Most startups begin with an idea. Ours began with an injury. What followed was a four-year journey from an EMBA classroom at London Business School (LBS) to the start line of the Paris Marathon, and everything nobody warns you about in between.

The Question I Could Not Answer

I have been running long distances for decades. After most injuries, I found myself asking the same question: were my shoes still doing their job?

The answer was elusive. While I tracked pace, heart rate, cadence, and recovery, my equipment remained a black box. The midsole foam was quietly degrading, absorbing less impact, transferring more stress to my joints, and giving me no signal.

That gap between what we measure and what we should be measuring became the seed of a company. But it took a business school, a chance introduction, and a great deal of failure before that seed became anything real. This brings me to the crucial early relationships that shaped our direction.

Meeting Your Co-Founder Is Only the Beginning

I met Xavier Segri in the EMBA programme at London Business School. We had complementary backgrounds, shared frustration with sports technology, and the optimism that comes from being both exhausted and intellectually stimulated.

What we did not have was a clear path from insight to product.
Jeff Skinner, a central figure in the LBS entrepreneurship community, made an introduction that changed the trajectory of the company. Through Jeff, we met Joe Foster, the founder of Reebok, at the school. That meeting, which would not have happened outside the LBS ecosystem, was one of the pivotal moments in our early journey. Joe understood the problem immediately. He recognised the commercial opportunity. And he became a supporter and shareholder.

I tell this story not to name-drop but because it illustrates something important: in deep tech, credibility is a currency. The access that LBS provided, through the Incubator Programme, through The Entrepreneurship Lab, through introductions like that one, shortened the time between having an idea and being taken seriously by people who matter.

The Mistake I Made Most Often: Underestimating Complexity

Building hardware is hard…
We initially thought the core of our product was just the sensor. Our concept was a reliable, battery-free sensor that could be placed inside a shoe sole and activated with a smartphone scan. This would let runners access real-time information about their shoes. But this was only part of the solution.
What we actually had was just one component. The complete product required interpreting the sensor’s data: matching shoe cushioning levels with a runner’s body weight, running frequency, surface, and usage across multiple shoes. Only then could we deliver information that a runner could use to make decisions about their footwear.

Hardware (the physical devices), software (the code and programs), data science (the analysis and use of data), manufacturing integration (combining production processes), brand partnership (collaborations with other companies), and regulatory compliance (meeting legal requirements) are each their own discipline. Each of them surfaced problems we had not anticipated. And each of them took longer than we had planned.

The instinct, especially when you are burning through runway, is to accelerate. What I learned, often the hard way, is that the correct response to complexity is not speed. It is sequencing. Knowing which problem to solve first, and which ones to accept as unresolved for now, is a skill that no textbook teaches well.

What Deep Tech Fundraising Actually Looks Like

Consumer software investors understand metrics quickly. Deep tech is different.
When we were fundraising, we were often explaining the problem before we could explain the solution. That is a long conversation to have with someone who is evaluating dozens of opportunities simultaneously. The instinct to compress the pitch, to skip the physics and get to the market size, is understandable. It is also a mistake.

The investors who believed in Movmenta took the time to understand what we were building and why it was difficult. In deep tech, difficulty is the moat; if it were easy, someone would have done it already.
I also learned that credibility compounds. Each proof point, whether that was winning first place at ISPO Munich BrandNew in 2023, securing a strategic partnership with a global speciality materials company, or signing a co-development agreement with a major running brand, made the next conversation easier. You do not build trust in a single pitch. You build it incrementally, with evidence.

The Partnership Lesson: Alignment Before Agreement

I will be honest about something that took longer than it should have to learn.
When you are a small company pursuing a large commercial partner, the temptation is to say yes to everything. The contract arrives. It is detailed. It contains provisions you were not expecting. And you are so focused on closing the deal that you underweight the importance of ensuring genuine alignment on the things that matter most.

The time to negotiate is before you need the relationship. A contract is not the end of a negotiation, but the beginning of working together. The terms you accept today shape your future collaboration. Invest in legal counsel and tough conversations upfront; it’s far cheaper than fixing misalignment later.

April 2026: The Paris Marathon and What It Represents

In April 2026, KIPRUN, Decathlon’s dedicated running brand, announced a new smart shoe at the Paris Marathon. It is the first running shoe in the world capable of measuring its own cushioning wear. It is built on Movmenta’s technology.

I am proud of that. But what I am prouder of is that it exists at all.
Four years ago, we were two people at LBS with a theory about why runners get injured and a conviction that there had to be a better way to understand what was happening inside a shoe. Today, that theory is embedded in a commercial product that will reach consumers later this year.

