Secret Leaders

Do you want to cut your carbon emissions to zero and save money on your energy bills? Introducing Bulb, a green energy company founded in 2015 by Hayden Wood and co-founder, Amit Gudka. Together they wanted to change the energy industry, to make it better, by making energy simpler, cheaper and greener. “We saw all the new technology from solar panels and batteries and smart meters changing the relationship that homes have with the grid. The home of the future [has] solar panels on the roof, there's an electric vehicle in the driveway, and that home needs an energy supplier that it could trust, because its energy needs need to be managed.”Today Bulb has grown their members to 1.7 million, adding more to their ranks each day. And with a team of over 700 people spread across London, France, Spain and the US, running a company that aims to use technology to reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide outstanding customer service hasn’t been an easy journey. “A lot of the feedback we got in the early days was: ‘sounds too good to be true’, ‘where's the catch?’ ‘It doesn't make sense, you know? Why are you doing this?’ ‘Why hasn't somebody else done it before?’”So what does it take to build and lead Britain's fastest growing company? “This is where I think I have really struggled to be honest, I found this job very difficult. And I feel like I'm really just at the early stages of my learning on how to do it. I think I do have tendencies to be a perfectionist. And I think it's helpful sometimes, but generally unhelpful. You have to not let perfectionism get in the way of excellence.”We chat about: The genesis of the idea for Bulb Angel investors and EIS Struggling to get customer sign ups Developing as a leader and giving employees autonomy Handling the pandemic and pivoting on a sixpence The importance of company mission in recruiting --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

If you’ve ever wondered how entrepreneurs without a specific idea go on to found a unicorn startup from their bedrooms, then this episode of Secret Leaders is for you. “One of the things that really strikes me that's changed over the course of the last 10 years is the level of awareness of what's possible. When we decided to start GoCardless, most of our friends just thought we were unemployed and couldn't get a job.”Today’s guest is one third of the British equivalent of the PayPal mafia, Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of payment giant GoCardless. GoCardless is a global payment network taking the pain out of getting paid for more than 50,000 businesses worldwide from multinationals to SMB, processing over $15 billion of payments annually across more than 30 countries.Hiroki and his fellow co-founders Matt Robinson (who now runs successful property tech startup Nested) and Tom Bloomfield (who has recently stepped aside as CEO of challenger bank giant Monzo) have raised over $120 million across 7 rounds of funding, securing $75 million in their latest series E.But it’s not been an easy ride. “The first round of investment that we raised was definitely the hardest. I think we had something like 64 ‘no’s’ before we got our first ‘yes’.”Hiroki has been on a real journey, not just professionally, but personally too, having to physically rebuild his body after a horrific cycling accident in 2016 that left him paralysed from the waist down, drastically altering how he manages himself and the business day to day.We chat about: The hardest part of starting a business The hockey stick growth curve How to mentally prepare to fundraise When co-founders leave the business Choosing a CEO and building a leadership team The future vision for GoCardless Links: Nested Monzo --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

“When have you actually been thirsty? We have water everywhere around us. There are taps, there are showers. It's this infinite resource for most people, yet for the marginalised 10% of the world, it's something that they've never known.”Scott Harrison is a former club promoter turned CEO of Charity: Water, a hyper transparent non profit organisation that in 13 years has raised over $500 million and brought clean drinking water to 11 million people. You’d think with these numbers under his belt Scott would be content to sit back on his laurels and congratulate his hard work. Far from it. “Did I ever think I could raise half a billion dollars for clean water? And the real answer is 13 years later, this is a fraction of what I'd hoped we could have done. I mean, yes, it's a lot of money, but it's water, for crying out loud. We should be able to rally the world, clean water for humans, clean water for children. When I go to bed at night, I'm not patting myself on the back. It doesn't feel like success. It feels like a fraction of the potential achieved.”This strong desire to help others hasn’t always driven Scott. For 10 long years he lived (in his own words) a truly ‘degenerate, hedonistic, sycophantic lifestyle’, filling up clubs with beautiful people, taking copious amounts of drugs, smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish, with a gambling addiction and a pornography addiction. It all came to a head one day when he realised there was nothing redemptive about his life. So he stopped and asked himself what the opposite of his life would look like, and he thought, doing something for others. “What if I volunteered for a charity? What if I volunteered for some sort of humanitarian mission for one year and tried to give instead of take.”And so Scott: the second chapter began. This is an inspirational episode everyone needs to hear. We chat about: From nightclub promoter to charity founder Creating a hyper transparent charity The three pillars on which Charity: Water was founded How he’s innovating the charity sector Why apathy is his biggest challenge Don’t be afraid of hard work Links: The Spring - The charity: water story - YouTube Donate - Give The Gift Of Clean, Safe Water | charity: water Thirst - Scott Harrison --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

