He built a viral game at 14. Now he’s creating rental millionaires and taking on U-Haul with Lockii.

In this episode of TechMates, Hendrik and Mark sit down with Bodhi Hawken, founder and CEO of Lockii — and the conversation starts exactly where you'd expect: a banned school game, two terabytes of copies, and a school IT guy hitting delete while Bodhi watched. From there, Bodhi traces the path from teaching himself Unity at 14, to building a paddleboard vending machine for his uncle at 17, to coding nightclub bottle service software from the back of LA clubs at 19, to founding Lockii — a fully automated rental platform already turning side hustles into million-dollar businesses.

The core thesis is simple but big: rentals are the next generation of e-commerce, and there's still no Shopify for them. Lockii is building exactly that. Whether it's mechanics garages in California scaling to 50 locations, trailer operators going from $0 to $10K revenue in two months, or floating saunas in Europe — Lockii automates the entire process so operators never touch a booking manually. One customer put it best: switching back to legacy software would save $800/month on software — and cost $30,000/month in staff.But what makes this conversation stand out is Bodhi's obsession with quality over speed. In a world where anyone can vibe-code a feature overnight, Bodhi runs 10,000 test bookings before releasing anything, tracks a "bad day" metric for every operator and every customer, and rebuilds features from scratch until they actually work. His take: taste and quality are the last real moat — and they're exactly what AI can't replicate yet.

🏄 The Paddleboard Vending Machine: The accidental origin story of Lockii — and why his uncle's request to automate paddleboard rentals became the seed of something much bigger.

🔑 How Lockii Actually Works: Booking, verification, IoT locks, pin codes, e-bike power cutoffs — handing a physical item to a stranger without being there.

📈 The Shopify for Rentals: Why rentals are the next generation of e-commerce and how Lockii is turning one-trailer operators into million-dollar businesses.

🎯 Quality as the Last Moat: Why Bodhi tests 10,000 bookings before releasing a feature — and why taste is the one thing AI still can't replace.

🎧 Listen On:

YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ghhpj9fekuI

Spotify: https://bit.ly/3TttiM7

Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/4xTmPZg

Connect with the Guest:

Bodhi LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bodhi-hawken/

Lockii Website: https://lockii.app

🔗 Learn more about NZVC: https://www.nzvc.co.nz

Mark Pavlyukovskyy — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavlyukovskyy/

Hendrik Remigereau — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrik-remigereau-09a03067/

00:00 — Intro

01:09 — The Game That Got Banned

03:19 — Learning to Code at 14

07:17 — How Lockii Started

11:51 — The Shopify for Rentals

14:15 — The Future of Rental Businesses

19:50 — Building Software for Nightclubs

24:10 — Lessons from Nightclubs

33:11 — How Bodhi Got His First Startup Job

34:54 — How Lockii Became a Business

38:28 — Building a Reliable Rental Platform

42:09 — How Lockii Works 45:05 — The Hardest Things to Rent

47:50 — Why Lockii Isn't a Marketplace

49:38 — Creating Rental Millionaires

55:56 — Competing with U-Haul

1:04:18 — Why Rentals Are the Future

1:05:40 — AI, Product Quality & Founder Advice

If this episode made you rethink what the next generation of e-commerce looks like, hit Like and Subscribe. Drop a comment — do you think rentals will replace dropshipping as the go-to side hustle?

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