Start-up stories

We have an exciting end to series 4 of the Invested Investor podcasts. This week we are proud to have our founders Peter and Alan Cowley talking about their experience running the Invested Investor. A unique and open conversation between father and son reveals what their key motives are for setting up the Invested Investor, as well as the key successes and failures of the business. Interestingly, they highlight the biggest learnings from all the podcasts they have recorded. 

Reece Chowdhry, the dynamic founder of RLC Ventures joins us this week. Reece has been investing since the age of 13 and now has over 40 investments to his name. In this podcast, we hear how Reece started life at EY, before setting up RLC Ventures in 2015.  At 30, Reece is a relatively young yet very well established investor. Don’t let his age fool you, he is extremely experienced but still willing to learn. His approach to investing includes looking for companies with a presence in emerging markets and offsetting a percentage of any carry from RLC Ventures to charities that the founders support. 

Zoe Peden, investor and award-winning educational technology entrepreneur joins us to talk about her journey. Founder of FutureWorldVC and MyChoicePad, a language development product has made a lasting impact on the lives of people with learning disabilities.  Zoe began her career in the charity sector, she describes life as an entrepreneur seeking funding, balancing the ups and downs and living off pure determination and creative talent. 

Joel Solomon joins us this week, he is the founding partner of Renewal Funds, the Canadian based mission venture capital firm and author of “The Clean Money Revolution”. Joel explains why he decided to become an investor and strategist for social and cultural change, as well as how his principles were cemented during his early career. He takes us back to his first job in politics through to his current position. Joel explains why and how he supports businesses so they can be part of the solution, making the new sectors of environmental technology and climate change matter.  This is a compelling podcast, it’s sound quality is not up to our usual standard, due to the method of recording.

Simon Bond is the innovation director for Set-Squared, a partnership of universities that support early stage technology companies helping them to raise investment. He is an experienced Director of business incubation, university enterprise & research commercialisation, he specialises in business development strategies for innovation-intensive companies.  Simon discusses his background and explains how he always believed he was destined for the business world, after founding a TV station with angel money in the early 1990’s.  We learn about his journey as Simon talks us through the thrill of founding, scaling and successfully exiting, and how those early lessons never left him.

Kath Austin founder and CEO of Bee Bee Wraps and SME Entrepreneur of the year joins us for this week’s podcast. Kath explains why she left her charity fundraising background for her heartfelt curiosity of conquering the waste that her growing household was creating. Kath solved part of her home waste problem by creating her waxed cotton, food wrap product, she explains her determination to bring Bee Bee Wraps to market and why the company has a wide appeal, not only focusing on sustainability and impact but also maintaining an aesthetic that fits alongside current retail trends.  Kath explains her journey with the Judge Business School’s incubator, Cambridge Social Ventures, and subsequently how the support programme enabled the sharp growth curve of the company and the business changes required to scale.

Firdaus Nagree, angel investor, founder and CEO of FCI London’s largest design showroom for high-end furniture and interiors with offices in India, UAE and Nigeria, joins us this week. Firdaus shares his journey from a family business to celebrated multi-award winner.  Firdaus openly discusses how he learnt from mistakes made in his early career and how his change in attitude towards business relationships enabled him to shape his decision making processes today. He goes deeper to explain how a eureka moment has since formed his current inclusive managerial style and has enabled him to better mentor start-ups within his role at Entrepreneurs' Organization, the international entrepreneurial network.

Chris Smith, Managing Partner at Playfair Capital, angel investor and previous Head of Product Development at plan.com, where under his watch the company ranked #1 in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100. Chris is passionate about investing and supporting tech companies where he is able to use  his extensive operational and legal experience to best advantage. Chris takes us through his career from London Lawyer to investment manager and entrepreneur. Chris offers some particularly insightful advice including his take on the protection of unique methodology or trade secrets.

Ronan Perceval CEO and founder of Phorest, a global software provider focusing on the salon space. Ronan tells us how entrepreneurship had always been part of his mindset but how his university software ventures  allowed him to define his business beliefs,  in particular fundraising vs bootstrapping and founding for the longterm. Phorest has recently been named the most successful business financed by early stage investors by European Business Angels Network

Craig Dearden-Philips MBE, social entrepreneur, angel investor, writer and academic joins us this week. Craig tells his inspirational journey from his first voluntary work to his present day social investment portfolio and social leadership publications.  His first venture Speaking Up, was a  system designed to support people with mental health and learning difficulties deemed by Craig necessary as the ones in place, both public sector and charity, where not achieving what they where designed to do. Craig recalls how he always wanted to “build and create things that benefited society”, and how his motivation to help others pushed him into his entrepreneurial endeavors. 

