Too many founders build quietly, assuming their work will speak for itself. Leah Sarich is on a mission to change that.
As head of story at Thin Air Labs and host of The Founder Mindset, she’s helping Alberta’s innovators show the world who they are and why it matters.
That’s what she sat down with Digital Journal to talk about at Inventures 2025, a gathering of entrepreneurs, investors, and changemakers held each year in Calgary.
“People need to know that you exist,” says Leah Sarich. “I’m not talking about just your clients or customers. I’m talking about the world at large, your sector, your ecosystem.”
Before anyone buys in, they want to know what makes you worth listening to in the first place. That’s where Sarich believes real connection starts.
“They need to know: what do you care about, what do you value, what’s important to you, what makes you unique, what makes you special?”
Thin Air Labs is a Calgary-based venture capital firm that backs founders and helps them tell the world why they matter.
When Leah Sarich left a two-decade career in broadcast journalism, this kind of role didn’t even exist. She built it anyway.
Five years later, her approach is helping Alberta’s innovation scene feel a little less like inside baseball and a little more like something you’d actually talk about at a dinner party.
And that shift is happening at a time when people across Canada’s tech ecosystem are all asking the same question. If a company is solving something important but no one knows about it, does it even stand a chance of going anywhere?
Sarich says it comes down to trust. If founders want people to care, they’ve got to let us in on what drives them.
[Watch the interview in full in the video below]
From broadcast news to founder stories
When Sarich first joined Thin Air Labs, she was deliberate about her title.
She didn’t want to be boxed into corporate communications or marketing. What she cared about was the founders themselves, learning what motivates them to take risks most people wouldn’t consider, and how they navigate the real human struggles that come with building something from scratch.
“I knew, and I felt very deeply, that if I was going to make a podcast that was successful, it had to be authentic, it had to be genuine, and I had to be personally, deeply curious about it,” she says. “For me, what I’m essentially curious about are the founders that we work with.”
And this quickly becomes evident when you look at the tagline of the podcast: ‘Why would you do this?’
“Because that’s really what I feel,” she says. “Why would they do this? Being an entrepreneur and a founder is so hard, it is so risky. They have to work all the hours, but the impact is so massive and the vision that they have for a future that we can’t see is so exciting.”
That curiosity, she argues, is just as essential for the people leading companies as it is for the people asking the questions. Sarich has been in enough interviews to see that founders who stay open and inquisitive about the problems they’re solving tend to build stronger companies.
“The best journalists are essentially curious,” she says. “But I would also suggest the best entrepreneurs are also very, very curious, because what do they do all day? They solve problems.”
Building trust and closing gaps
Telling these stories, Sarich says, is not about marketing. She’s focused on something a little harder to measure.
Alberta’s tech sector has picked up speed, but the tougher part is getting more people to actually believe in it. And that’s not just the insiders, but the ones watching from the edges. That kind of buy-in starts when leaders are willing to show the human side of what they’re building.
“It’s an opportunity to share that story, and when you’re sharing that story authentically… you’re not just trying to sell me something,” says Sarich. “When you help me understand your why, why your solution [is] the best one, then I think you’ve got a much better chance of building trust and getting the clients that you want.”
That focus on trust has helped shape her approach to the podcast she launched within Thin Air Labs. It’s audio-only by design, built to feel less like a pitch and more like a real conversation.
The moments that stick with her, she says, are the ones where founders stop performing and start telling the truth about what it actually takes to build something that matters.
“The stories I remember the most are the ones when people get really emotional in the chair. I think we do that because I’ve sort of created this safe space for us to have a conversation,” she says. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been interviewing people for years and years and years, but I think it’s important to listen and ask the right questions at the right time in the conversation, and then you get these incredible, beautiful answers.”
Even with more founders opening up, Sarich says the storytelling scene still feels a little too siloed. She wants to see more cross-pollination between storytellers, with people sharing each other’s work and building partnerships that help these narratives break out of the usual echo chambers.
“I think there’s so many of us starting to tell great stories, and I think we need to collaborate more and share each other’s stories and help each other with our storytelling efforts,” she says. “Partnerships allow you to amplify and to get in front of new audiences.”
[Watch the interview in full in the video below]
Scaling the narrative
As Alberta’s tech and innovation ecosystem matures, the stakes are high for how its story gets told.
Sarich sees an opportunity for venture capital firms to take storytelling more seriously. She believes it’s worth the investment, even if the metrics are hard to pin down.
“Podcasts particularly are really hard to measure, because the technology just actually isn’t there yet,” she says. “But we’re getting a lot of that validation from the people that we want to be in front of.
Sarich has her sights set on growth. More stories, more listeners, and more people waking up to the fact that Canada has something real to offer the world when it comes to innovation.
“I want to see policymakers and government supporting the storytelling and understanding the value of it,” she says. “Canada has an opportunity to really leverage its brand of being a trusted country in tech.”
She’s not waiting for permission. The next chapter starts with leaders who are ready to show their work and with audiences who are finally paying attention.
Watch the interview:
