Building And Growing

Eva Luitsz, Co-Founder of Studio Melrose LTD, has over 7 years of dedicated expertise in the dynamic field of marketing. Eva specialises in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), social media management, content creation, and strategic planning. Multi-channel testing is the heart of marketing and works as a great tool to overcome budget restrictions, by helping brands prioritise what delivers the most...

🚀 Insurtechs: the typically paper and process driven insurance industry sprouted insurtechs as a result of advances in technology, the internet of things (e.g. FloodFlash’s water level sensor) and improved data processing capabilities (e.g. Flock's leverage of telematics to provide quotes).  They’ve resulted in a number of benefits for end-customers, notably data driven pricing that correlate...

Lewis is a Director at Rothschild & Co Wealth Management. Prior to joining Rothschild & Co in 2014, he began his career in the Wealth Management department at Barclays, having graduated from the University of Warwick with a BSc in Economics. He has worked in London and New York over the past decade but now leads the Rothschild & Co office in Manchester. Areas mentioned on this recordin...

As the year comes to an end, Lucas Calleja who normally hosts the podcast, stepped into the guest's seat and was joined by James Horrax who kindly hosted the podcast! They discussed key developments and items that were brought up by guests. Here are three key themes from 2023 that we reflected on: Pathways to profitability: it was a make-or-break year for many startups, as funding and higher v...

Andrea Guzzoni is a serial entrepreneur and investor: Founder and Chairman of easyHire, Andrea invests and advises early-stage startups, focusing on SEIS-EIS UK-based companies and tech ventures in emerging markets. After building up international experience across Milan, London, Australia, Ukraine, and Tanzania, Andrea is currently pursuing an Executive MBA at Oxford University. Andrea is also a...

Outlier Ventures is the global leading Web3 accelerator, supporting founders building on layer one and layer two protocols with a portfolio of over 270 companies. During its Basecamp accelerator program, Outlier Ventures partners with global industry protocol leaders, including Aptos, NEAR, and Polygon, along with leading global corporations such as Walmart’s incubation arm Store Nº8, to design be...

Enis and Lucas discuss the opportunities and risks associated with investing in emerging markets. Enis Hulli is a General Partner at 500. Educated as an engineer he has a firm grasp of the technological aspect of the startup world and the ambition and knowledge to see the global potential in the regional startup scene. That is why, rather than venturing on the civil engineer path, he founded first...

Melvin Chen is an investor and serial entrepreneur, having worked across multiple sectors in the investment and scale up technology industries including Goldman Sachs, Terra Firma and Samena Capital working on financing, StarLake where he advised firms expanding to and raising money from Asia before joining Latch to focus on go-to-market during their hyperscale journey to IPO. Forming a new market...

About FloodFlash FloodFlash is a multi-award-winning insurance technology company at the forefront of the parametric insurance movement. Launched in the UK 2019 and in the US in 2022, their rapid-payout flood product provides coverage to businesses, corporates and municipalities that struggle to secure flood terms anywhere else. They use the latest in data modelling and IoT technology to provide f...

Kyle is the Co-Founder of pb+j , an award-winning eCommerce growth agency, named after a sandwich. Over the past decade, he alongside his Co-Founder Tom, and a crew of Jammers, have helped 100's of mid-market, founder-led DTC brands pour gasoline on the fire of their first $1mil+ to reach new heights of $10mil, $20mil, $30mil+, all on Shopify (Plus). Kyle is also a very proud dad of two, partn...

Kota is building a platform to help companies manage employee benefits and insurance. Issuing benefits to employees involves a magnitude of tools that are often offline and manual, making it difficult for both HR teams and new employees! Kota can offer cover across 30 countries in Europe to streamline their employees’ experience. Traditionally employees would have to fill in forms and HR teams wou...

About Adrian Fagerlund As Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder of Linkby, Adrian oversees global business development, sales, and revenue growth across its key markets of Australia, US, UK, Canada and SEA. He leads Linkby’s global sales team and is passionate about building and fostering high-performance teams that drive scalable business growth with customer experience at the heart.   Adrian has...

