Fintech Founder Ernst Dolce

I haven't met Ernst Dolce in person before this morning, though his company has been on my radar since Fuel Ventures backed Banqora last year. We're at the bar at Electric Bar & Diner in The Ned - the former Midland Bank headquarters on Poultry, all high ceilings, heavy stone and old-school City grandeur - which makes a fittingly cinematic backdrop for a conversation about tearing down the financial services infrastructure that institutions like this helped build. Dolce arrives early, and bursts into gear before the coffees have even arrived - the man radiates energy.

Banqora's thesis starts somewhere most people don't look: the middle and back office. Not the glamorous end of finance. Not front-of-house trading desks or client-facing apps, but the engine room - post-trade settlement, reconciliation, compliance processing - the part that still, in 2026, runs on infrastructure built before the internet existed. "If you look at the market," Dolce says, "roughly half of all financial infrastructure is still written in COBOL." (For context: a programming language designed in the 1950s that underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions and the majority of the world's financial systems).

He says it with the air of someone who has watched audiences react to this fact and now enjoys the pause that follows.

The frustration is personal. Before co-founding Banqora, Dolce ran one of the leanest trading teams in the market - seven people on the desk managing 300 billion in assets. Yet they were juggling six different trading tools that barely spoke to each other, plus hundreds of daily emails and chats. Each day the team hit the same walls: overlapping front-office systems, poor interoperability, fragmented workflows and manual post-trade processes handled by a large middle and back-office team. That persistent friction became the seed of Banqora. The trigger came in 2018, when Dolce was in the US and saw early-stage AI development gathering pace. "I said to myself, there is no way the infrastructure and the way we run the activity will remain the same." That was pre-COVID, pre-mainstream AI adoption. He'd clocked it early.

I said to myself, there is no way the infrastructure and the way we run the activity will remain the same.

The company was incorporated in March 2024. By June they had built the first version of an AI agent for the repo market. The banks and asset managers they pitched were unconvinced. "They said the market will never move to that." Dolce smiles at this. By November, the full platform with autonomous decision-making agents was live. "Do you know how long it took us to build something ten times more complex after that?" He pauses. "Three weeks."

The speed differential he's describing - six months to three weeks - isn't just a product story. It points to a structural shift in what it means to build software at all. Today, 80% of any financial institution's technology budget goes towards maintaining legacy infrastructure. Twenty percent, at best, funds innovation. "If you are my boss," Dolce says, "and you give me a hundred pounds to invest in tech, I'm forced to spend eighty just keeping the old stack alive. That leaves innovation as an afterthought." AI, in his reading, breaks that equation open. A junior developer with an LLM can now do in a week what once required months of senior engineering time. The old defense - "that's not possible," "that will take six months," "we don't have capacity" - have lost their cover.

He is impatient with the cultural resistance this exposes, but not unsympathetic to it. He draws a distinction between the technology changing and the system changing. Culture, he insists, is the much harder problem. "If you tell someone to change but don't tell them why, nobody moves," he says. He prefers a different approach: one where you don't tell a back-office employee their job is being replaced, but instead show them that the bulk of their role - the repetitive, low-value - can be handed to a machine, so they can focus on the part that is genuinely high-value. "People will listen to that," he says. "Some will not. They are the ones who will lose their jobs. But that is their choice."

Your biggest enemy is inside of you. Fight him first.

He reaches for a line from his childhood - something from Haitian Creole: your biggest enemy is inside of you; fight him first before you fight me. It resurfaces several times across breakfast, applied to employees resisting change, to founders second-guessing themselves, to anyone projecting external obstacles onto internal reluctance. "It's not the technology that takes you out," he says. "You took yourself out."

Dolce left Haiti at twelve. Civil war, seven presidents in three months, an army that killed people in the streets. "I grew up where you don't know tomorrow," he says, without drama. His family moved. He studied in Paris, worked in fixed income at Natixis and then AXA, moved to London in September 2010 - the first evening, at a drinks event with his new trading team, he found himself surrounded by thirty strangers, some of them running asset managers. "I knew nobody. Same day, I was having a drink with people who could accelerate my life." That openness - the instinctive accessibility of the London professional ecosystem - still strikes him as remarkable. "In France, you need to earn your way into the group. Here, I would see someone on LinkedIn and reach out without even thinking they would say no." I love the sentiment, but in 2026, that kind of faith in LinkedIn's inbox requires either genuine charm or a very high spam tolerance - probably both…

He has been in the UK for sixteen years and is unequivocal about its advantages for founders building in financial services. The talent pool is here, English sells everywhere, and the City means clients are a walk away. "If you have a good idea in the UK and you can deliver, you win." He holds France up as a deliberate contrast, with affection but little illusion: "If you start a company in France, be my guest. It's going to take time." The comparison isn't flattering.

That said, he has a pointed structural critique. European startups in many jurisdictions receive tax holidays in their earliest years - exemptions designed to protect fragile companies before they have the cash flow to absorb full corporate tax obligations. The UK doesn't do this. "A startup pays the same as a company that has been there for ten years." He frames it as a fundamental misalignment of incentive and risk. "You don't ask a baby to walk when they can barely crawl. You protect the small companies to create the ecosystem that eventually produces the large ones." He's clear-eyed about the implication: if the tax burden makes it rational to relocate once a company reaches scale, entrepreneurs will. "I will go where it is best for my company, for my investors, for my clients. If you don't create the right incentive, they will say goodbye."

You don't ask a baby to walk when they can barely crawl. You protect the small companies to create the ecosystem that eventually produces the large ones.

We spend time on AI adoption more broadly - the noise of it, the velocity, the low-grade anxiety of trying to keep pace. Dolce cuts through this with characteristic bluntness: "You cannot keep the pace. It's impossible. Even the engineers building these models can't keep up. If you think you're going to keep pace, you're lying to yourself." His prescription is not to track every model release or rotate subscriptions between ChatGPT and Claude, but to change the philosophy of how you work altogether. Banqora itself is the example: they started with APIs, built their first version over six months, then discovered MCP protocol (an open source standard introduced by Anthropic that allows AI models to seamlessly connect with external data sources, like a universal USB-C port for AI), and the integration that would have required ten separate technical connections collapsed into one. "Overnight," he says, leaning in slightly, "it became: enjoy the ride."

There's a genuine tension in his thinking here, though, and he doesn't elide it. He worries about what gets lost when AI absorbs not just the manual but the cognitive work. He recalls his early years as a quantitative analyst in fixed income - struggling through complex models, spending nights decoding them. "If I had had AI, it would have accelerated my output. But the thing I would have missed is the true understanding of what was going on." The calculator metaphor is fitting in this respect: access to a calculator doesn't produce more mathematicians. You get the right answer. And then what? "Critical thinking," he says, "will be the thing that makes the difference." It's not a Luddite position - he's building the automation layer - but it is a considered one. He connects it back to his view on young people working from home: without proximity to senior colleagues, without sitting next to someone who will hand you something they'd normally do and say try it, the muscle atrophies before it's built.

Critical thinking will be the thing that makes the difference.

Leadership, trust, the fragility of both in a moment of technological disruption. I ask him what principle he falls back on when things get difficult. "Transparency," he says, immediately. "Open the box. Show people what's inside." In financial services - where auditability is the first word in any conversation about AI adoption - this is both practical and philosophical. If clients can see how a model makes decisions, the fear of the black box dissolves. If teams can see why the business is changing direction, the resistance softens. "There is nothing magical," he says. "If I show you what's inside the box, you work with me again."

His co-founder and CTO, Nicholas Holden, a British veteran finance technologist and machine learning PhD who he'd worked with before founding Banqora - comes up repeatedly as the embodiment of this. Different temperaments, same commitment. "I do not queue," Dolce says, grinning. "He will be very polite and queue. I'm saying to him, you don't have to queue here." But he is effusive about what his co-founder brings: the skill set, the domain expertise, the volume of work. "I can go anywhere with this guy by my side and we will survive." The talent he values most, in anyone, is the capacity to learn new things. "If you're always telling me the same story, I'll stop listening."

When I ask for the most valuable piece of advice he's ever received, he goes back to being seventeen, in French Guiana, telling his parents he wanted to join the Foreign Legion. A Portuguese teacher - whose name he still remembers fondly - sat with him and worked through it methodically. Five years in the Legion. Then what? You like finance. You have an uncle in finance. What's stopping you from doing both? "It's the best advice I ever received," he says. "You CAN. Sometimes in life, you believe you have only one choice. It's not true." He repeats it like a refrain he's worn smooth over years: you can, so go. He says he passes it on to his children in exactly those terms. The simplest possible antidote to thought paralysis.

As for the fears that don't exist yet - the ones founders manufacture and then find themselves trapped by - he is consistent on the remedy: "Worry about the things you can control. On the things you cannot control, what is your impact?" When you're running a company with less money, fewer people, and leaner resources than those arrayed against you, he says, you have one move. "Find your niche and fight like hell. The rest, no one cares."

Find your niche and fight like hell. The rest, no one cares.

We wrap up over the fading warmth of a Ned breakfast, the City already in full Tuesday stride outside the stone arches of what was once the Midland's main hall. There's even some morning warmth from the sun as spring finally threatens to appear. This is the kind of conversation that leaves you feeling slightly re-calibrated: not because of the AI thesis, which is sharp and well-argued, but because of the clarity that runs beneath it. Dolce grew up somewhere where tomorrow genuinely wasn't guaranteed, moved to places that demanded constant adaptation, and built a company predicated on the idea that the future rewards those who change their philosophy of working rather than just their tools. The Creole phrase he quoted comes back on the walk out: biggest enemy is inside of you, fight him first. For a man who left Haiti at twelve and is now rebuilding the back office of global finance, it doesn't feel like a metaphor.

Visit Banqora

At the beginning of the month, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey warned of the growing urgency for workers to learn how to use AI effectively. Amid the excitement around productivity gains, there is also a quieter, more structural challenge: choosing the right tools, integrating them coherently, and ensuring people evolve alongside them rather than being left behind. It feels like an appropriate moment, then, to sit down with Johnnie Ball - someone working at precisely this fault line. Ball has spent years operating inside AI. He co-founded cashflow forecasting platform Fluidly, scaling it through to acquisition by OakNorth Bank, one of the UK's most successful fintech stories of the last decade. We meet at the Polo Bar opposite Liverpool Street station - an unfussy London institution that has been operating continuously since 1959. It feels like an appropriate setting to discuss a technology cycle moving at a pace that makes most organisations feel permanently behind. Ball has seen the transition from both sides: building AI products, and now helping companies adapt to them.

Fluidly's acquisition by OakNorth gave Ball what he describes as "a front row seat in how to apply AI within a scaled, regulated environment." No matter how entrepreneurial the business, or how ambitious the leadership, there is friction in staying current with technology - especially when it is moving at the pace of AI. This friction is universal, but particularly acute inside regulated institutions where change must coexist with compliance, risk, and legacy systems. Despite OakNorth's pace, Ball felt the pull back toward the frontier. "I realised that to genuinely stay at the edge, I had to get out and move independently - to apply these tools across different organisations, different industries, different contexts." Distance, paradoxically, provides perspective. And with AI, perspective compounds quickly.

Ball's background has always been rooted in machine learning, but more than technical interest, there is a sense of responsibility in his decision to start Axiiom. At its core, it's a specialist AI consultancy that helps companies actually put AI to work. The focus is less on simply embedding tools and more on the transformation that surrounds them - training teams, reshaping workflows, and helping businesses navigate a landscape that is evolving by the month. It's about keeping organisations clear on what good actually looks like, maximising effectiveness rather than experimentation for its own sake, and ensuring new tools are integrated not just technically, but culturally.

I happen to be living in an era where AI is finally taking hold. Sitting on the sidelines would be crazy. This is one of the most important technological revolutions of our lifetime - possibly ever.

Axiiom exists to help organisations navigate that shift. Its work is part diagnostic, part operational, and part educational - ensuring companies do not just adopt AI tools superficially but reorganise themselves to use them effectively. Because the real risk is not lack of access. It is incoherence. "The real problem is coherence," Ball says. "Without it, you get froth. Everyone is experimenting, but nothing compounds." This is particularly visible in SMEs, where dozens of disconnected initiatives emerge simultaneously. Tools are trialled. Agents are built. But without structure, momentum dissipates. To counter this, Axiiom focuses heavily on champion training. "We tend to start training the top 10 or 15 people in a company to lead adoption within their function. Otherwise, you get fragmentation - lots of activity, but no real progress." AI adoption is perhaps becoming less about the tools themselves, and more about sufficient leadership.

A phrase that surfaces repeatedly in AI circles is the "jagged frontier" - coined by Professor Ethan Mollick of Wharton, one of the leading academic voices on AI and work - to describe the uneven, unpredictable capabilities of modern models. They can outperform humans dramatically in one domain, and fail embarrassingly in another. This unevenness creates both opportunity and confusion. Ball is clear about what it means. "Your job is not disappearing. It is transforming into managing AI at the edge of its capabilities." The organisations that succeed will be those that learn to operate at that edge - delegating what machines do best, while retaining human judgment where it matters most.