The journey between those two moments was not smooth. There were stretches where progress felt invisible. There were moments where the technical barriers seemed insurmountable, where the fundraising felt like shouting into a void, where the right partnership was months away from materialising but felt years away.

What kept us moving was the community that formed around us at LB, founders who faced similar walls, mentors who offered perspective without sugarcoating difficulty, and the discipline to keep long-term objectives in focus when the short-term was uncertain.

What I Would Tell a Founder Starting Today

• First: your co-founder is your most important early decision. Not the idea, not the market, not the funding. The person you will be in the room with when things go wrong. Choose carefully, and then invest in the relationship as deliberately as you invest in the product.
• Second: evidence is everything in deep tech. Build proof points, however small, as early as possible. A working prototype beats a polished deck. A letter of intent beats a verbal commitment. A paid pilot beats a trial. The compounding effect of credible evidence is extraordinary.
• Third: the ecosystem around your institution is not a support structure for after you leave. It is a tool you can use while you are there. Use Jeff. Use Jo. Use the Incubator. Use the network. The relationships you build in that environment are not peripheral to the journey. For us, they were central to it.

Lessons form our failures

Throughout the Movmenta journey, the most significant failures I experienced were in product development and market traction.

Our initial prototypes failed after only ten miles of running, far short of our goal of over a thousand miles. For context, a 1.5-gram sensor must withstand up to 400 kg of impact per step, as running can generate forces 2.5 to 3.5 times the runner’s body weight. Each sensor must survive at least half a million impacts during the life of a shoe, or one million impacts for a pair.

Our technology repeatedly failed in field tests. We completed over seventy iterations before developing a sensor that could withstand real-world running conditions, remain battery-free, and weigh less than two grams. Each version provided insights into materials, adhesion, and the physics of repeated impact. There were no shortcuts; we had to build, fail, learn, and rebuild. It took years to achieve a reliable product, which continues to be improved.

On the business side, we struggled with credibility. As a small company with limited resources, no reputation, and no intellectual property, we attempted to introduce a new technology to major footwear brands, many of which were public companies unfamiliar with us. Despite our product’s strengths, gaining access was challenging. The uniqueness of our solution was difficult to convey to decision-makers who lacked a frame of reference for Movmenta.

Our breakthrough came when we partnered with Arkema, a leader in materials science with strong industry relationships. Their involvement as shareholders and global sales representatives provided us with credibility and access we could not have achieved on our own.

These failures taught me a consistent lesson: be smart, not just right; be creative and bold. When the direct path is blocked, persist through iteration or find a more effective alternative. Above all, remain consistent and determined. If you face similar challenges, continue moving forward by refining your approach or seeking creative partnerships to unlock new opportunities.

Conclusion

Someone once asked me whether I would have started Movmenta without LBS.
I think I would have started something. Whether it would have found the same partners, the same investors, the same credibility at the right moments, I genuinely do not know.

What I do know is that the school did not simply give us a qualification. It gave us a room to think in, a network to draw on, and a set of encounters that shaped the company in ways I still notice.
The invisible things, it turns out, are worth measuring. That is true of shoe cushioning. And it is true of the environments that shape entrepreneurs.

About the Author:
Ofir Dagan is Co-Founder and CEO of Movmenta, a Franco-British deep-tech company developing embedded sensor intelligence for footwear. Movmenta won first place in the Sports Technology and Platforms category at ISPO Munich BrandNew 2023. Ofir completed his Executive MBA at London Business School (EMBA 2022), and continues to contribute to the school as an affiliate lecturer, teaching Mastering Digital Transformation.

The post What Building a Deep-Tech Startup Taught Me About Patience, Partnership, and Proof appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

When Miki Kuusi founded Wolt in Helsinki, he wasn’t staring at a large addressable market. He was staring at a small one, with limited capital, no Silicon Valley network, and competitors who were raising $30 million rounds while he scraped together a fraction of that. Last Monday, sitting in a room at London Business School for The Summit Series — hosted by the LBS Entrepreneurship Club and the IEPC — I heard him describe what happened next: Wolt survived. Those well-funded competitors did not.

It’s the kind of story that sounds too neat in retrospect. But the lesson it carries is one that every MBA considering their next move should sit with: in business, the winner is rarely the one who starts with the most capital. It’s the one who builds the most resilient system.

The Power of Scarcity

Miki was matter-of-fact about it. Wolt had no choice but to be capital-efficient. Every operational decision was measured. Every market expansion had to earn its next step. That discipline — forged by constraint, not by choice — became the foundation of their competitive moat. When DoorDash eventually acquired Wolt, they weren’t just buying market share. They were buying an operating culture that had been stress-tested by scarcity.

