Lord Karan Bilimoria is the Co-Founder of Cobra beer, the best selling beer in Indian restaurants around the UK. We all pray for those moments we find a gap in a market we can exploit. That’s exactly what happened to Karan in 1989, realising the UK needed a better lager that complemented pan-asian food. He’s now a member of the House of Lords, having joined in 2006 and sits as a cross-bench peer, helping in particular with the Covid response. Over the years he’s almost lost the business 3 times,...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 10 min
Sometimes in business you pass the point of no return and you don't even know it. Someone who knows all too well is Rico Mandel, the Founder of Miz En Place, a successful foodie marketplace... but Rico only got into food after his marketing agency business went bust. This is how Rico failed, what he learnt from it - and a simple hack to make you feel better about your life, however bad things seem. -- To get a better handle on your security, check out https://npsa.gov.uk/innovation and download ...
Nov 09, 2023•13 min
Sir Robin Millar is arguably the UK's leading record producer, having worked with the likes of Sade, Randy Crawford, Eric Clapton, Sting, The Grateful Dead and many others. He produced the Atlanta Olympic Games opening ceremony in 1996, has had over 160 gold & platinum discs - including 44 No. 1 hits. He's got a great CV. He's also a blind man and in today's episode we learn what that's really like, how to make great music - and how to build a successful music business. Sir Robin is full of ...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 6 min
Emma Parker is the Founder of Playful Promises, a company behind a few lingerie and swimwear brands - including a lingerie brand of the same name. What’s funny though is she lost that business despite the outside world thinking it was going amazingly well. This is how Emma failed and how she recovered - and what you can learn from it about building businesses. --------------------------- To get a better handle on your security, check out https://npsa.gov.uk/innovation and download their free Qui...
Nov 02, 2023•13 min
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 clear thinking and great decision-making. -- Sponsors Get better internet through Vorboss: https://vorbo...
Oct 31, 2023•47 min
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 in him having to come clean to his wife about the extent of his business’s problems. It was the wor...
Oct 26, 2023•17 min
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. Her work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Ti...
Oct 10, 2023•56 min
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 Raider, Hitman, Championship Manager, Fall Guys and Golf Clash to name just a few. So you’ve absolutely pl...
Oct 02, 2023•55 min
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. Instead of taking time off, Simon decided to get straight back into the game. This time, he’s taking on t...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 10 min
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 chicken franchise (Sides) and premium vodka brand (XIX Vodka). Whilst these 7 guys are immensely talen...
Sep 19, 2023•1 hr 4 min
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 business. They ran it together for ten years. Then, in 2009 they decided to step away from the busine...
Sep 12, 2023•55 min
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 secrets of how to do it. Yes, we really mean the secrets - the stuff people don't talk about but is...
Sep 05, 2023•52 min
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 as rewards for daily activity, education, and health monitoring. Once users get enough points, they c...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 3 min
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 whole company at risk. What happened? --------------------------- If you have any feedback, we’d love ...
Aug 24, 2023•16 min
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…Only to forget one critical detail. A decade later, despite many bumps in the road, Vinted was valued at...
Aug 22, 2023•41 min
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 hear it. What would make the show better? [email protected] Sponsor links: personio.com/secret...
Aug 17, 2023•16 min
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 existence with new powers, senses and abilities. He co-founded Optimizely in 2009, growing it to $120M in ann...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 3 min
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, and no job, after having to fire a hundred people. What happened? --------------------------- If you...
Aug 10, 2023•12 min
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 companies with the fastest-growing sales over the last three years. In 2021, the company was sold for ...
Aug 08, 2023•53 min
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 his flat. How did he pick himself up and turn his life around? --------------------------- If you ha...
Aug 03, 2023•18 min
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, Therabody, the company Jason founded, generated nearly $400 millions in revenue. Woof. How did he do...
Aug 01, 2023•52 min
"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 consultant, and Founder himself. He’s a fan of taking as many shots as you can and failing fast....well now he...
Jul 27, 2023•15 min
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 Global - and the Founder of ScoreApp. You’ll hear some of his entrepreneurial gems today which we hope...
Jul 25, 2023•50 min
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 crippled morale. And in the midst of all this, it didn’t escape Jennifer that she was running a happiness ...
Jul 20, 2023•16 min
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 process. Thankfully, one of his former clients saw something in Sean and made a point of investing in ...
Jul 18, 2023•47 min
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 from it? And what did she learn about walking away? That’s something we don’t talk about enough in st...
Jul 13, 2023•14 min
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 searching, Niklas left Klarna and founded his next venture: Norrsken Foundation. It's a non-profit dedicat...
Jul 11, 2023•51 min
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 his low points, he found himself stripped of confidence, unable to make the simplest decisions. What...
Jul 06, 2023•12 min
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 acquisitions from Amazon, making Col one of Amazon's earliest employees. He got to work alongside Jeff...
Jul 04, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Taavi Kotka is the Founder and CEO of Koos.io but he shot to fame as the CEO of one of the largest software development companies in the Baltics. After he sold the company in a big money deal in 2012, he had a non compete which left him with time when he couldn’t work in the private sector. He was appointed the first Chief Innovation Officer of Estonia whose role is basically to drive technological progress in the country. It gave him the opportunity to make a massive impact - a national one. He...
Jun 29, 2023•14 min
