Stuart Leckie
Director, Military, Defence & Dual-Use Technologies, L-SPARK
Dual-use deals fail between sectors, not inside them. Stewart has worked in each one.
Selling into defence requires a founder, a public servant, an investor and a military user to understand each other. Most people in this market have spent their career on one side of that exchange. Stewart has spent his on several.
He served eight years in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve with the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa, training up to 40 recruits as a platoon second-in-command. He spent six years in banking at RBC and CIBC as a financial planner, managing $130M in client assets for up to 600 high-net-worth clients. At Shared Services Canada he worked in the Senior Assistant Deputy Minister’s office, coordinating executive taskings across eleven Director General offices. At L-SPARK he recruited and supported three of the accelerator’s strongest cohorts; at BridgeGreen Capital he led fund operations and authored a follow-on fund that doubled committed capital. He returned to L-SPARK to build its defence and dual-use practice.
The result is a working knowledge of how each of those groups makes decisions and what they need from each other. That is what this program teaches