This resonated deeply with my own background in e-commerce — an industry defined by razor-thin margins, brutal operational complexity, and a fundamental intolerance for waste. It’s why companies accustomed to the economics of social media advertising (where Meta, Google, or Tencent can print money on attention) consistently struggle when they try to move into e-commerce. The unit economics are different. The muscle memory required is different.

But there’s a flip side worth acknowledging. Founders forged in scarcity know exactly how to save money. What some of them never learn is how to spend it. In the ZIRP era — when zero interest rates flooded markets with cheap capital and “growth at all costs” became gospel — capital-efficient operators sometimes fell behind peers who were willing to burn aggressively to capture market share. In a winner-takes-most landscape, caution can be a liability.

The longer view, though, tends to vindicate them. When the tide eventually went out — and it always does — it was the operators who understood their unit economics, not the ones with the largest runway, who survived. Miki’s story is precisely that arc.

The MBA Paradox: Frameworks vs. The Trenches

When asked how aspiring founders should actually learn to build companies, Miki’s advice was direct: don’t read startup books. Join a well-run company of 40 to 500 people. Surround yourself with people who are actually in the trenches. Let the work teach you what no case study can.

Sitting in that room as an MBA student — someone who has spent the past year deeply engaged with frameworks, models, and structured methodologies — I felt the provocation land with some force.

I want to offer a defence of frameworks, but also an honest reckoning with their limits.

Frameworks are not substitutes for experience. They are tools for memory, expression, and rapid comprehension. A well-constructed mental model lets you walk into an unfamiliar situation and ask better questions faster. It lets you communicate complex ideas with precision. The BCG matrix, Porter’s Five Forces, the jobs-to-be-done framework — none of these will tell you how to actually run an operations team under pressure. But they will help you think clearly when you’re trying to.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming articulated this tension five centuries ago with the concept of 知行合一 — the unity of knowledge and action. His argument was that knowledge divorced from action is incomplete; that understanding something fully requires living it. An MBA programme gives you the map. The scale-up gives you the territory. You need both, and in that order.

The synthesis, then, is not to abandon frameworks but to treat them as preparation for the experience — not a replacement for it.

Scaling Culture Without Scaling Bureaucracy

Miki also spoke about the structural challenge every growing company eventually confronts: how do you preserve the customer obsession and operational agility of a ten-person startup inside a thousand-person enterprise?

His answer drew on the culture of Supercell — the Finnish gaming company famous for operating through highly autonomous, tightly focused small teams they call “cells.” Wolt adapted this model: organising large operations into small units that move fast, own their outcomes, and stay relentlessly close to the customer.

I’d be cautious about calling this the definitive solution. Every organisation is different, and what works for a food delivery company operating across forty markets may not translate cleanly to other contexts. But as one model for maintaining agility at scale — and one that has been pressure-tested in the real world — it deserves serious attention.

For those of us who have studied organisational behaviour at LBS, it maps directly onto questions we’ve explored about bureaucratic drift, network structure, and the conditions under which large organisations actually innovate.

The Question I Wish He’d Answered

There was one thread I was hoping Miki would pull on that the format didn’t quite allow for.

We heard about how Wolt was built. We heard the strategic and operational lessons. What I would have found most valuable — and what I suspect many in the room were quietly curious about — was the personal story. How does a scrappy, hands-on startup founder mentally and behaviourally evolve into a CEO managing thousands of people and a major public company’s expectations? What did he have to give up? What did he have to learn to let go of?

That evolution — from operator to leader, from founder to executive — is one of the least-discussed and most consequential transitions in business. I hope we get to hear him speak to it directly one day.

What This Means for MBAs

Miki’s journey from Helsinki to London — from a scrappy regional food delivery app to leading Deliveroo’s operations — is not a template. But it contains principles that travel.

Constraint sharpens systems. Frameworks prepare you to learn, but only action teaches you. And the culture you build at ten people is the culture you’ll spend the rest of your company’s life either defending or dismantling.

For anyone here at LBS weighing their next move: don’t overlook the scale-ups. Not the household names, not the pre-IPO juggernauts — the 100-to-500 person companies that are figuring it out in real time. That is where the knowledge and the action meet. That is where the real education begins.

Richard Zhou is an MBA student at London Business School with a background in e-commerce and venture capital.

The post The Reality of Scaling: Why Constraint is a Superpower and Frameworks Aren’t Enough appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

Like many MBA students, I did not have a perfectly mapped plan. I was exploring. If that feels familiar, you are in good company.

