Secret Leaders

Learning to be happy is hard enough. Learning to be happy in the middle of a pandemic should be nigh on impossible. Not so, according to Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google [X], serial entrepreneur and author of “Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy” (2017).  Mo’s famous for bringing Google to 4 billion new users, but that’s not all he’s done. Throughout his career he’s also co-founded over 25 businesses (7 still survive today). He starts businesses that fascinate him, making sure none of them have a conflict of interest with his ‘full time’ job (first at IBM, then Microsoft and latterly at Google), coming up with a new idea every year or two. His book, “Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy” (2017) was the result of 12 years researching the topic of happiness. Mo even created an algorithm and a repeatable well engineered model to reach a state of uninterrupted happiness regardless of the circumstances of life.  “Happiness is not found outside you, you were born happy. Our defa

From salty sea dog to captain of BrewDog in the space of a year. James Watt is the founder of the rocket ship brewery and brand known as BrewDog. Now valued at over $1 billion, this incredible startup began life in co-founder Martin Dickie’s mum’s garage.  “No one wanted to buy our beer. Everyone told us to make beer with less flavour, with less bitterness, with less hops, that our labels looked stupid, like nobody wanted to know and we were working almost 24/7, sleeping on sacks of malt on the floor, filling bottles by hand, doing deliveries out of the back of my beat up Volkswagen car, and just going absolutely nowhere.” But it took a meeting with Michael Jackson (no, not that one), a punt at Tesco and playing two high street banks off against each other to give them the kickstart they needed. Today, BrewDog are well known for their rebellious marketing tactics and have recruited a clan of investors known as equity punks, raising £80 million through a range of clever crowdfunding campaigns.  But how have th

It's a tough time for many businesses right now, but one sector in particular is thriving - the world of delicious food delivered to your doorstep. Unlike the vast majority of businesses, these companies are growing exponentially, because of the lockdown. “Literally overnight, it's [Covid-19] essentially forced consumers who have never bought one grocery shop online to go, ‘Well, I might as well try this because there's queues around the block for my supermarket, which has got nothing in it, and every restaurant in the land is closed. So let me give it a go’.” If you’re an entrepreneur wondering how your food business is going to survive the pandemic, then you need to listen to this episode with the founders of two brilliant brands, Mindful Chef and allplants.  Mindful Chef was founded by three school friends out of their tiny apartment in 2015 and now makes 5 million meals a year. allplants on the other hand was launched by brothers JP and Alex in 2017, and have already served 1 million plus meals and recent

If you’ve been caught out raising money for your startup during this complicated time, then you’ve come to the right place - you’re in good company.  In this episode of Secret Leaders we’ve pinned down VC extraordinaire, Fred Destin who is primed to answer not just our questions, but your questions too. Why should you take advice from Fred? Because he’s the founder of Stride.VC, a £100 million seed stage fund focused on operating in London and Paris.  Before starting Stride, Fred was a general partner at Excel and of the 17 investments he led, 10 have exited and 4 are active value drivers, including 5 companies in excess of $1 billion in value - these include Zoopla, Deliveroo and PillPack.  His portfolio has a total enterprise value of more than £10 billion, and he generated in excess of £700 million in exit value to investors. All of which makes Fred someone worth listening to if you’re wondering what the hell you’re going to do for money now that the world seems to have shut down.   Because if there’s one

Today’s guest is someone we’ve had on the show before, in fact, he kicked off season 4 for us. So don’t be confused and think we’ve got our seasons muddled up.  We thought we’d invite Cal Henderson back onto the podcast because his company, Slack, is one of only a few companies that aren’t in a tailspin currently. They’re facing an entirely different dilemma - they’re scrambling to keep up with demand, what with the majority of the world now in self-isolation and having to work from home (WFH).  “One of the challenges of remote work for folks has always been the boundary between being at work and not being at work. And that's, you know, that's one thing when it's individuals, and [another] when it’s an entire company in one go.” If you’re wanting to hear the story of how Slack started, take a listen here, because we don’t rehash it in this episode.  Instead we talk with Cal about Slack’s sudden increase in user numbers, how they’ve responded to the crisis as a global company (they have employees and offices a

