Secret Leaders

Do you risk it all when the odds are stacked against you? As a founder it’s very hard to take that first leap into the unknown and even more so when you’re in a job you love. The stakes are rarely higher and it’s so difficult to do it well.  But that’s exactly what Thibaud Hug de Larauze did when he left his job to found Back Market, a marketplace for refurbished devices, in 2014. They have grown...

Simon Squibb is a multi-millionaire entrepreneur and angel investor. After being homeless at 15, he has gone on to found 19 businesses and invest in 76 companies to date. After selling his business to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) he retired at 40 and is now on a mission to help 10 million people start their own businesses through the Purposeful Project. But it wasn’t a straight line to success, an...

This is Secret Leader’s 200th episode! Over the last 5 years we've featured over 50 unicorn leaders and household names such as Monzo, Slack, Duolingo, Brewdog, Lastminute.com. In today’s episode host Dan Murray-Serter takes listeners through the interviews that have had the biggest impact on him. Guests include host of Diary of a CEO, entrepreneur, and angel investor, Steven Bartlett; Co-Founder...

In 2013 Emma set up strategic brand agency Hands Down in her spare bedroom, on her laptop, with just £1,000 in savings. She’d never run a business before and had been an employee for the past twenty years, since she was 18. Learning on the job, she put all her energy into growing the business over the next ten years. She had one goal in mind, to make £1 million a year. Despite the pandemic, the bu...

John Hitchcox is the Chairman and Founder of Yoo Group, the property company behind the £1.3 billion pound regeneration of Olympia London and considered by many the global leader in the branded residence space.  John founded Yoo in 1999 with one of the world’s most famous designers, Philippe Starck. Together they have grown Yoo to where it is today, operating in over fifty cities and thirty countr...

This a new one for us - we've just launched our first true crime show at Kindling Media (we make Secret Leaders). It's called Bad Money and it's about the Hong Kong gangster, Big Spender. Obsessed with money, he went further than anyone before to get rich. In fact, he became so wealthy he could've had his own episode on Secret Leaders. This is a story of how money and power really work - and this...

Konrad Bergström is the founder of Swedish electric boat manufacturer X Shore and Zound Industries, the Swedish tech giant that sells consumer electronics for Marshall Amplification and Adidas.  But before that, he was half a million euros in debt and living out of his car after his previous business, Megascine Agency, failed. Konrad set up the business which distributed brands like Quicksilver an...

Nikki Wicks is the CEO of The Body Coach and the older brother of Joe Wicks. Joe, aka The Body Coach, is a household name. He’s a fitness coach with a massive online following and the author of one of the best selling cookbooks of all time ‘Lean In 15’, having sold over a million copies in its first year alone.  During the pandemic Joe became known as the ‘Nation’s PE teacher’, delivering exercise...

Kurt Davis has spent twenty years in Silicon Valley and Asia, working in venture capital and business development for technology startups, focusing on deals with companies like Apple, Microsoft, Spotify, and Sony.  But he experienced failure, with his very first business, a mobile game company. Kurt was living in Hong Kong in the early 2000s and from there he witnessed the beginning of a wave of i...

Christian Angermayer is a German-born billionaire. He’s on the Sunday Times rich list, and has accumulated a lot of wealth from his work as an investor, film producer and founder. But Christian is about much more than money… From his family office, Apeiron Investment Group, he invests and starts companies in areas from psychedelics to fintech, cryptocurrency, biotech, and artificial intelligence....

Jonathan Anderson is the co-founder and CEO of Candu, a no-code platform that helps people build their own products. They are used by companies likeAdobe, Thought Industries, and Gorgias and have raised over five million dollars. But his first business wasn’t such a success. In 2011, when Jonathan was a student at Stanford University in a CleanTech programme, he came up with the idea for a smart t...

If you’re not one of their 500 million users, Duolingo is a phenomenally successful app where you practise a language in small chunks every day. Launched in 2012, it has become the number one language learning app and the most downloaded education app in the world. The company floated in 2021 and currently has a market cap of just under 4 billion dollars.  It’s rare for a founder to be brilliant a...