For me, one of the biggest values of LBS was the white space to think, in a more curated environment, about what I wanted next. Before business school, my professional world had become quite narrow: bankers, consultants, lawyers, all working long hours and often heading into similarly structured post-MBA paths. LBS gave me the space, network and experimentation ground to explore a different route.

Today, I am Chief of Staff to the CEO at Marshmallow (series C unicorn insurtech). It is one of the most leveraged and least standardised roles I have seen in a scaling company. For LBS students considering startup, operator or founder-track careers, it is worth understanding properly.

What is a Chief of Staff?

At its core, a Chief of Staff is a generalist operator who helps a CEO translate priorities into execution.

In later-stage companies, the role often acts as an amplifier of the CEO’s time and attention. A good Chief of Staff helps the CEO focus on the highest-value decisions, while ensuring that the most important cross-functional work actually moves.

That said, the title can be misleading. “Chief of Staff” is not a standard job description. In one company, it may look like a strategic operator or proxy to the CEO. In another, it may sit closer to a highly capable coordination role, sometimes overlapping with a Founder’s Associate or Executive Assistant. I have even had people assume it is a People team role. In practice, most Chief of Staff positions sit somewhere in between.

This is why it is important not to optimise for the title alone. Optimise for the scope, the principal you work for, and the types of problems you will be trusted to solve.

Why do CEOs hire Chiefs of Staff?

As startups scale, complexity compounds. There are more functions, more decisions, more interdependencies and usually more distance between leadership and the reality on the ground.

That is where a strong Chief of Staff becomes useful.

The role often works as the glue across the organisation. You are one of the few people whose job is to see across functions, understand where priorities collide, and help drive progress on the CEO’s highest-priority issues. In practice, that can mean anything from market expansion and product adjacency work to cost discipline, AI adoption or operational efficiency.

The value is not just analytical horsepower. It is context integration. A good Chief of Staff does not only ask what should happen. They also ask how a decision will land, what resistance it may trigger, and what needs to happen to make it executable.

In my own role, that has ranged from revenue expansion work, such as evaluating new geographies and product opportunities, to transformation work, particularly around how AI can improve internal operations. The common thread is not the topic itself. It is helping the organisation move on the issues that matter most.

How does the role evolve as startups scale?

At earlier stages, the role is often more fluid. There may be more ad hoc problem-solving, more founder shadowing and more willingness to let a smart generalist pick up whatever is most urgent.

As companies mature, the role usually becomes more cross-functional and organisational. The challenge becomes less about doing a single project and more about helping the company execute through complexity.

This is where one of the hardest parts of the role emerges: influence without formal authority.

A distinction that has stayed with me is the difference between rank and authority. Rank is your formal position. Authority is the trust people give you. A Chief of Staff may have enough rank to enter a situation on behalf of the CEO, but not enough authority to make people follow willingly. That authority has to be earned.

In practice, this means the role is fundamentally a people role. It is not enough to have the right analysis. You need to know how to land a message, build trust, and move a group of people through change without creating unnecessary resistance.

That is also why some of the most important CoS skills look less like hard skills and more like organisational behaviour: judgment, calibration, communication and stakeholder management.

How can MBA students get a Chief of Staff role?

The encouraging news is that MBAs are often better prepared for this role than they think. The analytical training helps. Structured problem solving helps. Organisational behaviour matters more than many people realise. It is a role built for strong generalists with sound judgment and high EQ.

The less encouraging news is that you do not become effective in this role through theory alone. You need reps.

I did not step straight into a Chief of Staff role after LBS, even though I wanted to. In hindsight, that was probably useful. The roles I took instead gave me many of the same building blocks: working closely with senior leaders, solving cross-functional problems, and operating across strategy, finance and execution.

That is the mindset I would encourage current students to take. If you do not land a Chief of Staff title immediately, do not assume the path is closed. Look instead for roles that give you:

• exposure to the CEO, COO or senior leadership team
• ownership of important business problems
• room to move across functions
• opportunities to build judgment, not just produce analysis
  
  

Titles such as strategy manager, business operations, corporate finance, special projects or founder’s office can all be credible stepping stones if the underlying scope is right.

One other lesson from my own path is that side hustles and visible initiative can matter more than you think. During LBS, I started the Ride It Out podcast during COVID when traditional startup networking had largely shut down. It was a practical way to create my own channel into the ecosystem. I also created the Founders Book after a VC friend pointed out that LBS startup activity was real but fragmented, even though students, founders, mentors and angels would all benefit from seeing that ecosystem in one place. Both projects were useful to the community, but they also helped me stand out. In crowded markets, signals of curiosity, initiative and follow-through can be real differentiators.

For students earlier in their careers (MiM, MAM, MiF, MFA), the same principle applies. You may not be hired as a Chief of Staff on day one, but you can absolutely start building the raw ingredients.

Choosing the right company matters as much as landing the role

One practical point that is easy to overlook: not all Chief of Staff roles are created equal, because not all companies are. If you are joining a startup or scale-up, assess it with the same seriousness an investor would. What market is it in? How defensible is the product? Who are the competitors? Do customers genuinely need it, or is it a nice-to-have? How much runway does the company have? What are the founder’s strengths and blind spots?

You are effectively investing your time, energy and career capital. Unlike a VC fund, you cannot hedge across a portfolio and hope one unicorn makes up for the rest. You only get one job at a time, so the downside of getting it wrong is much more concentrated. Treat that decision with at least as much rigour as an investor would.

What happens after Chief of Staff?

MBA students are right to think about optionality. One of the strengths of a good Chief of Staff role is that it usually expands it.

The role can act as a pressure cooker for leadership maturity. You get unusually high exposure to decision-making, pace, ambiguity, trade-offs and executive communication. Used well, that can become a strong platform for a number of paths: COO or business leadership roles, strategy or transformation leadership, founding a company, or moving into operator seats in VC or PE-backed environments.

The exact exit path depends on the type of CoS role you had and which muscles you built. But in general, it is a role that can open doors rather than close them.

Common misconceptions

The first misconception is that the role is glamorous. Sometimes it is. Often it is simply demanding. You are close to decision-making, but you are also close to ambiguity, politics and pressure.

The second is that the role is just a dressed-up Executive Assistant position. It is not. The best roles are strategic, cross-functional and execution-heavy, even if they sometimes involve coordination as part of the job.

The third is that the role is about being the smartest person in the room. It is not. It is about helping the room work better.

The fourth is that AI will make the role obsolete. I do not see that. AI will absolutely make parts of the job faster, especially analysis, drafting and synthesis. But the essence of the role remains deeply human: aligning people, building trust, reading context and helping organisations execute through complexity.

Final thought

If you are an LBS student considering this path, my main advice is not to be intimidated by the ambiguity. Many of the best post-MBA roles are not neatly packaged. They are shaped by the problems a company needs solved and the trust you can earn.

The Chief of Staff role can be an extraordinary seat from which to learn how companies really work. But it is not just a title to collect. It is a craft to develop.

And if you are still figuring out whether you want to be a founder, investor or operator, that is fine too. I was in your shoes not that long ago.

I am also putting together a more detailed Chief of Staff guide, aimed at LBS students and early-career operators, which will go deeper on what the role is, how to land it after LBS, and the most common exit paths. It will also include perspectives from other Chief of Staff alumni voices across the tech industry, so stay tuned.

If useful in the meantime, I have also spoken about the role on two recent LBS podcasts with the Tech & Media Club (listen here) and the Student Association (watch here).

Kathryn Larin is LBS MBA (2021) alumni, Dean’s Award recipient, and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Marshmallow, a Series C insurtech unicorn. Prior to this, she spent a decade in investment banking at Bank of America and Evercore, and held strategy and finance roles in high-growth tech companies.

The post Thinking About a Chief of Staff Role After LBS? Read This First appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

Launchpad is London Business School’s startup pre-accelerator programme, organised by the LBS Entrepreneurship Club and supported by the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital. The programme helps some of the most ambitious founders at LBS transform early ideas into viable, scalable businesses.

The 2026 cohort brings together 30 startups and 90 founders working across a wide range of industries, including Consumer Tech & Marketplaces, AI infrastructure, B2B SaaS, Fintech, Climate & Energy, HealthTech, EdTech, and more. This diversity reflects the interdisciplinary talent and global perspectives within the UK startup community.

Over the coming months, founders will take part in an intensive programme of workshops, mentorship, and founder-focused training, guided by experienced operators, investors, and entrepreneurs. Participants will also learn from notable speakers, including Harry Stebbings (20VC) and Carlos Espinal (Seedcamp), while gaining access to the wider LBS entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Launchpad provides founders with hands-on support, mentorship from the LBS network, and access to one of London’s most connected startup communities. Many past participants have gone on to join the LBS Incubator, raise venture funding, and build high-growth ventures.

The programme culminates in a Demo Day, where selected teams will pitch their startups to a curated audience of investors and industry leaders, with the opportunity to win £18,000 in cash prizes.

We’re excited to introduce this year’s founders and their ventures below. Stay tuned for founder spotlights and updates as the Launchpad 2026 journey unfolds.

The post Introducing the LBS Launchpad 2026 Cohort appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

In 2018, I attended Financing the Entrepreneurial Business (FEB) executive course at London Business School. I enrolled to strengthen my financial toolkit as six months before I had transitioned into private equity. What I didn’t anticipate was how stimulating the experience would be, and how decisively it would influence my later decision to return to LBS for an MBA.

At the time, I had transitioned into private equity after several years working in M&A, first as a lawyer and then in a corporate setting. As a lawyer, I spent several years advising on a wide range of transactions, from small domestic acquisitions to complex cross-border deals involving multiple jurisdictions and stakeholder groups.

Whilst I was deeply embedded in the mechanics of transactions, the financial structuring itself was driven by other advisors. I understood the legal architecture of deals thoroughly, but I had not yet built the financial lens that ultimately determines how value is created. I moved in-house as an M&A Manager, where my focus shifted to actively reshaping a corporate business portfolio as my primary responsibility was the divestment of non-core business units. The objective was not financial engineering, but strategic clarity as the goal was to exit certain businesses as swiftly as possible to ensure attention was redeployed to areas with stronger long-term fit.

In addition to my legal studies, I had completed a master’s degree in economics, finance and management. So, it’s fair to say that I didn’t arrive at FEB looking to learn the mechanics of financial analysis from scratch, but rather at a moment of professional inflection.

High Intensity, High Engagement

FEB was one of the most intellectually demanding weeks I had experienced in a classroom – even after completing three university degrees! Although the pace was relentless, FEB rewarded engagement: the deeper you leaned in, the more transformative the experience became.

The real strength of the course was learning through the case studies. We analysed businesses from various industries, each facing different challenges: founder-led companies under shareholder tension, high-growth ventures struggling with operational scale, management teams navigating buy-outs, and entrepreneurs deciding whether to bootstrap or raise institutional capital.

These cases were never abstract. They tested frameworks against real-world situations. The insights travelled beyond the classroom. Whether in private equity, advisory, corporate strategy, or entrepreneurship, the core tensions around governance, growth, capital, and exit remained remarkably consistent. I applied these lessons repeatedly, even when the industries differed from those studied. In fact, none of the investments I worked on in my private equity role since FEB remotely touched upon the industries discussed during the week, yet there were many insights I could apply over and over again.

The questions we grappled with were not merely technical exercises, but fundamental strategic dilemmas. For instance, when does a founder bring in external capital to deepen management capability rather than simply to raise cash? How do you balance operational control with the need to professionalise a rapidly growing organisation? At what point does leverage enhance returns, and when does it begin to constrain strategic flexibility? And how should minority shareholder tensions be resolved when entrepreneurial vision and financial priorities diverge?

The cases reflected the real tensions that shape entrepreneurial businesses at critical inflection points, and they were demanding precisely because they forced us to think holistically. Financial modelling, capital structure, governance design, growth strategy and human incentives were intertwined. We had to take positions in each scenario and clearly justify our assumptions.

Lessons Applied in Real-World Investing

Whilst I may never found a high-growth consumer brand or face the exact circumstances of the companies we studied, I have found myself returning to the insights from those cases time and again in my work. When analysing new investment opportunities, I flook for dynamics that mirrored our cases, both in successes and failures.

Other key lessons I took with me were just how important management capabilities and aligned interest are, and that valuation discipline is non-negotiable. The realisation that valuation is more an art than a science was invaluable early in my investing career. It reinforced that whilst financial analysis is necessary, it is insufficient alone. Sound investment decisions emerge from a combination of quantitative rigour, commercial intuition, risk assessment and, above all else, structured debate. No matter what your opinion is, be prepared to validate it with sound facts: you are expected to justify your view, especially when equally qualified, or more qualified, peers arrive at different conclusions. Many can build a financial model, especially today with a little help from your favourite large language model, but fewer are comfortable confidently defending a valuation in the face of ambiguity.

The Power of Diversity

FEB surprised me with the diversity of perspectives in the lecture theatre. Participants came from various industries and geographies: investors, founders, operators, and executives from family businesses. Each brought unique experiences that shaped their assessments.

At first, it felt intimidating to share opinions among experts. But I soon realised that my experiences mattered. Differences in perspective became clear during discussions. People from diverse backgrounds broadened my thinking and challenged assumptions.

FEB also showed how cultural differences influence financing and operational decisions, reflecting how capital behaves in the real world.

