Secret Leaders Starling Bank, Resi and Just Eat: Funding and Financing Startups
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 Just Eat to discuss their experiences.
All three have had very different experiences of finance and raising funds, and so they are the perfect trio to discuss how they did it, what they were hoping to achieve and more importantly, how they handled the process, including how they coped when they came face to face with the urban legends that are in fact actual funding horror stories - because believe it or not, even the most successful entrepreneurs still face discrimination.
We chat about:
- Raising money before you need it
- What it’s like in the lead up to going public
- Inner demons and horror stories that actually happen when you raise funds
- Raising money as a single founder vs being a co-founder
- Practical processes to set up for successful funding
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