Secret Leaders

Niklas Adalberth is the co-founder and former Deputy CEO of Klarna. The massive Swedish fintech provides payment services for online shops like ASOS being able to offer their customers buy now pay later. Although Klarna has been hugely successful, Niklas found himself hitting an emotional rock bottom after he came to the infamous realisation that money doesn’t buy happiness.  After some soul searching, Niklas left Klarna and founded his next venture: Norrsken Foundation. It's a non-profit dedicated to helping entrepreneurs solve the world’s greatest challenges like poverty, famine, mental health, pollution, climate change, or something else entirely. Niklas is now less interested in unicorns than he is in impact unicorns – companies that positively impact one billion lives.  We want to know if 'typical' entrepreneurial success is even worth it. -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secr

Sançar Sahin is the Co-Founder of Oliva, a mental health startup which has just raised £4.3 million at the time of putting this together. It’s a B2B which helps companies give mental health support to their employees, like on-demand therapy and coaching. Like our host Dan, with his company Heights, there’s a very clear line of sight from Sançar’s personal health crisis to starting his company.  At his low points, he found himself stripped of confidence, unable to make the simplest decisions. What happened? --------------------------- If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Did you know that IMDb was one of the first 100 websites EVER? Yeah it's mad, and it's still going - and it's always in the top 50 most visited sites in the world. Welcome to the mad world of IMDb Founder Col Needham, the movie buff you want to take to the pub to ask him all the trivia and best-of questions you can imagine. But this is also a great business story. IMDb was one of the first ever acquisitions from Amazon, making Col one of Amazon's earliest employees. He got to work alongside Jeff Bezos and in this episode we draw on his extraordinary insights. -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders -- Newsletter Sign up here: https://secretleaders.email/ You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episode

Taavi Kotka is the Founder and CEO of Koos.io but he shot to fame as the CEO of one of the largest software development companies in the Baltics. After he sold the company in a big money deal in 2012, he had a non compete which left him with time when he couldn’t work in the private sector. He was appointed the first Chief Innovation Officer of Estonia whose role is basically to drive technological progress in the country. It gave him the opportunity to make a massive impact - a national one.  He and his team delivered in many areas but it came at great personal cost. What happened? --------------------- If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Gope Walker is the Founder and CEO of Data Kraken, a data consultancy that helps companies make valuable, data-driven decisions. But whilst Data Kraken is making more money than ever today, the venture downstairs is another story. Gope wanted to create a cafe that brought people together. But instead, it left him with depression, loss of appetite, and a £150,000 hole.  He thought he was creating something valuable but customers didn’t see it that way. And when the council had the chance to save the business, they gave the cafe the cold shoulder. What happened? If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Entrepreneurs need to reframe failure as the norm, says Aidan Corbett. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wayflyer, a unicorn which provides funding for ecommerce companies. Not too shabby, and along the way, he has tried and failed with various initiatives. His failures didn’t all come in one go, but what he learnt added up to some pretty good startup lessons.  What happened? If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Henry Engelhardt is the Co-Founder and former CEO of Admiral Group. They’re one of Britain’s most valuable companies – currently valued at over £7 billion – and also the only FTSE 100 company in Wales.  Chances are, you’ve used one of their many brands at some point: Admiral Insurance, Bell Insurance, Elephant Insurance, Diamond Insurance, Veygo Insurance… if you’ve ever purchased insurance, basically. Or even if you’ve just run a search on Confused.com or Compare.com. In fact, they launched the UK’s first ever search comparison site. Henry is full of stories and lessons. Not only was he headhunted to found Admiral, but he ultimately had to fight to keep everything that was owed to him once he made the company what it is.  His first book, Think Lead Succeed: The Admiral Way, was released in January 2021 and now, he’s back with a follow up: Be a Better Boss: Learn to build great teams and lead any organization to success.  We speak about what it really means to be a better boss and how to avoid falling into a

Being really productive isn’t enough to win at startups. Kim Little is the Co-Founder and CEO of Moments of Space, a successful meditation app, but about 10 years ago he was in a very different space. He was living in Australia, having co-founded a semantic driven products company (yeah we get onto what that means). He put $400,000 Australian of his own money into the company and they launched a series of cool sounding products. But they never got anywhere. What went wrong?  ------------------ If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Ed Perry and Rosie Brown are the Co-CEOs in charge of high-end ready meal company, COOK. Their USP is using the same ingredients and methods a normal person would use in their kitchens to create ready meals that actually feel home-cooked.  A company run by Co-CEOs is pretty unusual but Ed and Rosie are especially unusual because they’re also brother and sister. Ed co-founded the company with Dale Penfold in 1997. His sister Rosie Brown joined the company soon after and then became Co-CEO in 2018.  They’ve steered the company through tough times like the cost of living crisis and credit crunch which took the company to the edge of bankruptcy. Now, COOK's products are available in 850 stores across the UK not including the 94 COOK shops and turnover is £100 million.  Just like a great recipe, Rosie believes COOK's success is down to a number of high-quality ingredients like strong principles, valuing people properly and the influence of faith. Yup, faith. For instructions on how to prepare, put your headphones

Mike Dunn is the Founder and MD of Excel TLM Group, a telemarketing and lead generation company for construction businesses.  Excel today is a solid, growing business but they came within a whisper of collapse - as did Mike himself.  It all came to a head on a family holiday they’d saved for years for. Mike thought he could lose everything, including his family.  He felt like he’d hurt and failed everyone.  What happened and what did he learn from it? ------------------ If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Holger Seim is the Co-Founder and former CEO of Blinkist, a subscription service that summarises non-fiction books in 15 minute explainers.  The company was started because Holger and his Co-Founders wanted to find a way to read more books in less time whilst together at college in 2012. Blinkist has been downloaded 26 million times and was acquired by Go1 in May 2023, with Holger staying on as Chief Operating Officer. We don’t know how much they were bought for, but Go1 CEO, Andrew Barnes, has implied it was “significantly bigger” than the company’s previous $160 million valuation.  So, how did they do it? -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders -- Newsletter Sign up here: https://secretleaders.email/ You can find our historic newsle

