Today I’m joined by Abi Foster, Founder of Elent. After becoming a qualified ACA Chartered Accountant, Abi began her professional career in the luxury magazine sector at Condé Nast, before moving on to Hearst Publishing's finance department. She enjoyed spending time outside of work supporting colleagues and friends to better understand their own personal finances, though through this experience Abi noticed that many people, specifically women and young people, had low financial literacy and had...
Aug 21, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 32
Today I’m joined by Martha Silcott, Founder of FabLittleBag. Martha invented FabLittleBag after she was forced to smuggle her used tampon from the bathroom to her handbag at a friends dinner party when faced without a bin in their downstairs loo. The experience was so awful that she decided to do something about it and the more she looked into it, the more she was horrified at the impact of flushing tampons and pads down the toilet. Determined to bring her invention to market she left the corpor...
Aug 07, 2023•57 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Today I’m joined by Farah Kabir, Co-founder of HANX. One day, while enjoying a stable career in Asset Management at Goldman Sachs, Farah stood in line at her local Boots ready purchase a box of condoms when she realised her boss was standing behind her. Utterly mortified, Farah felt the very relatable pang of shame rise within her until… she suddenly thought “actually, why should I be embarrassed about this?” and so over a bottle (or two) of wine, she decided to jump into bed with her best frien...
Jul 24, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Today I'm very excited because we are doing a special episode all about fundraising. This is a topic I get asked about all the time from founders wanting to know who they should go to for investment, what investors are really looking for, and what they should be asking investors in turn. It's a topic we've talked about a ton on this podcast. We've had angel investors give their perspective, venture capitalists share theirs, and founders of all different stages talk about their journeys. So it se...
Jul 10, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Today I’m joined by Sanya Rajpal, Founder and CEO of AdagioVR. Sanya is an Activist, International Development Expert and Serial Entrepreneur dedicated to transforming systems that unleash individual potential - and a truly remarkable individual in her own right. She built her first company while at Law School, Dignifly, with the goal to empower people to transform their own lives and solve problems in their communities and the world. She then went on to the UN to focus on growing tech entrepren...
Jun 26, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 28
Today I’m joined by Milly Tamati, founder and CEO of Generalist World. After growing up on a farm in rural New Zealand, Milly set herself the North Star of travelling the world in her twenties. Driven by a deep desire to keep moving, she found herself venturing down the path of entrepreneurship as a way of funding her wanderlust. Along her journey, she’s founded multiple businesses across the globe as a solo and a co-founder; including one of the largest hop on hop off wine tours in Victoria, Au...
Jun 12, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Today I’m joined by Victoria Armstrong, Angel Investor, Advisor and Mentor. Victoria is an inspiring player on and off the pitch with an impressive entrepreneurial background of 20 years worth of experience in rapidly growing start-ups including Biotech, Mental health and SaaS, and has the stories to prove it. She’s invested her journey across three very different markets (New Zealand, the US, and the UK), in seven different startups, four of which she founded and exited, with one being acquired...
May 29, 2023•58 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Today I’m joined by Emmie Faust, Serial Entrepreneur, Investor, Advisor, Mum of four, Host of The Growth Podcast with Emmie Faust and Founder of Female Founders Rise. Emmie is an experienced exited entrepreneur with over 20 years in digital marketing, having personally scaled and sold not one, not two, but three businesses. She also has the rare and exceptional tale of facing modern day dragons on Dragons’ Den and winning - though her investment didn’t come without battle scars. Last year, Emmie...
May 15, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Today I’m joined by Lauren Currie (OBE) Founder of UPFRONT and Host of the podcast UPFRONT Moment with Lauren Currie. UPFRONT is an organisation dedicated to changing confidence, visibility, and power for 1 million women and non-binary people. The idea was born of Laurens own frustration with the lack of women speakers and the dominance of all-male panels at conferences. She’s been doing this work since 2016 and wherever she goes, it’s her aim to take other women with her and amplify their voice...
May 01, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 24
Today I’m joined by Jessica Alderson, Co-founder and CEO of So Syncd. So Syncd is a dating app and website that matches compatible personality types. Based on the 16 personality types theory, So Syncd is the first dating app to connect compatible personality types by pairing couples who have just enough similarities to understand each other and just enough differences to create a spark. After breaking up with her boyfriend of three years (who she moved to Australia with) Jess returned to London ...
