Throughout the last six months, I’ve been sharing different ways founders, like yourselves, can build…
Advice. We give it. We take it. We trade it. But what if the advice…
For years, founders have been told to reinvest everything. Scale faster. Ignore distractions. But what…
I’d like to quickly tell you about a female founder I’ve always found really inspiring. Her name is Sara Blakely.
In 1998 she was making a living selling fax machines door-to-door when, one day, she cut the feet off her tights because nothing fit right under white trousers. She wasn’t dreaming of billions. She was frustrated, determined to fix a problem she had herself
Every startup owner ultimately wants the same things: More money. More growth. More loyal customers or clients.
When we talk about workplace discrimination, most people immediately jump to gender, race, or disability. While those are urgent, undeniable issues, there’s one bias that every single one of us, no matter who you are, will face if we’re lucky enough to live long enough. It’s ageism.
Picture a glossy glass-walled office in the city.
Everyone’s impeccably dressed, their lanyards swinging as they head to meetings, their conversations filled with deals, strategy, and … Oxbridge anecdotes.
I used to think the way you speak was just a part of who you are. A reflection of your roots. Your family. Your story. Something to be proud of.
But then I started noticing just how quickly some people make judgments based on someone’s accent. How a certain voice in a meeting gets listened to more seriously. How a regional twang gets laughed off.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 20s and putting a name to something I always struggled with was such a relief.
You see, I wasn’t failing. I had a thriving business, managed a team, powered through a to-do list that never seemed to end. But under the surface, things felt harder than they should. I was constantly overwhelmed, mentally drained, quietly wondering why everything took so much out of me.
I used to think progress looked like more women in leadership. More women at the table. More women at the top.
And for a while, that felt true. After all, in a world where men are still holding quite a substantial amount of leadership roles – 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs to be exact – any shift felt like something worth celebrating.
I said something in a meeting once. When I was just a Junior FX broker trying to make it in an extremely male-dominated industry. It was an idea I believed in, one I’d thought through, one I knew had value. Silence. Then five minutes later, a man repeated it almost word for word. Suddenly, it was “brilliant.”
President Donald Trump is gutting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes across the US, and he’s not stopping at government initiatives. Major corporations are removing diversity hiring goals, and quietly erasing commitments they once championed. Google. Meta. Disney. Even Pepsi. One by one, they’re following suit.
In today’s cutthroat startup landscape, where innovation reigns supreme, and competition is fierce, one factor often separates the winners from the rest – personal branding.