But mindset is everything. "Most companies approach AI through the lens of cost-cutting. That is a mistake. If you operate from scarcity, you lose to competitors operating from abundance." In his view, AI is not fundamentally about reduction. It is about expansion. "These tools give people leverage. They augment human capability. They do not remove the need for humans - they change what humans spend their time doing." Workflows that existed for decades will be torn up. Roles will evolve. Entire categories of work will compress. And those willing to embrace it will move disproportionately faster.

Most companies approach AI through the lens of cost-cutting. That is a mistake. If you operate from scarcity, you lose to competitors operating from abundance.

One of the more counterintuitive consequences of AI, Ball believes, is that it may empower the ambitious more than anyone else. "There has never been a better time to be an ambitious 21-year-old. You have access to the world's best tutor in almost any subject for £20 a month." What once required institutions, gatekeepers, or years of trial and error can now be accelerated dramatically. Starting companies, in particular, has fundamentally changed. "What used to take months and thousands of pounds can now be done in days." This compresses iteration cycles. It lowers barriers. It shifts advantage toward those willing to move. The constraint is no longer access. It is initiative.

Ball remains fundamentally optimistic about the UK as a starting point for companies. "The UK has extraordinary talent density, a robust legal system, and world-class financial infrastructure." Graduates from institutions like Imperial, UCL, and Oxbridge etc. provide a deep pool of technical capability. Tax incentives like SEIS and EIS reinforce early-stage formation. "It is arguably the best place in the world to start a company."

Scaling, however, is another matter. "People do not realise how rare unicorn outcomes actually are." He offers a striking comparison. "For every UK unicorn created, there have been roughly 40 new Premier League football players." It's not hyperbole. Over the past decade, the UK has produced somewhere in the region of 60 - 70 new billion-dollar companies. In that same period, between 2,500 and 3,000 individual players have made at least one appearance in the Premier League. The maths is blunt: roughly 40 players for every one unicorn minted. The implication lands heavily. Building a billion-pound company is not just difficult - it is statistically rarer than making it onto a Premier League pitch. And becoming a Premier League footballer is already the kind of outcome most people would consider vanishingly improbable.

For every UK unicorn created, there have been roughly 40 new Premier League football players.

The UK excels at creation but struggles with scale. "Government support tends to drop off too early. The support rails need to extend beyond Series A." Ball is not calling for open-ended state backing, but for better investor incentives. Early-stage schemes like SEIS and EIS are strong; growth-stage risk capital is not. Without aligned incentives for domestic investors to back companies through the scaling phase, firms plateau, fail, sell early, or move abroad. Government's role is to shape the environment - not subsidise endlessly - so that taking scale risk becomes rational. And increasingly, scaling is as much about intelligent adaptation as it is about capital.

As AI systems become more capable, a deeper philosophical question emerges: how much thinking should humans delegate as we adapt? Ball frames the question differently. "Why would you deliberately limit your own capabilities?" He points to medicine as an example. "The best outcomes come from combining human expertise with machine intelligence." In his view, the future is collaborative, not substitutive. Doctors will not disappear. But their role will evolve. The same is true across industries. The individuals and organisations that thrive will be those that learn to orchestrate intelligence - not compete with it.

Having navigated acquisitions, integrations, and multiple company-building cycles, Ball's leadership philosophy is simple. "Be honest and direct - from a position of care." Clarity builds trust. Particularly when conditions are unstable. "When people know you are being truthful, and that you care about them and the organisation, it steadies things." It is not charisma that sustains teams through uncertainty. It is integrity.

Ball is drawn to difficult challenges - including rowing unsupported across the Atlantic. His reasoning is straightforward: "Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life," to borrow a quote from four-time Olympic weightlifting champion Jerzy Gregorek. Difficulty, properly chosen, compounds into resilience, perspective, and capability. And waiting for perfect readiness is a trap. "You are never ready. So, start before you are."

The Atlantic row itself began as a smaller idea, before expanding into something far more ambitious. There's an established, well-supported route each year from the Canary Islands to Antigua, but that version didn't quite land. The route shifted to something far rarer: from the tip of Portugal to South America. Longer by roughly 1,000 to 1,500 miles. Trade winds down to the Canaries, then Cape Verde, then west across open ocean. Only ten boats had ever completed that Europe-to-South America passage.

The row was also anchored in something far more personal than endurance. Ball's father was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia - a degenerative condition that alters personality, behaviour and language long before memory fully fades. The experience reshaped his understanding of time, agency and what really matters. He became a trustee of Dementia UK, and the crossing was undertaken in his father's memory, raising significant funds to support families navigating the same diagnosis.

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

As we leave the Polo Bar and step back into the churn of Liverpool Street, the pace of the AI cycle feels no slower. But the framing is clearer. This is not a moment defined by replacement. It is one defined by leverage. The frontier is jagged. Uneven. Disorienting. But for those willing to move toward it - even before they feel ready - the opportunity is extraordinary. Keep rowing…

Visit Axiiom

I'm meeting Nick Perrett at Soho Mews House, tucked away on a quiet cobbled street behind Bond Street, on a wet February morning. It feels deliberately different from the rest of the Soho House ecosystem. Less noise. No laptops. More personal. Opened as a thank-you to early members who helped build the group, it's effectively a club within a club. It doesn't feel like bubble and squeak will be making an appearance this week…

Perrett brings more than two decades of experience as both entrepreneur and investor across banking, venture capital, technology, media, and gaming - making him unusually well-placed to offer genuine perspective to Early Rounds readers. We begin with what pushed him to found Prosper, and what itch another startup is really scratching.

Most people experience something annoying and put up with it. If you're an entrepreneur, you don't accept the status quo.

That frustration - excessive fees of around 3%, outdated technology, and a poor user experience - was what led him to build Prosper, a digital-first wealth management platform designed for a new generation. In a world where in where other FinTechs have transformed payments, currency exchange and banking, wealth management has lagged badly behind. Old tech and high fees are a tough sell in 2026.

Perrett radiates energy. "If you're an entrepreneur, it's very hard to put your gloves down," he says, nodding to both industry frustration and an ingrained creative compulsion to build. He jokes about athletes who refuse to retire - think Novak Djokovic still reaching Grand Slam finals late into his career - but the underlying point is serious: the fire still burns.

Wealth management, if you're lucky, is often inherited rather than chosen. People stick with advisors out of habit, family ties, or inertia. I ask how deep that lock-in really is, and what finally causes someone to break away. The answer isn't ideology, he suggests, but friction. A moment when the experience no longer fits how people live their lives.

Perrett describes himself - with a smile - as "one of the oldest digital natives." The first at university to have an email address, a laptop, a mobile phone. For Gen Z this borders on fiction, but it gives him a genuinely cross-generational lens. "Our lives are now coordinated through our phones," he says. "So, the idea of someone coming round to your house to manage your wealth feels very dated."

Prosper is built around a digital-first experience: shared accounts, automated top-ups, gifting, all through a native platform. Cost matters too - Prosper promises low or zero fees, retaining interest on cash left uninvested. "The internet is a great leveller," Perrett reflects. "It shines a light on cost, and the impact fees really have." Over a 30-year horizon, that compounds dramatically.

Prosper is also naturally embracing AI across customer service and operations, using automation to streamline everything from onboarding to portfolio construction. I push Perrett on where automation stops making sense - because money, after all, is rarely rational. It's tied up with fear, security, identity, and control. People don't just worry about performance; they worry about making the wrong decision, about timing, about explaining those decisions to a partner, family member. Perrett's view is that this is where technology reaches its natural limit: "The need for human reassurance is still very strong," he says. "Even if AI can calculate the optimal plan and execute it perfectly, some people still want to talk to someone before hitting go." That pause isn't about information - it's about confidence.

That tension isn't new. A century ago, professions like bank clerks, travel agents, insurance brokers, even switchboard operators existed largely to provide trust and reassurance. Technology removed the mechanics, but not immediately the human need. The question now is whether that need fades for future generations - or simply shifts. AI may excel at consistency, speed, and removing friction, but reassurance may remain stubbornly human.

The need for human reassurance is still very strong. Even if AI can calculate the optimal plan and execute it perfectly, some people still want to talk to someone before hitting go.

Breakfast at Soho Mews is quietly buzzing - calm, purposeful, restrained. It mirrors Prosper's philosophy. Perrett founded the company with Ricky Knox, having previously built green digital bank Tandem together. Second- and third-time founders who've worked together before usually have an outsized chance of success. I ask how much that history really matters.

Perrett draws on his time in gaming, mentored by the former CEO of Vivendi Games, which was sold to Activision. "Game publishing is a hits-driven business - just like venture capital," he says. Vivendi ran extensive research across every major game ever made. The strongest predictor of success wasn't genre, platform, or budget. It was whether the team had worked together before.

Everything else paled in comparison. Don't ask shooter experts to build a driving game.

The analogy lands. In a world obsessed with speed and hustle, it's a reminder that durable success still compounds around teams. "The longer Ricky and I work together, the better we'll get," Perrett says. "Ironically, I didn't understand compounding properly when I was younger - and now we've built a business entirely around it."

Prosper's investors include Fuel Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, MMC Ventures, and Connect Ventures, alongside high-profile athletes and public figures. I ask how much value the latter really add. "Anyone at the top of their field wants to give back or do something exciting," Perrett says. "The question is how founders capture that value." In consumer businesses especially, attention is currency. Authenticity is everything.

Having built in both the US and UK, Perrett has a nuanced view of British innovation. He jokes that Europe's entrepreneurial gene pool may have partially emigrated centuries ago - a reference to the waves of risk-takers, dissenters, and economic migrants who left for the New World in search of opportunity. From merchants and industrialists to religious non-conformists, many of those willing to gamble on the unknown boarded ships for America, drawn by the promise of upside unconstrained by class or tradition. What remained in Europe was no lack of intelligence or creativity, but a culture shaped more heavily by hierarchy, stability, and preservation. That legacy still echoes today. In the US, risk-taking became culturally rewarded, in the UK failure carried longer memory. The result is not an absence of ambition here but a different expression of it - one that often favours craft, resilience, and durability over speed alone. He points to Michael Moritz, the Welsh-born Sequoia partner who moved to the US long before venture capital even existed as a real industry here. Moritz didn't leave because of a lack of talent at home, but because the US was structurally 10-15 years ahead - with deeper pools of capital, a faster-moving ecosystem, and a greater cultural tolerance for risk. It was where ambitious ideas could scale quickly, and where speed - not just quality - was consistently rewarded.

The UK has continued to punch above its weight however - particularly in the creative industries - where constraint is bred by originality rather than caution. While the ecosystem has matured, Perrett believes we still need more entrepreneurs-turned-investors - people who've been deep in the trenches. Government has a role too. Few people realise that the UK now has a sovereign wealth fund-style vehicle designed to back areas of genuine national advantage. Not as a short-term stimulus tool, but as a long-horizon capital allocator focused on sectors where the UK can realistically win: life sciences, fintech, and the creative industries - all increasingly underpinned by AI. Perrett sees this as a quiet but important shift. If the US built its advantage on speed and risk appetite, the UK is now trying to pair its traditional strengths - discipline, creativity, resilience - with deeper, more coordinated capital. Done well, it gives founders a reason not just to start companies here, but to build them here for the long term. In a world where AI is collapsing time-to-scale and tighter venture funding, that combination may prove decisive. The ecosystem doesn't need to be faster than the US in every dimension - it needs to be good at backing the right businesses, for long enough, in the areas where it already punches above its weight.

We finish on leadership and resilience. "Managing your own energy is the most important thing as a founder," Perrett says. "People smell fear. You must show them a path forward." Vulnerability matters, but action matters more. Acknowledge what's wrong - then demonstrate what you're going to do about it.

The world doesn't want change. It likes the status quo.

His closing advice isn't just for founders; it carries broader weight. In any meaningful pursuit, the odds are stacked against you by default. Resilience matters, he says - but passion matters more. It's the fuel that sustains resilience when progress is slow and outcomes are uncertain.

He likens founders to buskers or actors: endless rejection, but they keep showing up. Keep moving. Keep the passion. You'll find your people. You'll find your investors. You'll find your team…Plenty to digest over a hearty breakfast, before heading back out into a drizzly February morning.

Visit Prosper

Anyone who has founded a company before will understand the pain of finding the right investors. Endless networking, trawling through LinkedIn, Beauhurst and other vast pools of often unstructured data - all while trying to build the business in the first place. This is one of the core problems Rob Cossins, founder of Scribe, has set out to solve. I'm meeting him this morning at the Pop Inn Café in Bermondsey, adding a traditional full English to the growing list of Early Round breakfast locations.

Having spent several years at Barclays working in corporate risk, Cossins envisaged a better way to manage this process - not just for banks, but also for asset managers, funds and founders - in a more automated and efficient way. This was pre Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude etc. and the recent explosion of AI tooling, making Scribe genuinely ahead of the curve and capable of replacing hours of manual work. At its core, Scribe uses machine learning to map activity across private markets - analysing who invests, when, why, and alongside whom - turning opaque, relationship-driven fundraising into a structured, data-led process. The platform serves both sides of the market: founders use Scribe to target the most relevant investors, while funds, banks and lenders use it to source, assess and track private companies at scale - replacing manual research with real-time insight.

