Secret Leaders

  • Author: Vários
  • Narrator: Vários
  • Publisher: Podcast
  • Duration: 281:03:21
  • More information

Informações:

Synopsis

Secret Leaders promises a collection of contrasting, irreverent interviews with the high-flying CEOs and forward-thinking founders of some of the most successful businesses in the UK and the US right now, including Martha Lane Fox (Lastminute.com), Anne Boden (Starling Bank), Jed McCaleb (Ripple, Mt.Gox and Stellar) and Jason Calacanis (first Uber investor).

Episodes

  • 'I was 5 the first time I heard the word drugs': Nikki Wicks, CEO of The Body Coach and brother of Joe Wicks.

    08/11/2022 Duration: 44min

    Nikki Wicks is the CEO of The Body Coach and the older brother of Joe Wicks. Joe, aka The Body Coach, is a household name. He’s a fitness coach with a massive online following and the author of one of the best selling cookbooks of all time ‘Lean In 15’, having sold over a million copies in its first year alone.  During the pandemic Joe became known as the ‘Nation’s PE teacher’, delivering exercise sessions on YouTube for children every week. One class of PE with Joe was live-streamed by nearly a million people, earning him a place in the Guinness World Records.  Joe has his own personal brand, but The Body Coach is also a fast-growing business that Nikki has built, along with Joe, over the past seven years. Their YouTube channel has over 2.5 two and a half million subscribers and they hit over a million downloads on their app in their first year. They are booming. Nikki and Joe have a strong bond, formed during a difficult childhood during which their father struggled with a drug addiction. Nikki says he firs

  • How I failed: ‘Never go in with the idea of money first’, with Founder Kurt Davis.

    03/11/2022 Duration: 11min

    Kurt Davis has spent twenty years in Silicon Valley and Asia, working in venture capital and business development for technology startups, focusing on deals with companies like Apple, Microsoft, Spotify, and Sony.  But he experienced failure, with his very first business, a mobile game company. Kurt was living in Hong Kong in the early 2000s and from there he witnessed the beginning of a wave of innovation in China, especially in tech. Alibaba, Tencent, Baibu, all of them were launched around that time and were beginning to grow.  It was exciting and Kurt couldn’t resist the opportunity. He left his job and moved to Shanghai in 2003 to make it as an entrepreneur. He was really into football and hit upon the idea of starting an online fantasy football game app. At first it was going to be a website but, after realising they weren’t going to be able to monetise it very well, they then turned their attention to mobile phones. Remember this was 2003, so the early days of smartphones, before the iPhone. All of thi

  • Ignore the press, why you should be excited about the world - billionaire psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer

    01/11/2022 Duration: 01h02min

    Christian Angermayer is a German-born billionaire. He’s on the Sunday Times rich list, and has accumulated a lot of wealth from his work as an investor, film producer and founder. But Christian is about much more than money… From his family office, Apeiron Investment Group, he invests and starts companies in areas from psychedelics to fintech, cryptocurrency, biotech, and artificial intelligence. In fact, he’s been called the world’s first ‘psychedelic billionaire’. That might seem a bit strange given the fact he is basically a tee-totaler. He doesn’t smoke. He’s a Bavarian who’s never drunk beer! His biggest vice is tea and coffee.  He’s also really into longevity. He believes that within his lifetime, we will extend human lifespan to such an extent that we will voluntarily decide when we exit this life. And he’s committing some of his vast fortune to making that a reality.  He thinks deeply about how he has got to where he has and works hard to master his ego. Why does he think this is key to being a succes

  • How I failed: We were playing the wrong game, with Jonathan Anderson

    27/10/2022 Duration: 13min

    Jonathan Anderson is the co-founder and CEO of Candu, a no-code platform that helps people build their own products. They are used by companies likeAdobe, Thought Industries, and Gorgias and have raised over five million dollars. But his first business wasn’t such a success. In 2011, when Jonathan was a student at Stanford University in a CleanTech programme, he came up with the idea for a smart thermostat controlled by your smartphone with a couple of his fellow students. The problem they’d identified was that programmable thermostats at the time were really hard to use meaning customers just didn’t do it.  It was early days for the smartphone but also exciting times. They realised they could use the GPS on customer’s smartphones to say when they were coming in and out of their homes, making heating much more efficient. After securing twenty thousand pounds with convertible note financing, they worked with a Chinese supplier to build a prototype. They were pumped to be at the forefront of the revolution in h

