Mar 2024 – Present · 2 yrs · London Area, United Kingdom · Remote

• Founder15 is a team of pro entrepreneurs who have launched, scaled, exited and raised millions in funding.
• We advise founder-led companies on revenue expansion, operational turnarounds, M&A, fundraising, etc.

Feb 2023 – Present · 3 yrs 1 mo · London, England, United Kingdom

• UDX has helped hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs build real businesses from scratch. The programme provides a clear, step-by-step path to validate ideas, connect with customers, and generate early revenue, culminating in the chance to raise investment.

Aug 2022 – Jul 2023 · 11 mos · London, England, United Kingdom

• Working with creatively-minded start-up founders to accelerate their ideas into business realities in under 90 days.
• Oneday.io (previously Dorm) has raised $10m in funding and is a peer-to-peer platform where world-class professionals become educators and partner with aspiring founders & creators.
• I mentored over 100 founders over the course of a year and was a founding member of the faculty for the Oneday MBA programme.

Apr 2022 – Jul 2022 · 3 mos

• Entrepreneur in Residence, working with the former COO of Google Europe.
• This time a 0.5 to 1 journey, building out the commercial arm of the business.
• Performed an accelerated 3-month turnaround of an existing division and increased revenues by 53.6% vs. prior period.
• Our success was down to razor sharp client and process management.
• I approached the business from a position of blissful ignorance (having taken over from a lifelong recruiter who lacked entrepreneurial experience).
• This allowed me to refine systems and processes from first principles, and to set up a succession plan allowing me to exit and go back to building more 0 to 1s!

Jan 2021 – Dec 2022 · 1 yr 11 mos

• TPC was founded during lockdown to help employees make the switch from a permanent job at a single organisation to a portfolio career.

Jun 2020 – Dec 2020 · 6 mos

• First employee / co-founder.
• Built the early foundations of this VC-backed business (£2m+ in funding and counting).

Jun 2019 – Aug 2019 · 2 mos · London, England, United Kingdom

• Participant in Cohort 1 of the London programme of Antler, a global VC-backed startup generator and accelerator.
• Met some awesome people. Learnt some stuff. Had an okay experience on the programme.
• Ultimately realised that inorganically forcing strangers to team up within a matter of weeks of meeting, with the aim of building a long-lasting business together, was probably not a great thesis.

Feb 2019 – Present · 7 yrs 1 mo

• Those who can, teach?
• One-to-one career coaching, workshop facilitation and guest lecturing on finance, Venture Capital and start-ups at business schools across the UK and Europe (Cambridge Judge Business School, Cranfield, emLyon, ESADE, GEM, IE, IESE, IMD, INSEAD, Nova, SDA Bocconi, UCD Smurfit etc).
• Love inspiring the next generation!

Oct 2014 – Oct 2016 · 2 yrs

• Founded this awesome co-working space and incubation lab in the heart of London's Soho with Raj Ramanandi. Back before co-working was a thing!
• We got obliterated by WeWork who expanded to London and were outbidding us for leases on multiple locations.
• I kept running my complex financial operating model past Raj (you can take the boy out of the investment bank...), very confused as to how WeWork could be making any money at those rents.
• Now we know… the power of Community Adjusted EBITDA!

Jan 2014 – Jul 2015 · 1 yr 6 mos

• Founded Pocket Social with Lee Pickrell and Raj Ramanandi, two veteran start-up partners.
• We spun this out of Cornershop, a venture studio we were running (before they were cool).
• We were on a mission to enable smaller businesses to simply access the power of native social media advertising.
• Backed by a seed-stage VC.
• We were a bit ahead of our time, and the business closed after we failed to secure follow-on funding.
• Taught me the importance of timing and inflexion points when founding a startup.

Mar 2012 – May 2016 · 4 yrs 2 mos · Greater London

• Sourced, screened and structured VC deals, reporting directly to Raj Ramanandi and Lee Pickrell, the partners of #1Seed, a London seed-stage venture fund.
• Working for them led to many more exciting opportunities over the following years.

Aug 2011 – Present · 14 yrs 7 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Over a decade of hands-on operational experience:
• Founding multiple start-ups, including a venture studio (before they were cool) and two VC-backed tech companies
• Turning around two (very) distressed (very) small consumer goods businesses
• Investing in 100+ early-stage startups as an angel, a VC and an LP in a startup accelerator and a venture fund
• Selected case studies include:
• (1) The Portfolio Collective / cofounder / VC-backed, Europe’s fastest growing platform for portfolio professionals / first team member hired by the former COO of Google Europe to help build his latest startup
• (2) Pocket Social / cofounder / VC-backed social media management tool for SMEs / raised institutional funding, managed the user acquisition team, achieving double-digit month-on-month onboarding growth rates
• (3) Soho Labs / cofounder / coworking and incubation lab / sourced location, built membership base, managed operations
• (4) Tantrum / turnaround / kids' haircare products / spun out and relaunched the product range on a wholesale basis across major UK supermarkets and grew to six-figure business in year one
• (5) Wynnchester Outdoors / turnaround / asset purchase of distressed direct-to-consumer camping gear business / doubled gross margins and achieved full payback of investment inside year one

Jul 2007 – Aug 2011 · 4 yrs 1 mo · London, United Kingdom

• A strange few years cutting my teeth working with clients of all sizes on deals of all types.
• Found myself naturally migrating towards working with the smaller, entrepreneurial clients. I could definitely relate to them a lot more than the mega-cap board mandates, and the founders seemed to like me more than the 'normal' bankers, too :-)
• Finally took the leap and left to work on my own account. When my lovely boss, David Plowman, asked me what I was leaving to do, I told him: “David, I have no idea!”

Jul 2006 – Sep 2006 · 2 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Landed this internship after finding a back door into the bank, despite being technically ineligible for a summer internship (as I had already graduated).
• A summer mostly spent learning about the magic of mark-ups, expense accounts and black cabs.

Jul 2005 – Sep 2005 · 2 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Spent my summer bouncing among clients pretending I understood accounting.
• This culminated in a classic client interview where he mentioned something called a GL. Never afraid to ask questions when I didn't understand, I wondered aloud what it was. The client rose from his seat and shouted 'A GENERAL LEDGER, MAN! I THOUGHT YOU WERE AN ACCOUNTANT'.
• Somehow converted this into a full time job offer, so I must've done something right.
• Having heard most of the accountants telling me how they wished they'd gone into banking instead, I decided to leverage this job into a banking internship.

Jul 2002 – May 2003 · 10 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Learned about misaligned incentives.
• My manager was measured and compensated by how much training budget his team utilised. None of his sales staff wanted to take time out for CPD. I spent most of my year going on courses and collecting accreditations in everything from server management to sales training.
• I used this training to single-handedly manage a physical server migration from one end of England to the other following a site closure. No mean feat for a teenager!
• It (mostly) went to plan, notwithstanding waking up one morning to panicked messages from the distributed sales team only to find that an analyst in Ireland had turned off the live server a day early :-)