Keynotes · workshops · fireside chats

Talks that change how a room thinks about leadership.

Whether your audience is founders learning to lead, or established leaders who need to rediscover founder mode, the core message is the same: how people and culture decide whether a business makes its next leap.

I’ve coached the CEOs and leadership teams behind two unicorns and distilled twenty-five years into Founder’s Legacy. My talks are warm, direct, and grounded in real stories from behind closed doors. Every audience leaves with something practical to act on, and before any talk I do a research call to make sure it lands for your room.

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Simon Court speaking on stage at L.E Miami — Speaking at L.E Miami, Miami Beach.

Watch

My TEDx talk

“Find the Leader Inside You”, TEDx Marvila, Lisbon. Most people think leadership is reserved for the chosen few. I don’t. This talk makes the case that leadership is abundant, not rare, built from story, courage, community and impact, and it’s the clearest window into what I believe and how I hold a room. The keynotes below are what I’m booked for; this is the thinking underneath them.

Finding Another Gear

Why founders don't need to become someone else

The founder-to-leader transition, reframed. The conversation usually gets stuck on one question: step aside, or stay. In twenty-five years I have rarely seen that framing help anyone. The shift is not a binary handover but finding another gear, layering in leadership capability without abandoning founder instincts. The talk is anchored in the “founder's trap” and real stories from twenty-five years of coaching, including the Miniclip story: a flatlined business that became a Tencent acquisition at well over a billion dollars.

Best for: founder conferences, VC portfolio days, scale-up summits, accelerator programmes.

You Are Not Scalable. Your Culture Is.

Building the company that outlasts the founder

Most founders treat culture as a poster on the wall, or a set of generic values nobody can name. My argument: culture only works when the values serve the business, the leader embodies them personally, and the belief is genuine. This talk shows how to build a distinctive culture that becomes a competitive advantage, and what happens when you don't.

Best for: scaling businesses, PE portfolio companies, leadership conferences focused on growth.

Founder Mode

The leadership your business is missing

Most organisations excel at Horizon 1 (optimise, control, deliver) and love talking about Horizon 3: vision, transformation. But they are terrible at Horizon 2: building the next wave while running the current one. Using the Three Horizons framework, I show that Founder Mode is the specific leadership capability Horizon 2 demands. You cannot optimise your way into it. And you cannot delegate it.

Best for: corporate conferences in any sector facing disruption, industry events, PE and VC summits.

Watch an excerpt: “Navigating the Future of Energy Retail with the Three Horizons Framework”, delivered in Oslo. An example of the talk built around a specific sector.

Formats

Keynote (20 to 45 minutes) · half- or full-day workshop · fireside chat. Every talk is tailored to your industry and audience, and I always do a research call beforehand.

Tell me about your event, the audience, the moment.

What you want the room to walk away with, and I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right fit.

Enquire about a date