“Nobody gives a sh*t about your technology. They care about the result.”
- James Keirstead, President & CEO, Levven
Nearly 70 builders packed Fu’s Repair Shop for a fireside chat co-hosted with RBCx, where Dennis Agbegha (Director, Banking Prairies, RBCx) sat down with James Keirstead. James helped scale Arctic Spas from 15 employees in Edmonton to roughly 900 worldwide, selling into about 30 countries. Then he bought a small controls company to make hot tub parts and realized the real opportunity was in the walls.
The spark came from Landmark Homes. They were pre-building 85% of their walls in a factory but couldn’t close them because inspectors needed to see the wiring. Could James take the wire out? Levven’s answer: split the light switch into a load controller in the junction box and a wireless switch on the wall. Simple in concept. Brutal in practice.
This is our recap of the top ideas from last week’s Tech Thursday event in Edmonton. We had 3 main takeaways:
Tech isn’t the moat. The process is.
Raise like you mean it, or don’t raise at all.
Action always trumps a plan.
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1. The tech isn’t the moat. The process is.
Today there are a dozen cheaper wireless switch knockoffs on Amazon. None of them worry James. Levven’s advantage is the system that lets an electrician install it and walk away, with zero technical work.
It also took learning who actually matters in the sale. The builder specifies the product, but the electrical contractor buys and installs it, and contractors feared wireless would shrink their business. So James stopped pitching technology and started pitching math: a two-person crew wires two or three houses a week the traditional way, or five with Levven. “I’m pretty simple, but five is bigger than three.” Contractors who still say no get replaced, or James walks.
He also dismantled the first-mover myth. Statistically, the first company into a market is more likely to fail than the second or third. Timing wins, and tenacity is how you survive long enough for timing to catch up.
2. Raise like you mean it, or don’t raise at all
Before this round, Levven had raised $9.2 million total: $1.9 million of James’s own money, most of the rest from friends through his decades in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. A direct competitor raised $65 million USD. That competitor burned through it and ended up folded into a struggling U.S. public company.
James’s rules on capital are blunt. If your business doesn’t have real scale potential, bootstrap it and keep it. If it does, raise the money and stop obsessing over dilution. After the current round he’ll own just over 20% of Levven, and he’s fine with that. Most bad founder-VC relationships, he argued, come from founders who didn’t think big enough to deliver the return they signed up for.
And more money isn’t always better. In 2015, Levven raised $1.5 million and blew through half of it in six months building a U.S. sales team before understanding the customer or the regulations. The lesson stuck: “Scarcity breeds ingenuity.”
October Tech Thursday Events:
🌶️ October 8th - Hot Takes: Edmonton Startup Week Edition
Co-hoster by: Artemis Canada
Edmonton Startup Week packs five days of workshops, socials, and events into one citywide push to get the tech community talking.
This Tech Thursday, we’re switching up the format. Adam Dyck, comedian and host of LRT Takes, is joining us to moderate a no-filter conversation, sitting down with founders, operators, and investors from Edmonton’s tech scene as they put their unpopular opinions on the table.
Guests:
Kristina Milke, General Partner, Sprout Fund
Tristan Ham, COO & Co-Founder, Unbounded Thinking
More guests to be announced soon!
💭 October 22nd - AI on the mind: Uses and effects of AI in psychology
This Tech Thursday, we’re exploring where AI and the human mind meet: what brain research and language models can teach us about each other, how AI is already showing up in psychology and mental health, and the ethical questions that come with it.
Featuring:
Geoffrey Rockwell, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing, University of Alberta
Alona Fyshe, Associate Professor, University of Alberta
Moderated by: Kirsten Sokolovski, Host, Tech Thursday
3. Action always trumps a plan
The 1917 wall switch had no legal definition, which didn’t stop a Calgary inspector from flagging wire-free as non-compliant to inspectors nationwide. Levven spent eight years changing Canadian regulation and became the only company ever to get a section removed from the Canadian Electrical Code. The U.S. took six more.
That persistence is now paying off. Schneider Electric is Levven’s sales channel partner across Canada, PulteGroup invested, and Levven is piloting with D.R. Horton and Lennar on top of existing Canadian customers like Mattamy, Brookfield and Minto. Three U.S. builders alone could mean around seven million switches a year.
James closed with advice from an early coach: “What you know is nice, but it’s what you do that counts.” At 24 he flew to Hong Kong with $5,000, no language skills and no place to live, and sold $1.2 million USD of stainless steel sinks in year one. In 1999 he shipped four containers of hot tubs to a UK market that barely knew what they were. That warehouse is still running, and Arctic Spas remains the top imported hot tub brand in the UK. His caveat: take action, but don’t totally cowboy it.
Takeaways for Builders
Sell the customer’s economics, not your tech. “Five houses instead of three” closes deals that spec sheets never will.
Map your full path to market before you scale. Find the person who can accelerate you or kill you in a heartbeat.
Only raise if you’re building something big. If you are, accept the dilution and think big enough to earn it.
Tight capital forces focus. Premature scaling is the most expensive lesson in the book.
80% of startups fail within three years. As James put it, all you have to do is make it past three years.
Thank you to our sponsors
Thank you to RBCx for co-hosting, and to Ramp, our Title Sponsor, and Boast, Skip, Crestview Strategy, and Alberta Innovates for making Edmonton Tech Thursday possible.