Beau Leese and the first-experience problem

A student’s first professional assignment has a peculiar requirement: somebody must trust them before they have much evidence that they deserve it. The student needs an opening. The employer needs a reason to offer one. The university needs to know that something educational will happen between the introduction and the final presentation. Beau Leese has made a business out of arranging that meeting of interests.

It sounds agreeable enough. Almost nobody objects to students gaining useful experience. The difficulties begin with the next question: who writes the brief? Then come the meetings, the feedback, the uneven contributions and the small matter of fitting everything around a university calendar. A good intention can acquire quite a lot of stationery before it becomes an opportunity.

Leese, the Sydney-based co-founder and Co-CEO of Practera, works on those practical details. His career runs through consulting, Australia’s national science agency and an education technology company built with Wes Sonnenreich and Suzy Watson. Across those settings, the recurring question is how to get people with different responsibilities to do useful work together.

The institution before the startup

Before joining Intersective, the business behind Practera, full time at the end of 2015, Leese had been a director at Deloitte Consulting and Head of Strategy, Innovation & International at CSIRO. His consulting work involved universities, companies and government agencies. At CSIRO, he led the development of Strategy 2020 and helped establish the ON accelerator programme.

That background gives his move into education technology a particular character. He had already worked inside organisations where a promising idea must compete with budgets, responsibilities and established ways of doing things. A university buying a new programme has more to consider than whether a demonstration looks attractive. It needs to know who will run it when the demonstration ends.

Leese received AFR BOSS Young Executive of the Year recognition in 2013. In 2017, he was named among the ON Team members receiving CSIRO’s Support Excellence Award for designing, implementing and expanding the accelerator. The recognition belonged to a substantial team. That detail fits the work: an accelerator, like a student-industry project, needs a collection of people to make the opportunity function.

Everybody wants it. Somebody has to organise it.

Leese’s description of the company’s original problem is unusually useful: “It is a three-party collaboration problem”. Students, universities and employers each bring a different definition of success. A student might want something credible to discuss at an interview. An educator must protect learning and assessment. A business wants an answer it can use.

Practera supplies structure around that exchange. Its programmes can put teams on consulting or research briefs, gather industry feedback and help participants turn completed work into evidence of skills. Institutions can license the platform, share delivery with Practera or use managed programmes in which the company handles the operational arrangements. The amount of help varies with the university’s capacity.

The founders brought different experience to the undertaking. Sonnenreich had founded companies and led innovation at Deloitte. Watson’s background spans finance, strategy and operations. Together, their business asks institutions to treat professional experience as something that can be designed and delivered repeatedly. The appeal lies partly in the unromantic work of making the next cohort possible.

Three weeks, four universities

In 2018, an Adelaide pilot gave the proposition a concrete shape. A South Australian government seed grant of $90,000 supported a network connecting international students with local organisations. The pilot involved 143 students from the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, UniSA and Torrens University. Small teams worked on employer projects over three weeks.

“We help structure the experience so students are working through a very disciplined approach,” Leese explained. The sequence included forming teams, delivering the project and reflecting on feedback. It gave participants a defined route through an unfamiliar kind of work, while leaving room for the different perspectives they brought to the client’s question.

Three weeks is a revealing choice. It puts a boundary around the commitment without eliminating the need to work with other people. A student must contribute, explain an idea and respond when somebody asks for a change. A short project also gives an employer a manageable way to participate. Nobody needs to promise a permanent role before discovering whether the collaboration is useful.

The jerky company and the useful answer

Leese’s own writing supplies a pleasingly specific example of what a real client adds to learning. In 2019, he described Billabong Jerky’s participation in the Global Trade Accelerator. Two UNSW student teams researched two Asian markets. One report helped the business decide against further investigation of a market. The other supported its interest in a second.

A decision to stop is an excellent test of whether research has done its job. The students’ work affected how a small company would spend its time and money. There was an audience beyond the assessor, and that audience had a reason to ask whether the findings were useful. The assignment came with consequences, though mercifully no one had to build an entire overseas sales operation to learn from it.