AJ Keller is the Co-Founder of Neurosity, who make brain imaging devices you can use at home. But before that he experienced an epic fail that put him on the path to where he is today.  AJ’s first foray into brain imagining brought him to a point in the Summer of 2017 when everything was riding on him and his teammates winning an NYU startup pitch competition. If they won, they would get the funding they needed to turn their company into a real thing.  Fail, however, and their venture would be over. What happened? ------------------ If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Tim Urban is the writer/illustrator behind Wait But Why, a blog he founded with his business partner, Andrew Finn, as well as the man behind one of our favourite TED Talks of all time on procrastination.  Tim writes long-form articles covering topics from outer space to love to artificial intelligence. As he puts it, he writes about “almost everything actually”. Each post is also accompanied with Tim’s now-iconic doodles.  Content creation is one of the hardest things to monetise effectively, but Tim hasn’t just managed to make a living from stick figures; he’s also used it to network with the most influential people on the planet, including Elon Musk.  His new book, What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies is the fruit of Tim’s six-year exploration into what exactly is going wrong with society right now. In short: he thinks we’ve lost the nuances and lays out how we can start to rebuild the bridges that have been damaged in recent years.  What are the simple things all societies need to do to kick

Henry Holland is the man behind fashion brand ‘House of Holland’, known for its signature rhyming slogan t-shirts such as 'Cause me pain Hedi Slimane' and ‘“I’ll Tell You Who’s Boss Kate Moss’. At one point they had over a 100 stockists all over the world. Henry produced special collections for Debenhams and Habitat.  But at the start of the pandemic, Henry called in the administrators and left the world of fashion to go into ceramics. What happened? If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  Sponsor links: personio.com/secretleaders

Mo Gawdat is legendary builder, thinker and now one of the leading voices in the emerging field of AI. This is a topic we want learn more about because it’s going to change our world. Mo spent over a decade as Chief Business Officer for Google X. He’s also the bestselling author of the books Solve for Happy, and most recently, Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World. He’s extremely thoughtful about the positives and negatives we face as a species. As Mo says: “The shit has already hit the fan”. AI is coming whether we like it or not. And in a universe where AI is becoming increasingly prevalent, it’s more important than ever to find the value you can bring to the world.  We face a future beyond anyone’s comprehension, but Mo knows better than most what challenges we face. That’s why this conversation is so important: no one is coming to save us. But it’s not all doom and gloom - we can save ourselves, if we just start treating each other better. -- Sponsors Vorboss -

Jonathan Neman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, a farm-to-table restaurant chain making fast food healthy. Unless you’re one of our American listeners, you probably won’t be familiar with Sweetgreen but they’re a staple of the LA, New York and Washington food scenes. They’ve got over 200 sites across the country. You probably don’t think of salad and tech in the same sentence but Sweetgreen love a bit of tech. They’ve run pilots to test the viability of blockchain technology to track and trace their ingredients and stock. And, having acquired a robotics startup in 2021, they’re now creating an automated restaurant where robots will prepare ingredients which are then assembled by human chefs. Pretty wild. Where is the restaurant industry heading? -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the

Every few months we interview our host Dan to find out what it’s really like being a Founder because his day job is running his VC backed startup Heights.  If this is the first episode like this you’ve heard then please stop what you’re doing and search for Dan Chapter 1 in the Secret Leaders feed. He’s got a good origin story. If you’re up to date, in the previous episode with Dan a few months ago we learnt how to develop a product and bring it to market. That’s where we are today. Dan and his Co-Founder Joel have developed the Heights Braincare supplement but now they need to scale it. They need to scale the business. This is the tricky first year of being public. They need to negotiate their way out of the valley they’re in now, into the larger valley next door. How did they do it? -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off

Jess Salamanca is the Founder of Moxie Club, a community for female Founders. But before Moxie there was another business Jess started which could’ve been BIG. She had the opportunity to take it to a whole new level but instead decided to close it down. What really happened? -- If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  -- Sponsor links: otta.com/secretleaders

Fall in love with the problem; not the solution - that’s the philosophy of Uri Levine, the serial entrepreneur behind more than ten startups including two unicorns. His best-known success is Waze, the traffic navigation app he Co-Founded in 2007 and sold to Google for over $1 billion six years later. Uri is a well-known speaker but he added “author” to his CV earlier this year, with the release of his book, taking its title directly from his philosophy. He wrote the book to spread entrepreneurial success as far as possible. It covers everything from the importance of failure, to the best approaches to hiring, to why it's so important to 'date' your ideas but fall in love with your problems. Why should you focus on product/market fit above all else? Why is every decision you make by definition the right decision? And how do we know that our next episode is going to be the best one we’ve ever made? Tune in to find out. -- Sponsors Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders Vanta - get 20%

David Wood is a high performance coach. He’s been doing that for 25 years, and has recently taken up acting - but his life has been peppered with failure and tragedy.  David will tell you that failure is a part of a life-well-lived because it means you’re pushing yourself. The people you’ve really gotta worry about are the people who never fail because they’re the ones who never try. David has tried a LOT of things and succeeded in several. But we’re here to learn from his most memorable failures, including one which nearly killed him. What happened and what did it teach him? -- If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better? hello@secretleaders.com  -- Sponsor links: otta.com/secretleaders