What were your biggest learnings from your time at Wrapp, AdProfit and HDWR from bootstrapping through to scaling a business internationally?
My main takeaway when looking holistically at my founder years is that there is a huge range of differences on the entrepreneurial path and many of them can be incredibly rewarding in their own unique way. How you define success as an entrepreneur is not always determined by being a keynote speaker at the largest tech conferences and sweet-talked by brand-name investors. There can be endless satisfaction from controlling your own destiny and moving slowly. Even though I represent the VC-backed path today, I feel society often forgets to salute the many small businesses that never aspire to grow exponentially and have a huge exit but are still essential to our economy and the lives of millions.

Startup forecasts, valuations and capital requirements are all largely driven by the founders’ and their backers’ views on the future scale of the opportunity at hand. If the opportunity is vast and unprecedented, it is likely to attract investment to match that… I believe that artificial intelligence is one such opportunity, and that – if a ‘hype cycle’ is your preferred way of gauging new technologies – we are in fact still quite far from the “peak of inflated expectations”.

Did you know that humans spend 90% of their time indoors? That’s crazy, isn’t it? And yet navigation / mapping apps only seem to work outdoors.  

Why is that? It’s for a very simple reason, and it’s also not for a lack of willingness.   

These types of apps require a map to help get you around, but they also need to know where you are on that map. When outdoors, GPS does exactly that. When indoors, it’s much less simple, and we at Waymap have made it our mission to build a positioning system (and app on top of that) that works everywhere GPS can’t. Our goal is to be accurate enough to help navigate blind people around modern cities, and benefit everybody in the process.  

Despite projections towards the end of 2023 saying we’d start to see economic uplift in 2024, UK businesses, including in the tech sector, continue to struggle amidst a horde of significant challenges. And an ongoing funding slowdown isn’t helping the situation.

Before becoming Principal of Seraphim Space Manager LLP you were Senior Director at Astra and COO at Apollo Fusion and are currently Board Observer at D-Orbit. What have been your biggest learnings and pivotal insights gained on your journey thus far from these roles?
Team is everything. Many startups have great ideas and tech but it’s all about the execution, i.e. turning it into a product that people want to buy and doing that over and over again. That all comes down to the team. I was very fortunate at Apollo Fusion to work with a team of exceptional people that took very good tech and built a great company with a small team. For me, when I look at startups, the team is the real differentiator between startups.

Ever since I could remember, I have been into fitness- always on the search for the best health supplements. When I started to help my now-wife, Mari Llewellyn, on her fitness journey, we quickly realized there weren’t female-focused supplements that were both effective and delicious. So in 2019, we were inspired to create Bloom to give everyone the opportunity to become the best version of themselves with high-quality delicious health supplements.

Set one clear goal for the company to align around, with each person a “Single Threaded Owner” (STO) of an action to achieve it.

Dan Thompson
CEO, Kluster

Always Be Closing (ABC). Founders are their companies’ best salespeople and also the first to stop selling, handing it over to others — go out and get the revenues.

Avi Eyal
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Entrée Capital

In an era where technological advances are reshaping industries, the legal sector is no exception. The quickly advancing applications of Generative AI to the legal industry marks a significant leap forward. Law firms, in-house legal teams, incumbent legal technology providers and new upstarts are all grappling with the potential impact and figuring out how to prioritise their time and resources to capture the opportunity that has presented itself.

Skiing has been a passion of mine since my childhood, so turning this into a career was always a dream I had. My brother, Nick (Maison Sport CEO), and I both skied professionally for Great Britain and I have always felt at home in the mountains. After retiring from the sport and working as an insurance broker in the City, alongside my brother and fellow ex-ski-racer Aaron Tipping (Maison Sport CFO), we decided to take the leap and buy a French Ski School.