Secret Leaders

Amanda Perry tells us what it’s like to go bankrupt after flying high with her baking business. She’d been featured in Vogue; her cupcakes were flying off the shelves - she thought business was easy. Until it wasn’t, and it was her who was personally on the hook… How do you even go bankrupt from starting a company? What impact does it have on you? And how do you recover from something like that? ...

It’s pretty rare that investors have to ask the Founder they’re speaking to if they’re in a warzone, or insist they have to leave their country for somewhere a little more ‘peaceful’ but that’s exactly what happened to Yaron Galai, the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Outbrain. Yaron was a captain in the Israeli Navy before smashing it out the park with a few startups he founded.  Yaron’s latest company O...

Steve Witt knows what it’s like to make a lot of money… and lose it all. He knows what it’s like to go from sipping mai tais on the proverbial Caribbean island to sleeping on your mate’s sofa because you’ve got nowhere else to go. And he’s gone through that twice. Find out what happened and how he picked himself up again. ... We'd love your feedback: hello@secretleaders.com  Check out Yotpo, our e...

BorrowMyDoggy is the kind of brand that just sticks in your brain. Once you’ve heard it you can’t unhear it.  Today we’re talking with its Founder and CEO Rikke Rosenlund who had an idyllic Danish childhood but still doesn’t own a dog. Find out how she built the company bit by bit - and how they're helping the 25% of dogs who are depressed. We talk about: What your parents say behind your back The...

This is the first episode in our new bitesize series (10/15-minute episodes) dedicated to failure. Trinny Woodall’s an A-lister now, and the Founder of Trinny London, but before all the success she experienced a soul-crushing failure around the dotcom boom. Find out what happened, what she learnt from it - and how you should think about failure. ... We'd love your feedback: hello@secretleaders.com...

What we’re taught at schools is a real pet peeve here at Secret Leaders. Why are we mucking about learning Latin when we could be learning about stuff like nutrition and personal finance - genuinely useful subjects that will help us lead happier, more fulfilling lives? That’s what Max Rofagha thought when, after exiting his previous startup, he didn’t know what to do with his new found wealth. The...

If you’ve been on holiday - if you’ve been anywhere you’ve Googled - you’ve probably used Tripadvisor. It’s just one of those names synonymous with the internet, and it’s not just because their SEO has been amazing - they’ve been going for 22 years.  Extraordinarily it’s had the same person leading it all this time - Steve Kaufer, who’s finally stepping down this year.  Tripadvisor has been throug...

When you’re first dreaming up a business idea, you imagine it at its best - as if your execution was perfect and your resources unlimited. When your friends ask at a dinner party, you say you’ll have Gordon Ramsey teaching cooking and Christina Aguilera teaching singing. Your friends laugh, you cheers each other - and carry on with your meal. But in the case of today’s guest, David Rogier, he’s tu...

How do you buy a ski mountain? How much does it cost? And how do you turn it into the biggest ski resort in North America - Powder Mountain? That’s the kind of thing we wanted to know when we sat down with Elliott Bisnow, who shot to startup fame as Co-Founder of Summit, a now legendary events series which attracted speakers like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Jessica Alba. He’s now the proud Co-...

It’s not often you meet real life prodigies but Kieran O’Neill might just be one. By the time he was 19 he’d been sued by Disney and his company had been bought by Carl Page, the brother of Google Co-Founder Larry Page. And then he dropped out of university to start another successful business, because, why not? “At that point I discovered what I want to do for the rest of my life - build things....

Building a successful startup is about lots of things but a tonne of people get the first step wrong - picking the right business to launch. So how do you pick the right one? Well, our host and the Co-Founder of Heights Dan Murray-Serter is in the hot seat today answering that very question.  This is the second episode in our semi-regular series with Dan, showing what it’s really like to be a Foun...

One of the extraordinary things about the startup ecosystem is the kind of company that gets celebrated. Most of the time, they don’t make money. They bounce from one funding round to the next, and only a tiny % eventually make it. They’re the kinds of businesses that would’ve made our grandparents shake their heads. Today’s guest, Tom Leathes, the Co-Founder and CEO of used car marketplace Motorw...