  • Duolingo Founder: Being a genius, inventing CAPTCHA & getting 500m users - Luis Von Ahn

    25/10/2022 Duration: 48min

    If you’re not one of their 500 million users, Duolingo is a phenomenally successful app where you practise a language in small chunks every day. Launched in 2012, it has become the number one language learning app and the most downloaded education app in the world. The company floated in 2021 and currently has a market cap of just under 4 billion dollars.  It’s rare for a founder to be brilliant at both invention and business but Luis Von Ahn, the Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo, is one of them. Before Duolingo, he invented Captcha - those squiggly letters you have to write out to prove you’re not a computer. The guy’s a genius, and that’s a fact. He actually won an award for being one in 2006, the prestigious Macarthur Fellows Program award. It’s colloquially known as the genius grant, because it’s said you have to be one to get it.  Luis grew up in a single parent household in Guatemala. His mother spent all the money she could sending him to the best school she could afford. This experience, of seeing the d

  • How I failed: Leaving my high paying job for my doomed startup with Jay Radia

    20/10/2022 Duration: 11min

    Jay Radia has built three businesses worth over half a billion pounds and currently runs an accelerator focusing on increasing happiness in the workplace.  But before all that, he founded a company called Mobi RF, which failed. The idea behind the company was to allow anyone with a smartphone to start selling their photos to businesses, like iStock or Getty Images for your smartphone.  Jay had this spark of inspiration back in 2012 when Instagram was taking off and everyone was taking more and more photos on their phone. His confidence skyrocketed when he spoke to the Founder of iStock who told him the idea was incredible and that he wished he’d thought of it. He quit his six-figure job in finance and bootstrapped the company with his brother. What went wrong? Listen to find out.  If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders If you want to hear more from Jay, he's got his own podcast 'Happy Millionaire

  • How I failed: Not knowing when to accept defeat, with Mark Joseph

    13/10/2022 Duration: 11min

    Before Mark Joseph founded his current marketing agency, Vouch Global, he experienced failure with another agency called Testify Digital. Their clients included brands like Universal, Wonderbra, Shock Absorber and Lenovo. He loved the projects they came up with, including the world’s first award judged on social media for the Mobo Awards. They got to £1m in revenue and Mark ran the company for five years before he reached the point where he felt he had to walk away.  So, what went wrong? Listen to find out.  If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • How I failed: Good options but not enough focus, with Yorkshire Meatball Co Founder Gareth Atkinson

    06/10/2022 Duration: 14min

    Gareth Atkinson launched the Yorkshire Meatball Company in 2014 with his father after they recognised a gap in the market for a premium meatball product. They opened a restaurant in Harrogate, won awards, were listed as one of the UK’s top 100 startups, and ended up being stocked in 300 supermarkets across the country. Like all good entrepreneurs, they’d even built a brand that had the potential and scope to stretch into other markets. So what went wrong? Listen to find out.  If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Improbable: Inside the UK’s most secretive unicorn, with Co-Founder Herman Narula

    04/10/2022 Duration: 54min

    How do you build a metaverse?  Long before Facebook changed to Meta, Improbable, a British game and technology company, was working on the idea of a kind of metaverse, even if they didn’t call it that. Now, they are at the forefront of making virtual worlds (where you can go to work, socialise, have experiences) a reality.  Improbable was born in 2012 after Herman Narula met Co-Founder Rob Whitehead whilst they were both studying computer science at Cambridge University. They had a dream: they loved computer games and wanted to go live there. They spent over a decade working on how to do that and became a unicorn without anyone really knowing what they did. But it’s not all about entertainment, they also have another side of their business that has applications in defence and public policy. They build models of real world countries which can be used to solve a whole host of problems; from what would happen if a particular response to coronavirus is implemented, to how climate change might require the electrif

  • How I failed: On the cusp of greatness when everything falls apart with Flash Pack Founder Radha Vyas

    29/09/2022 Duration: 17min

    Would you fight for your business even after you’d put it into administration?  Radha Vyas co-founded Flash Pack, an adventure holiday company, with her husband Lee, after realising there was an untapped market for solo entrepreneurs in their thirties and forties. They slowly built their company and were just entering an exciting first fundraising round when the pandemic hit, decimating their company and the entire travel industry. They had to put the company into administration but then were offered a ray of hope which meant they might be able to get their business back. What happened next? Listen to find out.  If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Dan Murray-Serter, Chapter 4: How to cross the chasm from idea to product

