Secret Leaders

We are all for throwing two fingers up at the establishment, and who better to do that than an LGBTQ, black, woman investor? Meet Arlan Hamilton, Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital.  Backstage Capital is a fund that invests in under-estimated founders that are defined as women, people of colour and members of the LGBTQ community, who together represent the biggest economic opportuni...

Mental health disorders are the global epidemic of our times and according to WHO, the instances of anxiety, depression and suicide rates are climbing, globally. On this special live episode of Secret Leaders, two amazing guests, Damian Bradfield and Mills, open up about their personal experiences with mental health.  “I've come to realise now that everyone has some form of mental health without a...

As an entrepreneur, creativity is the name of your game. And who better to hear from than the king of creativity himself, Mr John Cleese. Yes, that’s right. John. Cleese. You’re welcome.  Where do we begin?  John’s (Mr Cleese?) talents are boundless - actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer and author. The co-founder of the infamous Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the creator and star of Fawlty Towe...

Marcia Kilgore is a serial entrepreneur in the truest sense of the term. Not content with creating just one globally renowned brand, Marcia is responsible for Bliss Spa, Soap and Glory, FitFlop, Soaper Duper and now Beauty Pie. But how did she become Queen of Startups? Bliss Spa, her first startup in NYC, saw her give facials to Demi Moore, Courtney Love, Christy Turlington, Bette Midler and Calvi...

If you created one of the world’s most popular programming frameworks, a framework on which hundreds of thousands of programmers rely to build applications such as Github, Shopify, Airbnb, Kickstarter, to name but a few, would you make it open source?  Because that’s what David Heinemeier Hansson decided to do.  DHH (to his friends and everyone on Twitter) is the creator of Ruby on Rails. But that...

Pleo is a fundamentally new way to manage company expenses (not to mention being one of the sponsors of this illustrious podcast). Founded in early 2015 by fintech veterans Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, core listeners may have a good understanding of who Pleo are, but how much do you know about their actual journey? “It was all about the product in the beginning. And we were just figuring out wh...

Do you want to cut your carbon emissions to zero and save money on your energy bills?  Introducing Bulb, a green energy company founded in 2015 by Hayden Wood and co-founder, Amit Gudka. Together they wanted to change the energy industry, to make it better, by making energy simpler, cheaper and greener.  “We saw all the new technology from solar panels and batteries and smart meters changing the r...

If you’ve ever wondered how entrepreneurs without a specific idea go on to found a unicorn startup from their bedrooms, then this episode of Secret Leaders is for you.  “One of the things that really strikes me that's changed over the course of the last 10 years is the level of awareness of what's possible. When we decided to start GoCardless, most of our friends just thought we were unemployed an...

“When have you actually been thirsty? We have water everywhere around us. There are taps, there are showers. It's this infinite resource for most people, yet for the marginalised 10% of the world, it's something that they've never known.” Scott Harrison is a former club promoter turned CEO of Charity: Water, a hyper transparent non profit organisation that in 13 years has raised over $500 million...

Have you seen your household food waste increase exponentially during the pandemic? You’re not alone.  “Food waste in homes is more under scrutiny now than ever because people are not used to cooking at home, seven days a week. It's the perfect storm for trying to figure out your cooking schedule and using everything and that definitely produces food waste, at least initially until you've found yo...

With the world now confronting issues of race, and more specifically, Black Lives Matter, we felt it right to bring on an award winning science journalist, author and broadcaster and the first ever guest we've had that is not an entrepreneur of a wildly successful company.  Angela Saini may not have the battle scars, nor learned the painful lessons that you, our audience, have become accustomed to...

If you think now’s not a great time to start up a business, take this advice from seasoned entrepreneur Sach Kukadia:  “There is never a good time to start anything, particularly a startup. There's always a list of reasons as to why you shouldn't do it. And the older you get, the more that list grows. If you're going to start anything, whether it's a start up or do something, you need to just do i...

Learning to be happy is hard enough. Learning to be happy in the middle of a pandemic should be nigh on impossible. Not so, according to Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google [X], serial entrepreneur and author of “Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy” (2017).  Mo’s famous for bringing Google to 4 billion new users, but that’s not all he’s done. Throughout his career he’s als...

