Secret Leaders

Natasha Baker is a British dressage rider with 5 Paralympic golds to her name and a load of other top medals. She experienced a very public failure which left her in tears. And then, a few years later, the thing she was most scared of happening in the world, happened.  What’s it like when you fall off the literal horse on the big stage? And what did it teach her about failure that we can all learn...

This conversation with Danny Gray is one of our all-time favourites. Danny had a childhood filled with bullying, trauma and mental disorders. It left him with scars that no one else could see, and eventually led him to starting War Paint, a men’s makeup brand that is on an unbelievable growth path. They’re creating a new category. In fact, they’ve already created it and are fast becoming an iconic...

You probably heard SVB collapsed, but what you probably don’t know is how close the UK startup ecosystem came to collapsing all together. This is the inside story of how a small group of Founders and VCs fought to save the industry. How do we know? Because our host Dan was a small part of it. If the story we’re telling today hadn’t happened, then Dan would be sitting here without a company. This i...

Taavet Hinrikus is the Co-Founder and former Chairman of Wise, the unicorn fintech which used to be called TransferWise. He’s now the Co-Founder of Plural, an investment platform for early stage capital built by founders and real operators like Taavet. Oh, and he was also the first ever employee at Skype. Basically, he’s one of the top startup dogs in Europe so we had to get him on to learn what t...

Alessandro, or 'Alex' Savelli, is the Co-Founder of Pasta Evangelists - a brand you’ve probably come across. Their pasta is delicious and everywhere. But, before he was getting his hands in the proverbial pasta dough, he tried to climb a much tougher mountain - building a luxury smartphone brand. We’re talking hardware and software to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung but bedecked in pre...

Maxim Perumal is the Founder of Unai and we think he’s a certifiable genius. He’s certainly one of the most exciting Founders we’ve ever spoken to - he built the world’s most popular open source VR headset when he was 15 years old, and turned down working at Meta. His company Unai is building a VR headset and virtual world to make human expression in VR feel magical, which is a bold claim but he’s...

That’s Matteo Grassi, the Co-Founder of Pop-Up, a thriving no code eCommerce platform. But before all this, there was another period in his life - a much darker period.  He left Shopify in 2016 to become a partner in a company, which Matteo has asked to keep anonymous. The idea was they would quickly spin up dozens of D2C ecommerce shops, connecting customers with cool products.   They would be th...

Matt Kelly, the Founder of Spacegoods (really cool company btw) experienced one of the fastest rises and falls with a bootstrapped business we’ve ever seen. He grew Neon Beach, a DTC neon sign brand, to £7m in revenue in a year. He got to £10m in 18 months - from his bedroom, in lockdown - basically just him, his laptop and freelancers. But then he made one big mistake which cost him more than thi...

We're linking up with our mates at Crowd Network to introduce you to one of their new podcasts, Captains with Sam Warburton. Whether you’re big into your sports or not, this show has plenty of leadership gems to be taken into your life and career. Sam is joined weekly by a successful sporting leader, who explain what it takes to be the very best. To listen to the rest of this chat, search for ‘Cap...

Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, where she teaches the immensely popular MBA course, Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design. She’s also the author of Happier Hour, a new book that gives us the tools to be happier, some of which we’ll dive into later today.  Cassie’s understanding of happiness was born out of a deeply unhappy period, sparked by an inte...

Joanna Jensen is the Founder and former CEO of Childs Farm, a baby & child skincare brand.   The company began at home after Joanna grew frustrated with the lack of choice for her young daughter’s sensitive, eczema-prone skin, so she started to make her own products. When those worked she got a thousand bottles made and went up and down the country selling them at trade fairs, country shows, anywh...

Brett Wigdortz is the Co-Founder of Teach First. He started the business in 2002 after seeing how the UK education system was failing miserably. The company has gone on to be a massive success but it was incredibly close to imploding because of how he operated in the early days.  When Brett asked for feedback from his staff, a small moment turned into a big moment that would change the course of T...

