How to Lead a Software Technology Company as a Non-Tech Founder

NOTE: This session will be delivered ONLINE via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent to all Registrants ahead of the event

You do not need to become a software engineer to lead a technology company, but you do need to understand enough about technology to make decisions about one.

AI has made it dramatically easier for people to generate software, prototype ideas and start building products. But producing software is only one part of building a technology company.

Someone still has to decide how the system should work, what should be built first, what should be left out, which tools should be used, how much a feature should reasonably cost, whether an engineer’s proposed solution makes sense, and what “finished” actually means. For non-technical founders, those decisions become very difficult when software remains a black box.

In this session, Mercy Nekesa, founder of Zorentia and Expert in Residence at Macquarie University Incubator, will explore why Zorentia believes founders need direct experience building technology before they can confidently delegate and lead technical work. She’ll demonstrate how Zorentia is designed around that principle: giving people practical exposure to the systems, tools and decisions involved in building technology while they complete real projects.

That approach is already being applied across entrepreneurship programs. Macquarie University Incubator uses Zorentia with founders in its programs, while through Zorentia’s partnership with UNSW Business School’s BizQuest program, high school students use Zorentia systems to develop their ideas, build their pitch decks and prepare to present their ventures.

You’ll explore:

• Why describing what you want a product to do is different from understanding what has to be built
• How technical knowledge changes conversations about scope, budgets and engineering trade-offs
• Why Zorentia requires founders to experience an end-to-end software build before progressing into ongoing technical advisory through Zorentia Office
• How Build Studio and Zorentia’s project-based learning environment expose people to tools and concepts such as system design, prompting, code, Git, deployment and modern AI building tools
• How repeated exposure to different technologies develops the judgement needed to work more effectively with engineers and technical teams
• How Zorentia is already being used across entrepreneurship programs to help people learn through producing real outcomes
• A live demonstration of the current Zorentia platform and how it turns technical learning into tangible outcomes
• The goal is not to turn every founder into an engineer.
• It is to make sure that if technology is central to the company you are building, you are capable of understanding, questioning and leading the systems your company depends on.