Today I’m joined by Sanya Rajpal, Founder and CEO of AdagioVR.Sanya is an Activist, International Development Expert and Serial Entrepreneur dedicated to transforming systems that unleash individual potential - and a truly remarkable individual in her own right.She built her first company while at Law School, Dignifly, with the goal to empower people to transform their own lives and solve problems in their communities and the world.She then went on to the UN to focus on growing tech entrepreneurship ecosystems before co-founding her latest venture, AdagioVR with her father.AdagioVR is a mental health and high-performance startup using cutting-edge clinical and therapeutic techniques that drive preventative mental wellbeing and behaviour change through Virtual Reality.Now, I'm often skeptical about VR being applied to lots of, in my opinion, not very useful use cases. But this is one where I have personally used the tech, and for me it was genuinely game changing, helping me work through some trauma that I have put a lot of time and therapy into, and hasn't made the same difference.So personally, I am honestly forever grateful to Sanya already for the work she's done.In this episode we discuss:What Nobel Prize winner and social entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus told Sanya about creating changeHow to secure leverage in businessWhen your strength becomes your weaknessBeing told you’re the wrong person to front your own venture if you raise - hello, a lot of biasWhy it’s time to let go of funding FOMOLinks:Checkout AdagioVR - https://adagiovr.comJoin the waitlist - https://adagiovr.com/jointhewaitinglistConnect with Sanya on Instagram & LinkedInRebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed - https://www.matthewsyed.co.uk/book/rebel-ideas-the-power-of-diverse-thinking/Listen to our episode with Joyeeta Das - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2NV8fCzOUKaGSU0xeUQwMJ?si=8blzNAQQR2uErhOpj0SN2w

Today I’m joined by Milly Tamati, founder and CEO of Generalist World.After growing up on a farm in rural New Zealand, Milly set herself the North Star of travelling the world in her twenties. Driven by a deep desire to keep moving, she found herself venturing down the path of entrepreneurship as a way of funding her wanderlust.Along her journey, she’s founded multiple businesses across the globe as a solo and a co-founder; including one of the largest hop on hop off wine tours in Victoria, Australia.Though it was when she was asked to write her own job description for a Mental Health startup that she realised she didn’t want to be defined by a list of bullet points and became the Director of Miscellaneous instead. Thus the seed for her latest venture, Generalist World, was planted.Milly’s now on a mission to change how the world sees generalists, and how generalists see themselves - all from a rural island in Scotland. And with Generalist World celebrating its first birthday, the day we recorded this episode, Generalist Universe is firmly in Milly's sight (literally, she’s got it sketched it on a napkin).In this episode we discuss:How to utilise a non-linear career pathThe hidden asset that is rural entrepreneurshipThe highs and lows of having a co-founderGetting your first customer within 12hrs of testing an ideaRethinking the “growth at all costs” mentalityLinks:Join the Generalist World Community - https://www.generalist.world/Connect with Milly on LinkedIn & TwitterListen to our episode with Lauren Currie - https://open.spotify.com/episode/3fesy7fsEVgLLrcOs0BIDK?si=4qvsnI0pRVacFFfy6N-yQwListen to our episode with Zoe Peden - https://open.spotify.com/episode/7FiiIpZ6w2LeLvSbtMtgdj?si=sLSsIhFLTZaIZzELIV9pvAListen to our episode with Sach Kukadia - https://open.spotify.com/episode/7EZwcaqJ6r8ZkXXnJVI7Ti?si=XlePYE5UQAS1xrGrPH-0fQ

Today I’m joined by Victoria Armstrong, Angel Investor, Advisor and Mentor. Victoria is an inspiring player on and off the pitch with an impressive entrepreneurial background of 20 years worth of experience in rapidly growing start-ups including Biotech, Mental health and SaaS, and has the stories to prove it. She’s invested her journey across three very different markets (New Zealand, the US, and the UK), in seven different startups, four of which she founded and exited, with one being acquired out of the US. Victoria now holds multiple board and advisory positions in various tech businesses and immensely enjoys helping others be “founder fit” to have sustainable journeys of their own. Oh and she also happens to be on the Board of Advisors for, our favourite, Female Founders Rise!In this episode we discuss:Exposing unconscious bias, especially your ownNurturing business and human babies in tandemWhy it takes a village to raise a businessCalling your A Team before a crisis hitsHow to create psychological safety with external stakeholdersStepping away from your founder identityLinks:Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaarmstrongCheckout Female Founders Rise - https://femalefoundersrise.com/Listen to our episode with Emmie Faust - https://open.spotify.com/episode/79dEjWYv8Aotkp7TTfznMY?si=dBZPCU0IQx-Fo0ANzBlAZAListen to our episode with Lauren Currie - https://open.spotify.com/episode/3fesy7fsEVgLLrcOs0BIDK?si=4qvsnI0pRVacFFfy6N-yQwListen to our episode with Valentina Milanova - https://open.spotify.com/episode/4jfFTiaD2hRyiuCHUaproV?si=tW-5vWe5TrOa9ibLkLNUJAListen to our episode with Nick Telson at Sifted Summit - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LIiOdqRsdUOqy2hu8iXbw?si=TBjVTQVNR6GEVGn55yyA2wListen to our episode with Zoe Peden - https://open.spotify.com/episode/7FiiIpZ6w2LeLvSbtMtgdj?si=sLSsIhFLTZaIZzELIV9pvA

