co-CEOs — school runs, after-school programmes, feeding kids — but they'd lost the connection piece at times. So they made it intentional: once a month, now their eldest is 14, they book a hotel and go away, just the two of them. Dinner, breakfast, each other, their dreams. "There's a cost, but it's the best cost. It's an investment." It's not a detail tacked onto a work conversation; for Dan it is the work conversation. "If we're not good, I'm not good at work."
Wayfinding: let the island find you
The image that will stay with me longest came when we returned to my friend — the one who'd asked whether there was light at the end of the tunnel. Dan reached for navigation. Māori crossed the Pacific without instruments, reading the stars, the manu, the wind and the water. He has his own guiding signs: people who steady him, and his children, especially his son Joshie, who beat cancer and carries none of the inferiority complex Dan grew up with. "They're my future in living form — but also my future self that I want to be."
And then the line. The wayfinding, Dan said, "wasn't about finding the island. It was being in the right space — wairua, tinana, hinengaro, a full-person perspective — so the island finds you." Help the island find you, but get yourself into the right space first. For everyone in choppy water — the redundancies, the isolation he rightly notes is everywhere now, not just in executive corner offices — it reframes the whole task. You don't have to chase the shore. You have to become the kind of vessel the shore can reach.
He extends the same grace to anyone whose work-waka has capsized. Your waka is still there. Right-size it, climb back on. "Maybe it's not this waka — the Microsoft waka. But my waka is something so much bigger and more ancestral than my job." Which is the same truth I keep landing on from the other direction: your purpose can't be the job, because there'll come a day the job tells you it isn't who you are.
Hongi the taniwha
The most courageous stretch of the conversation was also the hardest. Dan talks about the masks — high-performing Dan, perfect-dad Dan, perfect-husband Dan — built up over years of feeling like the other. The danger of the mask, he says, is precise and devastating: "If I receive praise, you're not praising me — you're praising the mask. Any love I get, you're not loving me — you're loving the mask."
Behind the mask, for Dan, is a taniwha. He explains the word generously for those who don't know it: not just a sea monster, but a spiritual protector, often invoked to keep people away from real danger — a stretch of river where the current runs deep and people have drowned. "There's a taniwha there, don't go." His own taniwha was sparked in childhood. After his parents split, he was beaten by his mum's partner — "proper hidings," for leaving a toy out or a light on — to the point where he was taken off his mum. The anxiety that lit then is still in him: walking on eggshells, the meeting-room voice that says you don't belong here, these people are too flash for you. Grief feeds it too; losing his brother Tohu, his best mate, to brain cancer was one of those pivotal, capsizing moments.
What he's learned — a gift from his tuakana, Whetu — is not to fight the taniwha but to greet it. "The taniwha is me, and I'm part of it. Hongi the taniwha." When we hongi, we exchange breath, we connect at the level of mauri, of life force. To press your forehead to your own darker self, rather than exile it, is the work of a lifetime, and Dan doesn't pretend it's finished. But the two halves that once warred in him — the one that could turn angry, or sink into depression and hopelessness — have become, through a relentless focus on connection, more like one person. He offered it as a koha, a gift to the conversation: we're connected, and whatever happens to us out there, we carry tools in here.
You are connected
I close every episode the same way: if you could whisper one thing to everyone in tech tomorrow morning, what would it be? Dan didn't reach for a productivity hack. "You are connected — to me, to everyone." Not just to other people, but to the world around us, and to our ancestors and our descendants, in every direction at once. He thinks of the people reaching the end of their careers who never became CEOs but who, by any measure that matters, made it — happy, with good families and a lot of friends, still richly connected. "Those connections are out there. People have just got to reach out."
For an episode that travels through abuse, grief, redundancy and anxiety, it lands somewhere remarkably full of hope. That's Dan. He'd want me to end where he ended, with Matariki — a time to honour those who've gone, to live fully while we're here, and to plant seeds for the year ahead. So: let the island find you. And in the meantime, reach out.
Mind Middleware is a podcast about the invisible space between doing and being — honest conversations about mental health in tech. If this resonated, share it with someone you care about. And if you're struggling, you're not alone: in Aotearoa New Zealand, call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.**