Partnering with a technical co-founder through venture builder Antler, Cossins reflects on the importance of timing - and the reality that "being too early is not always a good thing." It's a familiar risk in the current climate: building a technically elegant solution before the problem truly exists. Antler plays a critical role here, particularly in solving one of the hardest early-stage challenges - finding the right co-founder. "It's unparalleled in value because it brings a ton of smart, ambitious people into one room who all want to build businesses at the same time. It removes the timing risk from what is an incredibly vulnerable moment in anyone's career."

Not every team or company that emerges from Antler will succeed, but coupled with its ability to write the first cheque, it's a powerful launchpad - enabling founders to find the right person at the right time, alongside early capital. Scribe has since gone on to raise further funding from angels and Fuel Ventures, forming part of a 2021/22 Pre-Seed SEIS portfolio where investors gained exposure to Scribe alongside 10+ other high-potential early bets. They've also secured non-dilutive Innovate UK funding to develop a deep-learning model that uncovers revenue rationale across private companies.

Scribe's platform has clear global scalability, but I ask Cossins for his perspective on building the company in the UK. The platform is trained on Companies House data - "the best globally for available information" - alongside a European data platform. While London's economy has faced challenges since 2008, it was recently described by The Economist as "the rest of the world's startup capital" - a far cry from the familiar narrative of a city living off former glories. "The UK has two or three major advantages that very few people in the world have," Cossins says. "EIS and SEIS mean investors get access to effectively half-price deals, and the density of talent is completely unmatched."

London often gets compared to Silicon Valley, but it's arguably something different - a city capable of bringing almost anyone and anything together. I ask about the risk, however, of the UK and Europe becoming an incubator economy: a testing ground for category-defining companies that are then forced to scale in the US. Cossins doesn't claim to have the answer, but offers an interesting perspective on the DNA of UK-born companies:

They're often more resilient because there's greater risk aversion here. There's much less cultural acceptance of failure than in the US. So, when they do work, they're resilient as hell.

The US is more consumption-led - which in many ways is a strength - but beyond tax breaks and talent, truly competing may require a more adoptive market across consumers and businesses alike. Cossins points to savings rates as a telling indicator: "It's 4-5% in the US versus around 20% here. That means people aren't really deploying capital towards innovation and new ideas - which ultimately makes us poorer." When you compare growth rates between the two economies, the argument holds weight.

EIS and SEIS mean investors get access to effectively half-price deals, and the density of talent is completely unmatched.

There's a deeper cultural layer too. A lingering post-war scarcity mindset and fear of failure contrasts sharply with the US, where failure is often worn as a badge of honour. It's a contradiction: world-class talent density and globally competitive tax incentives, set against an embedded aversion to risk. That said, SEIS and EIS investing is clearly on the rise. Over 2,000 S/EIS-approved businesses raised funding last year - a signal that capital is gradually shifting from preservation to innovation.

So where are we in the cycle? "Crowdfunding kick-started the democratisation of early-stage investing," Cossins says, "but many platforms are now struggling as people move towards more direct investing - in some ways becoming victims of their own success." Scribe has benefitted from this shift, giving both investors and founders access to data that was previously locked away, enabling faster, better-informed decisions. Their broader mission is to increase liquidity in private markets by shining more light on them: "The more transparency we can bring to private ecosystems, the better."

Two full English breakfasts later - Bubble and Squeak included (for the uninitiated: shallow-fried leftover vegetables, mainly mashed potato and cabbage - perhaps an unintended nod to post-war scarcity) - I ask Cossins for his parting advice to founders. It's simple, but timely in a market flooded with AI-first solutions still searching for a problem. "Build something people want. Founders - particularly in the UK - are perfectionists. Speak to as many people as you can. They won't tell you exactly what to build, but they'll help you understand the problem."

Build something people want. Founders - particularly in the UK - are perfectionists. Speak to as many people as you can.

His final thought is more philosophical. Scribe may help founders secure those crucial early cheques, but building any business from scratch is brutally hard - whether that's a Bermondsey café or an AI co-pilot. "Think deeply about whether it's for you. Building any kind of business is extremely tough. Entrepreneurship is glamorised, but not everyone has to - or should - do it." For those who do and are wondering where those all-important cheques might come from, they may want to start with Scribe.

Visit Scribe

It's another grey, wet January morning and I'm meeting Dini McGrath at Popina in Mayfair, arriving suitably damp after the short walk from Bond Street to Duke Street. The café is the evolution of Isidora Popovic's market stalls, a fixture across the capital for nearly two decades, now moving decisively into bricks and mortar. The name comes from the Latin popina - a tavern serving simple food and wine - neatly reflecting a vision of bringing fresh, unfussy food to the city.

The menu offers a welcome diversion from the poached egg–avocado staples that have appeared on more than a few Early Rounds bills to date. Hot Dinners raves about a standout kedgeree, though it's absent today. Instead, there's plenty of original fare, and with only forty minutes before McGrath's next supplier meeting, we settle on a bowls of porridge and granola respectively.

I first met McGrath over fifteen years ago in entrepreneurial circles, when we both crossed paths at craft distiller Sipsmith. At the time, the company was still operating with a sub-ten team out of a residential street in Hammersmith, housing London's first copper gin still in over 200 years - Prudence, aptly named after Gordon Brown's flagship economic policy in 2008, the year founders Sam Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall launched the brand.

I was there briefly, delivering gin to the on-trade via Zipcar (RIP) and doing a bit of everything before starting a graduate role at Diageo. McGrath, however, stayed on, helping scale Sipsmith into a global spirits powerhouse and riding the first major wave of the craft gin boom, before its eventual sale to Beam Suntory. Alongside the obvious entrepreneurial osmosis of building a fast-growing brand, the experience exposed her to a less visible but pervasive problem across food and drink: supply chain waste.

Manufacturers are often trapped in a supply chain where retailers hold the power. You commit upfront - buying ingredients and building inventory - but when retailers don't take the full allocation, the impact isn't just lost margin. They inherit the waste, with perfectly usable inputs ending up thrown away.

Today, around 40% of food produced in the UK never reaches shop shelves, with a further 7% wasted during manufacturing rather than retail. Across the EU, £18.4bn worth of perfectly good surplus food is discarded each year, adding roughly 10% to the cost of goods - not to mention the environmental impact. This is the problem McGrath set out to tackle.

Zest began life as The Wonki Collective, initially focused on buying finished surplus goods from manufacturers and selling them directly to consumers - think OddBox, but broader. The market need was clear, but the economics weren't.

"Last-mile delivery costs, customer acquisition, short shelf life…" McGrath lists. The challenges quickly highlighted the fragility of consumer-facing logistics-heavy models and why many investors gravitate toward B2B solutions. The team pivoted.

While working with more than 25 food manufacturers to redistribute surplus finished goods, a pattern emerged.

Suppliers started calling saying they had 80 tonnes of excess flour and asking if we could find a buyer. That felt far more sustainable.

That moment reframed the opportunity: re-distributing and selling surplus ingredients to other food businesses and charities at scale. Doing that efficiently required data, technology, and speed. The company hired a CTO - still with Zest today - and rebranded to the sharper, more focused name it operates under now.

Zest began building a proprietary algorithm that scrapes vast amounts of publicly available data across the food industry, allowing the platform to rapidly match surplus supply with potential buyers. For a long period, the company remained in test mode - no fees for suppliers or buyers, instead taking a small cut on transactions to validate the model, build datasets, and train the system. Precision was critical: when shelf life is ticking, a missed match means lost value.

The R&D-heavy approach caught the attention of Innovate UK, which awarded Zest (and partners) a £1.9m non-dilutive grant to build industry leading waste identification technology as well as to support their redistribution mechanic at scale. McGrath also received a Women in Innovation award, followed by a pilot with Nestlé that allowed Zest to test its AI-powered models at scale and generate meaningful revenue.

Founded by McGrath and co-founder Alina Sartago - Zest has evolved into a lean, data-led team approaching the end of its grant period and the cusp of wider commercial adoption. Non-dilutive funding is the envy of many early-stage founders. It preserves cap tables, builds credibility, and provides a genuine runway to develop proprietary technology. For Zest, it has enabled a productive pivot and a clear mission.

We're building simple digital twins - digitalised waste maps that show manufacturers where waste occurs in real time, not in hindsight.

Unlike sectors burdened by regulation, much of Zest's data is publicly available, allowing the company to move faster and monetise sooner. I ask McGrath how she's found building in the UK, a view shaped partly by Sartago's continental perspective.

"We've been lucky with Innovate UK support, but I don't think quitting a job to start a company is as appealing here as it is in other places in Europe, like France."

While UK investors benefit from SEIS/EIS relief, France directly compensates founders for starting companies - a meaningful distinction. That said, McGrath notes the UK becomes far more supportive once traction is established, particularly for businesses aligned with government priorities.

As seed-stage expectations shift amid geopolitical and economic uncertainty, investors increasingly favour revenue visibility over promise - a challenge for R&D-led, grant-backed companies exiting long build phases. With partners like Nestlé and FareShare, however, Zest appears well positioned.

As we hit a hard stop, I ask McGrath for her biggest takeaway from the journey.

Be restrained with advisors early on. We had so many people wanting equity for advice - but the model changed completely. They'd be less useful to Zest now.

It's a reminder that progress in complex systems rarely comes from speed alone. Zest's journey has been one of restraint, iteration, and learning where value is really lost - not at the shelf, but far earlier in the system. Now, as the company emerges from a major innovation grant with proven technology, credible partners, and a disciplined cap table, it feels less like a beginning than a moment of alignment - where patience, timing, and conviction finally meet.

Visit Zest

I'm meeting Johnny Keeling on a brisk but dry mid-January morning at Caravan's Bankside outpost, tucked between Waterloo and London Bridge. Caravan is another well-established all-day dining and coffee fixture with Antipodean roots, deepening its footprint across the UK in a similar mould to Ozone. Big coffee, bold flavours - and here, a cavernous space inside a converted 19th-century grain store.

It also happens to sit just around the corner from Ministry of Sound - which, perhaps surprisingly, is now home to flexible workspace. That's where Keeling is based in his role as a Partner at Haatch, a pre-seed B2B SaaS fund backed by retail investors. Our paths last crossed almost twenty years ago at the same school, where - niche fact - we both played double bass in the orchestra. Taller teenage frames perhaps offering an advantage when wrestling with instruments of that size.

Today, though, we're discussing how Keeling has navigated the rise - and growing pains - of retail venture investing. He has a rare vantage point, shaped by nearly a decade at Crowdcube, from its infancy in the mid-2010s through to broader adoption, and the slow but meaningful shift of venture capital from a closed shop to a more accessible asset class.

Keeling joined Crowdcube as one of its earliest employees, at a time when "crowdfunding" meant little to most people. While the platform launched in 2011, 2015 marked a turning point for the category. Equity crowdfunding was hailed by Goldman Sachs as "one of the most disruptive models in modern finance." The platform surged, passing £100m invested, attracting institutional backing from firms like Balderton and government support via the London Co-Investment Fund.

That year also saw the world's first full exit of a crowdfunded business, when E-Car Club was acquired - a landmark moment. It validated the model, proved returns were possible, and helped usher in a new era of retail participation in venture investing. A wave of household-name fundraises soon followed.

We then did Monzo, Revolut, Moneybox, Freetrade. The explosion of fintech happened alongside the craft beer movement - and they worked in tandem. The beachhead for a business like Crowdcube was brands.

"We then did Monzo, Revolut, Moneybox, Freetrade," Keeling says. "The explosion of fintech happened alongside the craft beer movement - and they worked in tandem. The beachhead for a business like Crowdcube was brands. The brands did the storytelling for the crowd."

The model was simple and powerful: attract consumer brands people already loved, and the investors would follow - cheaply and at speed. "You could create 20,000 new Crowdcube accounts in under four hours," he recalls. Compared to the time and cost required to cultivate traditional angel or VC investors, the efficiency was orders of magnitude greater.

As competitors such as Seedrs (now Republic) entered the market, competition intensified - particularly on price. Then came the reset. Or crash, depending on your perspective. By 2021, amid Covid-era exuberance, capital was flooding in, valuations ballooned, and discipline thinned. Record sums were deployed across private markets, crowdfunding included. In hindsight, the pace was unsustainable.

Crowdcube responded by exploring new products and asset classes. "We got EU regulation that allowed us to crowdfund in Europe - we were the first platform to get it, without fully realising the significance at the time," Keeling notes. As capital inflows slowed, platforms became more cost-conscious, but innovation continued. Investors could now access venture funds via crowdfunding platforms, broadening engagement and blurring old boundaries.