Have you seen your household food waste increase exponentially during the pandemic? You’re not alone. “Food waste in homes is more under scrutiny now than ever because people are not used to cooking at home, seven days a week. It's the perfect storm for trying to figure out your cooking schedule and using everything and that definitely produces food waste, at least initially until you've found your equilibrium.”Chatting all things food waste on this episode of Secret Leaders are two entrepreneurial power houses beating the same drum, but tackling the global issue of food waste from different angles. We have Saasha Celestial-One, COO and co-founder of food sharing platform Olio who has featured on the podcast before (her episode is in the links section) and Hjalmar Ståhlberg Nordegren, CEO and co-founder at Karma. Hjalmar is a Swedish medical doctor turned entrepreneur. Together they’re both seeking a solution to the $1.2 trillion food waste problem.Join us as we discuss what’s been happening with the food waste problem during the pandemic, as well as what we can all do within our own communities to help tackle this unsustainable issue (one third to 40% of all food is wasted globally), as well as how to create a business that both monetises food waste and builds communities. “Find a co-founder or co-founders who are 100% obsessed with your mission and recruit for mission. So we always recruit for mission first, you can train people and upskill people, but you can't train passion and mission alignment.”We chat about: Impact of COVID-19 on food waste Breakdown in food charitable chains The recession and the food waste issue Earth overshoot day Building communities through food waste Starting an impact company Links: https://www.secretleaders.com/saasha-celestial-one https://www.overshootday.org/ --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

With the world now confronting issues of race, and more specifically, Black Lives Matter, we felt it right to bring on an award winning science journalist, author and broadcaster and the first ever guest we've had that is not an entrepreneur of a wildly successful company. Angela Saini may not have the battle scars, nor learned the painful lessons that you, our audience, have become accustomed to hearing on Secret Leaders, but what she has to say might be even more pertinent for you.We felt it was time to bring in an expert speaker on the topic of racism, so that we and other leaders can think about racism more deeply. “When we're arguing with racists, these aren't just intellectual arguments we're having, these are about belief. White supremacy is not just a kind of scientific belief, as it is for some scientific racists out there. It's like a religion. It's a fundamental faith in the idea that some groups of people are naturally better than other groups of people.”Angela was destined to be an engineer until a chance encounter as an intern on the London Underground set her on her current path - as a journalist who covers science. “We might think of it [race] as a biological quantity. But the race categories we use are social categories, not genetic categories. They're not born out in genetics. They were defined very arbitrarily, around the Enlightenment period and onwards by Western philosophers and naturalists in very vague ways.”Which is why science around racism can get confusing, resulting in scientific misinformation.So if you’re wondering what you can do to bring about change in your company, real change, not just an expression of solidarity, this is one insightful episode you don’t want to miss. “When you're thinking about bias and prejudice, before you start pointing the finger at others, and we know that there are plenty of fingers that could be pointed, just start with yourself, try and recognise the bias within yourself.”We chat about: Why science is a murky world The grandmother hypothesis Debunking COVID related racial myths  Why you shouldn’t argue with racists on Twitter Recognising the bias within yourself Links: Superior: The Return of Race Science Inferior: The true power of women and the science that shows 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

If you think now’s not a great time to start up a business, take this advice from seasoned entrepreneur Sach Kukadia: “There is never a good time to start anything, particularly a startup. There's always a list of reasons as to why you shouldn't do it. And the older you get, the more that list grows. If you're going to start anything, whether it's a start up or do something, you need to just do it now. Because it'll only ever get harder.”Wise words from someone who’s never earned any money he hasn’t made himself. Behind Sach Kukadia’s glittering facade is a dogged determination to succeed, but his metric for success has changed considerably over the years. In this latest episode of Secret Leaders, Sach shares his journey with Secret Sales, from startup through to sale, to buying it back, to selling it again. And he is brutally honest. Because not every successful startup stays that way. Sach doesn’t hold back and shares some of the behind the scenes facts you never normally hear about in the complicated journey of building a personal empire. “There's a bunch of things in my journey that have caused me to lose sleep and become a bad human being. I was convinced for 10 years that I was going to be able to retire. And when that didn’t happen it took me a little while to realise that this is life and things happen to you, you just have to get over it and you've got to find a way to continue hustling, and it wasn't that we didn't make money, it’s just the quantities were significantly different.”And if you’re an entrepreneur, you need to hear Sach’s story. We chat about: The idea behind Secret Sales and the business model that inspired it The Secret Sales journey The impact of Brexit on the sale of Secret Sales How business deals happen in the real world Rebalancing his life post Secret Sales The lesson of greed for his future businesses Links:https://resident.ly/london/--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