    27/09/2022 Duration: 46min

    You want to launch a new product. But how do you decide on exactly what you’re going to develop? How do you build a community when you don’t have anything to sell them? How do you test demand? These are important questions that Dan Murray-Serter, the usual host of Secret Leaders, will be answering this week. This is the fourth chapter in our semi-regular series with Dan where we put him in the hot seat. If you haven’t listened to the previous three it’s worth doing that now because you’ll understand more about what he talks about in this episode.  Dan is a founder himself. His day job is running his VC-backed company Heights. For this episode we are going back to the beginning of Heights. Well, actually, before the beginning, because whilst Heights is now a braincare supplement company, it didn’t start out as one.  After the failure of their previous company in 2018, Dan and his co-founder Joel decided they wanted to focus on building a consumer goods company in the mental health field. They knew where they w

  • How I Failed: Unable to keep staff, with Founder Hayden Bloomfield

    22/09/2022 Duration: 12min

    Do you struggle to maintain good relationships with your employees?  Hayden Bloomfield managed to grow his grounds maintenance company during the pandemic. At its height, it had a team of ten and was turning over £25,000 - £30,000 a month. But during a period of two years, Hayden went through thirty members of staff. He couldn’t focus on building the big picture because he regularly had to cover some staff not turning up for work. Why couldn’t he stop his staff from leaving?  Listen to find out.  If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders If you want to know more about Hayden's failures, check out his podcast, Benevolent Business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Fiverr: “Stop focusing on f*cking valuations, they mean nothing!” says Co-Founder Micha Kaufman

    20/09/2022 Duration: 51min

    Micha Kaufman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fiverr, the global online marketplace for freelancers. Let’s say you’re a designer. You can list your services and display your portfolio. And then companies who want stuff designed like a new website can find you and hire you to do the work. It's called Fiverr because at the beginning all the tasks cost 5 dollars. Though the pricing has changed, the name has stayed and the platform is currently used by 4.2 million customers in 160 countries worldwide. The company launched in 2010 but Micha was committed to growing it organically so spent nothing on marketing for the first five or six years.  And that is even more incredible when you think that Fiverr, which went public in 2019, has a current market cap of just under 1.4 billion dollars and revenue of over 160 million dollars this year so far. Micha says it’s three times larger than it was when it floated. But during the pandemic, they skyrocketed to a market cap of 11 billion dollars….yeah, we get into that period!

  • How I failed: The danger of doing business with friends, with Footlights Founder Jo Fisher

    15/09/2022 Duration: 12min

    Would you go into business with a friend?  Jo Fisher is the Founder and CEO of Footlights, a performing arts company, which has 17 franchises and works with schools across the north of England.  She got into business at a ridiculously young age. As a young child she used to sit in the entrance to her house and sell items her neighbours no longer wanted to make money for sweets. She left school at 14 to work full-time and launched her first business, an underwear business, when she was just 18. When it started to grow she decided to bring in her best friend as a partner…and that’s when things started to go wrong.  What happened? Listen to find out.  If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • The Newsette's Daniella Pierson on how to prove your haters wrong

    13/09/2022 Duration: 56min

    Daniella Pierson is the CEO and Founder of the Newsette, a women-focused newsletter which she started when she was at university at just 19 years old. Now 27, she was recently named by Forbes as one of the wealthiest women of colour in the United States.  The newsletter now has more than 500,000 subscribers, whilst revenue grew from $1million in 2019 to $40 million in 2021. Within the company she also started a creative agency, Newland, which works with Fortune 500 brands. According to Inc., the Newsette is the16th most successful company in America, based on its growth over the last three years of over 16,000%.  Last year, Daniella, who has ADHD, OCD, and depression, co-founded mental health company Wondermind with Selena Gomez and Selena’s mother Mandy Teefey. It was recently valued at 100 million dollars.  But Daniella did not grow up believing she could make it as an entrepreneur. She used all the ways people brought her down to fuel her desire to make her business a success but says there were many times

  • How I failed: “When people try to take things off you, you gotta fight back!” with Natterjack Whisky Founder Aidan Mehigan