Jay Radia has built three businesses worth over half a billion pounds and currently runs an accelerator focusing on increasing happiness in the workplace.  But before all that, he founded a company called Mobi RF, which failed. The idea behind the company was to allow anyone with a smartphone to start selling their photos to businesses, like iStock or Getty Images for your smartphone.  Jay had thi...

Before Mark Joseph founded his current marketing agency, Vouch Global, he experienced failure with another agency called Testify Digital. Their clients included brands like Universal, Wonderbra, Shock Absorber and Lenovo. He loved the projects they came up with, including the world’s first award judged on social media for the Mobo Awards. They got to £1m in revenue and Mark ran the company for fiv...

Gareth Atkinson launched the Yorkshire Meatball Company in 2014 with his father after they recognised a gap in the market for a premium meatball product. They opened a restaurant in Harrogate, won awards, were listed as one of the UK’s top 100 startups, and ended up being stocked in 300 supermarkets across the country. Like all good entrepreneurs, they’d even built a brand that had the potential a...

How do you build a metaverse?  Long before Facebook changed to Meta, Improbable, a British game and technology company, was working on the idea of a kind of metaverse, even if they didn’t call it that. Now, they are at the forefront of making virtual worlds (where you can go to work, socialise, have experiences) a reality.  Improbable was born in 2012 after Herman Narula met Co-Founder Rob Whitehe...

Would you fight for your business even after you’d put it into administration?  Radha Vyas co-founded Flash Pack, an adventure holiday company, with her husband Lee, after realising there was an untapped market for solo entrepreneurs in their thirties and forties. They slowly built their company and were just entering an exciting first fundraising round when the pandemic hit, decimating their comp...

You want to launch a new product. But how do you decide on exactly what you’re going to develop? How do you build a community when you don’t have anything to sell them? How do you test demand? These are important questions that Dan Murray-Serter, the usual host of Secret Leaders, will be answering this week. This is the fourth chapter in our semi-regular series with Dan where we put him in the hot...

Do you struggle to maintain good relationships with your employees?  Hayden Bloomfield managed to grow his grounds maintenance company during the pandemic. At its height, it had a team of ten and was turning over £25,000 - £30,000 a month. But during a period of two years, Hayden went through thirty members of staff. He couldn’t focus on building the big picture because he regularly had to cover s...

Micha Kaufman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fiverr, the global online marketplace for freelancers. Let’s say you’re a designer. You can list your services and display your portfolio. And then companies who want stuff designed like a new website can find you and hire you to do the work. It's called Fiverr because at the beginning all the tasks cost 5 dollars. Though the pricing has changed, the name...

Would you go into business with a friend?  Jo Fisher is the Founder and CEO of Footlights, a performing arts company, which has 17 franchises and works with schools across the north of England.  She got into business at a ridiculously young age. As a young child she used to sit in the entrance to her house and sell items her neighbours no longer wanted to make money for sweets. She left school at...

Daniella Pierson is the CEO and Founder of the Newsette, a women-focused newsletter which she started when she was at university at just 19 years old. Now 27, she was recently named by Forbes as one of the wealthiest women of colour in the United States.  The newsletter now has more than 500,000 subscribers, whilst revenue grew from $1million in 2019 to $40 million in 2021. Within the company she...

For this episode of ‘How I Failed’ we follow the story of Aidan Mehigan’s fight to save his business, as it happened. We first spoke to Aidan earlier this year when he was in the middle of a fundraise and court battle to keep control of his whisky business. When growing his company in 2018, Natterjack Whisky, Aidan had taken out a convertible loan note to fund his business. Then Covid hit, by the...

THIS is currently the fastest-growing meat alternative brand in the UK. After launching in 2019, it was recently valued at £150 million. But Co-Founders Andy Shovel and Pete Sharman didn’t always want to help people eat less meat. In fact, before THIS they ran a successful beef burger company.  Andy knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and sold his first business at 21. But far fr...

James Vincent has helped develop brands for some of the biggest companies in the world. For 11 years he met Steve Jobs every week to come up with some of the iconic campaigns for Apple’s products. And then to launch the very first iPhone, James started Media Arts Lab, Apple’s exclusive brand agency, along with Lee Clow and other co-founders, which he ran for over eight years. For someone who had a...