Learning to be happy is hard enough. Learning to be happy in the middle of a pandemic should be nigh on impossible. Not so, according to Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google [X], serial entrepreneur and author of “Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy” (2017). Mo’s famous for bringing Google to 4 billion new users, but that’s not all he’s done. Throughout his career he’s also co-founded over 25 businesses (7 still survive today). He starts businesses that fascinate him, making sure none of them have a conflict of interest with his ‘full time’ job (first at IBM, then Microsoft and latterly at Google), coming up with a new idea every year or two.His book, “Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy” (2017) was the result of 12 years researching the topic of happiness. Mo even created an algorithm and a repeatable well engineered model to reach a state of uninterrupted happiness regardless of the circumstances of life. “Happiness is not found outside you, you were born happy. Our default setting as humans is happy. But we grow out of happiness; we grow out of happiness because there are external influences that make us unhappy.”A lot of what Mo learned about happiness came from his experiences with entrepreneurship; born from the understanding that entrepreneurs are not only aware that things can go wrong, but they expect them to go wrong. Regardless of whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, if you’re wondering how you can find happiness again, post-COVID, this is an enlightening episode you don’t want to miss. We chat about: Why a business partner is more important than the business The impact of Solve For Happy Happiness is predictive Consumerism is destroying our planet Comparing COVID to Tetris Links:Action for happiness--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

From salty sea dog to captain of BrewDog in the space of a year. James Watt is the founder of the rocket ship brewery and brand known as BrewDog. Now valued at over $1 billion, this incredible startup began life in co-founder Martin Dickie’s mum’s garage. “No one wanted to buy our beer. Everyone told us to make beer with less flavour, with less bitterness, with less hops, that our labels looked stupid, like nobody wanted to know and we were working almost 24/7, sleeping on sacks of malt on the floor, filling bottles by hand, doing deliveries out of the back of my beat up Volkswagen car, and just going absolutely nowhere.”But it took a meeting with Michael Jackson (no, not that one), a punt at Tesco and playing two high street banks off against each other to give them the kickstart they needed.Today, BrewDog are well known for their rebellious marketing tactics and have recruited a clan of investors known as equity punks, raising £80 million through a range of clever crowdfunding campaigns. But how have they handled the COVID-19 pandemic? What have they done to ensure the nation’s thirst remains quenched - and how the hell have they produced and distributed over 250,000 units of hand sanitizer (free) to the NHS and charities? All the while operating the brewery AND adhering to social distancing measures? If you’re an entrepreneur, James has one piece of advice for you: “The only logical thing that my useless advice could be is don't listen to advice, which would also apply to this advice just now.”We chat about: From rebellious child, to quitting law, to making beer Overcoming the first disastrous year Fanvestors - advocate ambassadors AKA equity punk investors Developing the next generation of leaders from within the company The importance of culture fit when hiring Managing BrewDog through the pandemic Links: Book - The hard thing about hard things - Ben Horowitz App - Hop Drop --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

It's a tough time for many businesses right now, but one sector in particular is thriving - the world of delicious food delivered to your doorstep. Unlike the vast majority of businesses, these companies are growing exponentially, because of the lockdown.“Literally overnight, it's [Covid-19] essentially forced consumers who have never bought one grocery shop online to go, ‘Well, I might as well try this because there's queues around the block for my supermarket, which has got nothing in it, and every restaurant in the land is closed. So let me give it a go’.”If you’re an entrepreneur wondering how your food business is going to survive the pandemic, then you need to listen to this episode with the founders of two brilliant brands, Mindful Chef and allplants. Mindful Chef was founded by three school friends out of their tiny apartment in 2015 and now makes 5 million meals a year. allplants on the other hand was launched by brothers JP and Alex in 2017, and have already served 1 million plus meals and recently launched Europe's largest dedicated plant based kitchen. With names like Sir Andy Murray and Victoria Pendleton thrown around, and nuggets such as ‘frozen is the most neglected technology in the UK’, this episode is jam packed full of information that all aspiring foodie entrepreneurs need to take note of.We chat about: The positive impact of Covid-19 on the food industry How to increase volume of production while ensuring employees are social distancing Issues of sourcing new suppliers to meet demand How to manage overnight growth Maintaining the culture of the company with so many new employees --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

If you’ve been caught out raising money for your startup during this complicated time, then you’ve come to the right place - you’re in good company. In this episode of Secret Leaders we’ve pinned down VC extraordinaire, Fred Destin who is primed to answer not just our questions, but your questions too. Why should you take advice from Fred? Because he’s the founder of Stride.VC, a £100 million seed stage fund focused on operating in London and Paris. Before starting Stride, Fred was a general partner at Excel and of the 17 investments he led, 10 have exited and 4 are active value drivers, including 5 companies in excess of $1 billion in value - these include Zoopla, Deliveroo and PillPack. His portfolio has a total enterprise value of more than £10 billion, and he generated in excess of £700 million in exit value to investors. All of which makes Fred someone worth listening to if you’re wondering what the hell you’re going to do for money now that the world seems to have shut down.  Because if there’s one thing we all need right now, it’s someone who is able to give us a direct and honest account of where the funding environment is at today.“By the way, when we raised Stride, we talked to 420 investors, and we had 1,000 meetings. So I know fundraising for startups is painful, but I mean, I honestly have pitched the same story probably 800 times over”.We chat about: The reason he’s not investing in new startups currently Revenue based financing The role of VCs and venture capital during a global crisis Likely sources of finance going forward Growth plans for startups experiencing short term rocketing of demand Where founders should be conserving or spending capital Links:http://stride.vc/--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