Professor Chris Mairs CBE, angel investor, entrepreneur, Venture Partner at Entrepreneur First, patron of Fight For Sight and a fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering, tells his story this week. Chris co-founded telecommunications software company Metaswitch Networks where he was CTO for many years having completed a computer science degree at Cambridge and spending some time at IBM, where his seven-strong co-founding team met. Chris tells us the engaging story of how Metaswitch began, why they hired raw graduates over experienced applicants, and why the importance of a high-quality management team is crucial.  Chris goes on to discuss his transition from entrepreneur to investor in UK based early-stage technology companies and accelerators. Alongside this, he entertains with his many celebrated international sporting achievements, most recent being his incredible cycle across the USA, fundraising for research into the prevention of sight loss.

Christopher Mirabile the Boston based Chair of the Angel Capital Association, co-founder of Seraf and Managing Director of Launchpad Venture Group joins us this week with an incredible story. Christopher takes us from his early days in law and explains how he arrived in the venture, start-up and entrepreneurial space. His vast knowledge makes for an entertaining listen as he discusses what excites him and what pains him about angel investing. Christopher gives us his take on a classic start-up by saying  “A classic start-up consists of a team that’s never done it before, creating technology that’s never existed before, to serve a market that doesn’t exist yet, what could possibly go wrong?”

Keiron Sparrowhawk MedTech expert, founder and CEO of MyCognition joins us this week. He explains his personal connection to his early work within pharmaceuticals with Wellcome and GSK.  He tells us how his disruptive thinking lead him into entrepreneurship and how his first venture PriceSpective resulted in a fantastic exit, which enabled him to concentrate on himself and subsequently create MyCognition. Keiron explains how his vision for the cognitive fitness game and app described as “physiotherapy for the brain” is set to disrupt the pharmaceutical market, and how the inspiration came from his desire to improve the quality of life of people suffering, often silently with diminished cognitive function. His passion shines through when he describes how this development could shape the way in which society as a whole considers and deals with mental health and cognitive fitness.

Alex Sleigh investment director at the leading financial service provider, Newable Private Investing is our guest this week. Alex talks to us about his early career, how his father’s influence helped him to set his sights on venture capital and how his economics based background helped shape his future entrepreneurial vision.  Alex shares his journey from investment director at London Business Angels to his idea for improving people's lives with enhanced broadband connectivity in rural locations and founding Newable Private Investing, the UK’s leading early-stage investment and business angel network.

Emma Sinclair MBE joins us this week, sharing her audacious approach to life and how life lessons helped her to navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship, from car parks and health clubs to tech.  She explains how her childhood connection with the stock exchange taught her how to be bold and exit driven. Emma founded Enterprise Alumni a platform which enables enterprises to stay in touch with their talent pool and engage former employees. She is the youngest person to take a company public in the world.  Emma states how there is no one-size-fits-all for an entrepreneurial team or formula for winning in life but that it is easier if you have people around you who support you, expressing the importance of trust within her founding team.  Emma goes on to discuss how her sentiments towards work have changed over time and have naturally gravitated towards building communities for the benefits of competition, support and guidance. Emma’s involvement with Unicef as their first business mentor is her largest commitment outside of Enterprise Alumni. Her project teaches entrepreneurship skills in hard to reach places and resonates with her strong belief that “it is important to start things and not be afraid to think big in order to solve problems”.

Martin Frost, CEO and co-founder of CMR Surgical, joins us this week. Martin is passionate about supporting technology based start-ups that make a difference in people’s lives, and has great experience raising venture and company development. In this podcast, he talks about his early corporate life licensing breakthrough tech and how this led him into entrepreneurship. He co-founded Red Cloud, a mobile money platform, which has transformed the lives of millions of people in emerging markets. Martin continues to transform lives with CMR’s robotic surgical solutions based in Cambridge. He has his sights set firmly on the global market with the new robotic platform, Versius. Martin’s honest insights into the needs of an entrepreneur are not only engaging, but are straightforward and hugely valuable too. 

Raymond Luk, the Canadian serial entrepreneur and seasoned investor is our highly experienced and personable guest this week. Raymond takes us on his journey from his early days as founder of Hard Boiled Egg, a software development company, and Opendesk, a software service company, to his angel investing. Raymond explains how his entrepreneurial ventures have shaped his angel investing and how lessons learnt have helped him to understand the needs of start-ups and entrepreneurs. Raymond founded the Montreal based One Year Labs, an early-stage seed accelerator, and has since founded Flow Ventures and Hockeystick, which provides companies with software that enables growth using data.

Iris Barcia is an innovative technologist and experienced telecommunications professional, we are delighted to welcome her this week. Iris explains how technological curiosity and innovation drove her career, and set her on the road to becoming a leading telecommunications professional. Iris entertains us with her start-up journey and her creative role at Keima. 

In part two of Hermann Hauser’s podcast he brings us up to date by discussing his role within Amadeus Capital. Giving us an understanding of his investment portfolio, explaining why he champions AI, machine learning, quantum computing and Blockchain, and what qualities he looks for in an ideal entrepreneur. Hermann offers us his top tips for entrepreneurs and an insight into how lessons can be learnt from his failures.

Hermann Hauser of the legendary Acorn computers is our distinguished guest this week. In part one of Hermann’s podcast, he talks to us about his long and successful history as an entrepreneur. He prompts memories and amuses with his truly amazing journey. Hermann entertains us with the story of how he secured a bank overdraft to finance Acorn computers and how the team managed to put together the BBC Micro in just a few days. He explains how the Micro revolutionised IT teaching in schools, how school children learnt to program using Basic at school and home. He goes on to discuss his role at Olivetti, ARM and the Active Book Company. 

Emily Mackay, head of AI and data strategy at Congenica, Eco-entrepreneur and innovator in machine learning and data technologies, joins us this week.  Emily tells us how her desire for order and efficiency led her to the world of data and how researching renewable energy sources led her to found Microgenius, a digital, community funding platform. Emily discusses her steep learning curve as the founder of Microgenius and Crowdsurfer. Continuing on to a difficult end to her working at TAB and then her prosperous new role at Congenica.

Simon Calver, chair of the UK Business Angels Association, founding partner and Head of Investments at BGF Ventures and Chair at NED Moo joins the Invested Investor podcast this week.  Simon expresses his story from his early days with large multinationals, his strategy for LoveFilm, the acquisition by Amazon and his time transforming MotherCare. Simon brings us up to-date in his engaging journey by sharing his insights into angel investing and his portfolio of companies.

We are delighted to welcome Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea CBE DL to our podcast this week. Karan entertains us with his journey from a young entrepreneur of school age importing hockey sticks into the Uk from Calcutta, he gives us his insight into who influenced him to think like an entrepreneur and how that led him to found the Cobra empire. Karan goes on to explain why and how he has ended up bringing real world experience into parliament, he shares with us his tips on dealing with start-up growing pains and the biggest challenges he faced growing the Cobra brand.

Telecommunications expert Rosalind Singleton joins the Invested Investor podcast this week. In her podcast she divulges that her accreditation was gained through experience and tenacity, which has compelled her to openly communicate her own expertise with others. Ros is the Chair of the UK5G Innovation Network Advisory Board, the Managing Director of UK Broadband and works closely with the department for Digital, Cultural, Media and Sport. She is also an active mentor and angel investor, concentrating on female led tech companies with Angel Academe.

David Cleevely continues his vibrant story in part two of his Invested Investor podcast.  David begins by discussing his reasons for setting up Cambridge Angels in 2001 and why his main focus now lies with his impressive investment portfolio. David co-founded Cambridge Wireless in 2001 and 3Way Networks acquired by Airvana in 2007, in the same year he co-founded and became Chairman of CRFS. David has a wealth of experience and insight to share including his links with the Centre for Science and Policy, the Cambridge Science Centre and the Raspberry Pi foundation before entertaining us with his take on the restaurant business and his successes, Bocca di Lupo and Gelupo. David has recently been recognised as “Icon of the Year” a Barclays award which celebrates the positive ways that entrepreneurs can change an industry, the economy and society. Picture from Road.cc (https://road.cc/content/news/100293-top-entrepreneur-says-cambridge-should-spend-more-cycling)

David Cleevely, Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and co-founder of Cambridge Angels joins the Invested Investor podcast this week with an impressive story. David shares his early career highlights with us in part one of his fascinating journey. In the mid 70’s, David tells us he “cut his teeth” within PostOffice Telecommunications and how this experience taught him to think ahead, which influenced his subject choice for his phD at Cambridge during the 80’s. He also shares with us his time at the Economist newspaper group within the intelligence unit. David recalls how he went on to found Analysys which became the “go to” telecommunications consultancy of the time and his work with the European Commission. David talks about co-founding Cambridge Network, Cambridge Wireless and the biotech company Abcam, before finishing by touching on his consultancy for communications within the Department of Defence.

Suse Reynolds is welcomed to the Invested Investor for this week’s podcast. Suse shares with us her childhood dream of wanting to change the world and what lead her from a career in diplomacy to immerse herself in New Zealand’s angel investing space with the sole aim of creating world changing businesses.  Suse founded and is the Executive Director of the Angel Association of New Zealand (AANZ), sits on the board of Creative HQ, co-founded Angel HQ and is a member of VicLinks momentum Investment Committee.

Toby Norman is our notably inspirational guest this week. Toby is a social entrepreneur, passionate about empowering the global health community with high impact, cutting edge biometric technology in order to overcome the difficult lack of identification challenge faced by many developing countries. Toby is the co-founder and CEO of Simprints, the Cambridge based, non-profit technology company responsible for developing fingerprint recognition biometrics that are 98-100% accurate. Simprints is currently reaching 2.1 million mothers and children across 10 countries, the next challenge facing the company is to provide concrete evidence that the Simprint biometric is a frontline tool that positively impacts people lives.

Dr Ronjon Nag entertains us further this week with part two of his compelling podcast. Ronjon discusses his transition into angel investing and his preference for Cambridge and Silicon Valley based companies, his conversation highlights his good nature, creative thinking and openness to new ideas. He offers us his tips for angels, non-more important than ‘never follow, use your own mind’, and how he is a firm believer in serendipity. Ronjon has since become a fellow at Stanford University Distinguished Careers Institute, he enthusiastically promotes the benefits of returning to university later in life.

Dr Ronjon Nag inventor and serial entrepreneur is our prominent guest this week. In part one, Ronjon shares the fascinating start-up journey for his first three mobile technology companies selling out to Motorola and Blackberry. A pioneer of speech recognition and neural networks in the mid 1980’s, to the development of handwriting recognition AI and predictive text, Ronjon’s first company Lexicus was acquired by Motorola in the early 1990’s. His second company Cellmania concentrated on further mobile developments including a mobile search engine and the first App store in 1999, he sold to Blackberry in 2010. A truly gripping listen with more to come next week, in part two.

Dr Elin Haf Davies is both tenacious and personable. In this week’s podcast she shares her professional journey and her love of extreme physical adventures. Elin’s career began as a paediatric nurse at Great Ormond Street hospital. After 20 years of clinical, research experience and gaining her PhD she founded Aparito.  The company provides a solution to the ever changing challenges of bringing innovative drugs to market by offering a patient-centric design of wearable long term monitoring devices. Aparito’s data collection is key to monitoring patients, allowing to feed into care plans and treatment pathways. Whilst their wearable devices enable the delivery of an effective and personalised treatment.

Jon Bradford has been described as the ‘godfather of European accelerators’ for good reason. Jon is one of Europe’s most experienced early stage investors with many accomplishments under his belt, including recently being honoured at The Europas Awards. This week on the invested investor we gain an insightful look at Jon’s journey from founding the Difference Engine through to his more recent achievements. As co-founder of F6S, Jon has established the social network as one of the worlds largest platforms for entrepreneurs, as well as co-founding Tech.eu which has risen to become Europe’s premier tech news site.

Katy Tuncer, serial founder and leadership coach is this week's guest on the Investor Invested podcast we are delighted to welcome her back. As the founder of Horizon37, Katy explains her philosophy and approach to leadership coaching and talks us through her vision. Horizon37 offers leadership coaching, board facilitation, strategic consultancy, bespoke workshops and courses for high impact, senior leaders, entrepreneurs, angels, founders, and Invested Investors. Katy is a recognised inspiration, having gained the Prime Ministers’ Point of Light award in 2016 and, in 2014 being listed in the BBC top 100 women list.

Tomi Davies is our welcome guest this week. Tomi discusses his awareness of a strong social responsibility and how he feels this is knitted together with his commercial and technological talents. The President of the African Business Angel Network (ABAN) and co-founder of the Lagos Angel Network (LAN), he sits on the board at MBO Capital and TextNigeria. Tomi has outstanding experience building large-scale, technology enabled systems projects in the US, Europe and Africa, which was gained from a variety of executive leadership roles with influential global brands including Ernst & Young, Marks & Spencer, Elf Aquitaine, Sapient and the One Laptop Per Child project. Tomi’s personal goal is to help "drive the development of Africa through entrepreneurship that is creating social and economic value using technology”.

Max Bautin connects with the  Invested Investor podcast this week. Co-founder and partner in IQ Capital, a Cambridge based deep tech, seed and early stage VC fund, focusing on a portfolio of start-ups, within the UK. Max offers us an insightful glimpse into his world, a compelling listen. Max is a seasoned member of the Cambridge Angels syndicate, a council member of Invest Europe, the governing body for the association of European VC’s and a board member of Thought Machine, to name just a few of his undertakings.

Inger Anson shares her commercial perspective on legal counsel in business and early-stage investing in this weeks’ acutely insightful and useful podcast. Inger is a partner and the gregarious, head of the Cambridge office of Harrison Clark Rickerbys Ltd which is well located to meet the needs of the Cambridge scientific and biotech ecosystem. Along with the highest levels of integrity, Inger offers a level of transparency and trust that simplifies and eases the legal process, and enables clients to gain confidence in her.

In this edition of the Invested Investor podcast, we immerse ourselves in the world of IP.  We talk with the acutely, insightful Zeev Fisher, founder of Pekama, a Cambridge based IP company. Zeev saw the need for innovation and has since, initiated change within the IP space, for both IP owners and attorneys. Bringing the international IP community together, sharing work and offering both simplicity and clarity to IP management, Zeev shares valuable advise and offers his top tips for entrepreneurs and invested investors.

In this weeks Invested Investor, podcast, we are pleased to introduce, former scientist, Luke Hakes. An accomplished deep technologies investor with numerous successes under his belt, including Magic Pony and Eve Sleep, to name just a couple. Luke is happy to talk to us about some of the failures he has experienced too, and gives us his practical advise on people, timing and gaining the right investors.  Luke is a talented, Invested investor and partner in Octopus Ventures, Chairman of the University of Manchester’s commercialisation company, UMI3, Director of The University of Manchester Global Leadership Board and an angel investor specialising in the AI and Genetics space.

This week on the Invested Investor podcast we are pleased to bring you the enthusiastic and determined, iconoclast, Gemma Milne. A creative, innovation strategist and freelance tech and science writer. Gemma gives us an insight into her deep passion for all things tech and how she has been driven by the desire to support new innovation and science start-ups. She co-founded Science:Disrupt, a platform which offers investment pitching advise to science start-ups and helps invested investors track down new talent. Gemma also sits as an expert advisor on the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 panel, which judges applications for funding from science and deep technological start-ups and gives us her measured perspective on the effects of Brexit.

This week at the Invested Investor podcast, we are pleased to be joined by the personable, Ofri Ben-Porat.  Co founder and CEO of the highly successful and innovative, London based, SaaS data analytical and personalised marketing company, Pixoneye. He shares his varied journey from college campus to his current success and lets us in on his top three, valuable tips; think big and raise big, hold onto your tech, keep it in-house and share the burden with a valued co founder. We hope you enjoy listening to Ofri as much as we have.

In part two we continue William Tunstall-Pedoe’s journey. William discusses his exit from Amazon, his involvement with Toronto based incubator, Creative Destructive Lab and what drove him to be a successful invested investor with over 50 investments with Cambridge Angels and Octopus Investments. He offers us an insight into his passion for big impact, deep tech, in particular, an AI physician app, where he acts as an invested investor and adviser. In this episode we also bring you an Amazon Alexa demonstration carried out by William, we hope you find it as highly entertaining as we do.

In part one we are fascinated to learn how the hugely successful, artifical intelligence entrepeneur, William Tunstall-Pedoe developed anagram-generating AI to solve cyrptic crosswords and how he was inspired to become the sole founder of the Cambridge based, start-up Evi in 2005. As the architect, William tells us how he steered a course from familiy investment through multiple venture capital rounds to the final pivot and the origins of an own brand, consumer product with Alexa and Echo. Aquired in 2012 by the multinational, technology giant Amazon as a major competitor for Apple’s Siri, William explains how the move from independant to Amazon executive fitted him and the product well.

In this edition we cant offer you the full turkey dinner with all the trimmings but we can bring you some seasonal cheer with our 2018 year end special edition. This podcast brings together a collection of serial entrepreneurs and seasoned invested investors, it focuses on some of our highlights from 2018 including an entertaining story from Priya Lakhani of Masala Masala and more recently Century Tech, Neil Garner from Proxama and Thyngs and Shirin Dehghan from Ariesco. William Makant and Yusuf Muhammad who created Plumis, talk about their first premesis on a ship and the serial investor Richard Lucas recalls an exraordinary story involving thirty thousand pounds cash, a briefcase and a gun! Ramona Liberoff warns not to run out of funds especially if you are too early to market and Jonathon Millar founder of Abcan PLC celebrates its twentieth year, congratulations from us. If thats not enough, you can hear valuable, words of wisdom from Andy Philips of Booking.com fame.

Dr Victor Christou follows on from part one of his podcast to us about his story beyond Opsys and discusses his philosophy behind investments made today. Victor spent time at Oxford Capital Partners and later at Wellington Partners before embarking on his future at Cambridge Innovation Capital. CIC is Cambridge University’s preferred investor for it’s spin-out businesses and also the wider Cambridge technology and healthcare cluster. He gives us his insight into which investments he tends to avoid and which he is best at supporting. He manages a fine balance between his entrepreneur and the investment, by engaging in a necessary mix of support and scepticism.

Victor Christou is the CEO of Cambridge Innovation Capital, he relates his story from career academic to entrepreneur and why his future switched from one to the other. His career began at Oxford when creating innovative materials in the laboratory, this led him to recognise the business potential of developing technologies. In this podcast Victor talks us through his venture, from the creation of Opsys in 1997, a pioneer in mobile OLED display technology, up to his exit, 5 years on. He explains the acquisition of IP was paramount because of the erratic nature of the companies progress and how important it was to remain agile and opportunistic in his approach. The interlectual property became the value driver within the business and was realised at his exit, unlike the investment made in production. He explains how the experience taught him life lessons, none more important than to adopt an holistic perspective in order to improve interpersonal dynamics, embrace an opportunistic and agile tactic and to preserve the vision of the founders. Today, victor looks for transparency in his investments, recognising the need for a relationship based on honesty. To read the podcast transcription please CLICK HERE - Powered by Speechmatics Victor has considerable experience on both sides of the investment table. In recent years he has focused his attention on technology investing. Immediately prior to CIC, Victor was at pan-European venture capital investors Wellington Partners, where he was a Venture Partner in the Tech Team. Before that Victor founded Opsys, an organic electronics business focusing on OLEDs and was a member of the team that sold Opsys to Cambridge Display Technology (now owned by Sumitomo Chemicals). Victor has a BSc and PhD in Chemistry from Imperial College, London and was a Sloan Fellow in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. In the early stages of his career, Victor was an academic at the University of California at Berkeley and then at the University of Oxford, where he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College. Victor was the Royal Society of Chemistry Entrepreneur of the Year in 2002.

