Last year one of our founders, Javier Bates, was named a Westpac Young Technologist — one of eight from QUT, and thirty-four nationally. Last week he was in Singapore for the leadership stage that comes with the scholarship: the Disruptive Leaders Program, four days with scholars from universities around Australia. We're proud of him, and glad he went. It also turned out to matter for reasons we didn't expect.
The days moved fast. Javier's group spent a morning inside PayPal, and what he came away with wasn't about scale. It was that the way a company that big works a problem isn't off-limits to a small team — you can hold the same standard with five people that they hold with thousands. Then there was the live challenge, set by a conservation group called Mandai Nature: how do you use technology to fight the illegal wildlife trade that now runs through social media across Southeast Asia, where the listings in a single country run into the tens of thousands? That's our kind of problem. Real, tangled, and impossible to solve by buying something off a shelf.
None of that, though, was what stuck.
That was the people. On the last day a few founders sat down with small groups and talked through how they'd built what they built — one a social enterprise teaching kids about money, one an accessibility platform, one a health practice. Completely different worlds, and not one of them treated success and impact as a trade-off. They'd built things that work and things that matter at the same time, and seemed a little puzzled you'd expect otherwise.
You can say all day that you shouldn't have to choose between the two. Sitting across from three people who just didn't is a different thing entirely. That's what shifts what you think is possible — a person telling you, plainly, how they did it.
Some of it was practical. We came home with problem framings we'll reuse — "how might we…" is a plain one, and it's surprisingly good at turning a vague worry into something a group can move on. But the thread running under the whole week was leadership as a practice you keep up, not a rank you reach. And a quieter point that's stuck with us since: the biggest impact in a room is rarely the person out front. It's usually a lot of people lifting each other, and it adds up.
That one hits close to home. Most of what passes for leadership in our own work is unglamorous — writing the documentation someone will need in a year, handing a system over so a client's team can run it without us, holding the line on our own work before anyone else sees it. It's also the reason we build the way we do. At Slash Tech, and across Slash Group, we don't think you should have to choose between building something that works and building something that matters. A week with people already living that made the case better than we ever could.
One thing caught us off guard: the program is built so the week doesn't just evaporate. You leave paired with accountability partners, on the hook to each other to keep going. Our whole argument as a firm is that the real value shows up after the exciting part is over — so that part, we loved.
Javier Bates is a founder of Slash Tech and a 2025 Westpac Young Technologist. Slash Tech is part of Slash Group.
