Secret Leaders

Is there a more important skill for business leaders than making good decisions? We’re not sure there is. Yeah, you need vision, communication skills and hopefully some empathy - but without good decision-making you won’t get very far. In today’s episode we’ve got arguably the world’s most popular decision-making expert Shane Parrish, Founder of Fanham Street, to explain the key principles of clea...

Sometimes we put on a brave face when it's the opposite of what we should be doing. Alex Chisnall is the Founder of a Podpreneur, a podcast agency, and the host of the Screw It Just Do it podcast. He’s built a great business and loves what he does, but his first foray into entrepreneurship was a disaster. After a debt collector knocked on his door, blocked his car and refused to leave, it resulted...

Amy Edmondson has spent her life dedicated to studying failure and psychological safety. It’s her belief that the most successful cultures are those in which you can fail openly, without your mistakes being held against you.  Amy is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and has been named by Thinkers50 as the most influential management thinker in the world...

If you’ve visited a high street in the last 40 years there’s a good chance you’ve seen Games Workshop, a British institution that’s stood the test of time. One of its Founders, Sir Ian Livingstone, sold out of the company in the 90s but continued to make an unbelievable impact in the games industry, alongside being an angel investor and a best-selling fantasy author.  He’s had a hand in Tomb Raide...

2011 was the beginning for Depop, an app that lets you buy and sell your own clothes on a marketplace, Depop attracted GenZ and created a boom for vintage clothing. Simon Beckerman wanted to create a community behind his marketplace, somewhere users could create virtual stores from a device in their pocket. Fast forward 10 years, Simon sold Depop to Etsy for $1.6bn. But he didn’t stop there. Inste...

If you’ve been online in the last 10 years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of The Sidemen. 7 guys from the UK, all successful YouTubers in their own right, who grouped together to create one of the most successful YouTube collectives in the world. With over 240 million monthly views and 19 million subscribers, the Sidemen have branched out well beyond content - launching their own fast food ch...

Would you go back to save the business you started, when you’d already walked away?  Renée Elliott had to fight for her business, Planet Organic, right from the start. Two years after they launched in 1995, her then-business partner tried to force her out, which culminated in a High Court battle. Renée won and along with her husband Brian who came on as Managing Director, took back control of the...

If you're a Founder, or if you've just got big career ambitions, building your personal brand is becoming less and less optional. It's what potential employees or investors or Co-Founders or employers look at when deciding whether work with you. It's also one of the things that our usual host Dan is best at. He's just passed 150k followers whilst running three businesses so today he's spilling the...

Being comfortable with different opens your mind… Those are the words of our guest today, Christine Lemke, she’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Evidation. Christine’s story is a unique one, she was adopted from South Korea as a baby into a strict Lutheran household in South Dakota.  Several start-ups later, Christine was encouraged by her own chronic pain to co-found Evidation,an app which uses points...

Former professional baseballer, Devan Kline founded fitness company Burn Boot Camp with his wife Morgan. From starting out in a parking lot with only 600 dollars in his bank account, they are now operating in 42 states and have 375 gyms across the country.  But we wouldn't be talking to Devan if everything had all gone up and to the right. In the early days he made a serious mistake that put the w...

How long would you spend before launching your business?  Milda Mitkute was at a party in 2008 when she ended up chatting to developer Justas Janauskus. She’d come up with the idea for Vinted after she found herself with too many clothes for the small flat that she moved to for university. They decided then and there to turn the idea into a reality and launched the website just two weeks later…Onl...

Lucy Cohen is the Co-Founder of Mazuma, the UK's first subscription tax advisory firm and one of the country’s leading online accountants for small and micro businesses. They have over a thousand clients across the UK and have moved into the US market. But, in their early days, it all came so close to falling apart.  What happened? --------------------------- If you have any feedback, we’d love to...

Have you found your ‘calling’ in life? Do you think you ever will?  Today’s interview is with Rewind AI Co-Founder and CEO Dan Siroker. After leaving Google to take on the role as director of analytics in the 2008 Obama campaign, Dan knew his purpose was elsewhere. Having gone deaf in his 20s and later getting a hearing aid, he felt superpowered. This inspired him to try and augment human existenc...

