Most teams have more ideas than evidence.
I help them find the few worth funding, with real customer evidence, before they build.
Leslie Barry is the founder of Exponentially and a pioneer of pretotyping and rapid experimentation. A guest lecturer at Stanford, he has worked since 2016 with Alberto Savoia, who created pretotyping at Google, to bring the method to Australia and the Asia Pacific. His programs have generated $38M in value, saved $30M by stopping weak ideas early, and tested 4,000+ ideas. He has trained 1,000+ practitioners and built AI into Rapidly, his platform for evidence-based innovation.
Leslie Barry
Founder · Exponentially
From four startups to the source of the method.
Leslie started out as an operator, not a theorist. He founded four startups, two of them exited, and led innovation as Head of Innovation at Thoughtworks Australia and Sportsbet. He has seen, up close, how easily a capable team can pour months into the wrong idea.
In 2016 he sought out Alberto Savoia, the Google engineer who created pretotyping and teaches it at Stanford, and trained with him directly. Since then he has spent close to a decade adapting the method for Australia and the Asia Pacific, and for regulated industries like financial services, insurance, utilities and wagering, where the hard part isn't the theory. It's building an innovation engine that balances compliance with speed.
Today he teaches that method as a guest lecturer at Stanford, mentors founders at technology and corporate accelerators, advises the board of Phoria, and writes The Experimenter's Edge. The work he's proudest of isn't a number. It's the 1,000+ people who now pause to ask "should we build it?" before spending time, money and political capital on the wrong thing.
Evidence beats opinion when the stakes are high.
$38M+
Value generated
$30M+
Saved by stopping weak ideas early
4,000+
Ideas tested
1,000+
Practitioners trained
“Leslie has a deeply purposeful connection to the pretotyping philosophy, and he has done amazing work in industrialising the training, tools and methodologies to truly bring pretotyping to life.”
Scott Thomson
Head of Innovation & Customer Engineering, Google
“The lecture gives a convincing argument why pretotyping is useful in developing an MVP, and practical guidance in implementing it. The students love the class. They applied pretotyping to test their assumptions before designing their MVPs.”
Edison Tse
Associate Professor, Stanford University
See it with your own team.
I run complimentary executive briefings and team sessions online, so your team can join wherever they're based. It's a quick 30-minute talk: an intro to pretotyping, real case studies, and how to spot which AI and innovation ideas need validation before you invest.
Topics I cover
- 01
The Impact of AI on Your Innovation Engine
Validate AI ideas before investing. Test 100x more ideas faster.
- 02
Building Evidence-Based Innovation Engines
From opinion-driven to data-driven innovation, with the framework from Google and Stanford.
- 03
Innovation Engines That Run Without You
Build repeatable capability that scales across hundreds of people and runs independently.
- 04
Scaling Innovation Through Rapid Experimentation
30 ideas validated in 3 weeks. Democratise innovation across your organisation.
- 05
From AI Buzzword to Working System
Turn AI strategy into measurable innovation: validate AI ideas with data, not opinions.
Speed without evidence is just faster waste.
AI has made building cheap. It hasn't made customer demand easier to predict. The teams that win won't build the most. They'll learn fastest what not to build. Bring one idea you're under pressure to build: 20 minutes, no pitch, and you leave with a one-page experiment design and a yes or no on whether pretotyping fits.