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.

• About the Presenter:

Mercy Nekesa is a computer scientist, technical founder and founder of Zorentia, a Sydney-based technology company helping non-technical people learn how systems are built by building real things themselves. Mercy serves as an Expert in Residence at Macquarie Incubator, advising founders on system architecture, product strategy and technical execution, and her platform Zorentia is used to support founders throughout Macquarie Incubator's entrepreneurship programs. Zorentia also partners with UNSW Business School through BizQuest, where high school students use Zorentia systems as part of the entrepreneurship program to develop their ideas, create pitch decks and present their ventures.

Mercy holds Computer Science degrees from UNSW and the State University of New York at Buffalo and was the 2025 first-place winner of the UNSW New Wave program, supported by Westpac. Before Zorentia, Mercy founded Raining Vegetables, an agricultural venture that grew to work with more than 7,000 farmers across East Africa. Through the company, she built partnerships with organisations locally and internationally, including Belgium-based partners, Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO), and the Agribusiness Development Centre, an initiative supported by the Rabo Foundation and DFCU Bank. Today, her work focuses on a question becoming increasingly important as AI makes software easier to produce: if more people can build technology, how do we help them develop the technical judgement to build and lead it well?

A recording of this session WILL be made available on our youtube channel.