Fuel Ventures raising its first fund through Seedrs marked another inflection point - professional investors opening their pipelines to the public for the first time. Until then, venture capital exposure had been reserved for a narrow group. Awareness has since grown steadily, alongside a clearer understanding of tax reliefs, even if many still underestimate how accessible the asset class has become.

Keeling believes the trajectory is clear.

I don't believe we'll be in a world five years from now where you can't access venture capital seamlessly from your phone. Banks like Revolut have broken down barriers - crypto, public equities, all one click away. Why can't I do the same for UK venture, diversified, and offset income tax?

"I don't believe we'll be in a world five years from now where you can't access venture capital seamlessly from your phone," he says. "Banks like Revolut have broken down barriers - crypto, public equities, all one click away. Why can't I do the same for UK venture, diversified, and offset income tax?"

It's a vision I buy into. But what needs to change for broader adoption? Many people remain cautious - startups are high-risk, illiquid, and poorly understood. Venture is often seen as a punt rather than a deliberate, high-risk/high-return component of a balanced portfolio. The capital exists, but allocation remains small.

Keeling sees challenger banks and investment platforms - Revolut, Monzo, Chip - as the catalysts. Just as they've normalised trading ETFs, crypto, and commodities, private investments could follow.

I think the ten-year overnight success story is now in play. It's a case of when, not if - but it'll take time.

"I think the ten-year overnight success story is now in play," he says. "It's a case of when, not if - but it'll take time."

Education remains key. Entrepreneurship has boomed over the last two decades; venture literacy has lagged behind. Founding a company is now aspirational, even fashionable, and increasingly viewed as a path to wealth creation. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to open a newspaper and read about a startup bank becoming one of the UK's most valuable companies - or its founder among Europe's wealthiest.

Retail venture, in Keeling's view, has exited its first cycle. After the 2021 trough - inflated valuations, excess optimism - it's entered a more mature, post-adolescent phase. Crowdfunding platforms are now established parts of the ecosystem, and there are genuine success stories. Chip, valued north of £200m, reached scale without traditional top-tier VC backing, delivering meaningful returns for early retail investors.

Of course, for every Chip or Revolut, there are many also-rans. Education - and expectation-setting - remains paramount.

Beyond Haatch, Keeling runs Edge, a consultancy helping consumer brands optimise crowdfunding campaigns, drawing on years of frontline experience. He's also a Non-Executive Director at Wine-Fi, a fine-wine investing platform that allows individuals to build fully owned, bespoke wine portfolios via syndicates rather than funds. The business is part-backed by Coterie Holdings, a major fine-wine group, leveraging its broader ecosystem.

A clear theme runs through Keeling's work: a belief that access to venture-stage investing should be democratised - and that progress, while uneven, is real.

With two flat whites and two Americanos down, we begin to wrap up. It's peak season for EIS and SEIS managers deploying capital, with seasoned retail investors maximising allocations before the March tax deadline, and first-timers writing their maiden angel cheques - whether into funds like Haatch or Fuel, or directly into companies they believe in.

I finish with a quick-fire question: the best advice he's absorbed over the years - his "if I could tell you one thing" maxim.

There are two. Always compound. Make the top 1% of small things marginally better every day - by the end of the year, you'll be in a better place. And don't overcomplicate your product or go-to-market. Keep it simple.

"There are two," he says. "Always compound. Make the top 1% of small things marginally better every day - by the end of the year, you'll be in a better place. And don't overcomplicate your product or go-to-market. Keep it simple."

Small things add up - whether that's early crowdfunded tickets into Chip, or the slow, steady democratisation of venture investing itself. It's an exciting moment not just for the industry, but for the individuals only just beginning to lean in.

Visit Haatch

Visit Wine-Fi

Visit Edge

I'm meeting Lucía Larragoiti Fisher at Potter & Reid, just behind Spitalfields Market. It's an unfussy but chic neighbourhood café founded by two friends who met while working at Allpress in Shoreditch. It's also a short walk from the headquarters of La Maritxu, the company Lucía founded five years ago and has since grown to several sites across London.

A Basque Country native, Larragoiti studied architecture at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, before moving to London to pursue a career in the industry. While Spanish food and culture are well represented in the UK, she was surprised to see Basque cheesecake - a dessert deeply ingrained in her native culture - appearing on pub and restaurant menus with little emphasis on provenance or quality, and rarely in the format she recognised. That gap proved the spark for La Maritxu.

The business technically began in Ecuador, where Larragoiti's sister María is based. She started baking cheesecakes informally for parties and events, and demand quickly followed. Requests kept coming. If there was an appetite in South America, why not test the same idea in London? The seed was planted, and La Maritxu - a combination of María's name and "txu", a Basque suffix used as a term of endearment and affection - was born.

They began baking in Larragoiti's Earl's Court flat and selling cakes at parties on weekends. The first customers were friends and family, but after formally setting up the company and creating a Google profile, an unfamiliar customer turned up on her doorstep to buy a cake. While relatively normal for the customer, it was a clear inflection point for Larragoiti: there was demand beyond Spanish friends living in London, and without any external marketing.

Markets followed. After months of waiting for a slot - notoriously competitive in London - they secured a last-minute place at Duke of York Square off the King's Road in Chelsea. Larragoiti and her now-husband Ignacio, a data analyst by trade, turned up with 16 cakes, all baked at home.

We could only bake three at a time in the oven. We thought 16 was a lot. But by 1pm they were all sold.

"We could only bake three at a time in the oven," she says. "We thought 16 was a lot. But by 1pm they were all sold."

At that stage, La Maritxu still felt like a hobby with distant commercial potential. Ignacio, she admits on the other hand, "100% wanted to build a business." They began travelling to markets across London at weekends, and before long were baking over 100 cakes a week - all from a single oven in their flat.

That was when capacity became the constraint. Larragoiti bought a second oven and plugged it into the living room, but refrigeration quickly became the bottleneck. Cheesecake needs to settle overnight, so they removed the sofa and replaced it with a second fridge. The flat gradually transformed into a full production line.

Demand continued to grow, and Larragoiti realised they were at a crossroads. She quit her job in architecture and opened La Maritxu's first store on Connaught Street. She had no prior retail experience and, at that stage, "didn't even know what footfall was," she says. A simple business plan showed they needed to sell around 20 cakes a day and raise £100k to fund the fit-out and working capital. Within a week, they had raised the money from friends and family who had supported them from the beginning.

Connaught Street was not an obvious winner. Other shop owners warned her that "nothing happens here." But La Maritxu struck a chord with a viral marketing moment that leaned into the growing appetite for Spanish food in London. Queues followed. To keep up, Larragoiti baked through the night before hiring a full-time chef and increasing capacity to 150 cakes a day.

The company quickly encountered the challenges of hiring and retaining staff in the food and drink industry, a problem exacerbated post-Brexit and by rising employment rights and minimum wages. Larragoiti leaned on her Spanish roots to source willing workers, tapping into Hakuna - a Catholic youth movement and prayer group founded in 2013 during World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro. Through a WhatsApp Hakuna group for Spaniards living in London, mainly students looking for part-time and flexible work, she was able to build an evergreen cohort of bakers and shop staff to run the stores.

A year later, and newly married, they opened a second site in Soho's Kingly Court. The unit was half the size and double the rent, so production remained in Connaught Street and was delivered daily. Since then, the business has expanded to sites in Greenwich and Mercato Metropolitano in Mayfair, alongside a central production facility under the railway arches in Bethnal Green, close to where we're having breakfast this morning. Capacity can now scale to up to 2,000 cheesecakes a day if demand allows. Another site in King's Cross opens next month. It's an impressive trajectory in a competitive sector, all funded from the original £100k friends-and-family round.

Spanish food culture continues to grow in popularity in the UK - something Larragoiti says she underestimated before starting the business. I ask whether she ever considered building La Maritxu in Spain instead.

In Spain, you set up a company and immediately have huge, fixed costs, whether you sell anything or not. It feels like the system doesn't want you to succeed. In the UK, it's much simpler.

"In Spain, you set up a company and immediately have huge, fixed costs, whether you sell anything or not," she says. "Administrators, paperwork, monthly payments. It feels like the system doesn't want you to succeed. In the UK, it's much simpler. You pay based on what you earn. It still hurts, but it scales with you."

Early investors also benefited from SEIS relief, which Lucía credits with making early risk-taking easier. As the business grows, I ask what she refuses to compromise on. Quality is an obvious answer, but she is quick to focus on service.

The three minutes you spend talking to the customer are part of the product. We're not just selling cheesecake - we're selling Spanish warmth.

"We recently discussed adding more tills to speed things up," she says. "But the three minutes you spend talking to the customer are part of the product. We're not just selling cheesecake - we're selling Spanish warmth."

Her advice to other founders, particularly those bringing a cultural product into a new market, is simple: keep things uncomplicated. Start doing rather than overthinking minor details. Test demand before worrying about polish.

Today, Larragoiti's role looks very different. Ignacio has joined the business full-time, and her focus has shifted from baking through the night to managing teams and building structure for the next phase of growth. As we wrap up, she reflects on recent advice from an early investor who visited their HQ. As the team has scaled, she admits to occasionally worrying about the lack of decoration or formal branding in the space. The investor pushed back: the moment you start obsessing over back-end details rather than the customer and the experience you're delivering, you begin to lose sight of what really makes this industry work.

"That's when you know priorities might be shifting," she says. "A nice workspace matters, but the product and the service have to stay at the centre."

With that, she heads back under the railway arches to start the day - another site opening imminently, a packed schedule ahead, and a business that's come a long way from a weekend hobby, bringing a truly authentic slice of Basque culture into London.

Visit La Maritxu

I first met Victoria Sampson around three years ago, while we were building the MVP for Floe Oral Care's protein-focused saliva test. As we put together a team and advisory board with deep credentials in the oral–systemic link and salivary diagnostics, she had already established herself as one of the UK's leading pioneers in the space. A growing body of published research, alongside the launch of her own dental practice, The Health Society, had positioned her at the centre of a broader shift in how oral health is understood - not as a standalone concern, but as a portal into overall wellness.

A visit to her practice bears little resemblance to a traditional dental appointment. My first consultation included a full Oral Health MOT: oral microbiome testing, collagen breakdown markers, vitamin D levels and blood pressure, alongside the dental examinations we're all familiar with. It felt closer to preventative medicine than dentistry - systematic, personalised, and rooted in measurement.

We're meeting this morning over breakfast at The Twenty Two, tucked into the corner of Grosvenor Square, a short walk from The Health Society's Mayfair clinic. Part hotel, part members' club, it blends New York and London elegance, with two giant Nutcrackers flanking the front door. Oscar Wilde lived here briefly in the 1880s, and you can imagine he'd approve of how the former Edwardian townhouse has evolved. It's a fitting setting to talk about ORALIS, the oral microbiome test Sampson founded two years ago - and about why dentistry may be on the cusp of a much larger role in healthcare.

To understand ORALIS, you need to understand Sampson's path into it. After graduating, she practised across both NHS and private clinics, giving her exposure to the full spectrum of patients in the UK. When Covid hit and clinical dentistry paused, her research accelerated. "Dentists weren't working, and I started writing a lot," she says. "I had a hypothesis that there was a connection between severe Covid complications and poor oral health - something both dentists and the public still don't fully understand."

With no access to ICUs, her team began collecting saliva samples from patients and running oral microbiome tests. What emerged was a realisation that saliva could offer insight into what was happening not just in the mouth, but across the body - remotely, non-invasively, and at scale. That work led her to collaborate with microbiome company Invivo, translating something that had largely lived in academia into a commercial application. While gut health testing had already entered the mainstream, oral health remained comparatively overlooked.

Dentistry became very aesthetic. Cosmetics, veneers, smile makeovers - while medical colleagues weren't really learning about dentistry at all.

Part of the issue, Sampson argues, is dentistry's own identity crisis. "Dentistry became very aesthetic," she says. "Cosmetics, veneers, smile makeovers - while medical colleagues weren't really learning about dentistry at all." More fundamentally, dentistry has existed in parallel to medicine rather than alongside it. "We don't speak the same language as doctors."

Saliva testing, she believes, can change that - acting as a shared biological language between dentistry and medicine. But implementing it in practice exposed a deeper insight. Patients could present with the same bacterial profiles yet have entirely different clinical outcomes. "That's when I realised it's not the bacteria causing disease," she says. "It's how the body responds."

That realisation became the foundation for both ORALIS and The Health Society. ORALIS has been built using data from hundreds of patients within the clinic, allowing the team to continuously refine and validate results - effectively running live clinical trials inside a functioning dental practice. It's a neat model: real patients, real outcomes, and constant iteration.

The US led the charge on cosmetic dentistry, and the proliferation of well-funded saliva testing companies reflects that first-mover momentum. Sampson feels the UK is now starting to catch up. "Patients want a full-body picture. Everyone's into longevity - dentistry has to catch up." But she's realistic about the pace of change. ORALIS costs £350, and prevention demands a different economic model to traditional dentistry. "You can make four grand from a smile makeover and not see someone for five years," she says. "That's not prevention."

Patients want a full-body picture. Everyone's into longevity - dentistry has to catch up.