If you’re wondering how on earth you’re going to hold down a full time job while working from home AND educating your kids for the foreseeable future, then you need to listen to Koru Kids founder Rachel Carrell and Tech Will Save Us co-founder Bethany Koby.  “Lower [your] impossible expectations. It is not possible to work full time and also homeschool kids full time, at the same time. It's just not possible. And just don't listen to anyone who implies that it is. We are working really hard to come up with new services to help people make one plus one somehow equal three.” Koru Kids, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, was building a whole new childcare system, recruiting, training, matching and managing over 1,000 nannies in London every single day. Having had to pivot hard, Rachel explains the impact that coronavirus has had on her business and how she has taken nannying online.  Tech Will Save Us co-founder Bethany has created a play led home learning system focusing on creativity and technology, delivering fu

Kicking off series 5 of Secret Leaders are two fantastic guests - Ali Parsa (CEO and founder of Babylon) and Dr Ranjan Chatterjee. Ali has been on the show several times before - firstly on his own, and secondly for one of our live events where he shared the stage with Michael Acton-Smith, founder of Calm.  In the light of the current global crisis, nobody knows what the world is going to be like when the dust settles at the end of this pandemic. And this is what we discuss in this episode - what the business and social impact of the coronavirus on society will be.  Because currently, it isn’t looking good. The economy is tanking. Borders are closed. Everyone is practicing social distancing. The strain on political leaders is evident. And the pressures on the NHS are close to crippling it.  Ali Parsa is one of the best placed people in the world to talk about some of the predicted health impacts of the virus, in particular what he’s seeing in his own industry of healthcare. Dr. Ranjan Chatterjee is also incre

We’ve all been there - back from a hard night’s boozing and hungry. Most of us would simply eat some toast and hit the hay, but then most of us aren’t Will Shu, founder and CEO of Deliveroo.  “I was like, wow, you know, you can't get any decent food delivered here when you've been boozing. Then I was like, wait a minute, maybe I should start something that is a late night delivery service for food that you can get in like half an hour. You want it for McDonald's or BK.” And so from a late night boozy idea, everyone's favourite takeaway service delivery unicorn company, Deliveroo, was born.  Today this incredible company that began life in a shared flat in 2013, with Will and four other riders delivering food, has seen off the competition in the form of Uber Eats and received significant investment in their latest funding round (to the tune of £450m) from Amazon, valuing Deliveroo at over $4 billion.  Widely regarded as one of the most dynamic and impressive founders in the European entrepreneurship scene, we

“I think the worst thing is every morning when you wake up as a founder and you pick up your phone, you think what will I discover that will ruin my day?” While your business might not care what your gender is, significant discrepancies still exist between the number of female and male entrepreneurs. As Baroness Martha Lane Fox quite rightly proclaimed, ‘you cannot be what you cannot see’.  And so we’ve gone and put four female entrepreneur powerhouses together on the same live stage. We’ve put the same questions to them and their answers are as diverse as they are. This episode on female leadership and equality for International Women’s Day is a real smorgasbord of insights from some of the UK's leading female founders.  Get the expert investor perspective from Reshma Sohoni, co-founder of Seedcamp. The non-VC route founder Renée Elliott, founder of Planet Organic. Alex Depledge offers the perspective from a consumer facing tech enabled marketplace, with her startup Hassle. And finally our technology softwar

If you found the film ‘The Holiday’ so inspirational it kickstarted a business that you went on to sell for over £50 million, then you’re in good company. You didn’t? Well you missed a trick. Not so Debbie Wosskow, co-founder of AllBright and former CEO of LoveHomeSwap (a subscription based home exchange business) who on a plane home from a ‘holiday’ in the Caribbean watched the movie and thought, ‘does this even exist?’ But LoveHomeSwap wasn’t Debbie’s first successful business, nor was it her last. So what is her secret to successive business success?  She credits her formative years for her entrepreneurialism (not that her family would have called it that), and she credits her business acumen to her first business Mantra, which she calls her 7 year business education.  With the mantra of ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ it’s safe to say that Debbie Wosskow is an entrepreneurial powerhouse and a female force to be reckoned with. She’s had an independent government review into the sharing economy named af