From salty sea dog to captain of BrewDog in the space of a year. James Watt is the founder of the rocket ship brewery and brand known as BrewDog. Now valued at over $1 billion, this incredible startup began life in co-founder Martin Dickie’s mum’s garage.  “No one wanted to buy our beer. Everyone told us to make beer with less flavour, with less bitterness, with less hops, that our labels looked s...

It's a tough time for many businesses right now, but one sector in particular is thriving - the world of delicious food delivered to your doorstep. Unlike the vast majority of businesses, these companies are growing exponentially, because of the lockdown. “Literally overnight, it's [Covid-19] essentially forced consumers who have never bought one grocery shop online to go, ‘Well, I might as well t...

If you’ve been caught out raising money for your startup during this complicated time, then you’ve come to the right place - you’re in good company.  In this episode of Secret Leaders we’ve pinned down VC extraordinaire, Fred Destin who is primed to answer not just our questions, but your questions too. Why should you take advice from Fred? Because he’s the founder of Stride. VC, a £100 million se...

Today’s guest is someone we’ve had on the show before, in fact, he kicked off season 4 for us. So don’t be confused and think we’ve got our seasons muddled up.  We thought we’d invite Cal Henderson back onto the podcast because his company, Slack, is one of only a few companies that aren’t in a tailspin currently. They’re facing an entirely different dilemma - they’re scrambling to keep up with de...

If you’re wondering how on earth you’re going to hold down a full time job while working from home AND educating your kids for the foreseeable future, then you need to listen to Koru Kids founder Rachel Carrell and Tech Will Save Us co-founder Bethany Koby.  “Lower [your] impossible expectations. It is not possible to work full time and also homeschool kids full time, at the same time. It's just n...

Kicking off series 5 of Secret Leaders are two fantastic guests - Ali Parsa (CEO and founder of Babylon) and Dr Ranjan Chatterjee. Ali has been on the show several times before - firstly on his own, and secondly for one of our live events where he shared the stage with Michael Acton-Smith, founder of Calm.  In the light of the current global crisis, nobody knows what the world is going to be like...

We’ve all been there - back from a hard night’s boozing and hungry. Most of us would simply eat some toast and hit the hay, but then most of us aren’t Will Shu, founder and CEO of Deliveroo.  “I was like, wow, you know, you can't get any decent food delivered here when you've been boozing. Then I was like, wait a minute, maybe I should start something that is a late night delivery service for food...

“I think the worst thing is every morning when you wake up as a founder and you pick up your phone, you think what will I discover that will ruin my day?” While your business might not care what your gender is, significant discrepancies still exist between the number of female and male entrepreneurs. As Baroness Martha Lane Fox quite rightly proclaimed, ‘you cannot be what you cannot see’.  And so...

If you found the film ‘The Holiday’ so inspirational it kickstarted a business that you went on to sell for over £50 million, then you’re in good company. You didn’t? Well you missed a trick. Not so Debbie Wosskow, co-founder of AllBright and former CEO of LoveHomeSwap (a subscription based home exchange business) who on a plane home from a ‘holiday’ in the Caribbean watched the movie and thought,...

You may know that LoveFilm became Amazon Prime Video, that part of the deal was public knowledge. What you may not be familiar with is the wrangling, the deal making and the allegiance swapping that went on behind the scenes to get the deal across the table.  In this very special live episode of Secret Leaders we once again sit down with serial entrepreneur and angel investor, best known for creat...

Today’s guest has been a high achiever since he was a kid, completing his computer science GCSE at 11, his A-levels at 13, and receiving a Masters from LSE by the time he was 20. Some child geniuses burnout before they achieve great things, not Rishi Khosla.  Rishi, according to LL Cool J, is something of a phenomenon in the world of entrepreneurship, and we are wont to agree with him.  Co-foundin...

Have you ever wondered what the meaning of life is? Of course you have, you’re only human after all.  Well, today’s guest, Alain de Botton, philosopher and founder of The School of Life, has not only wondered the same thing too, philosophising this age old dilemma, he’s also written a book on the subject.  Actually, he’s written well over 15 books as a solo author and collaborated on countless oth...