Intellectual Momentum

Beyond cases, FEB was energising. The intense pace, advance preparation (which was not insignificant!), and quality of discussion created intellectual momentum. It reminded me how stimulating it is to step outside daily routines and immerse myself in rigorous learning.

Until FEB, I had not seriously considered returning to formal study. The programme introduced me to the LBS approach: practical, case-driven, globally informed, and grounded in real decision-making. This lit a fire in me: should I perhaps take a bigger leap and consider doing an MBA at LBS in the future? At around this time last year I answered that question in the affirmative; FEB, and in particular Professor John Mullins, had played a significant role. The programme offered a first taste of that environment and showed how structured learning can transform a few years into your career when combined with peers and faculty who challenge assumptions.

Relevance Across Career Paths

FEB proved more relevant than I expected. In private equity, it strengthened my ability to assess transactions with discipline and perspective. It also improved my understanding of entrepreneurs’ thinking, allowing me to communicate more effectively with them.

Financing decisions are inseparable from value creation; they shape long-term outcomes. In corporate settings, FEB deepened my appreciation for how capital structure influences strategic flexibility. Most importantly, it reinforced that financial judgement develops through practice, exposure, and debate.

For professionals considering FEB, it is worth being clear about what the programme is. It is a disciplined exploration of how real investment decisions are made under imperfect information, across diverse contexts and with meaningful consequences. It is for investors refining their judgement. For executives contemplating buy-outs or growth capital. For founders thinking more deeply about alignment and control. And for professionals who recognise that financial expertise evolves through dialogue as much as through modelling.

Lasting Lessons

When considering what kind of executive course I wanted to participate in, a key criterion was the immediate applicability of the learnings in my professional life. FEB delivered that. I left with sharper tools and clearer frameworks, directly applicable in my investing role.. But its longer-term impact has been subtler and perhaps more significant. It broadened my perspective on capital and strengthened my tolerance for ambiguity.

Nearly eight years on, the questions remain: What is something worth? How should it be financed? How do we align incentives for sustainable value creation? These questions sit at the heart of entrepreneurial finance and are, if anything, even more relevant today.

FEB taught me that while financial analysis and modelling are essential, they are rarely decisive on their own. As analytical tools become more widely accessible through AI, the real differentiator is judgement: the ability to interpret imperfect information, weigh competing priorities, and defend a point of view in the face of uncertainty. Judgement develops through experience, exposure to real dilemmas, and rigorous debate with diverse peers.

Looking back, FEB did more than sharpen my technical skills. It broadened my perspective on capital, strengthened my ability to navigate ambiguity, and reinforced the idea that sound financing decisions are inseparable from long-term value creation. These lessons continue to guide how I evaluate opportunities today and they remain a lasting competitive advantage in entrepreneurial finance.

About the author:

Anna Autti is a One-year MBA candidate at London Business School. Prior to the MBA, she was an Investment Director at CapMan Growth Equity, working with growth-stage companies across Europe. Earlier in her career, she worked in M&A and began as a lawyer advising on cross-border transactions. She holds degrees in law and economics and is interested in entrepreneurial finance and value creation in growing businesses.

Explore Financing the Entrepreneurial Business through London Business School Executive Education and discover how one transformative week can elevate your perspective for years to come. Next course to start on 13-17 April.

Find out more here.

The post Beyond Valuation: Lessons from Financing the Entrepreneurial Business appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

Two weekends ago, the atmosphere at London Business School shifted. The usual quiet of Nuffield Hall in the North Building was replaced by the frantic energy of 48-hour sprints, late-night coding, and the unmistakable buzz of people building something from nothing.

This was my third time attending HackLBS, the flagship hackathon-style event hosted by the LBS Entrepreneurship Club and Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital (IEPC). I can say without hesitation: it was easily the best one yet.

What made this year different wasn’t just the quality of the ideas, which were exceptional, but the sheer energy injected into the format. As Co-President of the Entrepreneurship Club, seeing the Hack team reinvent an event that has been an LBS staple for years was a masterclass in community-led innovation.

From Introvert to Game Show Host

One of the most unexpected highlights for me was watching my co-president and classmate, Gary, in a completely new light. Normally known for his relatively introverted nature, Gary underwent a total metamorphosis. Under the bright lights of the stage, he evolved into a charismatic game show host.