If you’re in the UK and you like your peanut butter, you’ve probably come across Pip & Nut, the brand named after its Founder and today’s guest, Pip Murray. Pip started the business when she was 24, at her kitchen table, with a blender and some nuts.  But plenty of people start businesses like that so what makes her special? How has she managed it?  Oh, and we’ve also got the return of the king, R...

It’s amazing how important business seems until something really important happens, like a war breaks out. For Aleksandr Volodarsky, Founder of Lemon.io, which connects companies with software engineers, although he and his colleagues had gotten used to operating in a conflict situation since 2014, he was still stunned when Russia invaded. And the most useful thing he can do now is to keep the bus...

Look, we’re going to tell you straight - this is a blinding episode - and that’s because we’re talking to a man who is unflinchingly honest about his Founder experience. On the outside it looked like Adam Bierman had it all. He was the Co-Founder and CEO of MedMen, a cult phenomenon and the world’s first cannabis unicorn. They were seen as the Apple of weed and they looked unstoppable.  But in 201...

What’s particularly shocking about Nick Telson’s success with DesignMyNight is how deliberate it all seemed. They set themselves a target each year, achieved it and moved onto the next one until they’d hit the numbers they needed for the exit they wanted. How many businesses do that? And it was the first startup he’d ever founded… Nick explains how they sold the business - the actual steps they to...

It’s the stuff entrepreneurs dream of. Houzz, a marketplace for home renovations, evolved from an evenings and weekends passion project into a multi-billion dollar company with investors queuing up to get a slice of their proverbial pie. So how did the two Co-Founders, husband and wife Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen, do it? “I think, in retrospect, delaying it and bootstrapping it, the way we bootstra...

Life is the sum of your choices, says Jeffrey Kolovson, COO and Co-Founder of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands. At the end of the day, it’s not what you say, it's what you do and the choices you make and the accumulation of those over time that matters.  “I once had a mentor tell me that the prize for winning the donut eating competition is more donuts. And that kind...

Cocaine, £1,000 on roulette, sleeping with the client, a boss demanding bail out of a Malaysian prison, a restraining order - and that’s just one of the stories in this special episode where we turn the microphone on our host, Dan Murray-Serter. This is the start of a semi-regular series where we interview Dan roughly every three months because:  If you listen to the podcast regularly we thought y...

Having grown up poor, Founder and CEO of Vuori Joe Kudla always wondered what it would be like to have money and go on holiday, so he spent the first chapter of his career proving to himself that he could make money. But then he started to make life decisions differently. “I see myself on my deathbed. And I am coming to terms with that moment, am I going to look back and feel like I went for it, l...

Curve CEO and founder Shachar Bialick is a multi-exit entrepreneur with a background in the Israeli Defense Force special forces. “There's a joke in Israel: how do you win a competition in racing? You start as fast as you can, and you slowly increase the pace.” Curve brings all your credit cards and debit cards into one app and card. The idea first came to Shachar in 2006, but he knew that launchi...

How did NetSuite grow from its humble beginnings above a hairdressers in 1998 to almost 20,000 employees 23 years later, and selling to Oracle for $9.3 billion dollars?  Today we’re speaking to Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP of NetSuite who make software which helps businesses with stuff like accountancy and inventory management.  “We provide [services] for businesses that are fast growing, that h...

The only certainty in life is death (and taxes!) And yet the industry of death had remained largely unmodernised by the time Farewill was co-founded by Dan Garrett in 2015. “Out of 100, losing a spouse, or a parent or a best friend, is the 100 out of 100 worst thing you ever go through. And what a great funeral can do is bring back some of that connection that you have with someone.” Dan says that...

Being a Founder takes its toll on you - even if it looks like everything is rosy from the outside. Today we’re learning from Alex Lieberman, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew, which became a darling in the media industry because it actually became commercially successful. But whilst everyone else was applauding the company’s success, for Alex at least, he was trying to cope with an...

How many times have you stood in front of a wall of wine in a supermarket and taken a punt on one because the bottle looked nicer than the others? We’ve all done it… and often been disappointed by results. So, in 2009 Heini Zachariassen, Co-Founder, Former CEO and current board member of Vivino, decided to fix the problem. “Why is wine something that nobody has disrupted? And why is wine something...