Secret Leaders
Dan Murray-Serter and Chris Donnelly are two serial entrepreneurs who've built, sold, scaled & failed companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In Secret Leaders we get inside the greatest minds and greatest moments in business, because we believe the best way to learn about business is to hear from the people who make it happen.
Sponsored by Wise Business and Vanta.
Contact: hello@secretleaders.com
251
Outbrain: closing a funding round with gunfire ...
It’s pretty rare that investors have to ask the Founder they’re speaking to if they’re in a warzone, or insist they have to leave their country for somewhere a little more ‘peaceful’ but that’s exactly what happened to Yaron Galai, the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Outbrain.
50 min
252
How I failed: Steve Witt on losing everything… ...
Steve Witt knows what it’s like to make a lot of money… and lose it all. He knows what it’s like to go from sipping mai tais on the proverbial Caribbean island to sleeping on your mate’s sofa because you’ve got nowhere else to go. And he’s gone through that twice.
11 min
253
BorrowMyDoggy: how to get people to trust stran...
BorrowMyDoggy is the kind of brand that just sticks in your brain. Once you’ve heard it you can’t unhear it.
35 min
254
How I failed: Trinny Woodall on the fall of her...
Trinny Woodall’s an A-lister now, and the Founder of Trinny London, but before all the success she experienced a soul-crushing failure around the dotcom boom.
12 min
255
Finimize: what you should’ve been taught in sch...
What we’re taught at schools is a real pet peeve here at Secret Leaders. Why are we mucking about learning Latin when we could be learning about stuff like nutrition and personal finance - genuinely useful subjects that will help us lead happier, more fulfilling lives?
55 min
256
Tripadvisor: how to lead a company for 22 years...
Tripadvisor has been through a variety of management changes along the way, which have forced Steve to adapt but he’s still here, although not for much longer. Find out why now’s the time he’s leaving.
54 min
257
MasterClass: how to get over a stutter and attr...
Everyone thought he was mad, and pointed it out to him at various stages, but here we are with MasterClass, valued at $2.75b last year according to CNBC - and with the craziest line up of teachers you’ll ever see in one place.
51 min
258
Summit: how to pull off insane ideas like buyin...
We have a lot of dreamers on this show but Elliott’s dreams are legitimately crazy. Find out how he turns them into a reality
55 min
259
“He offered me $1m and I was much more interest...
It’s not often you meet real life prodigies but Kieran O’Neill might just be one. By the time he was 19 he’d been sued by Disney and his company had been bought by Carl Page, the brother of Google Co-Founder Larry Page. And then he dropped out of university to start another successful business, because, why not?
51 min
260
How to come up with the right business idea - D...
This is the second episode in our semi-regular series with Dan, showing what it’s really like to be a Founder, warts and all.
55 min
261
Motorway: How to combine the best of bootstrapp...
Today’s guest, Tom Leathes, the Co-Founder and CEO of used car marketplace Motorway, is different. The first few companies he built were bootstrapped, profitable and he sold them for more money. Which is basically how business worked for centuries.
55 min
262
Pip & Nut: How to take your business from your ...
Pip started the business when she was 24, at her kitchen table, with a blender and some nuts.
43 min
263
Ukrainian Founder Aleksandr Volodarsky on runni...
It’s amazing how important business seems until something really important happens, like a war breaks out.
41 min
264
MedMen: what went wrong at the cannabis industr...
On the outside it looked like Adam Bierman had it all. He was the Co-Founder and CEO of MedMen, a cult phenomenon and the world’s first cannabis unicorn. They were seen as the Apple of weed and they looked unstoppable.
49 min
265
DesignMyNight Co-Founder Nick Telson on gay sha...
Nick explains how they sold the business - the actual steps they took - which isn’t a process that most people know about unless they’ve been lucky enough to go through an exit themselves. And in classic startup style, it looked like the whole deal was going to collapse on the day of signing until an unlikely hero stepped up.
43 min
266
How to go from a side hustle to a multi-billion...
Find out how they secured an investment from legendary investor Mike Moritz in a matter of days - and what they did next to dominate their category.
42 min
267
When your mental health forces you to leave the...
Life is the sum of your choices, says Jeffrey Kolovson, COO and Co-Founder of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands. At the end of the day, it’s not what you say, it's what you do and the choices you make and the accumulation of those over time that matters.
41 min
268
“He threatened to kill my parents and I had to ...
This is the start of a semi-regular series where we interview Dan roughly every three months
41 min
269
“By the end of 2015 we were just about out of m...
In 2013 he founded Vuori, an activewear brand initially aimed at men. They nearly ran out of money in 2015, but a few pivots and several years later Vuori is worth $4b and launching in the UK this spring.
36 min
270
Curve: Building an $800m FinTech after being la...
“There's a joke in Israel: how do you win a competition in racing? You start as fast as you can, and you slowly increase the pace.” That’s Curve CEO and founder Shachar Bialick, a multi-exit entrepreneur with a background in the Israeli Defense Force special forces.
42 min
271
NetSuite: How Evan Goldberg scaled one of the w...
Today we’re speaking to Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP of NetSuite who make software which helps businesses with stuff like accountancy and inventory management.
28 min
272
Welcome to the death industry, with Farewill’s ...
43 min
273
I went to sleep one day... and woke up gasping ...
Today we’re learning from Alex Lieberman, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew, which became a darling in the media industry because it actually became commercially successful.
40 min
274
Vivino - how to disrupt a $400 billion industry...
Vivino isn’t Heini’s first rodeo. His first foray into entrepreneurialism was with BullGuard, a company delivering cybersecurity and VPN solutions.
40 min
275
They had two weeks of runway left and are now w...
Loom, a video communication tool for businesses, wouldn’t be here today if Vinay and his Co-Founders hadn’t had their ‘sliding doors’ moment which revealed what they should be building right before they were going to have to give up.
41 min