Glenn Poulos is a successful founder, who exited from his company in 2022. But that was his second exit. His first, 15 years before, was a very different story. He thought he had achieved the entrepreneur's dream, an eight-figure exit, after selling his business to a public company. With the shares he got in return he was going to be a multi-millionaire. Instead, he was left with hardly anything,...

Have you ever questioned what kind of leader you are and which roles truly suit you?  Today’s interview is with Leon Co-Founder and Former CEO John Vincent. Named after John’s father, Leon was founded in 2004. John became CEO ten years later in 2014 after his co-founder Henry Dimbleby stepped down. In 2017, Leon was named on The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 list, which ranks Britain's 100 private c...

Peter Kell is a serial entrepreneur and successful marketer who has gone from being a millionaire to losing it all to being a millionaire again. As a teenager he was obsessed with the idea of getting rick quick. So he set about to do it, he hustled, setting up seven businesses in four years. But each one of them failed. He was left with nothing; completely broke, his car repossessed, evicted from...

In 2008 Dr Jason Wersland was in crippling chronic pain after a motorbike accident. He was in a dark place. A trained chiropractor, he knew what kind of relief he needed, and searched the market for a product that could give it to him. But when he came up empty handed, desperate, he decided to make one himself. By 2019 the Theragun was being used by over 250 professional sports teams and by 2022,...

"Every single major tech company that you know of has this story where they battled it to the bitter end." Young Han grew up in Silicon Valley and worked in tech before moving to Texas a few years ago for a slower way of life. In this most recent chapter he’s really got into small businesses, like a pool cleaning company which he scaled to $1m in revenue in 10 months.  He’s a coach, tech consultan...

Daniel Priestley is a serial entrepreneur and one hell of a thinker who we first spoke to on the podcast in 2017, for just our 9th episode. How the time flies. Daniel is prolific. He’s the bestselling author of books like Key Person of Influence, 24 Assets and Oversubscribed. He’s a lecturer and an excellent teacher of entrepreneurship. He’s also the co-founder and CEO of consulting agency Dent Gl...

Jennifer Moss is a workplace happiness writer, speaker and strategist.  Having moved back to Canada from Silicon Valley in 2012, she co-founded a company called Plasitcity Labs with her husband.  They developed happiness strategies for companies and got some big clients like LuluLemon. On the cusp of signing a transformative deal in 2019, they got blind-sided days before signing which fatally crip...

Sean Harrington is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elemis, one of the best-known skincare brands in the UK. Before being bought by L’Occitane four years ago for $990 million, they were the number one British skincare brand in the world. Sean spent time as a bouncer, taxi driver and worked for his dad’s suntanning business before it was bankrupted in the recession of 1989, leaving him destitute in the pr...

Anita Abildgaard is the Founder and CEO of Iris AI, a company helping humans make sense of the world’s scientific knowledge.  She’d always wanted to be a Founder and lead companies. In fact that was her specific goal after finishing her MBA.  She achieved that, but her first venture ended in failure, as did the next. She went through two bruising startup experiences in a row. So what did she learn...

Niklas Adalberth is the co-founder and former Deputy CEO of Klarna. The massive Swedish fintech provides payment services for online shops like ASOS being able to offer their customers buy now pay later. Although Klarna has been hugely successful, Niklas found himself hitting an emotional rock bottom after he came to the infamous realisation that money doesn’t buy happiness.  After some soul searc...

Sançar Sahin is the Co-Founder of Oliva, a mental health startup which has just raised £4.3 million at the time of putting this together. It’s a B2B which helps companies give mental health support to their employees, like on-demand therapy and coaching. Like our host Dan, with his company Heights, there’s a very clear line of sight from Sançar’s personal health crisis to starting his company.  At...

Did you know that IMDb was one of the first 100 websites EVER? Yeah it's mad, and it's still going - and it's always in the top 50 most visited sites in the world. Welcome to the mad world of IMDb Founder Col Needham, the movie buff you want to take to the pub to ask him all the trivia and best-of questions you can imagine. But this is also a great business story. IMDb was one of the first ever ac...