Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly

Being really productive isn’t enough to win at startups.Kim Little is the Co-Founder and CEO of Moments of Space, a successful meditation app, but about 10 years ago he was in a very different space.He was living in Australia, having co-founded a semantic driven products company (yeah we get onto what that means). He put $400,000 Australian of his own money into the company and they launched a series of cool sounding products.But they never got anywhere.What went wrong? ------------------If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better?hello@secretleaders.com Sponsor links:personio.com/secretleaders

Ed Perry and Rosie Brown are the Co-CEOs in charge of high-end ready meal company, COOK. Their USP is using the same ingredients and methods a normal person would use in their kitchens to create ready meals that actually feel home-cooked. A company run by Co-CEOs is pretty unusual but Ed and Rosie are especially unusual because they’re also brother and sister. Ed co-founded the company with Dale Penfold in 1997. His sister Rosie Brown joined the company soon after and then became Co-CEO in 2018. They’ve steered the company through tough times like the cost of living crisis and credit crunch which took the company to the edge of bankruptcy. Now, COOK's products are available in 850 stores across the UK not including the 94 COOK shops and turnover is £100 million. Just like a great recipe, Rosie believes COOK's success is down to a number of high-quality ingredients like strong principles, valuing people properly and the influence of faith. Yup, faith. For instructions on how to prepare, put your headphones and turn the volume up to 8...--SponsorsVorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleadersVanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleadersVertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders--NewsletterSign up here: https://secretleaders.email/You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

Mike Dunn is the Founder and MD of Excel TLM Group, a telemarketing and lead generation company for construction businesses. Excel today is a solid, growing business but they came within a whisper of collapse - as did Mike himself. It all came to a head on a family holiday they’d saved for years for. Mike thought he could lose everything, including his family. He felt like he’d hurt and failed everyone. What happened and what did he learn from it?------------------If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better?hello@secretleaders.com Sponsor links:personio.com/secretleaders

Listen as Holger Seim, Co-Founder and former CEO of Blinkist, shares his journey of building the app and discusses topics like the value of full books vs Blinkist summaries, selling a business, and the challenges faced by entrepreneurs. He also offers valuable advice on building a lasting business.

AJ Keller is the Co-Founder of Neurosity, who make brain imaging devices you can use at home. But before that he experienced an epic fail that put him on the path to where he is today. AJ’s first foray into brain imagining brought him to a point in the Summer of 2017 when everything was riding on him and his teammates winning an NYU startup pitch competition. If they won, they would get the funding they needed to turn their company into a real thing. Fail, however, and their venture would be over.What happened?------------------If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better?hello@secretleaders.com Sponsor links:personio.com/secretleaders

Tim Urban is the writer/illustrator behind Wait But Why, a blog he founded with his business partner, Andrew Finn, as well as the man behind one of our favourite TED Talks of all time on procrastination. Tim writes long-form articles covering topics from outer space to love to artificial intelligence. As he puts it, he writes about “almost everything actually”. Each post is also accompanied with Tim’s now-iconic doodles. Content creation is one of the hardest things to monetise effectively, but Tim hasn’t just managed to make a living from stick figures; he’s also used it to network with the most influential people on the planet, including Elon Musk. His new book, What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies is the fruit of Tim’s six-year exploration into what exactly is going wrong with society right now. In short: he thinks we’ve lost the nuances and lays out how we can start to rebuild the bridges that have been damaged in recent years. What are the simple things all societies need to do to kick on from where we are? How do you monetise well when you’re a content creator going after a niche audience? And what’s Elon actually like in person?Let's find out...--SponsorsVorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleadersVanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleadersVertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders--NewsletterSign up here: https://secretleaders.email/You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

Henry Holland is the man behind fashion brand ‘House of Holland’, known for its signature rhyming slogan t-shirts such as 'Cause me pain Hedi Slimane' and ‘“I’ll Tell You Who’s Boss Kate Moss’. At one point they had over a 100 stockists all over the world. Henry produced special collections for Debenhams and Habitat. But at the start of the pandemic, Henry called in the administrators and left the world of fashion to go into ceramics.What happened?If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com Sponsor links:personio.com/secretleaders

Mo Gawdat is legendary builder, thinker and now one of the leading voices in the emerging field of AI. This is a topic we want learn more about because it’s going to change our world.Mo spent over a decade as Chief Business Officer for Google X. He’s also the bestselling author of the books Solve for Happy, and most recently, Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World.He’s extremely thoughtful about the positives and negatives we face as a species. As Mo says: “The shit has already hit the fan”. AI is coming whether we like it or not. And in a universe where AI is becoming increasingly prevalent, it’s more important than ever to find the value you can bring to the world. We face a future beyond anyone’s comprehension, but Mo knows better than most what challenges we face. That’s why this conversation is so important: no one is coming to save us. But it’s not all doom and gloom - we can save ourselves, if we just start treating each other better.--SponsorsVorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleadersVanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleadersVertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders--NewsletterSign up here: https://secretleaders.email/You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

Jonathan Neman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, a farm-to-table restaurant chain making fast food healthy.Unless you’re one of our American listeners, you probably won’t be familiar with Sweetgreen but they’re a staple of the LA, New York and Washington food scenes. They’ve got over 200 sites across the country.You probably don’t think of salad and tech in the same sentence but Sweetgreen love a bit of tech.They’ve run pilots to test the viability of blockchain technology to track and trace their ingredients and stock. And, having acquired a robotics startup in 2021, they’re now creating an automated restaurant where robots will prepare ingredients which are then assembled by human chefs. Pretty wild.Where is the restaurant industry heading?--SponsorsVorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleadersVanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleadersVertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders--NewsletterSign up here: https://secretleaders.email/You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

Every few months we interview our host Dan to find out what it’s really like being a Founder because his day job is running his VC backed startup Heights.  If this is the first episode like this you’ve heard then please stop what you’re doing and search for Dan Chapter 1 in the Secret Leaders feed. He’s got a good origin story. If you’re up to date, in the previous episode with Dan a few months ago we learnt how to develop a product and bring it to market. That’s where we are today. Dan and his Co-Founder Joel have developed the Heights Braincare supplement but now they need to scale it. They need to scale the business. This is the tricky first year of being public. They need to negotiate their way out of the valley they’re in now, into the larger valley next door. How did they do it?--SponsorsVorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleadersVanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleadersVertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders--NewsletterSign up here: https://secretleaders.email/You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes