※I?think work-life balance is bullshit, if I’m honest,§ says entrepreneur Levi Fawcett. ※You don’t do extremely hard things unless you’re willing to both be hyper-efficient and work your arse off.§?

His tech start-up Partly has topped US$20m revenue and plans to grow to $400m over the next four years as it expands into Europe; its founder does long hours, and expects the same of his nearly 100-strong team.

But nobody could have wished for the two long weeks of on-again off-again labour that his wife Franka went through, before giving birth to their second baby Lucas this week.

Fawcett missed the inaugural NZ Leadership Awards black-tie dinner at Auckland War Memorial Museum on August 15, when Franka first went into labour. He wasn’t there to accept the award for best overall leader.

The judges said: ※Levi demonstrates the qualities sought in entrepreneurial leadership: innovation, vision, resilience, and the ability to execute and scale a complex business idea on a global stage.§?

They said Partly was revolutionising the US$1.9 trillion car parts industry by uniting fragmented sectors and promoting sustainability through recycled parts. Fawcett’s visionary leadership had attracted top talent from major tech companies, helped reverse New Zealand’s brain drain, and secured a record-breaking NZ$37m Series A funding round.

Accepting on his behalf, colleague Hanafi Zwart said everyone would?respect his decision to be with his wife. ※Great leaders are regularly faced with decisions, trade-offs and priorities and Levi is exactly where he should be right now.§

The couple’s baby son eventually arrived this week - a full 10 days later. And, given that Fawcett is an introvert like many leaders, he says he was secretly glad that Hanafi was there instead of him. ※I generally like to just get shit done in the background,§ he tells Newsroom.

※Partly would never be described as an easy place to work. People are not working nine to five.§

Levi Fawcett, Partly chief executive

The path to success hasn’t been an easy one for Fawcett. He was home-schooled on the family’s north Canterbury farm. As a 16-year-old, an employer told him he had no future on the job market.

※You can barely do maths,§ the manager retorted. ※You’ve got pretty good practical skills. Maybe just stay in your lane.

※So I took myself off to school, and then university. I wanted to control my own destiny.§

While at university, he launched a new business every year. First he built and sold architectural caravans made from insulation panels, then he made $100,000 making aluminium extrusion-based balustrades, then he launched an e-commerce site, ※quite similar to Shopify, actually, but not as good§.

Some of the businesses succeeded, some faded away. He was headhunted by Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, working there on hardware simulation within guidance navigation control for five years. ※It turned out I was quite good at maths!§

Then in 2020, while still working at Rocket Lab, he founded Partly. It sounds straightforward - connecting mechanics to the right car parts, online - but in a fragmented industry that mostly relies on phoning and emailing around local contacts, it’s a particularly hard problem.

※Behind the scenes, what we’re actually doing is structuring and standardising the world’s vehicle information. There’s about one and a half billion cars on the road today, about 18 trillion parts in operation on those cars, made by around 1000 different vehicle manufacturers, anywhere over the past 30 years.§

Part of that standardisation is in language. Partly doesn’t deal in bonnets, it talks about hoods. And autos, not cars. The company deals with big businesses, like rental firms with more than 100,000 vehicles, seeking to procure parts.

And they’re working to lock in business from 230 of those firms. ※We’re the only one doing this at scale,§ Fawcett says.

※The single thing that we’ve done really right in hindsight was having an insanely high bar in terms of who we hire. That maybe sounds like a little bit weird, little bit trite, but that’s the truth. We hire about 1 of the 500 applicant’s CVs we see.

※We take the best people in New Zealand, some of the best people in the world, give them one really, really hard problem, and then say, solve this problem as fast as physically possible. We hold people to a really high bar.

※Partly would never be described as an easy place to work. People are not working nine to five. I expect people to work far more than average, because we’ve got such hard problems to solve. But also, everyone has equity. Everyone has a stake in the company.

※We’re driving super aggressively towards one one goal.

※If you can hire people and give them a huge amount of freedom and responsibility to solve very open-ended problems, but own that problem - that’s not going to make someone unhappy, right? So far, I’ve never seen anyone unhappy. We’ve had only one person voluntarily leave, ever since we founded the company.§

With all that he’s done, Fawcett is still aged just 29.

What would he say to that employer who told him he was unemployable, as a teenager? ※The honest answer is, they were probably right! So fair enough.§

It was that rebuff that gave him the drive to start his own business. ※So maybe I should say, thanks.§

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