The stakes are increasingly clear. Oral health is now linked not just to gum disease, but to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's. Dentists see patients more regularly than GPs, and many clinics are already screening for type 2 and pre-diabetes. If patients attend twice a year, dentists have a unique opportunity to track health over time - and to intervene early.

That preventative focus is a major draw for patients at The Health Society. Many travel from around the world, Sampson says, because they feel failed elsewhere and want answers. Testing is central, particularly for those with stubborn gum disease or early metabolic dysfunction who want personalised, measurable recommendations. There's also a strong family thread running through the practice, with Sampson's sister - also a dentist - and her mother both co-founders. Like many physical clinics, staffing and rising consumer expectations have been challenges. Dentistry sits somewhere between healthcare and hospitality, and standards are rising. The clinic reflects that ambition, even offering infrared saunas, IV drips and personal training alongside dental care.

ORALIS has been bootstrapped to date and is now raising a seed round. The test is sold in 12 countries, but expansion into the US will require local labs - likely in California - alongside a European base in Germany to reduce regulatory and shipping friction. The long-term commercial value may also lie in data. As companies like Zoe sit on vast metabolic datasets, validated oral health data could become critical infrastructure for biotech and pharma. "Dentists don't realise how important they can be," Sampson says. "Reducing oral inflammation can have a huge impact on systemic health."

Dentists don't realise how important they can be. Reducing oral inflammation can have a huge impact on systemic health.

Nearly half of adults globally have some form of gum disease. Periodontal disease is the sixth most common inflammatory condition worldwide, one of the most preventable, and linked to more than 50 systemic diseases. Treat it properly and the knock-on effects across overall health are enormous. Sampson envisages a future where people see their dentist and hygienist more regularly than their doctor - where risk is spotted early, and prevention doesn't fall through the cracks of a fragmented system.

Running a clinic while scaling a diagnostics company is a lot to juggle. Over the next five years, Sampson wants ORALIS fully operational in the US, the mouth–body connection firmly embedded in mainstream medicine, and cheaper re-testing options available. "There are loads of things you can do with saliva," she says, pointing to prostate cancer as a future vertical where saliva may outperform blood in diagnosis.

As we wrap up, I ask for the best advice she's ever been given. Sampson, who has Iranian heritage, laughs and recalls a Persian expression her mother used to say to her often: Ageh badtarin besheh chi misheh - roughly meaning "what's the worst that could happen," with a distinctly more defiant edge. It's unexpected, but fitting. For a founder whose world revolves around precision and prevention, it captures a rare and necessary instinct: the willingness to take risks and move forward, even in the face of uncertainty. It reminds me of In Praise of Risk, the book by French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle that I'm currently reading - a meditation on how modern society has come to fear uncertainty, mistaking security for progress, when in reality it's risk that opens up new frontiers. Sampson would offer the same advice to entrepreneurs and investors alike: don't obsess over hypothetical consequences that haven't even happened yet.

With that, she heads back to Mayfair - patients waiting. Dentistry may still be seen as traditional, even cosmetic. But if Sampson is right, it's quietly becoming one of the most important front lines in preventive healthcare.

Visit ORALIS

Visit The Health Society

Ozone Coffee has several branches across London now, and on a particularly grey, drizzly morning I'm meeting Ed Vickers of SUMS Speciality Running Socks at the Shoreditch outpost, tucked just behind Silicon Roundabout. The Kiwi-owned coffee chain has been a runaway success since setting up shop in 2012, and today there's barely a spare seat in the house. We manage to carve out some space at the counter to talk about the growth of the apparel brand Vickers launched three years ago - and one I've also invested in as an angel via the SEIS/EIS scheme.

SUMS sits at the intersection of performance wear and social purpose, riding the surge in running culture that has exploded over the past few years. The brand launched with a tightly focused first product: high-quality, technical running socks. But the product is only half the story. SUMS enables customers to connect their Strava accounts and unlock a blend of store credit and charitable donations based on the number of runs they clock each month. Every run generates in-store credit for the runner, and SUMS donates the equivalent value to a monthly charity pot, which is then awarded to a runner fundraising through a challenge. It's a smart, behaviour-driven loop - one that taps directly into the motivations of modern runners: performance, consistency, community, and meaning.

Socks may sound modest, but they are an increasingly technical - and crucial - part of a runner's kit. SUMS has used this narrow entry point as a wedge, with plans to expand into other speciality running gear over time. The strategy is deliberate: earn trust on an accessible product before broadening the range.

Running culture and charitable culture are completely interlinked. And there's been a digital revolution through wearables, Strava, social media, and the way running is celebrated.

He's well placed to comment. Vickers previously founded a sock brand at university and is a strong advocate for people at least testing their entrepreneurial mettle early on. That experience, coupled with his own immersion in running culture, pushed him to build a community-led brand - starting with what he calls "the unsung hero of the runner's kit bag."

It's a competitive space, but by focusing on a single niche first, SUMS has been able to build partnerships with household-name brands that would have been far harder to access if they'd launched with a broader apparel range. Patagonia is a clear inspiration. Vickers admires how the brand began by solving a specific problem - durable rugby shirts for climbers - before earning the right to expand across the wider outdoor category. SUMS is taking a similar long-term view: build trust and loyalty through a relatively low-cost, high-touch product, then grow from there.

The running landscape itself has changed dramatically, fuelled by digital community, marginal gains, and a sharper eye for aesthetics. I can personally vouch for the socks' performance - and for spotting an increasing number of distinctive SUMS pairs disappearing into the distance on weekend park runs. Perhaps the most high-profile fan is Harry Styles, now a committed endurance runner, who was spotted completing the Tokyo and Berlin Marathons wearing SUMS socks - proving they're not just a sign of the times, but built for serious miles.

We had no idea he was wearing them.

"We had no idea he was wearing them," Vickers says, stressing that there was no PR, gifting, or product placement involved. They only discovered it later while in Berlin activating a partnership with HOKA. Moments like that are pure gold for consumer brands - organic validation that deepens brand equity overnight.

SUMS operates in a fiercely competitive market, acquiring customers through a blend of partnerships, paid social, retail, and events. Vickers is clear that performance marketing alone isn't enough. "You have to build an emotional connection to drive word of mouth marketing," he says. "That's the engine."

The journey so far has been funded through angel investment, including high-profile backers such as Octopus founder Simon Rogerson, alongside other keen runners. Given the capital intensity of consumer brands, I ask how external pressures - macro conditions, tax changes, cost inflation, national insurance hikes - have shaped his thinking.

Vickers is characteristically straight-talking. "If a business is overly exposed to external shifts, it may be worth concentrating on the areas where management can still make a difference - i.e try and not lose sleep on things that are outside your control." The priority right now is focus: a lean team of fewer than ten people, clarity on brand, and building a running company designed for long-term loyalty rather than short-term hype.

A key pillar of that strategy is trail running. Ultra-runner Tom Evans competed in SUMS socks and co-designed a bespoke pair with the brand. Vickers describes trail running as "an exciting subculture that gets far less attention than road running," but one that's primed for growth as runners look beyond PBs for new, nature-led experiences. Festivals like Love Trails are proof of that shift.

There's a big migration from runners who've done a few marathons and nailed their PBs, towards something more experimental, more social, more travel-oriented.

"There's a big migration," he says, "from runners who've done a few marathons and nailed their PBs, towards something more experimental, more social, more travel-oriented." SUMS wants to own that space - what Vickers calls a "muddy, authentic trail-running brand true to the sport."

Vickers is a solo founder, but acutely aware that ambition requires the right mix of capital and people. "From day one, I wanted a multi-channel route to market - DTC, retail, and events," he says. "To build the brand I have in my head, I need specialists across each of those touchpoints."

There's a clear positivity to SUMS that mirrors the adoption curves of platforms like Strava and Runna. "Runners are very altruistically minded animals," he says, noting the irony that digital platforms are often pushing people offline. Strava's latest wrap-up highlighted just how many hours users spend actively recording activities - time spent away from screens.

In an era where investors and consumers are increasingly preoccupied with AI, there's something grounding about a brand tackling a fundamentally human need. "Running kit isn't going anywhere," Vickers says. "They're stable. They're human. People will always need that product - and brands to deliver it properly."

I ask what advice he'd offer from the journey so far. He's sceptical of advice in general, preferring lived experience. "Learning by doing is everything," he says. "I honestly think curiosity trumps passion. We're told to follow our passion, but that assumes you already know what that is. A lot of people don't - until they start doing."

Learning by doing is everything. I honestly think curiosity trumps passion.

SUMS doesn't have a long list of company values. Just one statement: Let's Go Find Out. It's about momentum, action, and discovery - whether that's going for a run rather than thinking about one, or building a brand step by step. Vickers does, however, recall one piece of advice that stuck, from Simon Rogerson: All business boils down to how you make people feel - investors, employees, customers. It's about creating a unified entity.

It's a fitting note to end on. A deeply human message, from a brand rooted in movement, community, and purpose. With that, we wrap up. He's got to run. An honest conversation about a running brand breaking new ground - powered by excellent coffee and a butternut squash and goat's curd omelette that I'm still thinking about.

Visit SUMS

I first met Gina Farran over coffee in Soho when she after she had recently launched, Glaize, her custom-made gels business challenging replacing the need for an expensive and time intensive manicures. At the time she was part of Antler's residency programme, and we were able to share challenges/ solutions on the growing pains of consumer start-ups. Today we're meeting for breakfast in Jusu Brothers in Elephant & Castle, a stone's throw from the in-house production facilities where Glaize now produce their gels in. The Japanese/ Asian style chain has recently expanded from its Notting Hill origins and now sits on the ground floor of the newly renovated Grade II Walworth Town Hall, with co-working space on the floors above.

Farran is full of energy in spite of recovering from bunion surgery on one foot with the other booked imminently. She transmits the confidence of an entrepreneur who has managed to strike the balance between perseverance and flexibility and is now able to look back and appreciate what she has built. Investor sensibility towards consumer businesses that strongly rely on social media for customer acquisition can be luke warm, but Glaize has built a sustainable model coupled with awareness on Dragons Den and mainstream PR. Farran's passion for the sector and hunger for iteration comes across a key part of the fuel behind this: "Glaize has been a self discovery journey as much as building a business, and I have discovered that I have a true passion for building consumer brands. We are now constantly iterating and the way we do things is almost like software in my head, rolling out new formulations like an IoS update every 6 months"

Despite her husband joining the Glaize team in a formal capacity to handle all things tech, legal, operational, there is no impression that Farran is looking to build a lifestyle business, and the hunger/ single-mindedness to achieve a multi-million pound exit burns strong. Having studied in Paris, before starting her career in banking for Goldman Sachs in London, and Dubai, she is under no illusions that building a company is a much tougher journey where the risk/reward on lifestyle often feels significantly more strained than within the corporate environment. "There is definitely some magic involved in not knowing what you're getting yourself into" she muses, in a way that will resonate with any first-time founders who have recently blooded themselves.

I really feel like resilience is a muscle that you exercise every day building a business, and it only gets stronger and stronger.

Farran was born and raised in Lebanon during a period when political assassinations, electricity cuts, and bombs going off were commonplace. There is a sense that the injustice and instability of that period has fuelled a deep-rooted sense of resilience and desire to challenge the status quo. "The city was so alive, despite everything it's been through, but it's a nightmare to live in and I grew up yearning to leave." Her parents echo the sentiment of Lebanese resilience, her father having built businesses across the middle east whilst forced to re-locate, re-build, and go again. Whilst this ethic clearly seems to have rubbed off on her, she paints an interesting perspective on the "privilege" of being able to choose and build a business in the UK, where day-to-day decisions that may feel existential and generate sleepless night pale in comparison to the environment she grew up even more so today. "A lot of people in my region don't have the luxury of waking up and knowing how to plan their day and build their business, because they might not even be alive."

It certainly puts the challenges facing UK growth and productivity into perspective, and outlines the advantages that a more diverse background can have in terms of attacking the gruelling construction of a start-up with the emotional right tool-kit and wider vision. "I'm very grateful for the UK, and don't take it for granted at all, though do I see myself here in 10 years' time? Not necessarily." Like many business owners and those seeking to escape high taxes and low growth, she sees the appeal of places like Dubai, having witnessed its evolution from the "much more bubbly" phase of the 2010's whilst working for Goldman Sachs there, to the optimism that now surrounds for those seeking better growth conditions both professionally and personally.

I ask her for her view on whether it's easier or harder to start and scale a company in the UK; some commentators are concerned that the UK is at risk of becoming an incubator economy - good at getting new companies off the ground only for them to be sold to overseas buyers. "Scaling is definitely getting harder", she says. Glaize owns its own production process in factories in the viaduct arches underneath Elephant & Castle station, and is accordingly reliant on low-skilled workers to produce their gels. "I don't think it's a good idea to give people protection from day one, and there's now not one side of the business that does not get taxed." People will often try and play the system for jobs like this in order to prove they're looking for job, only to maintain claiming benefits. It is hard not to wonder about the profile of who's claiming them as well – unskilled and skilled immigration remains crucial to the UK economy and multiple sectors have no doubt suffered since Brexit. "I've never seen had a British Deliveroo driver deliver a pizza in the pouring rain on a Friday night." It certainly paints a thoughtful consideration of UK productivity, and where both the gaps and abuse of the system are really being driven from.