Apr 18, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 23
Today I’m joined by Joyeeta Das, Co-founder & CEO of Samudra Oceans. Joy is a serial deep-tech entrepreneur who’s founded five startups, three of which have had successful exits. She’s also an influential and active member of the wider startup community with additional roles as an advisor and investor. She’s scaled projects to hundreds of million of dollars in revenue, managing teams of three to 800 strong so she has a lot to teach us from startup to scaleup. Our conversation is a little bit...
Apr 03, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 22
This episode is a little flashback for us, jumping back to a conversation Hattie had with Matt Meeker, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman and CEO (that’s Canine Enrichment Officer) at Bark, and former founder of Meetup. Today, when she’s teaching founders how to test their ideas in the early stages, Hattie still comes back to how Matt tested both Meetup and Bark with customers, and with so many valuable insights and lessons, it seemed rude not to have this available as part of this series! So with M...
Mar 21, 2023•41 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Copy Club is a community for marketers who want to help each other do great things. And there’s a lot of them out there with the Copy Club community having grown to over 1000 members from over 800 brands since Lottie founded it in 2014. After working with massive global brands including Proctor & Gamble, Lacoste, and Dolce & Gabbana, Lottie created Copy Club as a means to feel less lonely in her job as Head of Marketing for PROPERCORN, who were at the time one of the five fastest growing...
Mar 07, 2023•57 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Porto and Bello are an accessible clothing brand that seeks to help ease some of the fear and anxiety around cancer treatment by focusing on the person and not just the patient. Alexia launched Porto and Bello in 2021, with husband Josh, following her own experience of being treated for breast cancer which she was diagnosed with at 29, 34 weeks pregnant with her second child, in March 2020 - five days before the very first covid lockdown. This is a bit of a different episode for us as Alexia gra...
Feb 21, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Daye are on a mission: to close the gender pain gap, and overcome historical gender biases in medical research and product innovation. They launched their first product, CBD tampons in 2019, with a focus on sustainability and pain relief, and have since branched out to other products supporting vaginal health, including their latest product- vaginal screening using a tampon sample. But they're not stopping there- hoping to democratize access to insightful gynaecological health information which ...
Dec 20, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Most founders dream of going public- but what happens after you ring the bell, if share prices tank, and the company you used to leap out of bed to run is destroying your mental health? For anyone who hasn’t heard of Eve mattresses, they were one of the first companies in the UK to offer a mattress in a box- and the countries fastest retail IPO at the time they went public just a couple of years after launching. They disrupted the standard business model of having to invest in retail stores wher...
Dec 06, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Recorded live from Sifted Summit, this episode unpacks the challenges of fundraising as a diverse founder, practical tips on fundraising, and what we can do at individual, organisational, and systems levels to fix inequities in the startup ecosystem. Our incredible guests are: Simi Lindgren is the founder of Yuty , tackling bias in AI to match customers based on ethnicity, skin type and medical condition to the best beauty products. They raised £500k in their pre-seed, making Simi just the 10th ...
Nov 01, 2022•48 min•Season 1Ep. 16
What is a female urinal and why does it matter? Ever walked past a massive queue for the ladies, while the queue for the mens is non-existent and wondered why? Ever wondered what the solution is? Women have to urinate more often and on average for longer than men. Plus, we have more reason to visit the loo (typically we take on more care duties for children or adults who need assistance, plus menstruation ). Our toilets also take up more space, so we tend to have fewer places to go, because venu...
Oct 17, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Meet serial entrepreneur, angel investor, musician, physicist and self-professed big geek Chris Howard! Chris has raised millions in investment for his own startups, taught entrepreneurship by giving founders £100 and a raspberry pie, and started to invent an "anti-accelerator" at his new startup, The Rattle. In this episode Chris shares: How he wrecked his first startup after raising $2.2m for it, by ignoring product market fit 3 questions every prospective founder should ask themselves (in the...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 14
Meet Foong, reformed Consultant turned Founder, who loved her colleagues at PWC, but found she lacked Purpose in her work. When Foong made the leap, it was to Matchable, a company intent on helping people like her find more purpose by volunteering their specialist skills to startups and charities; which are impact heavy but resource poor. Today, Matchable has projects ranging from transforming Columbian farmers into cacao entrepreneurs using Blockchain, to helping children deal with grief using ...