You may know that LoveFilm became Amazon Prime Video, that part of the deal was public knowledge. What you may not be familiar with is the wrangling, the deal making and the allegiance swapping that went on behind the scenes to get the deal across the table.  In this very special live episode of Secret Leaders we once again sit down with serial entrepreneur and angel investor, best known for creating Lovefilm and being an early investor in Secret Escapes, ‘the subscription guy’ William Reeve and VC Jedi, Simon Cook, to discuss the ins and outs of one of the most complicated business sales in recent history - when LoveFilm sold to Amazon.  Because this deal wasn’t straightforward in the slightest. A series of unusual mergers, buyouts, disputes and much more led to this being one of the more complicated deals of both their lives.  In fact, the only way to explain how convulated the deal was, is by comparing it to the plot of Game of Thrones. Simon was the VC on the board throughout the whole deal and Will was t

Today’s guest has been a high achiever since he was a kid, completing his computer science GCSE at 11, his A-levels at 13, and receiving a Masters from LSE by the time he was 20. Some child geniuses burnout before they achieve great things, not Rishi Khosla.  Rishi, according to LL Cool J, is something of a phenomenon in the world of entrepreneurship, and we are wont to agree with him.  Co-founding OakNorth, Europe's highest valued FinTech company having raised over a billion dollars in funding to date, in only four years, Rishi is considered one of the stars of the industry.  And OakNorth is just his most recent headline. He’s an early stage investor, investing in several businesses including PayPal and Indiabulls. He’s already co-founded a company, Copal Amba, a financial research firm which was scaled to 3,000 employees and sold to Moody’s Corporation in 2014. And he helped establish the family office of the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal amongst many things. With OakNorth he estimates they’ve created about

Have you ever wondered what the meaning of life is? Of course you have, you’re only human after all.  Well, today’s guest, Alain de Botton, philosopher and founder of The School of Life, has not only wondered the same thing too, philosophising this age old dilemma, he’s also written a book on the subject.  Actually, he’s written well over 15 books as a solo author and collaborated on countless others.  “I was a young man who really wanted to know the meaning of life. I wanted guidance in the big questions. I wanted to know why I was anxious. Why I might be sad. What love was. How to secure love. What a good relationship was. What friendship was. What a satisfying career might be. I wanted to know all of these things. And really, there were very few clues in my education.” And so as well as writing on meaningful topics to help elucidate these deep subjects, Alain also founded The School of Life. He set it up in 2008 with colleagues, friends, supporters and his family, with the aim to offer an emotional educati

Here at Secret Leaders we are all about bringing you the best entrepreneurs in the world - those people who you wouldn’t ordinarily hear from, but who have inspiring stories to tell. They share their highs and more importantly their lows, with the aim of sparking a fire in you to follow in their footsteps, or accelerate the path you’re already on.  Because let’s be honest, success stories are all good and well, but it’s the failures that shape us; it’s how we handle adversity that makes us who we are. And today’s two live guests are no strangers to adversity.  Jo Malone: “My goals have never been realistic and that's the secret of my success. I really go out there and I push myself above and beyond. I think what we have to realise is that mistakes are a part of life.” Justine Roberts: “I worked very, very hard to find patient capital, which I think is what Mumsnet needs. And I made it very, very clear that we will always put purpose before profit.” Today, sharing the live stage and their entrepreneurial exper

Founded in 2010 in the USA by Co-CEOs brothers Dan and Michael Broukhim and Editor-in-Chief Katie Echevarria Rosen Kitchens, the wildly successful lifestyle subscription platform FabFitFun is a lifestyle membership that inspires happiness and well being.  Their flagship product, the FabFitFun box (now available in the UK), delivers a curated collection of full-size products across beauty, fashion, wellness, fitness, home, tech and more - to over 1 million members each season. And as well as the box, members have access to FabFitFunTV, their digital lifestyle magazine, a robust online community, members-only shopping experiences, exclusive perks, events, and their mobile app. Now in their 10th year of trading and having surpassed $200 million in revenue, they have recently closed the most remarkably whopping series A of $80 million, led by some of the best venture capitalists in America.  But it hasn’t always been plain sailing.  “We were $1 million in debt when we closed our financing the first time. And we w