In the current environment too, many business owners, investors, and consumers will increasingly wonder where the taxes are being allocated. To borrow a quote from the French economist and statesman Jean Baptise Colbert, "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." The UK's small businesses should be fuelling this county's growth ambitions, but government funding and regulation are increasingly out of step with the reality SME's, choking their potential to boost GDP growth. There is an irony here given that early-stage businesses consistently punch above their weight in terms of private sector employment and total business turnover. Despite this, Farran maintains that setting up a company in the UK remains 'super easy', from the support HMRC offer for start-ups navigating painful early cash-flow squeezes to collaborating with Southwark council. This belief is certainly bolstered by an infectious determination for creating something now and seeing that through the lens of privilege rather than pain.

Everything passes. The bad moments, and the good ones as well. Reflect where you are on the journey and make time to stop.

I ask what the most valuable piece of wisdom she would impart is, and the best piece of advice she's received. Either in business or life more broadly. "Everything passes. The bad moments, and the good ones as well. Reflect where you are on the journey and make time to stop." I get the feeling that Glaize is only one chapter in Farran's life story. To walk away from a well-paid job and into the trenches of start-up life could be perceived as risky, but she sees this is a virtue that many people wouldn't even be able to consider. Or the resilience, I would hasten to add, a spark that flickers brightly throughout breakfast on a damp November morning. As a source of inspiration, she references Vicky Tsai, founder of Japanese skincare brand Tatcha, who quit a high paying Wall-Street job to start the company, before facing spiralling debt to fund it and even selling her engagement ring at one stage.

As we finish breakfast, Farran reflects on the privilege of even being able to build at all. The emotional and physical toll of climbing the beauty industry's highest mountains is not for the faint-hearted, but you get the feeling she's only just begun.

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I've known Sam Stirrat since childhood. Beyond being a close friend, he's the founder of Blackacre, an award winning bespoke luxury jewellery house built around a lifelong passion for precious stones. In a world where most founders are chasing the next AI breakthrough, Stirrat's story is refreshingly human. His business isn't about scale, but soul - creating one-of-a-kind pieces where design, emotion, and experience meet. We meet for breakfast at 45 Jermyn Street, the room alive with morning conversation and the clink of cutlery on a grey November morning.

Blackacre began with Stirrat's childhood hobby of collecting pebbles on the beach. "It was my mother, an artist herself, who was the one that first suggested I have a go at making jewellery" following a chance encounter with a jeweller at a local craft fair. "Looking back, it was the perfect means of combining my love of rocks and art".Self-taught through his teenage years, Stirrat learnt the craft of making jewellery, working with inexpensive materials like copper wire and glass beads. Fifteen years on, Blackacre represents the evolution of that journey, a company widely recognised for its craftsmanship in bespoke engagement rings and fine jewellery.

A B Corp–certified business built entirely organically, Blackacre has grown through a steady stream of loyal clients drawn to Stirrat's understated approach. "This has never been about me. We're happy working quietly, away from the limelight. What I want is to build a community of people who share the same values."Specialising in deeply personal commissions made to order jewellery tailored to individual or couples stories remain at its foundation, but the company is now expanding into pieces that express Stirrat's own artistic instincts.

Within the luxury world, you have to offer one of two things, or ideally both. Your creations have to be an art form, or, you have to offer a special experience.

"Within the luxury world, you have to offer one of two things, or ideally both," he says. "Your creations have to be an art form, or, you have to offer a special experience. We want to achieve both by immersing people in our world as creations unfold."That world now exists in a showroom off Chancery Lane, where clients - some flying in from overseas - come for private consultations. The company was recently awarded 'Bespoke Jeweller Of The Year' by the National Association of Jewellers, formal recognition of a journey defined by quiet excellence and conviction.

Stirrat launched Blackacre solo and without external funding - a rarity in any industry, but especially in luxury, where brand credibility and upfront costs are notoriously steep.On growing from a standing start in the UK he notes "It's immensely challenging for small companies without financial backing to grow". When I ask what he thinks it takes, the answer is "unrelenting hard work and determination". When I press him on what he thinks is needed in the UK, "People need to be inspired and aspire towards something. These are the true motivators and it is about having the right role models and environment in place to encourage this".Markets like the Middle East and China may have more appetite for luxury, but Blackacre's strength lies in its authenticity - in heritage, craftsmanship, and personal service.

A good business looks after people - its customers, its team, and itself financially.

When asked what makes a good business, Stirrat's answer has little to do with revenue or growth. "A good business looks after people - its customers, its team, and itself financially."It's an unhurried philosophy that feels almost rebellious in a startup world obsessed with blitzscaling and valuations. "I have a clear vision that may be harder to achieve with investors," he says. "Jewellery is about emotion and purpose. Once you start chasing volume and money, the soul gets lost. It is not about the money, it is about creating something beautiful that people love."It's a quietly radical stance: that some products - especially those defined by intimacy and meaning - simply can't be rapidly industrialised in his view. For many entrepreneurs, a relentless focus on the customer is the true north of building a successful business - echoing Warren Buffett's enduring belief that companies will succeed if they delight rather than satisfy their customer base.

Creative freedom is the reward of independence, loneliness perhaps, its cost. Most founders share the journey with investors or boards. Stirrat carries it alone."We aspire to be the best in the world," he says simply. "The ultimate vision is to bring joy to people across the world by immersing them in the creative journey of making meaningful pieces of jewellery."The embryo of that vision came to life earlier this year at Sessions Arts Club in Farringdon, where Blackacre hosted clients to unveil its Origins collection - Colombian emeralds sourced and designed entirely in-house. The evening felt less like a product launch and more like a celebration of artistry and belonging. "We want every single person connected to the brand to have an amazing experience," Stirrat says.

Blackacre Origins film showcasing the new collection.

I ask whether the absence of co-founders or shareholders risks narrowing perspective as the company grows. Stirrat shakes his head. "We are laser focused on doing the best possible job for each client."He hires specialists, not salespeople. "If someone's buying something expensive, they want to talk to an expert." Growth at Blackacre isn't about efficiency; it's about excellence. Rising costs may bite, but cutting corners isn't part of the equation. When asked to describe his legacy in one word, he pauses. "Growth." Not just financial, but personal - for the team, the clients, and the relationships forged through each piece.

There's no silver bullet. You can have the best idea in the world, but unless someone behind it is determined beyond belief, tenacious, unrelenting - it's going nowhere.

As the rain begins to fall outside, I ask what advice he'd give to other founders. "There's no silver bullet," he says. "You can have the best idea in the world, but unless someone behind it is determined beyond belief, tenacious, unrelenting - it's going nowhere. You just have to work really hard. I don't think people talk about that enough."The best advice he's received came from Andrew Dunn, founder of luxury travel operator Scott Dunn. "Pick one small thing and do it better than anyone else."It's an ethos that runs through everything Blackacre does. In luxury, perfection is the product - and when something goes wrong, it's a chance to go above and beyond. "If a customer has an imperfect experience, it's a golden opportunity to turn it into a positive," he says. "That's how loyalty is built."

Blackacre's creative vision comes to life through immersive experiences that celebrate the journey of creating meaningful jewellery.

As we finish breakfast - a mushroom omelette, Full English, and flat whites justifying the £86.44 bill - Stirrat reflects on the Origins collection and what it represents. Engagement rings will always be Blackacre's foundation, but the brand is now flexing its creative muscle beyond that. It's a story of organic growth from a solo founder devoted to his craft - one building not at the speed of capital, but at the pace of conviction."We just want to create something beautiful and share in the joy of the creative process," he says, smiling.

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I first met Anil Stocker in 2019 at the Shoreditch offices of MarketFinance (now Kriya), where my co-founder and I were renting two desks after starting Floe Oral Care. Our time there was brief - derailed by Covid in early 2020 - but it offered a front-row seat into a fast-growing fintech and a wealth of inspiration for two newly minted founders. Today we're meeting over breakfast at The Emory overlooking Hyde Park - a gleaming glass box of a hotel with a nautical-industrial feel. It would be fun to explore, but we're here to talk about something far more interesting: the sale of Kriya to Allica Bank.

To understand Kriya's place in the financial ecosystem, you need to start with the 2008 crash. Stocker began his career at Lehman Brothers in 2006 and saw the "boom and bust" up close - along with the growing scrutiny of traditional finance. Against this backdrop he co-founded MarketInvoice.

Small businesses really bore the brunt of it. Credit was rationed, payment terms were extended. Everyone was busy bailing out the big banks - no one was helping the small businesses.

In a world where "fintech" wasn't a word and Revolut didn't exist, MarketInvoice used technology to serve SMEs - spotting how music, travel and retail were being transformed while financial services remained stubbornly analog. Peer-to-peer finance was gaining traction in the US, and invoice finance offered a clear gap where banks were retreating but demand was rising.Launching a financial services company with no brand or track record is no small feat. Stocker expected customer demand to be high and funding hard to find - but the opposite happened. "Interest rates were low. Funding came easier than we expected."

Today, SME lending is crowded and increasingly shaped by embedded finance, something Kriya has leaned into aggressively. "Finance is no longer controlled by centralised institutions - it's embedded within the product," he says. From point-of-sale apps to Uber drivers sourcing loans within the platform, embedded finance has gone mainstream. Kriya has evolved alongside the market, rebranding three times as its product range expanded. Its name now comes from the Sanskrit word for "flow."

Our ethos is to keep businesses flowing - brilliant things happen when business flows.

Kriya's mission has been to dismantle friction across lending and financial services. When Stocker started the business, the prevailing theme in fintech was the unbundling of banks - specialist companies solving one problem exceptionally well rather than many problems poorly. He compares it to the early internet: a shift from centralised portals to millions of specialised sites. Now he predicts the opposite trend is emerging: "We're entering a new era of banking re-bundling."

Kriya's sale to Allica Bank may be early evidence. Though Kriya predates Allica by nearly a decade, Stocker stresses that today's environment - higher rates, tougher fundraising conditions, macro uncertainty - creates new pressures and new opportunities. Kriya focuses on established SMEs, not sole traders or early-stage founders. Allica serves the same segment and shares Kriya's conviction in embedded finance. The result was one of the first meaningful fintech-to-bank acquisitions in this new consolidation cycle.

I ask how he maintained transparency and creativity across a nearly 100-person company during a complex M&A process - especially while pushing forward new products like embedded finance. He points to tight, cross-functional "early bet" teams and an unwavering focus on customers at all times. He recalls advice from a senior Stripe product manager: "You need to summarise the learnings from at least 200 customer calls before launching anything new." It's a reminder of how easily founders can get pulled into scaling fast before they've earned true product-market fit - no matter the size of the company.

We turn to the UK ecosystem. Stocker has built, scaled and exited a fintech over 14 years - long enough to see the landscape shift dramatically. "The overall package of incentives was better," he says of the early years. Pre-Brexit. David Cameron was in power. Cheaper visas. Lower NI and pension costs. Lighter regulation. Capital gains tax capped at 10% on the first £10m of an exit.Now, with high-profile entrepreneurs moving abroad and declining incentives to build here, he acknowledges the UK feels less aspirational. But he rejects the doom narrative.

The UK isn't broken. When the UK is open to capital and talent, it thrives. My advice to the government would be to make things simple, not more complicated. There's so much high-quality innovation here - but it's being choked. We still have the ability to course correct.

It's a balanced but pointed assessment: the UK's fundamentals remain strong - universities, talent, commercial and scientific heritage - but the next five years will be decisive.

Stocker has become an active angel investor, often investing through SEIS/EIS. He supports the schemes but insists incentives shouldn't be the primary driver. "You invest because of the problem being solved - and the quality of the team." SEIS/EIS have broadened access to venture as an asset class, but he remains clear-eyed: "They help, but they shouldn't be the reason you invest."

Fourteen years building Kriya have given Stocker an unusually long-term view of resilience. He echoes Kipling's line about treating the two imposters "triumph and disaster" the same. "A key thing I've learned is that a core part of the job of a leader is to calm things down - not add to the stress."

His advice to early-stage founders is direct: "Finding product-market fit is the job of the entrepreneur. Why are you building, and why do people care?" The stickiest lesson he's absorbed came from Paul Forster, Indeed.com founder and a former Kriya board member: "All entrepreneurship leans towards the recruitment of great people. Find and retain great people."

All entrepreneurship leans towards the recruitment of great people. Find and retain great people.

It's a message that resonates powerfully as the UK grapples with retaining world-class talent - a prerequisite for the kind of breakout companies that fuel future prosperity. Stocker remains bullish on fintech's next frontier, from stablecoins to blockchain-driven financial infrastructure. Whether his next act lies outside fintech remains to be seen, but for now his focus is on guiding Kriya's integration into Allica Bank.

