Happy New Year!
Something I’ve noticed over the years is that not everyone in business likes to play a long game.
Running a business takes a lot of patience, and not just when it comes to strategy. When you’re a founder, you’ll always find that there are things you don’t know. That’s especially true if you’ve got a niche product that you know technically inside out, but you’ve not had exposure to scaling or an exponential growth journey. When that’s the case, a founder needs to either spend a lot of time learning, or hire for the gaps.
It’s a very brave person who’s willing to let someone else take the reins of their business.
It’s one of the reasons I’m looking forward to my first WiserWednesday Fireside Chat of 2024. I’ll be talking to the brilliant Tom Carter, founder of Ultraleap. He’s a rising star of the UK tech space, and one of the things that really impresses me about him is that he was totally willing to let Ultraleap scale fast as CTO so he could properly learn the ropes before taking over as CEO. That kind of humility is rare.
Thank you Tom for an excellent discussion on his journey to Series D (a feat only achieved by a few people on the planet). We dive into the human side of being a founder and how challenging that is with a young family and the excitement on Tom & his cofounders eureka moment when they realised this would actually work. From Bristol University PhD spin-out to CES Vegas & HQ in San Fransisco with an acquisition in between, tom share why we should make sure in life that we take the leap, realise we will step on rakes & why the trick to succeeding is to work (& sleep) like a lion!
