Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly

John Hitchcox is the Chairman and Founder of Yoo Group, the property company behind the £1.3 billion pound regeneration of Olympia London and considered by many the global leader in the branded residence space. John founded Yoo in 1999 with one of the world’s most famous designers, Philippe Starck. Together they have grown Yoo to where it is today, operating in over fifty cities and thirty countries worldwide. John has been in the property market since the early eighties, when he was just 17. He’s had to bring a lot of confidence to be so successful but is honest about the challenges of being an entrepreneur. He has also ridden through multiple financial crises. With the market going bananas and uncertainty over interest rates and inflation going through the roof, it’s a good time to talk to someone who knows more than most. What does he see in his crystal ball? And what happened when he tried to do his first property deal at the age of 14?Listen to 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

This a new one for us - we've just launched our first true crime show at Kindling Media (we make Secret Leaders).It's called Bad Money and it's about the Hong Kong gangster, Big Spender. Obsessed with money, he went further than anyone before to get rich. In fact, he became so wealthy he could've had his own episode on Secret Leaders.This is a story of how money and power really work - and this is the first episode.You can listen to the rest of the show here: https://link.chtbl.com/badmoney_slOr search for Bad Money wherever you listen to your pods.Hope you enjoy!

Konrad Bergström is the founder of Swedish electric boat manufacturer X Shore and Zound Industries, the Swedish tech giant that sells consumer electronics for Marshall Amplification and Adidas. But before that, he was half a million euros in debt and living out of his car after his previous business, Megascine Agency, failed. Konrad set up the business which distributed brands like Quicksilver and Burton in Sweden in the late 90s. The company grew quickly and made a name for themselves, organising events such as the world’s largest indoor snowboarding competition and the first European edition of the World Cup in wakeboarding. So what went wrong? Listen to find out what. 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

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 first heard the word ‘drugs’ when he was just five years old and tried to hide his father’s drug’s use from the rest of the family. When Joe asked Nikki to come back from working abroad in 2015 to help him build his business, Nikki says he was worried about working with his brother because of the warnings he’d heard about working with family but doesn’t regret his decision. What is his advice for those that want to work with someone they are close to and how do they cope with such a fast-growing global business? Listen to 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

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 this was really new, but they did it! They got mobile phone carriers, like China Unicom, to sell their product and also spread into other countries in Asia. 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

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 successful founder and investor? Listen to 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

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 household technologyBut they’d made a fundamental mistake.Listen to find out what. 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’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 difference between those who receive a good education and those who don’t, would later form the basis of Duolingo. But when Luis and his Co-Founder Severin started Duolingo in 2012 they had a big problem - how could they keep their users coming back? Listen to find out. Show notes: (01:50) - The beginning of Duolingo (08:40) - Getting first interested in computers at 8 years old.  (11:15) - Inventing CAPTCHA (16:00) - Selling reCAPTCHA to Google  (19:45) - How he handled suddenly becoming very rich  (23:30) - The key things they did right with Duolingo in the early days (25:25) - How they got their users to stay motivated (29:00) - Working out how to teach Gen Z (33:00) - Why he doesn’t see Google Translate as a competitor (35:40) - Using crowdsourcing as a tool to grow the business (40:35) - His advice for other entrepreneurs --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

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/secretleadersIf you want to hear more from Jay, he's got his own podcast 'Happy Millionaire'.

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