We wrap up breakfast, and I leave feeling energised about the UK's future - not naïvely optimistic, but reminded of the reasons this country has produced so much ingenuity. Stocker's blend of realism and ambition captures that perfectly - even if a coconut-milk English breakfast tea remains one of the more unusual morning tonics to start the day....

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I am meeting Walter Kerr at Café Phillies, tucked behind High Street Kensington. It's buzzing on a brisk Tuesday morning and, fittingly, it's where Oppidan Education - the company Kerr co-founded almost exactly a decade ago - first took shape. Over breakfast at the same table where their first business plan was sketched out, we speak about how Oppidan has grown from a kitchen-table idea into a global mentorship platform operating in the US, Seoul, and Thailand. No external funding. Profitable from day one. And built around a problem that feels increasingly urgent.

"We wrote our first business plan on this table," Kerr says, smiling at the contrast between the early vision and the business today. Oppidan focuses on the advisory layer of education - not tutoring, not therapy, but the middle ground young people increasingly need. Kerr recalls his own adolescence: "I had a privileged and happy upbringing, but at 16 I still didn't have someone I could speak to about university choices, careers, relationships… someone neutral."After university, he tried private tutoring and quickly realised he "wasn't much good at teaching English or Maths." Yet parents kept him on for something else - the human side. "There's a shadow that exists in the after-school market that isn't tutoring," he reflects. That shadow became the genesis of Oppidan, founded with a school friend.

Today, Oppidan is a marketplace of mentors and parents. Families choose from a range of programmes and profiles, while Oppidan takes a commission from every session. Minimal marketing spend, heavy referral momentum, and a wide pool of mentors from diverse backgrounds. Kerr still mentors himself: "It keeps me close to the product," he says - a guardrail against drifting into pure management and losing sight of the company's purpose. Profitability from day one has given them freedom. "Patience is massive to me. We've committed to this being a 20-year project."

Patience is massive to me. We've committed to this being a 20-year project.

Trust, naturally, is the central commodity. How do they maintain quality as they scale?"We take three out of every ten applicants, and we pay them well. It's deliberately hard to join. Looking after someone's child is the most important job in a parent's life."But this raises the obvious question: what about the vulnerable families who can't afford mentorship? Kerr acknowledges that early criticism stung. "Family and friends asked if we were exacerbating the divide between those who could and couldn't afford mentorship." Oppidan has since built programmes specifically for underserved communities, bridging the funding gap and expanding access. Mentorship may sound like a luxury, he notes, but the pressures facing young people - digital, emotional, societal - are intensifying. "We didn't talk this problem into existence." Their expansion into the US and Asia supports the thesis: the need is global.

We didn't talk this problem into existence.

Given proven demand and a working business model, why not bring in capital and scale aggressively? Kerr is philosophical. Growing without external funding is a privilege, but also a discipline. "Trust can't be rushed," he says. There's a disconnect, he feels, between the UK founder who grows quietly, organically, and the noise around the latest raise or valuation. Capital reshapes businesses, often wholly necessarily, but sometimes prematurely. Oppidan's ability to choose patience is the envy of many founders grinding through perpetual fundraising cycles.He's not blind to the ecosystem around him, though. Kerr actively backs other education businesses through SEIS, placing targeted bets on companies tackling other parts of the learning landscape.On macro headwinds, he's surprisingly unfazed. "I always wanted to build a business in the UK." Corporation tax has risen sharply since Oppidan's launch, and the rules around freelancing require constant vigilance, but he's not tempted by Dubai - or even New York, where they now have an office. High tax, low growth, rising costs for parents: will mentorship remain a priority? Kerr believes that staying lean and unencumbered will allow them to adapt. And despite no external shareholders, Oppidan has a formal board structure. "It provides accountability and challenges us," he says - an uncommon practice for a wholly founder-owned business, but an important one.

We turn to the philosophies that drive him. Kerr talks about the power of narrative and the importance of maintaining control over the trust parents place in them. He quotes a line from the book If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair by Anya Hindmarsh, something along the lines of "drop the pebble that leads to things" – alluding to the ripple effect where a single action can have far reaching and continuous consequences. He removes his watch to show me the engraving on the underside: a reminder to stay open, keep learning, and take his time. It was a wedding gift from his wife, and he returns to it often.After ten years of Oppidan, what advice has proved most reliable? He reaches for Mark Twain: "If I had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter." "I love the idea of clarity in communication," he says - whether with a spouse, a team, or a co-founder. It's deceptively hard, which is precisely the point. "Execution depends on it." There isn't space for that mantra on the watch, he jokes, so he'll need some new real estate.

If I had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter. I love the idea of clarity in communication.

"We've only got this far through patience," he says as we wrap up - an appropriate conclusion over Turkish eggs and mercifully modest coffee prices compared to the cafés edging toward Hyde Park. Kerr heads off into the next ten years of Oppidan: slow, steady, eyes forward; a curated, careful service for a generation navigating an overstimulated, hyper-digital childhood.

Visit Oppidan Education

Meeting Jacques Cockell at the R&H Gallery Café in Kensington feels fitting for a founder who sees the world - and oral care - through a creative lens. The art-infused café, founded by an ex-medical engineer and steeped in Persian influence, bills itself as a "sanctuary" rather than a coffee shop. Their call to arms - flavours that "embrace you like a warm melody" - sets the tone as we order a Persian omelette and a Mirza to start the conversation.

Cockell, the ambitious solo founder of Zing, never planned to build alone. A potential co-founder wobbled early, and he pressed ahead regardless. "I wasn't scared or daunted in the beginning, but in hindsight I definitely should have been," he admits - an observation that will resonate with many first-time founders. That early wide-eyed naïvety, he suggests, might be essential. Rationality alone would tell most people the odds are deeply unfavourable.

For Cockell, languages were the unlikely training ground for entrepreneurship. Fluent in French and German after studying and then living in both countries, he sees a direct analogy between linguistic immersion and company-building.

You move to a new country. Everything is new. Everything is overwhelming. You break it down. You get comfortable making mistakes because you have to. It's survival.

It's a compelling comparison. A classroom offers a soft landing; a foreign country does not. Founding a company, he argues, is the latter. "You need a minimum viable product to survive. Once you can survive, you start building your foundations. It's incredibly empowering."

Zing is part of a growing cohort of challenger toothpaste brands offering fresh flavours and clinically backed ingredients. I relate to the category from my time building Floe Oral Care, where differentiated formulations - like paired day and night pastes - proved the appeal of a product consumers use twice daily. Cockell, after a brief stint at another startup, felt the itch to build something of his own and chose oral care not out of dental expertise - unlike companies like Parla, founded by dentists - but because toothpaste sits in a rare sweet spot: huge market, habitual consumption, and little sensitivity to gender, age, culture, or economic cycles.

Product-market fit in the classical tech sense is less relevant here; taste, brand, and customer love are the levers. "We wanted to make a product that wasn't just novelty flavours but genuine quality inside the tube," he says. Zing uses ingredients like hydroxyapatite - a mineral found naturally in teeth and bone - while avoiding cheaper irritants like SLS. The company's raison d'être to borrow a French phrase is simple: make people smile.

That ethos extends to its partnerships. Cockell is inspired by how Red Bull turned "caffeine in a can" into a cultural phenomenon through extreme sports. "If Red Bull gives you wings, Zing makes you smile. We want to capture the emotion of sport - the winning moment, that winning smile." Zing has teamed up with world wingsuit champion Espen Fadnes, a man who regularly jumps off mountains and whose wife happens to be a Red Bull athlete.

If Red Bull gives you wings, Zing makes you smile. We want to capture the emotion of sport - the winning moment, that winning smile.

As a solo founder with no external shareholders - and a business built organically from his bedroom - Cockell enjoys total creative control. I ask whether that ever risks stifling creativity or accountability. He doesn't think so. Much like learning a foreign language on the streets rather than in a classroom, he embraces a "don't overthink it - test it" mentality. While Zing may eventually need outside capital, he's not focused on that now. "I feel grateful, rather than proud, that market conditions have allowed me to build at this pace."

Given his lean model, wider macro-economic pressures seem to concern him less than most. Brexit frustrates him, particularly the loss of the single market, but for now it hasn't clipped his wings. He remains engaged with the founder community but isn't writing angel cheques yet - everything is reinvested into Zing.

When asked for advice he'd impart to others, he circles back to languages. "I'm not saying everyone needs to learn a language, but the mindset it creates - the willingness to start from scratch, to be comfortable not knowing everything, to be curious - is incredibly powerful. If that excites you, you'll love building a company."

I'm not saying everyone needs to learn a language, but the mindset it creates - the willingness to start from scratch, to be comfortable not knowing everything, to be curious - is incredibly powerful.

It's a reminder of how diverse founders with varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds often outperform; they are battle trained in adaptability. English speakers, we discuss, are notorious for avoiding language learning - perhaps due to fear of failure or a lack of curiosity at times. Cockell, who has French heritage, seems somewhat of an outlier. "For many people, learning languages isn't optional. It's essential for survival and productivity." The parallels to entrepreneurship are obvious.

He laments cuts to arts and humanities, arguing that languages should be a foundational part of UK education for precisely these reasons. One wonders how the Zing mindset will evolve if the brand expands into new geographies and new tongues - even if toothpaste, as he notes, is remarkably culture-resistant.

Cockell feels lucky to still be building Zing: through creative partnerships like Fadnes, through his beloved Leeds United, and through charitable links to organisations such as Teenage Cancer Trust - a cause close to him after losing a friend to leukaemia in their twenties. So far, Zing has raised more than £10,000 for the charity, with plans to make this a lasting, defining pillar of the brand. "I'm lucky to be able to give this a go, even if it fails," he reflects.

It's a healthy, grounded perspective - acknowledging both the emotional conditions required to start something and the resilience needed to keep going. As we finish breakfast beneath a giant Persian rug with music humming softly in the background, it feels appropriate. I don't know whether Persian is the next language on Cockell's list, but I look forward to seeing how Zing's next chapter unfolds.

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Bob Wigley has a technique for people seeking his advice, time, or capital. Come and play squash with him at 7.30am, followed by breakfast. Then he'll talk.

I've managed to short-circuit the system - we both play at the same club - and fast-tracked straight to breakfast in the Brooklands Room at the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall. But the analogy stands. In Wigley's mind, the world divides into "administrators and entrepreneurs." Ninety-five percent are administrators. They won't risk a 7.30am squash game. Too much out of the comfort zone. Too uncomfortable. They'd rather go straight to breakfast. First rung cut out.

For the few who do show up, prior ability is irrelevant. It's about who you are. Are you on time? Have you brought the right kit? Do you give it a proper go? How do you react when you lose a point? How do you react when a let call doesn't go your way? By 8am, inside the four walls of a squash court, he's got a full working read on your character. Sport often mirrors life on multiple levels.

Wigley has spent decades at the core of British financial services and now chairs UK Finance, the trade body representing the UK's banking and financial sector. Alongside that sit multiple NED roles with the likes of Lightico and Seraphim Space, in addition to active angel investment and philanthropy interests. Few people have a clearer vantage point on the structural importance of financial services to UK prosperity. For all the noise about national decline, we remain the largest net exporter of financial services globally. The question is not whether we're strong therefore, it's whether we intend to stay that way.

We're still living with the legacy that fifteen years ago we led the world in payments technology. We built CHAPS and BACS and we built Faster Payments.

"We're still living with the legacy that fifteen years ago we led the world in payments technology," he says. "We built CHAPS and BACS and we built Faster Payments." The UK genuinely did set the benchmark - instant transfers, sophisticated clearing, infrastructure that many countries went on to copy. But speed created new vulnerabilities. Instant money movement also meant more opportunity for fraud. Governance splintered. Parts of the ecosystem were separated into different regulatory and operational bodies. Innovation therefore started to slow down.

Today, around two-thirds of UK payments run through Visa and Mastercard (which owns Vocalink). Consumers don't care – these systems and cards are reliable and we'll keep tapping away. Businesses do care on the other hand. Fee competitiveness and continual innovation are important. Across the whole of Europe, payment sovereignty has risen up the agenda. Conversations about alternatives - and reducing concentration risk - have started to gather pace.

The UK's 2024 National Payments Vision is an attempt to reset direction, and it feels even more relevant in 2026. The ambition is simple in theory: move more money directly between bank accounts, modernise legacy infrastructure, reduce cost and fraud, and regain control of domestic rails rather than defaulting to networks outside the UK. Systems like BACS and Faster Payments have been safe pairs of hands, but transaction volumes have exploded, expectations are 24/7, and fraudsters have evolved just as quickly. The old plumbing is starting to creak.

Crypto inevitably enters the conversation and does have a role to play - just not in the way many imagine. Wigley is measured. Despite the hype, the total crypto market is tiny relative to global equity and debt markets. Stablecoin circulation has grown but still represents a fraction of global flows. "It's not the speculative tokens that matter," he suggests. The real prize is the tokenisation of real-world assets - equities, bonds, foreign exchange, commodities, property - and settling them using regulated digital money.

