Happy MBA

Brendan Kearns is a designer and founder of Studio Rival. For many people his career path is already a mark of success having worked at Twitter, Invision and Google. But like most creative entrepreneurs he has his own definition of success that isn’t driven by money or status. In this episode we talk about his time working for tech giants, his view on the role of designers and what it means to him...

Does creating impact always have to take effort and hard work? Can you make change without forcing it? According to Rei Chou it is possible. You just have to hold on less tightly to the outcome and be more honest about why you need to be a changemaker. This takes some inner work, which according to Rei is an exploration into what you don’t know that you don’t know about yourself. Rei is a former m...

Carrie is an author, entrepreneur, community builder and consultant and has been building online communities for the past 15 years. Her new book Building Brand Communities is about how companies can create a greater sense of belonging and therefore create more positive impact in the world. Her experience in tech startups did not create a great positive impact for her. She started her professional...

Sarah Metcalfe is the founder of Happy Coffee Consulting and a long time member of the Happy Startup School. She’s passionate about creating happy workplaces and this September she launched her very first online summit about Happiness at Work. The idea came to her in March and within 6 months it was up and running. Now that’s idea to action! In this episode we talk about her work and how she helps...

One of my highlights from this year’s Happy Startup Summercamp was watching Laurence Shorter’s Spiritual Experience. Think of it as stand up comedy meets group therapy meets chat show meets transformational workshop. I like to call it cheerful introspection. I’ve come to believe that many of the challenges that we find in business and leadership come from a lack of clarity. This is a lack of clari...

Alexander Kjerulf is the founder of Woohoo Inc and is the original Chief Happiness Officer. Laurence and I first met Alex over 6 years ago when we went to a conference in Denmark for innovators trying to change the world of business. He’s an amazing guy with an infectious positive energy. When we were over there he invited us to dinner and it was my first experience of Cards Against Humanity. I ca...

The entrepreneurial path is an uncertain one. When you decide to claim control over the direction of your work (and life) you also to take on the responsibility for the big decisions and regularly you don’t always have all the information you need to make them. You can try to think your way to an answer and systematically way up all the pros and cons but that may not be enough. It doesn’t take lon...

We hear it said by influencers and Instagrammers, “find your passion and make it happen”. However when you identify so closely with the business you want to create you want to make it perfect and you fear even more that it will be rejected. And that slows you down. That’s because if you’re work is rejected doesn’t that mean you are rejected? On this episode I talk to Kim Slade founder of Unlost an...

I love the following excerpt from this week's podcast. It fully captures our work with early stage entrepreneurs who are stumbling along trying to get their idea out into the world. Maybe they're slowed down by the feeling of imposter syndrome or perhaps it's their need to make sure their idea is perfect and a fear of failure? In the end though you just need to get clay on the wheel... "You can’t...

In this episode I share the audio of a live webinar Laurence and I hosted where we discussed whether to change our name. We've been running The Happy Startup School for over seven years and during that time we've evolved from delivering workshops on how to build a startup to hosting transformational retreats on the beaches of Goa. We run an online community where we support entrepreneurs at differ...

The Map of Meaning is a very simple map that can create powerful insights. In this episode of the podcast I talk to Lani Morris, one of the co-creators of the map and we discuss what it takes to create more meaning in our lives. Along with her fellow co-creators they’ve discovered that there are four common elements to meaning: integrity with self; unity with others; actualising self potential and...

Marianne is an entrepreneur, coach and author of Be a Free Range Human. I first met Marianne at our Summercamp in 2015 where she ran a workshop about escaping the 9 to 5 and creating a lifestyle that aligns with your business. In this episode we talk about her journey since then and discuss how leaving employment to create our own businesses can mean unintentionally swapping one cage for another....

Over the past 7 years of building the Happy Startup School I’ve met entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. Some are motivated by looking at the market and creating what’s wanted while others are motivated by an internal need to create what’s true to them. In my mind they’re at the opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end is the businessman and at the other end is the artist. In this episode of th...

Learning about Non-Violent Communication has been a game changer for me. As a child I’d always struggled to deal with difficult emotions and so would either lash out in anger or, what was more often the case, would cry with frustration. I learned that expressing emotions was weak and so I decided to suppress them. However, in doing so I limited the development of my own emotional vocabulary and th...

Petra Smid is a consultant and facilitator who helps organisations and individuals navigate change. She believes that by living our values we’re able to overcome our fear of uncertainty and by trusting in ourselves we’re able to tackle all the challenges we’ll face. Petra joined us for Alptitude 2019 because she was looking to create space for herself. In our business lives and our personal lives...

Alan is a business coach and mentor on a mission to help and empower as many entrepreneurs as he can. His focus in on owner managed businesses that want to scale up and he’s been amazing support for myself an Laurence. On a previous episode Alan and I discussed the idea of building a minimum viable audience, essentially gathering people around you that love what you do. While many early stage entr...

On this episode of the podcast I talk to Ebonie Allard about self knowledge and creating more alignment in your life. “No matter where you go, you’ll be there too so it’s useful to know who you are.” If you’ve ever got to a period in your life when you’ve looked around and asked yourself the question “is this it?” then you’ll be interested in Ebonie’s journey of going from misfit to maven. This st...

In this episode I have a very honest conversation with Ed Barton, cofounder of Curiscope, about what it’s like to build a venture backed startup. What starts off as a classic tech startup story and a window into the world of venture capital evolves beautifully into a raw story of what it's like to be a leader at a personal level. We talk about the struggle and overwhelm that comes with investment...

In this episode of the podcast I’m joined by John Parkin author of the international best seller Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way. He’s also written other books in the Fuck It series as well as hosting retreats in Italy with his wife Gaia. John will be joining us at Summercamp this year to give a talk and I so I wanted to get to know him more as well as introduce him to our community. During ou...

Phoebe is one of those true multipotentialite with a finger in many pies. She’s involved in many projects including being a member of the social change freelancer network Enspiral. She’s on a mission to understand what it means to be human in this technological age and sees life as an experiment with no 'wrong' answer. She believes that we could be offering a far richer, more holistic and innovati...

This is a touching and illuminating conversation with Jerome Ribot, founder of Coglode. Coglode is a startup with a mission to help people make better decisions by making sense of behavioural research. Laurence and I have known Jerome and his brother Anthony for many years. They actually ran a workshop at our Happy Startup Summercamp nearly 5 years ago, which is coming up again this September and...

 For much of my life I’ve been a worrier. I’ve worried about whether I was making the right decision or whether people thought I was doing the right thing. My mind fills with thoughts and judgements that can turn into a cacophony. This stops me from being able to listen to my body and therefore be able to follow my intuition. As Max St. John, founder of Being Wild Things, tells me in this epi...

Laurence has been reading the book Nature Fix recently and it inspired him to write a post on our Medium publication entitled Hiking The Therapy Trail Where Life and Work Meet . If you’d like to have read go to http://ahappy.link/read . He says that it backs up what we intrinsically know. That when we lose ourselves in nature time stands still and we learn to behave more generously to ourselves an...

It’s over a week now since we got back from Alptitude, our retreat for leaders and professionals. Alptitude is for people who want to make space for themselves so that they can get clear on their next steps. It’s a time to get away from the noise of the everyday in order to hear that inner voice called our intuition. In this episode of the podcast I talk to Meghan French Dunbar, founder of Conscio...

Casper ter Kuile is one of the authors of the How We Gather report which is an exploration into how Millennials are finding and building communities of meaning and belonging. He’s also the co-host of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text which itself has grown into a community and business in its own right. During our conversation we discuss what community means to Casper and how our need f...