Founder, award-winning advisor, speaker and investor in the startup ecosystem. With 10+ years of deep experience in the startup space having built a global community and working with over 1,000 founders directly during this time.
All said and done, I’m a contrarian. For whatever reason that may be. I like to look at things differently and try to shake them up. The world is constantly changing with new ideas being bought to the forefront every day – the only way to keep up with those changes is to be the person creating them. This is what I help people do. Every project I involve myself in is designed to enable, catalyse, inspire and provide energy to the development of new ideas and delivery methods, to bring the future forward and ultimately make the world–in all meanings of the phrase–a better place.
My story began as a university drop out (cliché, I know), where I’d realised I was much more excited about applying myself practically to projects (vs. theoretically for what would have been 3-4 years of academic study). My first business was a marketing agency; where I put my design and self-taught technical skills to the test, providing brand & website work for anyone who needed it. Over time, and while saying yes to more things, this skill-set expanded, while my interests narrowed on the field of startups.
I started multiple things myself, hacking away in the single-bed box-room of my parents’ terraced house. I actually grabbed a picture back then to remember that period of time:
Working in my childhood bedroom, in 2012
Coming from a working-class background, entrepreneurship was essentially completely new to me; a career-option we were never taught about in school. With a friend-group of similar circumstances I began to realise I couldn’t talk to my network at the time about what I was working on – nobody understood it enough to help or even empathise. So I sought my own network of contrarians, or “Rebels” as I know affectionately refer to them, and started a meetup for likeminds.
The very first Rebel Meetup (or YENA event – the Young Entrepreneur Networking Association) was started in 2013, with around 5 people in attendance at the first event. I remember it well, all sat around a table, sharing ‘war stories’ from entrepreneurship & self employment, and seemingly all finally realising like we’d found ‘our people’. Naturally everyone wanted to know when the next event was, and I felt obliged to organise one shortly after.
The rest, as they say, is history.
People came from all over, as much as a 4 hour car drive away(!), to attend the free, casual meetup. It was clear I had created something that many others, aside from me, wanted to see in the world. So we grew the events to cater to more folks, in more cities. Making everything up as we went along. The organisation was not revenue generating, it wasn’t intended to, we just wanted to organise safe spaces for similarly minded people to connect. And so we did; by the beginning of 2020 we had in fact grown across 9 countries, with over 100 events a year connecting 5,000+ people in 21 cities every year.
Along the way, we’d developed a membership organisation for ambitious individuals that has taken many forms over time as it’s sought to fit the market as it changes. That adaptation over time has led to what we see today as Dffrnt – an social enterprise that exists to support the development of future leaders in business, both entrepreneurs and professionals.
Over the past ten years, and building these organisations, I’ve been lucky enough to take advantage of other opportunities that have arisen. Including taking part in the very first Ada Ventures Angel Programme, where I invested in 5 deals via the £30m+ inclusive European venture fund, and subsequently helped design and deliver the second cohort as a part of my consultancy work. I’ve also invested in a number of members, one such member being Ecologi, which has now funded the planting of over 65 million trees and was valued at £70m in it’s latest funding round.
Through this community building and exposure to the venture ecosystem I’ve build a personal deal flow of over £20m of active deals per annum which I am able to scout to venture funds on an ad hoc, or formal, basis (please get in touch if you wish to discuss further).
Beyond this, I am active in non-executive director roles, for startups & scaleups across different industries and remain interested in hearing about more opportunities like this on an ongoing basis. I run monthly advisory sessions for current clients and deliver talks on a regular basis for schools, universities, corporate organisations, and startup communities. More on my speaking services here.
Now, I am quietly working on a new project with a mission to genuinely democratise entrepreneurship for everyone, everywhere. In a world where self-employment is growing and SMEs make up 99% of the global economy, we must do our best to put the best support in the hands of people who need it most. If you’d like to help with this mission, please also get in touch.
