Kwame’s mercurial career includes roles as a professor of design, a filmmaker and the founder of the most successful record label in the history of Portugal. His true calling is the solution of meaningful problems from a design, engineering and systems perspective. After meeting model Lily Cole who was working on a gift economy app called Impossible, together they decided that the Impossible brand could be so much more than one product. They now describe Impossible as an innovation agency, where...
Mar 11, 2019•1 hr 10 min
Peter is a serially successful entrepreneur with a number of exits under his belt. His most notable was to Microsoft in 2006. That business then went on to become the most successful post-acquisition product in Microsoft history, earning Peter a congratulatory email from Bill Gates. He was also Head of LivingSocial in the UK when it and Groupon were the fastest-growing companies in the world. His latest project is Wagestream where his mission is to make payroll streamable and so put an end to pa...
Feb 25, 2019•1 hr 6 min
David’s 20-year career contains some remarkable highs: overseeing Lastminute.com ’s $1.2bn exit to Travelocity, merging mydeco.com with Made.com , founding Tribesports and raising £2m from Adidas, acting as an NED for Simba Sleep and now as part of the founding team, alongside Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox, of award-winning accelerator and incubator Founders’ Factory, (where we are fortunate enough to record these podcasts). But this glittering CV which David describes as ‘a drunkard’s stumb...
Feb 11, 2019•2 hr
Barney studied at Oxford and Harvard Universities before working as a doctor for the NHS. His experiences juggling multiple pagers and sending faxes (yes, faxes!) on graveyard hospital shifts led him to start Forward Health with fellow doctor, Lydia Yarlott, and serial entrepreneur Philip Mundy. Their product is already saving healthcare professionals time and improving patient outcomes by providing a secure, efficient system for communication and collaboration. Featured in every big publication...
Jan 28, 2019•1 hr 9 min
This conversation is with Thea Alexander and Pip Murray. Thea is the founder of Young Foodies – a community platform supporting food & beverage startups as they try to get off the ground and achieve scale. They have helped a number of brands become market leaders in their niche including: WheyHey, Mallow+Marsh, Plenish and Pip&Nut. Pip is the founder of all-natural nut butter phenomenon Pip&Nut. Now stocked in most major retailers, Pip&Nut is the foremost UK nut butter brand. In ...
Dec 10, 2018•1 hr 21 min
Simon is the founder of Depop – a peer-to-peer social shopping app for creatives which boasts over 10 million members and $43m in funding to date. Simon started out in design and publishing. He created innovative sunglass brand RETROSUPERFUTURE, an experience which included an interesting collaboration with Kanye West. He also spent 10 years running PIG, one of the most influential independent magazines in Italy; and credits his experience there as one of the driving forces behind his idea for D...
Nov 26, 2018•1 hr 14 min
Wil disappointed his mother when he abandoned a career in corporate law to start ChannelFlip Media. Apparently he had a 'good feeling' after waking up one day with a business plan scrawled on a napkin. Six years later, on Christmas Eve, he sold the business to TV production giant News Corp. His mother was very pleased. He then became Head of Digital at Condé Naste. Managing a team of over 100, he was responsible for creating a digital presence for their many prestigious publications including Vo...
Nov 12, 2018•1 hr 15 min
A serial entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, diplomat, and author; Bill founded not one but two unicorn companies in the 80s and 90s. His ambitions are now always driven by the purpose of creating a 'world that works for all life'. His work includes: - CoderDojo, a volunteer-driven community which teaches coding to kids in 107 countries -WeForest, which aims to combat climate change and support communities through forest restoration and has already planted 20 million trees. He is also a Gene...
Oct 29, 2018•1 hr 24 min
Giles is the CMO of What3Words. What3Words is one of the truly visionary companies on the current UK tech scene. They have addressed the world by dividing it into 57 trillion 3x3 squares, each with a three-word label. Already used by Mercedes, the United Nations and the Mongolian postal service to name a few, Giles talks us through the astonishing applications and efficiencies created by a flawless address system. Giles is a master storyteller and thrilled us with tales of the creative ways he i...
Oct 17, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Ed is the founder of Flock – a UK government & Silicon valley-backed insurtech platform disrupting the insurance industry with its real-time risk assessment and pay-as-you-fly model. Flock’s first product caters to the $100bn drone market. We learn how Ed’s academic background in engineering and then AI and government policy set him on this path (and allowed him to meet Elon Musk along the way). We also talk about the current and future applications of drones; and what they might mean for th...
Oct 01, 2018•1 hr 14 min
Sergey is the founder of Atlas Biomed. Atlas is a personalised healthcare company empowering individuals to take control of their health through actionable recommendations based on gene and microbiome tests. We discuss the exciting potential of this space; Sergey's experience at Silicon Valley think tank, Singularity University; and the weird and wonderful symbiosis between us and our gut bacteria including the 'gut-brain axis' and its link to weight loss and depression.
Sep 17, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Julian is the entrepreneur and marketing wizard behind Huel. Huel is a 'nutritionally complete' food product which aims to change how we produce and consume food. The 'hockey stick' growth of the business since launch in 2015 attests to its wild popularity with 20 million+ meals sold already. The company is on course for revenues of £58 million this year and anticipate a $1bn valuation in the next few years. We learn how he used SEO smarts to generate £2m revenues per year for his voucher codes ...
