Basis Points

What if the biggest barrier to life-changing medicine wasn’t science, but the cost of making it? Harriet speaks with Ali Afshar, the co-founder and CEO of Mytos, a biotech company automating the manufacturing of human tissue to make regenerative medicine affordable and accessible at scale. Ali believes that within 50 years, every tissue in the body will be replaceable, and that the way there is th...

What happens when the systems we rely on – states, money, infrastructure – start to fall out of sync with the world around them? Harriet speaks with Stefano Bernardi and Francesco Moiraghi of Unruly Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing ideas that feel early, unconventional, and often uncomfortable. Their work centres on a simple thesis: many of the institutions built over the past 70...

Harriet sits down with Harvey Hodd, who is working on a 20-year plan to build and scale synthetic fuels – changing how humans generate energy forever.  Rivan is developing a new way to produce synthetic natural gas using sunlight, water, and captured CO2 – with the aim of decarbonising industries that cannot easily be electrified. Harvey explains how Rivan’s fully vertically integrated model, in-h...

What will it take to bring orbital launch back to the UK? In this interview, Harriet sits down with Eddie Brown, co-founder and CEO of Astron Systems, to discuss the future of the British space industry, fully reusable rockets, small satellite launch, defense applications, climate monitoring, and why the UK could become a major player in orbital launch again. Astron Systems is building the first 1...

Europe’s old tech media is collapsing, just when European tech is booming. Someone needs to tell the story. Harriet sits down with Ronan Chambers, co-founder of the European Technology Network (etn.), a twice-weekly live broadcast that covers the founders, investors and companies driving growth in Europe. The goal is to be the voice of European technology and its future founders. They talk about w...

How do you give every location on Earth an address? In this conversation, Chris Sheldrick – co-founder and CEO of what3words – explains the idea that turned a frustrating moment at a music festival into a global addressing system used by emergency services, delivery companies, governments, and millions of people worldwide. What3words divides the entire planet into 3m x 3m squares (57 trillion in t...

Is AI really coming for jobs or is it rebuilding the industries that underpin our economy? In this episode of Basis Points , Harriet speaks with Ben Peters, Co-founder & CEO of Cogna, the business recalibrating productivity by building custom software for critical industries – from energy and water, to manufacturing, logistics and construction. They discuss: Why AI adoption can’t realistically...

Building a company straight out of university comes with very real trade-offs. In this episode of Basis Points, Harriet sits down with William Moore and Ethan McNeil, co-founders of Consus Energy, to talk candidly about what it’s actually like to start a company early – without accelerators, without a safety net and while learning everything in real time. We cover: How they met at UCL and split ro...

What if landlords could become their own green energy suppliers – cutting carbon, lowering tenant bills and unlocking entirely new revenue streams? In this episode, Harriet sits down with William Moore and Ethan McNeil, founders of Consus Energy, to explore a radically different approach to the energy transition: distributed batteries, wholesale energy buying and real-time energy arbitrage. Instea...

Private security has existed for centuries, but access has always been limited to the few. What if you could book a trained security detail as easily as ordering a cab or groceries? In this episode of Basis Points, Harriet sits down with Nick Sarath, Founder & CEO of Protector, to explore how on-demand executive protection and community-funded neighbourhood patrols are reshaping how safety is...

In this episode, we sit down with Sahaj Sharda, CEO and co-founder of The Antifraud Company, to explore a bold new model of investigative journalism, designed to expose large-scale government fraud, corporate misconduct and crony capitalism. Sahaj explains how up to $500 billion a year in U.S. federal spending may be lost to fraud and how his company is using whistleblower laws and litigation to f...

This week we sit down with Ben Kellie, CEO & co-founder of Applied Atomics, and formerly a lead engineer at SpaceX. Ben believes something simple and profound: energy is the single biggest unlock for humanity. If we solve clean, stable, abundant power, we can unleash progress in food, housing, manufacturing, materials science – even the technologies we haven’t invented yet. Applied Atomics is...

Christian Owens dropped out of school at 16, built Paddle into a unicorn, walked away and is now starting again from zero. In this episode, Harriet sits down with Christian, founder and CEO of Clove, founder and former CEO of Paddle – and also her other half – for one of the most open conversations we’ve had on Basis Points yet.  Christian talks about discovering entrepreneurship at 12, teaching h...

Healthcare is entering a new era – one where AI doesn’t replace clinicians, but makes them faster, safer and more effective. Julian Titz, co-founder and CEO of Asterix Health, is building this future. A future of medicine through evolution not revolution, starting with patient education, and iterating towards AI-supported and eventually AI-driven clinical decisions, this is the revolution through...

Restaurants are struggling with rising costs and vanishing margins. Josef Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kaikaku, believes automation can save the industry – by freeing humans up to deliver real hospitality again. Kaikaku’s “restaurant in a box” uses robotics, vision systems and nutritional data to make fresh, personalised food at scale. Josef shows Harriet how Kaikaku’s robotic kitchens, proprietary...

Isembard’s machine shops bring together hardware and software to reshore, meet critical demand and reindustrialise economies – while also redefining blue-collar work. Isembard’s Shaun Rowcliffe and Andrew Kramer give Harriet a tour of their Exeter site, and talk about decentralising manufacturing, moving at pace and transforming define as a sector. We talk: How Isembard is democratising manufactur...

Science Machine is building an AI data scientist for biotech – one that can reason like a scientist and collapse development timelines. CTO and co-founder Ben Tenmann joins Harriet to talk about democratising drug discovery, the broken economics of R&D, why universities are obsolete and what it means to build when growth has stalled.

Artificial Societies simulates your world. The 2025 YC team is helping companies like Anthropic and 11x predict what their customers will do before they do it. CEO James sits down with Harriet to chat democracy, journalling, Mars, 996 and free will.