Ben's journey began at NatWest, in treasury & capital management. He then ventured into the fast-paced realm of RBS' investment bank, focusing on the intricate world of interest & FX risk management and became a corporate bank director, where he led the banking relationships with enterprise and SME customers. A change of scenery brought him to Barclays, where he lent his expertise...

David Cava is an AI engineering manager and a musician and song writer. Even though he studied a Master in Aerospace Engineering (Imperial College), music is his guilty pleasure. Right after his master's he started travelling to Miami while working as an engineer in London, to write with some of the best songwriters in the Latin music scene. Now, he is pursuing his musical career as a songwrit...

About AbbeyCross AbbeyCross is developing a wholesale marketplace to improve transparency, compliance, pricing, and service levels for payments to Emerging Market (EM) countries. Historically, a lack of relevant market data and a fragmented and inefficient wholesale market has meant that margins for payments to EM countries can be over 5%. AbbeyCross’ product roadmap has been developed through a p...

Harjas and Lucas discuss the story behind Shares, a social investment app. Shares aims to connect users with their existing network and bridge the education gap in investing, by allowing them to communicate and share insights about their investment decisions within the app. Harjas discusses how Shares was founded, the infrastructure that sits behind it and its European expansion plans. About Harja...

Tom and Lucas discuss the importance of leadership hires to help start-ups and scale-ups win. Startups often struggle with slow or inaccurate executive search campaigns that can take 120 days to close plus on average in Europe another 90 days to get the person in a seat, at times with the wrong profile and with a sizeable fee (around 30% of a competitive package) being paid out to external recruit...

Nicola and Lucas discuss the importance of startups building a strong legal foundation, a team which complements each other and what investors look for from startups from a governance perspective. About Nicola McConville Nicola is a Partner in Mishcon de Reya’s Corporate Department with particular experience in advising companies and investors on funding rounds from seed through to exit. Nicola ad...

Ken and Lucas discuss Ken’s experience working in commercial roles at fintechs and banks, his current focus of building a VC for SaaStock and the intersection between VC, sales and partnerships. About Ken Thomas Ken is a New Yorker building a venture capital fund here in London. He also helps companies exit and build commercial partnerships. Before coming to London, he worked in traditional bankin...

About Adheeb Rifdi Adheeb is a sales and revenue operations leader, having worked at multiple scale-ups including Flock and Mulesoft. At Flock, Adheeb initially led sales before aligning all revenue-generating functions towards company OKRs, while at Mulesoft in a revenue operations role. At Mulesoft, Adheeb helped organisations change and innovate faster by making it easy to connect the world’s a...

About Sarah Hiraki As Smartly.io’s Head of Creative for EMEA & APAC, Sarah collaborates with the world’s biggest advertisers to drive creative innovation and #worksmartly to reach audiences with more agile, meaningful and effective ads. At Smartly, she is known for her work with clients on short form video, dynamic creative workflows, and elevating brands in emerging channels. A distinctly dig...

Ben Stocken Ben is the founder and Managing Director of West Peak. His work over the last 20 years has enabled teams and businesses to achieve far more than they believed was possible before they met him. His background as an adventurer,  performance coach for England Rugby and subsequent people and organisational development roles across industries have given him an unrivalled skillset when it co...

Eva Piskadlo is a lifestyle Influencer and Blogger based in London. Eva has worked with an array of luxury hotels and restaurants worldwide, including the Edition Hotel group, The Mandarin Oriental, Belmond Hotel Group, The Four Seasons, The Royal Mansour and MGM Hotels. She has also partnered with exciting brands and tourism boards such as Lavazza for their iconic Wimbledon and Royal Ascot sponso...

About Superscript Superscript provides tech insurance for the bold, brave and ambitious. Based in London's square mile, Superscript has rebuilt insurance - driven by transparent, digital processes, with an expert human touch when you need it - so startups, scaleups and grown ups can go all in on growth. As a venture-backed Lloyd's broker with specialists across key tech verticals like digi...

Stephanie and Lucas discuss Recurly, the world of subscriptions and enterprise marketing, focusing on customer retention, streamlining user experience and taking a multi-channel approach towards marketing. About Recurly Recurly offers a comprehensive suite of services that covers the entire spectrum of subscription management, from acquisition to retention to scaling. With Recurly, businesses can...