Sep 05, 2022•50 min•Season 1Ep. 13
How do you test a blood testing business, when none of the co-founders come from a clinical background? What happens when your entire investor pipeline disappears overnight? What do you do when customers just aren't buying? And what's it like scaling a health tech startup from 0 to 130 staff, and over a 100k customers? The person to ask is Eliot Brooks, co-founder of Thriva and former COO. We spoke the week Eliot stepped down to make space to explore new entrepreneurial endeavours; after 7 years...
Aug 22, 2022•43 min•Season 1Ep. 12
What do you have to do to make your customers love you so much, they'll get a tattoo of your logo? Especially when it's a "boring" B2B tool for writing better cold emails... Lavender's founder William Ballance may not quite have gotten his own head around why customers love them this much; but he's certainly cracked building a product and brand customers rave about. There's a lot to learn along William's journey as a serial founder, whatever your industry or business model. In this episode we di...
Aug 08, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 11
Design thinking is a buzzword we hear a lot in the startup space- but what is it really all about? Should you be trying it? Is it too late to get started? And how might it speed up your route to market and loyal customers who keep coming back for more? In this episode, Hattie is joined by Nirish Shakya, a design thinking and user experience design expert. For the past 15 years, he has been helping organisations across the UK, Europe and the Asia-Pacific create impactful customer experiences by e...
Jul 25, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 10
After earning few thousand euros selling toasties at school, you may think founding a company would have been Anieke's first stop post university. But a horrendous hackathon experience initially put her off the no sleep, stinky side of entrepreneurship. Instead, she started out in the corporate world, though quickly made her way into Venture Capital, where she invested in Social Impact ventures at Rubio. Her desire to sit the other side of the table never wore off though, so she quit to start he...
Jul 11, 2022•43 min•Season 1Ep. 9
This week's interviewee, Emily Cummin, is carving out a new industry- not quite Death Tech, but Grief Tech instead. Her platform, Untangle was founded to help people dealing with big loss, whether bereavement or divorce, to cope with the emotional and practical fall out. Untangle are still pre-revenue, but are just about to turn on a series of income streams, having already built a more than 40k strong instagram community, and a user base of 12.5k people, with strong retention, engagement and re...
Jun 27, 2022•45 min•Season 1Ep. 8
How do you unlock the opinions of a generation? And what does it change when you can tap into qualitative research at scale? The person to ask is Jay Richards, co-founder of Imagen Insights, which helps big brands like Amazon Prime, Sky, Puma, the NFL, Pepsico and many more, to access thousands of Gen Z opinions, within 48 hours. Not coming from a traditional marketing or research agency background, Jay hasn't felt he has to do things the traditional way. From creating a SaaS business model, ins...
Jun 13, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Venture Capital claims a lot of Techcrunch headlines, covers our Linkedin timelines, and eats months of our lives and runway, as founders fundraising. But, it can be hard to separate the celebrations of fundraises, from whether Venture Capital is really right for you as a founder, what it will cost you personally, and what is going to increase your chances of success if you do choose that path. Who better to help us debunk some of the myths around venture capital, alongside offering incredibly p...
Jun 06, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 6
What do you need to know as a founder raising early stage, pre-seed or seed funding? Who are angels? What do they care about? How do they make investment decisions? What should you be asking of them? And what can you do to increase your chances of a successful raise? In this episode we meet founder of entrepreneurial community Dffrnt, Ash Phillips, who became an Angel investor with Ada Ventures to invest in more diverse, typically underrepresented and overlooked founders. Together, we dive into:...
May 30, 2022•48 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Many founders dream of the moment their company is acquired. But no-one imagines that post acquisition they may be forced to fire the employees who helped build the startup over 10 years, watch the company they built lose millions in value, and ultimately, have to buy it back to save their legacy. That was Sach Kukadia's journey in Secret Sales. Luckily, he was able to build back some of the value, for a second sale that was, as he describes "a gentle dismount". But, the process still left him a...
May 16, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Ideas often come from experiencing frustration first hand. That's exactly what happened to Ellie. While giving up alcohol for a month, she got fed up with the lack of options available in lieu of her traditional G&T. That, coupled with career frustration, that she couldn't get a job building a consumer facing brand, led her to create her own. She launched Caleño- a non-alcoholic drinks brand, to bring more joy to those choosing to go alcohol free. Today, Caleño has both d2c and traditional r...
May 10, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 3