Dr Ben Maruthappu is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cera, a digital-first home healthcare company. In just over six years, Cera has established itself as one of the biggest providers of healthcare at home in the UK, as well as one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe.  Cera currently makes almost 50,000 visits a day to people’s homes in the UK. That’s the equivalent capacity of around 50 hospital...

Christie Ellis founded one of the first human quality pet food companies, The Healthy Pet Gourmet. Her aim was to revolutionise how we feed our pets by helping them live longer and happier. She was going to build the next IAMS.  The press went mad, customers loved it. She was on World News Tonight, the Today show, and top-end magazines. She had high profile clients, one who designed her kitchen fo...

Shyp started in 2013 when Kevin Gibbon had the idea of taking the Uber model and using it for shipping. He created an on-demand service where customers would take a picture of what they wanted to send, a courier would come pick it up and then take it to a warehouse to be packaged and delivered using major shipping companies.   There was huge excitement when they launched. They were featured on the...

Did you know that looking after your brain is one of the best ways to be more productive? And your gut is central to the decisions you make?  This episode brings insights from two professionals at the cutting edge of their fields, to give actionable steps on how to be more effective, improving your life at work and at home.  Dr Tara is a world-leading neuroscientist and best selling author of ‘The...

Dom McGregor co-founded Social Chain with Steven Bartlett, host of the hit podcast Diary of a CEO. Their business didn’t fail, in fact, it sky-rocketed. When they exited the company after six years in 2020, they’d built it to hundreds of employees, with clients like Apple, McDonald's, the BBC, and Boohoo, and taken it public the year before with a value of about £250 million.  But the pressure on...

What do you want to do with your life? Do you have a plan? Bryan Johnson knew from a young age he wanted to have a big impact on the world and set out to do it. His plan was simple, he wanted to make enough money so that he could focus on really making a difference to the world.  And he did it. Not by doing anything flashy but by building a payments platform, bootstrapping it for years, and throug...

What are your new year’s resolutions? Is money on your mind?  Being an entrepreneur can be a bit of an all or nothing game when it comes to money. You're into the creation process and are willing to sacrifice a lot. It can cost you much more than you earn, especially at the beginning, and often you have nothing for a long time. But, admitting that you want money and understanding how to take contr...

Ella Mills started a plant-based food blog, Deliciously Ella, in 2012 after chronic illness left her physically and mentally depleted. The blog blew up and its popularity led to her first recipe book, which was released in January 2015. It became the fastest-selling debut cookbook of all time in the UK and spent eight weeks at number one on Amazon, across all categories.  Deliciously Ella now has...

How do you know what to do when you’re just starting out?  In 2007, Rob Fitzpatrick and his two co-founders, were in their early twenties. They were programmers just out of academia and had an idea for a business. They were accepted to YCombinator in the same cohort as teams like Dropbox and Songkick. They got deals with big companies like Sony Music, MTV, and the BBC, were on national talk shows,...

Where were you when you came up with the idea for your business? Simon Griffiths was sitting on a toilet when he had the idea for Who Gives A Crap, a subscription-based toilet paper brand that donates 50% of its profits to help build toilets in the developing world. Since they launched in 2012, they’ve sold more than 300 million rolls of toilet paper and donated more than 11 million Australian dol...

What happens when your business pivots so much you end up in a completely different industry? Steven Renwick founded Satago, a platform that helps businesses get paid faster, in 2012. It was actually one of the first companies to raise money on the equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs.  Whilst it started out as a way to crowdsource data about when companies were getting paid and use that to make re...

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones grew up in poverty in Birmingham, having come with his parents from Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation. One of nine children, and as the oldest boy, it was his job to help his father on their allotment, which they used to supplement the family income. And it was on that allotment he first dreamt of owning his own farm.  His drive to change his circumstances was relen...

Do you want to learn about raising capital from someone who has been through the wringer and reflected on his mistakes? Alex Rainey is the Co-Founder of travel insurer and planning app Pluto, which he founded in 2018. They raised a total of £1.3 million, and grew to be the UK’s second highest rated travel insurer and one of the top-3 travel planning apps on the app store.  But in September 2022, j...