Beautytech Founder Gina Farran

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.

Visit Zing Toothpaste

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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