Prior to focusing on Direct Leap Technologies, Simon Rowland operated a consulting firm which took client concepts for new businesses using technology, and to executed them directly from the idea stage. Rowland and his team currently divide their time between client engineering and business development projects, and developing new technology products.

Prior to this, Rowland worked with a partner to start an online content publishing company for competitive cyclists. Integral to the success of the venture was an innovative emphasis on community building and interactive content. The editorial team wrote and sourced a base of content with hundreds of articles over just six months, building an award-winning resource which draws about two million individual readers annually in a niche market.

As part of a leadership role in a non-profit aerospace engineering organization, Rowland founded a team to create at the time the world's largest online space flight engineering reference library, with an annual readership measured in millions. Building the electronic publishing organization to source or write nearly one thousand articles during his three-year tenure, the geographically dispersed organization which formed around the project has continued the library's growth to over three thousand articles today. CyberTeams, Inc., a successful commercial spin-off company, was founded in 1996 to market the award-winning content management and workflow automation technology that was developed to manage this flow of documents.

Simon Rowland took 18 months away from business to pursue social activism and electoral politics after a long history in non-profit organizing. A few examples range from serving on the Board of Directors in professional and research organizations, to running as a Candidate for Federal Parliament in a central Toronto riding during the 2000 Federal Election. His campaign received significantly above the party's average popular support in the Toronto area.

Starting in 1994, Rowland helped to build a family business, Blue Cat Design, a pioneering and acclaimed multimedia design and development exporter. With a classical business background through the Rotman business school at the University of Toronto, he wrote the business plan and planned an expansion resulting in 300% personnel growth as revenues spiraled up 650%, provided sales management, worked on client strategy, and when needed crossed over as the lead technical architect.

Rowland's first career was in spacecraft design and space mission design. Rowland is one of the founding shareholders of TransOrbital Inc., the first private company licensed in the United States to operate a privately-owned research spacecraft outside of Earth orbit. TransOrbital has been covered in over 2,000 news stories, including articles in Wired Magazine, National Geographic, and Nature. We again recieved worldwide media attention for launching a test spacecraft into orbit in 2002. Rowland still keeps in touch with space agencies around the world.