“The best founders are the ones who have resilience and persistence”. That's the lesson Simon Leckey learned after leaving the corporate world to build a startup, and it's the mindset he now helps founders develop as a coach for Startup Aotearoa and Startup Queenstown Lakes. 

 

 

Hi Simon - give us your yarn. Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a coach for Startup Aotearoa and Startup Queenstown Lakes, a part-time ski instructor, and a founder! I do a lot of coaching at the very early stage - and hopefully getting founders to a point where they’re pitch-ready. 

 

 

There’s a lot there to choose from - how did you get here?

So, I got here back in 2018: I was working in big corporate, had a midlife crisis and decided to throw it all in and have a go at doing a tech startup. We got to the last 20 with  Tech Stars, pitched to their board, and we didn’t get! That gave me an awful lot of learnings about moving from a corporate life bound by rules and risk aversion, to a space where you’re constantly trying and failing, trying and failing… the peaks are way higher, the troughs are way lower, and that was a major mindset shift for me. 

 

 

How often do you see founders struggling with that same transition?

I would say it’s probably 50/50. In this region, people have a lot of side hustles going on, so it’s not necessarily something that they aren’t used to. Having said that, over the past year I’m getting a lot more people coming from a corporate background who are looking at moving on and doing their own thing - particularly within the AI space, and the opportunity that it offers. For those people, the guidance is often the emotional piece of it - there’s this fear of stepping outside something predictable - how do you cope with that, you know?

 

 

Once someone has taken the leap into founding, what tends to hold them back?

There’s the ‘I don’t want to share my idea’ mindset - thinking someone will steal it - which is a mindset that I definitely want to help people break. People don’t typically have the energy to steal an idea and do something about it - especially if you’re moving faster than anyone else who’s going to hear your idea; you’re already ahead of the curve, you’ve already put in all this work.

The other challenge I see a lot is the validation piece. Helping founders understand the value of it, helping them get to a point where they can seek out that validation, be prepared for the tough feedback, growing a thick skin. You’ve got to change your mindset from ‘everyone I know is telling me this is a great idea’ to a mindset where you can absorb all of the good alongside all of the bad. I think people find that transition particularly hard. I know that for me, it took a long time to be in a space where all feedback was good feedback. 

That’s so important because you begin learning how to pivot and realign your concept to where the real problem lies. It also means you learn how to answer the difficult questions. 

 

 

On answering those difficult questions - what does that look like when it comes to pitching?

My mantra is, your pitch deck answers the difficult questions, and a good pitch deck will guide the investor to ask you the questions you want to answer during the Q&A session; though, don’t let the investors know you have gamed them ;)!!. 

 

 

Moving away from the coaching nitty-gritty: this is your chance to pump up the tyres of the Lakes region - what makes it so great?!

There’s great growth projected for the Lakes area, and there’s a surprisingly high density of founders within the region. You’ve got the likes of Scannable, First Table (currently mid-raising US$10M) and Race Ranger (heralded as the international gold standard for triathlon tracking) - for a small region, that’s pretty compelling. 

The other aspect is the huge number of people moving into the area - not just from New Zealand, but from overseas. There’s the lifestyle that definitely draws people to the region - the outdoor sports, the environment here. You’ve got people who have founded and exited coming in - again, for the snowsports, the mountain biking, all the rest of it, and so the opportunity for cross-fertilisation and wider networks is growing significantly. 

 

 

And to close us out - where do you think New Zealand’s biggest opportunities in the startup space lie?

I think we’ve got enough maturity in Deep Tech to globally leverage our expertise and successes for other founders; and to also attract more ambitious investors. We’ve got academic depth and global recognition - just look at RocketLab. The second opportunity is about a mindset change: move to “can this scale globally?” and away from “win in New Zealand, then scale to Australia in two years”. We really need to support the founders with big visions through meaningful financial runway and encouragement - no founder wants to spend their time perpetually figuring out how to deliver the next capital raise - they want their time to focus on product and market growth!