In this live podcast episode we talk about what makes a healthy body, a healthy mind and the future of technology enabled healthcare.  We’ve previously talked to both of today’s guests - Michael Acton-Smith, founder of Mind Candy, Firebox and Calm.com in Series One of Secret Leaders and Ali Parsa, founder and CEO of Babylon Health in Series Two.  But to have both of these guys (who are revolutionising healthcare), sit down together and go through pertinent health issues of the day was too good an opportunity to pass up.  Yes, Michael Acton Smith OBE, once described as the ‘tech version of Willy Wonka,’ may not seem an obvious choice to talk all things healthcare with, but this esteemed guest has focused his recent attention on raising awareness and building businesses in the mental health space, an arena that we are still very much lacking information. And Ali Parsa, well Ali is a one man war on healthcare. He’s a refugee who has set up the world’s largest healthcare app successfully changing the way we as hu

Secret Leaders is all about hearing from founders and CEOs of some of the world’s most successful startups. We grill each guest on the highs and more importantly lows of starting and running a startup, and one of the biggest hurdles for any startup to overcome is financing and funding. “Leave investors with two or three messages that are really clear what is special about your business, what's great about you and your founders, and how this thing is ever going to make money. They're probably the only three things that [they’re] going to remember from [a] 45 minutes or an hour [pitch]. Sometimes you feel when making a deck that more is more, it really isn't.” Financing and funding a startup seems to be the biggest sticking point for so many businesses. So much so, we invited back three incredible human beings - Anne Boden, founder and CEO of innovative challenger bank Starling Bank, Alex Depledge, co-founder of Resi and formerly Hassle.com (since sold to Helpling) and David Buttress, ex-CEO and co-founder of J

If you’re an entrepreneur in the FMCG industry, this episode of Secret Leaders is one you don’t want to miss. Today we talk to the founders of Grenade, one of the fastest growing companies in the UK, featured in the Sunday Times Fast Track Top 100 companies four out of five consecutive years.  Launched in 2009 as a hobby company, “we were only ever planning on launching one product, but then it did so well that customers and retailers were asking us for more”, and getting down to just £27 in the bank at one point, Grenade was sold in 2018 for £72 million.  So how did this husband and wife team start and grow such a successful company, developing it into a global lifestyle brand?  Alan says, “one of the things that I think has been a real strength at Grenade is that people have enjoyed working with us, whether it's a supplier or customer, or the team, treat people how you'd like to be treated yourself.” It’s honest insights like these that make Alan and Juliet Barratt so listenable. They’re funny, inspiring an

If you want to know what it takes to start and run a technology company, then you need to listen to two of our most pioneering guests discuss their experiences live, as they started visionary companies in every single sense of the word.  In this special episode we talk live to Jess Butcher, co-founder of Blippar - the augmented reality giant, and Dhiraj Mukherjee, co-founder of Shazam - the app that lets you discover the media playing all around you.  Jess was one of our first guests in Season One, and Dhiraj was interviewed for Season Two. We thought we’d bring them back on to the podcast for a catch up, only this time we’d interview them in a live setting.  We know, first hand, how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and get a business off the ground. Which is kind of the main reason we started this podcast, to help entrepreneurs, like us. Because the more we sat down with successful founders and picked their brains, the more we discovered that getting from zero to anywhere wasn’t always the glossy and incredi

Want to know what it takes to become a food and drink millionaire? Of course you do. That’s why you need to listen to Julian Hearn talking about how and why he founded the powdered food product Huel. Huel is marketed as a super convenient, nutritionally complete meal replacement. With sales of £14 million last year and a projection for 2019 at more than £40 million, this makes Huel one of Britain's fastest growing businesses - full stop. But Huel wasn’t Julian’s first foray into entrepreneurism - he sold his first venture, Promotional Codes, for £10m. “I had enough money to retire, but I get bored and I needed something to stay busy.” So his answer to staying busy was getting back into business. And after a few failed ventures he eventually founded Huel. So if you’re looking for inspiration, you won’t go far wrong tuning into Secret Leaders to hear how a guy who just wanted to find a way to spend time at home, not commuting, made millions in his pajamas. We chat about: How a failed entrepreneurial venture le