Aug 27, 2018•1 hr 25 min
Emma is the founder of notorious adult party brand Killing Kittens which focuses on empowering female sexuality. Emma is widely hailed as the UK’s foremost female ‘sex entrepreneur’. We learn how she built the Killing Kittens empire which now holds events for its 100,000+ members all over the world as well as sex seminars and workshops on top of a thriving online dating community. We also discuss her latest product ‘SafeDate’, an app plugin aimed at making dating safer. Emma delighted us with sa...
Jul 30, 2018•1 hr 21 min
Maya Pindeus is the CEO & Co-Founder of Humanising Autonomy who are using deep machine learning to become the standard for communication between autonomous systems and people. Their first product, Blink, is computer vision for autonomous vehicles which can understand even culturally-specific human gestures. We discuss architecture, city design, deep learning and the unknown reality of a symbiotic future with autonomous machines. We ask how deeply can communication between man and machine go?...
Jul 16, 2018•1 hr 12 min
Devika is the co-founder of care platform Vida. Motivated by her 12-year experience looking after her grandmother who received care from over 150 different carers, Devika is on a mission to harness technology to deliver personalised in-home care to the elderly and disabled. A former Googler, breast cancer research scientist and health policy advisor, she has been featured in Forbes’ 30 under 30 and in the Top 10 women changing the world by Glamour Magazine. She is also part of the Mayor of Londo...
Jun 14, 2018•1 hr 16 min
Andy met Pete while looking for a co-founder for his burger delivery idea which became Chosen Bun. They were ahead of the curve given the subsequent rise of Deliveroo and made a quick exit after successfully growing the company, even sending a burger into space. Their latest project NOT(MEAT) is bringing delicious plant-based meat alternatives to the mass market. We try their NOT(Chicken) strips live on the episode and are astonished by the likeness in texture as well as flavour. They make for a...
May 21, 2018•1 hr 10 min
Dr James Field is a leading scientist in the field of synthetic biology. He set up LabGenius while completing his PhD at Imperial College London. He is a winner of the prestigious BBSRC Innovator of the Year award for early career impact and was featured on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list for Science & Healthcare. James is also a fellow of the prestigious Synthetic Biology Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program (LEAP). As founder and CEO of LabGenius, he has overseen the development if EVA - an ...
May 08, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Oleg Fomenko is the co-founder of Sweatcoin, the fastest-growing health and fitness app in history. The app gamifies keeping fit by converting users’ steps into virtual Sweatcoin which can be exchanged for rewards. In December 2017, Sweatcoin hit 10 million users and raised Series A funding from several US-based VC firms. Oleg tells us of his big plans for 2018 and beyond. These include expanding into every country, listing as a trade-able currency on the blockchain and partnering with governmen...
Apr 05, 2018•1 hr 28 min
In this episode, we speak to the inimitable, Pip Jamieson. After stints in the British civil service, then with MTV (actually launching MTV in New Zealand aged just 24), Pip founded a ‘LinkedIn for creatives’ called The Loop in Australia. After exiting this, she returned to the UK and its £76bn creative sector to replicate that success. From her houseboat by King’s Cross, she started ‘The Dots’ which is on a mission to connect 1 million creatives this year and is now going viral across the secto...
Mar 08, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Anthony Rose is the Founder of multiple successful companies; his most recent, SeedLegals, was named the UKTN Startup of the Year 2017; he is also the genius behind BBC iPlayer at a time when on-demand TV represented a paradigm shift in the industry - he compares the build process to the British building an exocet missile in two months during the Falklands War. We talk a fair amount about how the SeedLegals platform works and the benefits it brings (in cost and time) to entrepreneurs raising mon...
Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 18 min
Hamish Grierson is the CEO and Founder of personalised healthcare platform, Thriva. Hamish cut his teeth as an entrepreneur through a varied early career in advertising, hospitality and a mentoring period at Travelex thanks to the New Entrepreneurs Foundation. A serendipitous beer with Co-Founder-to-be Eliot Brooks (who has a cholesterol condition requiring regular blood tests) led to the birth of Thriva – the world’s first preventative health service. Easy-to-use blood test kits are posted to y...
Mar 03, 2018•1 hr 9 min
When the UK tech scene started to come online in the late noughties, Oxford-grad Alex left traditional careers in corporate law and management consultancy to join Anthony Eskinazi’s startup, Parkatmyhouse, which soon became JustPark. As CEO of JustPark from 2012-5 Alex oversaw several high-profile funding rounds including the largest equity crowdfunding round for a startup in history. In 3 years, he grew revenues 10-fold and set the company on a path towards its current user base of 1.5million d...
Mar 03, 2018•47 min
Despite his 23 years, Tim Armoo’s reputation for ingenuity and audacious business plays precedes him, most recently as the founder and CEO of influencer marketing platform, FanBytes. A company described by the BBC as “…[owning] the mind of Generation Z”. We discuss his Tedx talk in which he describes the different manifestations of his identity from his early failures as a swimmer turned magician to his first company at 14 and his second which was acquired when he was 17. We dive into the exciti...
Mar 03, 2018•1 hr 34 min
