investor
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Michelin stars go to restaurants. Sure, it’s “Le Bernardin has three Michelin stars.” But we also say, “Eric Ripert has three Michelin stars.” The chef gets the glory. Not the dining room. Not the owner. The chef. Why? Because ownership of the outcome sticks with the person who made it happen. That’s the mindset that separates contributors from accelerators…
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Support tickets are noisy, messy, and usually urgent. But buried in that chaos are patterns that tell you exactly what to build next. The challenge isn’t finding ideas, it’s filtering them. Sales want speed. Support wants relief. Product wants strategic bets. So how do you turn ticket noise into signal? You use a scoring model.…
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Marketing automation works best when it fades into the background. In my own practice I see Marketo as the nervous system of growth, never a mere broadcast tool. Treat the platform this way and it starts becoming strategic infrastructure. Results follow silence. First of all, begin outside in. Intent appears before form fills. The moment…
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Most cap tables don’t break in the early rounds. They break later—when it’s too expensive to fix. That’s why founders need to understand the equity trade-offs early. Not just how to issue shares or set strike prices, but how to build a cap table that still works at Series B. Let’s start with the core…
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Founders wait too long to hire their first product marketer. They either think it’s just copywriting (or they assume it’s someone else’s job). Sales wants more leads, product wants more feature usage, and somehow no one’s responsible for the layer in between. If you’re feeling that gap positioning isn’t sticking, new features don’t land, customers…
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We saved £300,000 a year. Every year. That’s not a pitch. It’s a real outcome from a UK cybersecurity start-up that finally tapped into the R&D tax relief scheme. If you’re a founder building anything remotely technical, there’s a strong chance you’re leaving money on the table. The UK government disbursed £7.5 billion in R&D…
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The industry chessboard is being rearranged at speed. In the past 24 months alone we’ve seen: All three moves share a single motive: buyers have no patience for stitching point tools. The future belongs to platforms that do the joining up for them. What This Means for Founders, Marketers and CISOs Shift Practical Implication Your…
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When Sophos wanted to acquire DNSSense just when I joined, it wasn’t just betting on DNS security, it was hedging against the spiralling costs of in-house threat intelligence development. For early stage cyber founders, that calculus is now unavoidable: build a bespoke threat intel operation or buy your way into maturity? The Build Case: When…
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Building a Learning Budget When Cash Is Tight
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2 min read
When budgets shrink, the first thing to get cut is often the learning spend. No more courses. No more conference tickets. Forget upskilling—just ship the sprint. I’ve seen it happen at pre-seed startups and post-Series B scale-ups alike. Survival mode kicks in, and learning becomes a “nice to have.” But here’s the kicker: the teams…
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Businesses don’t collapse because they lack ambition. They collapse because the right questions can’t be answered fast by customers, investors, regulators, or even your own team. By month 12, the chaos must become codified. Whether you’re selling into enterprises, raising capital, or just trying to keep internal alignment, documentation is leverage. It wins trust, accelerates…