Pilgrim Beart shares his journey from Silicon Valley to his Cambridge homeland and gives us his insight into the similarities between the two. He discusses how start-ups can adopt the valley’s culture in order to be diverse, both in forming partnerships and buying into other peoples expertise. This is to ride the scaling wave and not get left behind.  He discusses his journey from R&D engineer, his experiences climbing the ladder and how he gained his bigger picture with AlertMe, which was white-labelled at HIVE by British Gas. He focuses on how the company was nearly crushed by the transition from R&D to service provider, and when scaling the company he was lucky to quickly understand how operations and the process was everything. Pilgrim Beart worked at a startup even before University and never looked back. After University he worked at other startups in Oxford and Silicon Valley then returned to Cambridge in 1998 to begin his entrepreneurial career with his first company activeRF. Out of that spun Antenova which shipped billions of antenna systems and then he joined a couple of grads to form Splashpower, a pioneer in wireless charging. In 2006 he teamed-up with Adrian Critchlow (Active Hotels) to form AlertMe which created the platform now known as Hive, shipped millions of connected devices and was sold for $100m to British Gas in 2015. Most-recently Pilgrim co-founded DevicePilot, which helps IoT companies to manage their devices.

Belinda Bell sets out her mission to protect Social Enterprise from being hijacked by corporations as a marketing tool and clearly defines what a Social Enterprise is. In this podcast we find out about her life and the journey that brought her to The Judge Business School in Cambridge. Belinda is a social entrepreneur having set up multiple businesses with a social vision and has been supporting entrepreneurs who share her purpose. Belinda is a social entrepreneur with experience in establishing, supporting and growing organisations that bridge the public, private and third sectors; alongside extensive experience in consultancy and within academia. She is currently Director of Cambridge Social Ventures, part of the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation. She has set up a number of social ventures herself and has considerable experience working to support entrepreneurs that are scaling their social ventures. Her work is informed by a rigorous evidence-based underpinning and she continues to contribute to academic research and teaching at Cambridge Judge Business School.

Carlos Diniz is a fantastic example of an entrepreneur learning from their ups and downs. This podcast tells the story of O Meu Dentista, which was the largest dentist franchise in Portugal. The company grew fast, with upwards of €11 million in sales at its peak, however a number of deciding factors led to its closure. Carlos has learnt a incredibly large amount about hiring the right people, Invested Investors and growing pains of a successful start-up. This story is a hugely useful tool for any entrepreneur looking to grow their business, and Carlos is an inspirational figure that now helps businesses learn from his O Meu Dentista journey.  After graduation Carlos began working life in the Marketing Department of a major Portuguese bank. He quickly found his calling in the dental industry, due to one of his best friend’s sister being a dentist. Founding O Meu Dentista in 2008, Carlos rapidly grew the company. He has made his first €million in sales by the age of 25, raised his first million in funding by 28.  His company quickly grew to 22 clinics, 300 employees and €11 million in sales. Today he is a healthcare board adviser for a number of leading companies in Portugal, using his business experience to help start-ups learn from his successes and failures. Additional to all this, he is developing a highly sophisticated Clinical Software CRM.

Tamara Giltsoff never expected to end up in a Government role. She was always interested in new technologies and how they could create innovative business models. This led her to Product Health a connected hardware start-up, which also introduced her to commercial Africa. When it was time to move on, Tamara found her calling as Head of Innovation at the Department for International Development. In this podcast, Tamara gives us insight on how her entrepreneurial spirit could be applied to the world of government, as well as the economic development of Africa. She also investigates how venture capitalism can help shape future government investing practice.

Dominic Hill was on a six-figure salary and the director of a multi-million pound jewellery wholesaler. However, he left this coveted position because his learning had slowed and saw that the future of the industry was digital. Dominic joined an ambitious start-up but soon realised it wasn't a good fit, so started his own business, Atelier Technology. It was a very hard beginning, with angry investors and a shoestring budget, but he has persevered and the business is now the talking point of an old-fashioned industry. In this podcast, Dominic talks about his decision to leave a comfortable job, and the risk of the unknown. His drive stems from his desire to see the jewellery industry digitise and his many well selected mentors and advisers.

It is fantastic to be able to say that this week’s podcast comes from our launch event. Filled with interesting anecdotes from a number of leading entrepreneurs and investors from across the country. We hear how Jeanette Walker set up a blind company, based on the hope for 8 months of Mediterranean weather in the UK a year, Modwenna Rees-Mogg’s intriguing story about almost going into business with an ill-advised co-founder, Tony Quested explaining how he helped blow the whistle on a biotechnology entrepreneur who had a ‘magical’ vaccine, and many more.  In between war stories from the start-up world, we interviewed those who have been integral to the release of our first book. One of the most important being Kate Kirk, our inspired wordsmith and ghostwriter, who explains what drew her to the project.