    08/09/2022 Duration: 16min

    For this episode of ‘How I Failed’ we follow the story of Aidan Mehigan’s fight to save his business, as it happened. We first spoke to Aidan earlier this year when he was in the middle of a fundraise and court battle to keep control of his whisky business. When growing his company in 2018, Natterjack Whisky, Aidan had taken out a convertible loan note to fund his business. Then Covid hit, by the end of 2021, cash was low, their sales were almost non-existent on the international market and the Irish market just wasn’t big enough to support them.  The convertible loan note holder wanted their money, and Aidan couldn’t pay it back… What happened? Listen to find out.  If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • THIS Co-Founder shares secret to making plant-based food that doesn’t suck - Andy Shovel

    06/09/2022 Duration: 58min

    THIS is currently the fastest-growing meat alternative brand in the UK. After launching in 2019, it was recently valued at £150 million. But Co-Founders Andy Shovel and Pete Sharman didn’t always want to help people eat less meat. In fact, before THIS they ran a successful beef burger company.  Andy knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and sold his first business at 21. But far from feeling proud of himself, he really struggled. He hardly left his room for three weeks. Surrounded by friends in stable jobs, he felt lonely, scared that he didn’t know what to do next. A chance visit to a new restaurant startup gave him the direction he needed, he would go into the “rock and roll” world of food. THIS definitely pushes the boundaries. Their early traction, says Andy, came from their PR stunts. In 2021, they did a takeover of the town of Quorn, rumoured to be where the meat-free brand, their main competitor, got its name from. THIS sponsored the football team, the pubs, the bingo hall…even the bran

  • What it was really like building Apple with Steve Jobs, with Founder & CEO of FNDR James Vincent

    30/08/2022 Duration: 01h11min

    James Vincent has helped develop brands for some of the biggest companies in the world. For 11 years he met Steve Jobs every week to come up with some of the iconic campaigns for Apple’s products. And then to launch the very first iPhone, James started Media Arts Lab, Apple’s exclusive brand agency, along with Lee Clow and other co-founders, which he ran for over eight years. For someone who had a big part to play in constructing Apple’s narrative, James Vincent is a relatively unknown figure. Maybe because he hasn't ever really put himself in the spotlight. He can be pretty self-deprecating about his career but he’s helped some absolute icons. As well as Steve Jobs, he’s worked with Brian Chesky at AirBnB and in his most recent company FNDR he’s working with the next generation of unicorns. Clients have included Evan Spiegal at Snapchap and José Neves at Farfetch.  Find out how a young boy from Sheffield ended up in the inner circle of some of the world's most iconic brands.  -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better

  • SumUp: how to stumble into building an €8b company, with Co-Founder Marc-Alexander Christ

    23/08/2022 Duration: 51min

    How much of your success is down to luck?  Marc-Alexander Christ is the Co-Founder of SumUp, which was recently valued at €8b. He says being in the right place at the right time was a big factor in him starting the company.  SumUp is a fintech best known for supplying card readers to small businesses so they can take payments. You may have seen them, and have probably used them because they work with over four million merchants worldwide.  It hasn’t always gone their way though. As well as some early mistakes that could have proved fatal, they were initially hit hard by the pandemic, which saw their revenue drop around 80% almost overnight. Find out how they managed to adapt and how Marc says you can make the most of the luck you get dealt in life.  -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code

  • Octopus Energy: how to run a massive company with no HR function, with Founder and CEO Greg Jackson

    16/08/2022 Duration: 47min

    Greg Jackson started Octopus Energy, a green energy supplier, in 2015. Since then it has enjoyed huge growth. It is now the fourth largest energy retailer in the UK, supplying over 3 million homes in the country, as well as homes in Germany, the USA, Japan, Spain, Italy, France and New Zealand. They were valued at nearly 5 billion dollars at the end of 2021.  Greg is clearly passionate about climate change and says he went into business to drive change. Octopus Energy is a fascinating business, not only because of its growth in a highly competitive industry but also because Greg has rejected traditional business structures. Despite having three and a half thousand staff, Octopus Energy has no HR department.  Listen to find out why he wanted to create a completely new organisational structure; how that system coped when an unprecedented event like the pandemic happened; and what is it like being the CEO of an energy supplier during an energy crisis.  -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.c

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