Today I’m joined by Emmie Faust, Serial Entrepreneur, Investor, Advisor, Mum of four, Host of The Growth Podcast with Emmie Faust and Founder of Female Founders Rise.Emmie is an experienced exited entrepreneur with over 20 years in digital marketing, having personally scaled and sold not one, not two, but three businesses. She also has the rare and exceptional tale of facing modern day dragons on Dragons’ Den and winning - though her investment didn’t come without battle scars.Last year, Emmie decided to take on a new adventure and set out on a mission to help other female founders succeed by creating Female Founders Rise. Female Founders Rise is a UK based community of over 1000+ female and non-binary founders providing advice, connection, resources and the support they need to scale their businesses, and is quickly growing itself.In this episode we discuss:Paying a painful price for SEOLearning how to listen to what the universe is telling youNavigating stressful exitsDeciphering what to believe and who to trust as a founderBalancing organic growth with global aspirationsLinks:Join the Female Founders Rise community - https://femalefoundersrise.com/Listen to the Female Founders Rise Playlist on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5LD1Fd1vgVjUchVDEiXQ3DListen to The Growth Podcast with Emmie Faust - https://emmiefaust.com/podcast/Learn about Black Hat SEO - https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/black-hat-seoLearn about Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spv.asp#:~:text=of the risks.-,The Bottom Line,and perform separate financial transactions.Listen to our episode with Simi Lindgren - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LIiOdqRsdUOqy2hu8iXbw?si=TBjVTQVNR6GEVGn55yyA2wListen to our episode with Lottie Unwin - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2iRxjMLNUXviNhpVPJXmiE?si=50ycebb2SKy3CuYJcYeVZA

Today I’m joined by Lauren Currie (OBE) Founder of UPFRONT and Host of the podcast UPFRONT Moment with Lauren Currie.UPFRONT is an organisation dedicated to changing confidence, visibility, and power for 1 million women and non-binary people. The idea was born of Laurens own frustration with the lack of women speakers and the dominance of all-male panels at conferences. She’s been doing this work since 2016 and wherever she goes, it’s her aim to take other women with her and amplify their voices. She and the UPFRONT team do this through Bonds (6-week course), The UPFRONT Global Community Bond (their membership community), and content.Besides running UPFRONT, Lauren’s also a CEO, a speaker and the Trustee and Chairperson of Pregnant Then Screwed, an organisation dedicated to ending maternity discrimination.She’s been building businesses since she graduated from University. She was CEO and co-founder of Stride; a digital platform on a mission to democratise leadership development. She co-founded Snook, one of the UK’s leading service design agencies when she was 23. She was the Managing Director of NOBL Collective in the UK and Europe. And before that, she was Director of Design at Good Lab.Lauren’s work has been featured in The Guardian, Design Week, and Creative Review and she was awarded an OBE for services to design and diversity. She’s been named “woman changing the world under 30” by ELLE magazine, “one of the UK’s top businesswomen under 35” by Management Today, and "one of the UK's top 50 Creative Leaders" by Creative Review.Essentially, she’s a ridiculously impressive and even more ridiculously kind and supportive woman!In this episode we discuss:How to trust yourself to do the thing that feels like the oneTesting an idea with a post-it on the back of a toilet doorHow to redress your lack of confidenceThe most important thing you need to know about imposter syndromeWhy you need to double your price, nowLinks:Follow Lauren and UPFRONT on Instagram - @_laurencurrie_ and @upfrontglobalCheckout UPFRONT - https://weareupfront.comSign up for Bond 7 - https://bond7.weareupfront.comCoupon code for 10% off Bond 7 for NMFG listeners is - NOTMYFIRSTGUESSJoin Laurens free Masterclass on May 11th - https://workshop.weareupfront.comListen to the UPFRONT Moment Podcast - https://weareupfront.com/podcastVisit Pregnant Then Screwed - https://pregnantthenscrewed.comThe Good Lab - http://www.thegoodlab.co.uk/Valentina Milanova’s Episode - https://open.spotify.com/episode/4jfFTiaD2hRyiuCHUaproV?si=qlUCRHE_TCuHPEEEtBxT1Q

