He Went Viral as "the TikTok Founder Guy." A Stranger Recognised Him at a Bar and He Deleted the Account That Night.

Freddie McKenzie used to run VIVID, a production agency in Auckland that shot campaigns including Jetstar's pandemic-era "Travel Here While the Rest of the World Can't," filmed at Piha beach during the brief window when travel opened between New Zealand and Australia. Running an agency taught him where the real problems in a services business actually surface — and it wasn't in any dashboard. "I learned most of the biggest problems that were happening inside my agency through my clients giving me a grilling over email," he says. That observation became the seed for Manifest, his current company: AI that replaces agency timesheets by inferring effort directly rather than asking staff to track billable hours, and just closed a $2 million pre-seed in a brutal funding market for anything SaaS-shaped.

The tool he won't let AI touch

For someone building an AI company, McKenzie is pointed about where he draws the line. "You don't need to automate your inbox," he says. "Just write an email and speak from the heart." It's a small, specific refusal, but it fits everything else he says about the category: the real signal in a business comes from unfiltered, human contact — the angry client email, the honest conversation — and that's exactly the layer he's most wary of letting a model smooth over.

Recognised at a bar, deleted that night

He's also candid about a phase of his own founder journey he now finds embarrassing. McKenzie briefly ran a "Day in the life of a 25-year-old VC-backed tech founder" TikTok — exactly the genre of content he now argues is actively corroding B2B brands' long-term audience quality. It ended abruptly. "Someone came up to me and they're like, 'You're the guy from TikTok,'" he says. "And I was like, I am the f—ing guy from TikTok. That's me. And that was the day that I turned it off." He deleted the account that night and hasn't gone back, calling the whole phase tacky in hindsight.

"We are not solving a sexy problem. We're solving the worst problem inside agencies. Find something that's not sexy — something where 'this is the way that we do things' is a clear signal there's a problem to be solved there."

The myth he's most tired of hearing

McKenzie's sharpest industry argument is a direct rebuttal of a narrative he thinks has become lazy shorthand. "I reckon the SaaS apocalypse is a myth," he says. "It's something journalists love to throw around to scare investors." His read on the real failure mode isn't that AI is killing software businesses — it's that most AI-agent projects never get past the demo stage. "Agent projects are being abandoned," he says, "and they're not being picked up. They're really just being used to trial and to create LinkedIn content." He recalls standing in front of two thousand people and asking how many were actually using AI agents in production: three hands went up. The gap, in his telling, isn't between SaaS and AI. It's between what gets posted about AI and what actually ships.