He picks up his phone and places it on top of mine to show how it will work in future. Today, if he buys £200 of BP shares from me, a chain sits behind that trade: broker, clearing house, custodian, settlement cycle, reconciliation. It works, but it's layered, slow and costly. In a tokenised system, we both hold regulated digital wallets. A token represents ownership of the asset. When my £200 arrives, the share token transfers simultaneously via self-executing code. Payment and ownership move together. No settlement lag. No clearing house friction. Fewer intermediaries. Lower cost. A cleaner fraud and counterparty risk profile.

Last year, UK Finance launched a live pilot for tokenised sterling deposits (so called GBTD) to try and put this in practice - effectively digital representations of bank money operating within a regulated perimeter. The aim is to demonstrate tangible benefits: stronger fraud prevention, greater user control, faster settlement, and more efficient capital flows. If the UK gets this right, it does not just modernise - it reclaims payments, leadership and sovereignty.

There was no such word as 'digital asset' in English law.

But there are still big hurdles. "There was no such word as 'digital asset' in English law," he says. If programmable finance is to scale, two things must accelerate. First, digital assets needed to be clearly defined in law. Second, the UK must build world-leading regulation for digital exchange and settlement. Legal clarity plus regulatory confidence equals velocity. Without them, innovation drifts elsewhere.

Identity follows money. If payments and assets become programmable, identity must become digital too. That triggers predictable British resistance from some. ID cards have always felt like a step too far - towards the end of last year public support for them was sitting at -14% according to some media outlets. Wigley reframes it. Today's system is fragmented - passport scans, utility bills, repeated KYC uploads across multiple databases, each a vulnerability and often to companies that are not banks and don't have military grade security. A secure digital identity layer is not about surveillance; it's about simplicity, consumer convenience and security. "Think of it as a consumer passport." If we ever introduce a central bank digital currency, an electronic identity layer becomes essential. One encrypted, verified identity underpinning transactions, rather than dozens of insecure touchpoints. In a world of escalating cyber risk, coherence should be much safer than fragmentation. This feels even more pressing as the latest generation of AI models and agents make it trivial to construct convincing fake documents, spoof biometrics, or fabricate a digital footprint. The age of purely visual document checking feels like it's coming to an abrupt end.

It's a natural moment to widen the lens to AI more broadly. Adoption across banking is already deep - credit modelling, compliance, fraud detection. Wigley is upbeat but realistic. "Anywhere you're interrogating data against rules and drawing conclusions, AI will be transformative. But you will still need human judgement." Fraud detection is the obvious example: machines surface patterns at scale; humans apply context, judgement and can override.

His deeper concern sits in the attention economy. "The battle for attention was lost years ago," he says bluntly. Smartphones have delivered extraordinary utility but also engineered addiction. Yet he is quick to avoid blanket condemnation. Spending up to twelve hours a day in front of a screen is a lot by any stretch, but it could be coding, reading, learning - not purely doom-scrolling. He is working with King's College London to examine links between specific forms of digital consumption and biological markers such as inflammation, shifting the debate from moral panic to measurable science. They are trying to fill the academic gap in proving that certain types of social media can cause physical, not just mental, harm.

He has also written extensively on the subject in Born Digital: The Story of a Distracted Generation, which argues for a societal reset in our relationship with technology. The internet may have assumed all users are equal; children - and the vulnerable at different stages of life - are not however.

You have to be almost clinically optimistic. You've got to be naïve and very positive, almost to the point of being ill.

The conversation shifts back to entrepreneurs and what really excites him about backing companies at an early stage. His language sharpens. "You have to be almost clinically optimistic. You've got to be naïve and very positive, almost to the point of being ill." Otherwise, you have no chance. The best founders recognise their blind spots quickly. They hire people better than themselves. They surround themselves with complementary capability at speed. Angel relationships become meaningful because investors are backing not just a product, but a person they want to spend time with through inevitable volatility.

Distribution matters just as much. He dislikes the phrase "building a customer base." It's slow. Expensive. Instead, plug into someone who already has distribution and offer something so compelling that their customers feel compelled to switch. As we all bounce between the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude etc. the switching behaviour is instructive. None of us are 'building' loyalty from scratch - we move because something feels incrementally better, faster, cleaner. And that's Wigley's point. Don't build a customer base. Win one. Find where demand already sits and give people a reason to leave. It's as true in AI as it is in any other industry. Perhaps it mirrors his payment's philosophy: optimise existing rails rather than rebuild from scratch.

As breakfast chatter rises around us and Pall Mall buzzes into its Friday morning stride, the through-line from Wigley feels clear. Character first. Infrastructure second. Regulation close behind. The mechanics of money are evolving - faster, programmable, embedded in software rather than stone. For anyone wanting a crisp history of how money shapes - and is shaped by - civilisation, David McCloskey's Money is a reminder that payments infrastructure isn't technical plumbing; it's societal scaffolding. Every shift in how value moves has redrawn the boundaries of power, trust and growth.

Squash is simple in one respect: if you don't take the ball early, you're immediately on the back foot - scrambling, reacting, dictated to by someone else's pace. Speed matters. So does the ability to change direction quickly. Adapt or get pinned down. Payments sovereignty, digital identity, programmable assets - none of this is inevitable. It's a choice, and we're at a crucial point mid-rally. The UK can drift and react, or it can step forward and set the pace again. By the end of the year the rails beneath our economy may look very different. The only real question is whether we're serving - or stuck in the back corner chasing someone else's game.

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I last met Charlie Cowley when he was building Impala, the hotel API platform he co-founded in 2016 that went on to raise around $35 million, scale to 120 people, and work with some of the biggest names in global travel. That company didn't end the way anyone planned. The scars, by Cowley's own admission, run deep. Letting people go. Tough shareholder conversations. The kind of darkness founders rarely talk about publicly. So, when I heard he was building again - same co-founder, overlapping team, new sector - I wanted to understand what pulls someone back into the ring.

This morning's venue wasn't chosen by Cowley but by Sophie - his Dream-powered personal assistant. She sends us to Catalyst Café on Gray's Inn Road, a Scandi-style specialty coffee spot in Holborn where they roast their own beans in the basement. Sophie clearly has good taste, and - fortunately for me this morning - a light touch on breakfast: we've opted for two pain au chocolats between us rather than a larger spread…. excellent for the budget. Cowley arrives with his arm in a sling, collarbone recently broken playing football and now surgically repaired, organising his week almost entirely by voice note through the very product he's building. It's a fitting, if slightly theatrical, proof of concept.

Dream is an AI assistant platform for busy professionals & small businesses, recently backed by SpeedInvest in a seed round. Not another chatbot. Not another dashboard. The pitch is action, not conversation - assistants that send emails, book restaurants, update calendars, coordinate travel, and when the AI reaches its limits, spin up real humans behind the scenes to complete the task.

It's the action, the task, that people want value from. Not just another conversation with GPT.

The starting block is hyper-specific: AI Personal Assistant (for busy professionals) and AI Business Assistant (for small businesses). Dream's first consumer-facing product will be the personal assistant for London professionals - booking tables, sourcing flowers, coordinating dry cleaning, handling the kind of concierge tasks that previously required either a £20,000-a-year PA or a lot of personal admin. The idea is to prove the model in a single city, with deep local context, before expanding to Paris and beyond. "It's the action, the task, that people want value from," Cowley says. "Not just another conversation with GPT." Together, they form what he sees as the operational bedrock for any lean business or busy professional.

I push him on defensibility. The AI agent space is crowded, noisy, and moving at a pace that makes last month's innovation feel dated. Cowley is clear-eyed about the challenge. Dream has spent nine months building a platform layer that combines deep personal context - who you are, what your business does, how you like things done - with tooling that enables the assistant to actually execute. When the AI can't complete a task, a human-in-the-loop steps in, managed by the AI itself. It's a hybrid model: part software, part operations, designed to deliver outcomes rather than suggestions.

Once you build up that level of trust and it performs, you're off to the races.

There's something quietly radical about giving an AI assistant a name. Cowley admits the team was initially nervous about it - the psychological implications of attachment, reliance, even protectiveness. But what they've found is that a nickname, chosen personally by the user, accelerates trust dramatically. "Once you build up that level of trust and it performs, you're off to the races," he says. It's a small design choice with outsized consequences.

The conversation turns to Impala, and what building a second company with the same core team really means. Cowley and his co-founder Ben Stephenson started Dream together; Philip and Chris, early hires at Impala, came across too. They know how each other work under pressure. They've made the mistakes already. That institutional memory, Cowley argues, compounds - in speed, in decision-making, in knowing what not to do. "We have the battle scars. We have the learnings. Let's apply that to this one."

But he's honest about the counterweight. A team of thirty-somethings with families and different life stages doesn't carry the same raw energy as a group of twenty-four-year-olds. The 996 culture - nine to nine, six days a week - doesn't map onto a team with children and partners and a different relationship with time. Cowley doesn't romanticise the grind. "Some of the best work gets done going for a walk and just thinking through how you're approaching a problem," he says. The hours still have to be long, but they must be considered. At Impala, he prioritised work over everything - no proper holiday for four or five years, the gradual breakdown of boundaries. He's doing it differently this time.

If you're trying to build that next big thing, you need your own level of arrogance about what you're building. Otherwise, you end up regressing to the mean.

One of the sharpest lessons from Impala, he says, was favouring long-term vision over short-term execution. It sounds counterintuitive - isn't long-term thinking supposed to be the hallmark of a serious founder? Perhaps… but Cowley's point is more specific. In a world moving this fast, particularly in AI, getting lost in a grand five-year roadmap can blind you to what needs to happen this month. Revenue. Product. Optimised, tangible progress. Eyes on the road.

On building in the UK, Cowley is measured. The barriers to starting a company are low - SEIS and EIS remain among the best tax incentives for early-stage investment anywhere in the world. His wife started a handbag business alongside her job during Covid, and the ease of doing that shouldn't be taken for granted. But he's frustrated by the gap between starting and scaling. The UK incubates well but struggles to provide the framework - capital, consistency, conviction - that founders need at the next stage.

What irritates him most is the lack of clarity from government. Not the tax rates themselves, but the uncertainty. Even the rumour of a 50% capital gains hike in the last Budget was enough to rattle founders weighing up whether to stay. "You just need someone to come in, make the decision, follow through, and be clear," he says. "That's going to be the plan for the next five years. Rather than - I have no idea." He draws a light-hearted comparison to Trump: whatever you think of the politics, there's a directness and follow-through that gives people confidence to at least plan. The UK, by contrast, feels governed by politicians more afraid of losing their jobs than building long-term prosperity.

The deeper thread running through the conversation is one of cognitive outsourcing - what happens when we hand more and more of our thinking, our admin, our decision-making to AI. Cowley is building tools that accelerate exactly that, and yet he's thoughtful about the limits. Human connection, he says, is the obvious thing not to outsource. At Impala, the team worked fully remotely during Covid, and something essential was lost. You need to be able to turn around and have a beer at the end of a hard day. You need the unstructured, unoptimised moments.

You always want the end to sit within your own grasp.

His view is that AI should handle eighty percent of the heavy lifting - freeing people to spend more time on relationships, creativity, and the things that actually matter to them. But intent is key. "You always want the end to sit within your own grasp," he says. The blur between AI that amplifies human capability and AI that starts making decisions for you is where things get uncomfortable. Dream is building in that tension deliberately: proactive assistants that act on your behalf, but with you retaining control over what matters.

I ask about the speed of change, and whether even a founder building in AI can keep up. He laughs. "You can't keep up with absolutely everything." New models, new platforms, new competitors - the landscape shifts weekly. A company called Rent-a-Human recently launched a platform where AI agents can hire actual people to complete physical tasks. It's both thrilling and unsettling. Cowley's own engineering team uses AI to write code that would previously have required a team three times the size. The leverage is real. But so is the vertigo.

As we wrap up, I ask for the maxim he lives by. He references "strong opinions, loosely held" - the framework coined by Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo in the 1980s and since adopted as gospel across the tech world. The idea is simple: form a conviction quickly based on available evidence, then actively try to disprove it. Stay flexible. Update your view. Cowley firmly rejects it. "I don't agree with the loosely held part," he says. His version is strong opinions, strongly held. In a world full of noise, market shifts, and competitors building in every direction, a founder's job is to maintain conviction in their vision - not to be swayed by whatever everyone else is doing. "If you're trying to build that next big thing, you need your own level of arrogance about what you're building," he says. "Otherwise, you end up regressing to the mean."

It's a philosophy that carries risk - and he knows it. Sometimes the data will prove you wrong, and that's fine. But ninety percent of the time, it's conviction that sustains the iteration, the knock-downs, the slow route to building something that generates real value. With that, we're done. Cowley heads back out into a grey March morning in Holborn - arm in a sling, week managed by an AI agent, building his second company with the same team and a harder-won clarity about what matters. Dream is in private-beta and moving fast. If the product works as advertised, the irony is rich: a founder whose own assistant booked the café, coordinated the calendar, and handled the logistics - leaving him free to sit across the table and talk, human to human, about why that still matters most.

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