Today I’m joined by Jessica Alderson, Co-founder and CEO of So Syncd.So Syncd is a dating app and website that matches compatible personality types.Based on the 16 personality types theory, So Syncd is the first dating app to connect compatible personality types by pairing couples who have just enough similarities to understand each other and just enough differences to create a spark.After breaking up with her boyfriend of three years (who she moved to Australia with) Jess returned to London ready to date again, but was left disappointed after meeting people on dating apps and not feeling a real connection. Jess and her sister (now co-founder) Lou were having drinks one night and agreed there had to be a better way to date. Their colleagues and friends were also wasting a lot of time on bad dates and it was clear why: personality compatibility is the key to any amazing relationship, yet dating apps were still matching people on the basis of a couple of photos. It just didn’t make sense to them and they believed there had to be a better way to help people find exciting, fulfilling and long-lasting relationships, thus So Syncd was born.With a match on So Syncd being seven times more likely to result in a conversation compared to the industry average, Jess and Lou are proving their theory to be right. So Syncd already has around 400k users globally and an almost 50/50 split of male:female which is super rare on dating apps as they’re usually heavily male weighted, and has helped lead to an exceptionally high success rate of people finding love through the app – including a wedding less than a year after launching and recently welcoming their first So Syncd baby!In this episode we discuss:The real power of true success storiesA better way to find investmentHow to stand out in an overcrowded marketOvercoming personality bias in the workplaceFinding the right CTO and tech team as non-technical foundersThe cost of customer acquisitionWhy we all need to talk more about the value of the right co-founder personality matchLinks:Checkout So Syncd - https://www.sosyncd.com/Quiet by Susan Cain - https://susancain.net/book/quiet/Lunchclub - https://lunchclub.com/The 16 Personality Types - https://www.sosyncd.com/personality-type-guide/

Today I’m joined by Joyeeta Das, Co-founder & CEO of Samudra Oceans. Joy is a serial deep-tech entrepreneur who’s founded five startups, three of which have had successful exits. She’s also an influential and active member of the wider startup community with additional roles as an advisor and investor. She’s scaled projects to hundreds of million of dollars in revenue, managing teams of three to 800 strong so she has a lot to teach us from startup to scaleup.Our conversation is a little bit different again today as it focuses more on Joy’s collective wisdom and experience so I’ll give you a quick taster of her various businesses now for context, before we get started. I’d also highly recommend following the links in the show notes to learn more about them if you’re interested.Joy’s current business is called Samudra which is sanskrit for oceans. Joy and her co-founder Alexander Facey founded Samudra in October 2022 after meeting at climate emergency venture builder, Carbon13, and bonding over their mutual love of the ocean and hardware engineering. They believe the ocean holds the key to a lot of the present climate crisis and are on a mission with Samudra to take 10 million tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere by 2033 by scaling seaweed farming using robotics and AI.Joy also co-founded;Gyana - an organisation that creates tech platforms to democratise the power of AI.SuperPitch - an online ecosystem connecting globally-minded investors with talented, diverse founders, particularly women, to raise funding and build successful businesses.Anahatalife - a unique NGO that gets artists, scientists, poets, actors, musicians and mathematicians together to solve world scale problems.Aseema - a strategic consultancy advising new businesses on the formation of corporations, business structures, drafting privacy policies and structuring commercial transactions.In this episode we discuss:Why Joyeeta pivoted her dream of becoming a monk into being a serial founder and what it taught her about taking risksHow to gain the same market intuition in three months as someone who’s spent a decade in the same industryDating to find the right co-founder, nurturing your relationship, and breaking up successfullyWhy the funding system is broken and what we can do about itThe number of meetings it takes to raise your first million and then turning that into 20 (million)Responding to biasLinks:Check out Samudra Oceans - https://www.samudraoceans.comJoyeeta’s TED Talk, Why do we have to choose between a dreamer and a doer? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3Nx4YT-_UThe 36 Questions - https://www.scienceofpeople.com/deep-questions/Carbon13 - https://carbonthirteen.comGyana - https://www.gyana.comSuperPitch (acquired by Diversity X) - https://www.diversityx.vcAnahatalife (integrated into a national program)Aseema (acquired)