Leese also wrote about employers developing their own staff through mentoring student teams. In May 2019, his account of the Gold Coast Business Excellence Awards highlighted Southport Sharks and its partnerships with local universities. He was interested in the system around the opening: an employer participating regularly, students gaining experience and relationships surviving beyond a single event.

Taking the arrangement overseas

International expansion presented the founders with their own practical education. Leese described the additional work of engaging large overseas organisations: travel, legal advice and offshore contracting. A licensing opportunity in Vietnam made that effort worthwhile. Export Finance Australia’s Small Business Export Loan helped the business invest in product development and serve international customers.

This is a less glamorous account of expansion than a map with enthusiastic arrows. It involves contracts and the cost of reaching the people who can agree to them. The company needed financing that suited the opportunity. Watson, its CFO, described exploring alternatives after its bank could not help because of a lack of security.

In 2018, Intersective raised a $3.75 million Series A led by Main Sequence Ventures. Earlier, it had presented at Tech23 in 2013. The distance between a demonstration and a funded business matters here: student learning might happen in a compact project, but building the organisation that supplies those projects takes years of development, selling and partnership work.

“We are taking this around the world.”Beau Leese, 2018

Feedback before the final slide

Leese’s public appearances increasingly addressed the quality of the experience itself. A 2021 webinar brought him together with university practitioners to discuss online project learning. His contribution concerned research drawing on more than 7,000 students across five years and over 30 educational institutions. The question had moved beyond whether a project could run remotely to how well it worked.

At the 2024 ACEN conference, a session listing Leese alongside co-authors Brigitte McKenna and Denise Jackson proposed examining more than 25,000 online and hybrid student-industry project experiences. The dataset covered more than 40 institutions. The session’s agenda included success factors, effectiveness and limitations - useful subjects when a programme is becoming routine rather than experimental.

Feedback is central to this approach. A completed report shows what a team produced; it does less to explain where the team needed help along the way. Practera’s tools organise reflection and feedback, with analytics to help coordinators identify problems during delivery. Technology earns its place when the people overseeing the work can use it to make a timely intervention.

The bid failed. The partners continued.

The launch of Horizons brought a sharper access question into Leese’s story. In late 2024, Practera helped form a consortium of 17 UK universities for a bid to the Office for Students’ Equality in Higher Education Innovation Fund. The application was unsuccessful. Some university partners then agreed to support implementation with their own funding, while Practera invested in establishing the programme and subsidising places.

By June 2025, Horizons was being launched at the AGCAS conference. Leese joined a panel with governance chair Kate Daubney, Manchester Metropolitan University’s Lindsay Halliday and City St George’s Charlotte Brown. The programme aimed to give widening participation undergraduates an introductory professional experience through a supported industry project.

The episode puts a decision, rather than a slogan, at the centre of the access argument. Partners had to decide whether the programme was worth running after the proposed source of funding disappeared. Their answer produced a route to participation that institutions could support together. An unsuccessful application became a change in the financing, rather than the end of the work.

An opportunity with room in the diary

Horizons uses a three-week, thirty-hour online format. Most work is asynchronous, with an industry client, peer teamwork, coordinator support and a final presentation. The programme’s design takes account of students’ other commitments. Daubney has described the importance of scheduling experiences away from crowded academic periods and allowing students with part-time work to participate without abandoning it.

Those details make Leese’s ambitions tangible. Access depends on the invitation, but also on whether someone can accept it. A short programme still needs guidance, a responsive client and a clear end point. Its purpose is an introductory experience students can describe on a CV, with professional connections and a better understanding of what they can contribute.

Leese’s career has brought him from institutional strategy to the arrangements surrounding a student’s first client meeting. The scale changes; the need for cooperation persists. His work leaves a straightforward question for the people organising education: who will make the first opportunity happen? For the student waiting to start, the answer needs to include a date, a brief and somebody ready to meet them.