This episode is a little flashback for us, jumping back to a conversation Hattie had with Matt Meeker, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman and CEO (that’s Canine Enrichment Officer) at Bark, and former founder of Meetup. Today, when she’s teaching founders how to test their ideas in the early stages, Hattie still comes back to how Matt tested both Meetup and Bark with customers, and with so many valuable insights and lessons, it seemed rude not to have this available as part of this series! So with Matt’s kind permission, we’re thrilled to welcome the episode to its new home. If you haven’t listened yet, there is so much in here!Bark are on a mission to make dogs as happy as they make us. Because dogs and humans are better together. The company started as BarkBox a monthly themed combining their favourite toys and treats from the market, and have gone on to create their own toys and treats, along with health and wellness support.Matt is an incredible, serial entrepreneur who before Bark, founded Meetup in 2001. Growing from 50 to 6,000 users in the first few months Meetup was then acquired by WeWork for $156million. After leaving Meetup in 2007, Matt went on to launch BarkBox in 2012 which is an equally impressive company reaching profitability in 2017 having sold over 50million boxes.In this episode we discuss:How Meetup was born out of the devastating event of 9-11 to connect people and give underserved communities a place to goThe value of the Lean Startup methodPivoting a business one year in after responding to customer feedbackPutting the product where customers want to buyBuilding retention in subscription modelsKeeping connected to customers as a founderThe keys to success as a serial entrepreneurSince this episode was originally recorded, Matt’s dog Hugo, who was a big inspiration for him and the company, sadly passed away though Matt continues to feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility to honor him and his legacy, to ensure it’s still here and strong one-hundred years from now. Matt has also returned back to his original position as CEO and is just as passionate about fulfilling Barks mission to make dogs as happy and healthy as ever, as Hugo would’ve wanted.Links:Bark - https://bark.coMeetup - https://www.meetup.comThe Lean Startup Methodology - https://theleanstartup.com/principles

Copy Club is a community for marketers who want to help each other do great things. And there’s a lot of them out there with the Copy Club community having grown to over 1000 members from over 800 brands since Lottie founded it in 2014.After working with massive global brands including Proctor & Gamble, Lacoste, and Dolce & Gabbana, Lottie created Copy Club as a means to feel less lonely in her job as Head of Marketing for PROPERCORN, who were at the time one of the five fastest growing businesses in the UK.She didn’t know where to turn to for help and wanted to make friends who might make her life easier, and who, she could in turn support, so she took matters into her own hands and made that kind of place a reality.The Copy Club community is now a mega resource of some of the brightest minds in marketing with a slack channel where people can share and solve their challenges with other members, monthly talks diving into key marketing skills, regular social events, over 100 hours of recorded content, oh and 2% of their top-line revenue goes to charity, which is no small number as they have reached over one million in annual revenue.In this episode we discuss:The lessons Lottie learned at P&G and how those apply to high growth startups, as well as what is totally different about startup marketing!Building a business slowly and sustainably without investment, but still growing to exciting revenuesLearning from burnoutAnd community building adviceLinks:Checkout Copy Club - https://thecopyclub.co.uk

Porto and Bello are an accessible clothing brand that seeks to help ease some of the fear and anxiety around cancer treatment by focusing on the person and not just the patient.Alexia launched Porto and Bello in 2021, with husband Josh, following her own experience of being treated for breast cancer which she was diagnosed with at 29, 34 weeks pregnant with her second child, in March 2020 - five days before the very first covid lockdown.This is a bit of a different episode for us as Alexia graciously opens up about her powerful and very personal journey to discuss how one of the most painful and biggest challenges of her life inspired her new venture as an entrepreneur, and how Porto and Bello gave her a fire that helped fuel her through the rest of her treatment.With the statistic now sitting at one in two of us being affected by cancer in our lifetime, Alexia’s story is one we can all gain a lot of insight and inspiration from.Links:Checkout Porto&Bello - https://portoandbello.comCheck your boobs or pecs - https://coppafeel.org/Listen to our episode with Sophie from Mamamade (Alexia’s sister in law)AppleSpotifyNicky Newman - @nicknacklouMacmillan - https://www.macmillan.org.ukFuture Dreams - https://futuredreams.org.ukChai Cancer Care - https://chaicancercare.orgTrek Stock - https://www.trekstock.com