The Hack Team introduced a new elimination format this year, which made the final rounds feel less like a dry pitching session and more like a high-stakes reality game show. Audience and participants alike waited with bated breath for their favourite pitches – something reminiscent of an episode of Britain’s Got Talent. Gary leaned into the role perfectly, joking about being the “bad guy” for the sake of entertainment as he made teams stand on stage during the elimination moments. It was frantic, exciting, and exactly the kind of “theatre” that a high-paced hackathon needs.

Resilience Beyond the Pitch

While the event was filled with high-energy moments, there were also reminders of the incredible personal resilience LBS students carry. I want to acknowledge Zara Mogadasi.

Zara was preparing her final pitch during the height of the recent conflict in Iran. While navigating the pressure of the competition, she was simultaneously facing a complete communication blackout, unable to contact her parents or family back home. To see her stand on that stage and deliver a winning performance under that kind of emotional weight was nothing short of humbling.

This Year’s Winners

The diversity of problems solved over the weekend was a testament to the talent in the room.

The Grand Prize (£5,000): TradeMate Team: Zara Mogadasi, Midhat Fatima, Diego Sarasua, Cristina Hurtado TradeMate is an AI agent designed to tackle the worker shortage in the UK trades sector (£215BN market) by making existing workers more productive. By handling calls, bookings, and invoices with zero data entry, they are building for the workforce that keeps Britain on track for its Net Zero targets.

“Winning the Grand Prize was an amazing validation… The prize funding gives us the opportunity to turn this weekend project into a real solution,” the team (all MBA2025 alumni) shared.

The Impact Award (£3,000): Iris Founder: Liam Bakker (MFA2026) Iris is a revolutionary accessibility tool that turns a standard webcam into a mouse and keyboard using eye-tracking. Built for people with ALS and motor disabilities, it allows users to move, click, and type entirely by sight.

Liam noted: “HackLBS was an opportunity that allowed us to challenge and uplift each other and ultimately grow closer through the process.”

The Audience Choice Award (£1,000): Moda Team: Lavanya Saberwal, Maya Stolle, Sekere Pepa, Yuqin Xiao (Shaw) Moda is redefining the lingerie category with a modular, sustainable bra system that adapts to women’s changing bodies, reducing waste and cost while prioritizing wellness.

A Growing Ecosystem

Entrepreneurship at LBS doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It was a pleasure to welcome students from other universities and business schools. The Business Society from Queen Mary University joined us to work on a career advice app. This cross-pollination of ideas is what makes the London startup scene so vibrant.

We also owe a massive thanks to Aion.xyz for the financial support, Replit for the AI credits and essential merch, and FIX8 for keeping us hydrated and focused with their kombucha.

Reflections on the Journey

As I wrap up my second year at LBS, I feel an immense sense of pride in what our club has achieved. Pulling off an event of this scale is no small feat. Seeing the Hack team inject so much enthusiasm and new life into this tradition has been one of the highlights of my co-presidency of the Entrepreneurship Club.

I’m walking away from this weekend inspired by the ideas that surfaced and the bonds that were formed. Will I be back next year? Most definitely. I’ll be back as a participant again and who knows, maybe it’ll be fourth time lucky!

The post Third Time’s the Charm: Why HackLBS 2026 Was the Best One Yet appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

Here is a statistic that tends to stop people mid-conversation: women who leave salaried jobs to found companies increase their earnings by around 22%. Men who make the same move see a gain of about 8%.

That is not a typo. Nor is it because women are suddenly out-earning men as founders; they are not. Women founders still earn around 21% less than male founders in absolute terms. But when you ask the right question, not how women compare to men, but how women compare to what they would have earned had they stayed put, a completely different picture emerges.

Entrepreneurship, it turns out, is one of the most effective tools available to women for closing the gap between what they are worth and what they are actually paid.

The wrong comparison

For years, research on women and entrepreneurship has focused on underperformance. Women founders raise less capital. They run smaller companies. They earn less than men. All true. But this framing contains a category error: it measures women against men rather than against their own counterfactual.

Our new study, “Does Entrepreneurship Narrow the Gender Earnings Gap?” by Tiantian Yang, Aleksandra (Olenka) Kacperczyk and Lucia Naldi, corrects this. Rather than asking whether women do worse than men in entrepreneurship, we ask whether women do better in entrepreneurship than they would have done remaining in salaried employment, and whether that answer differs by gender.

To find out, we drew on matched employee-employer data covering the entire working population of Sweden from 1990 to 2020, more than 136 million individual-year observations. We tracked individuals over time, comparing earnings before and after founding a company, and used 12th-grade GPA as a rare and clean proxy for underlying ability. The results should prompt a rethink of how careers, organisations and gender equality are understood.

Narrowing the gap

The gender earnings gap in salaried work is, in the data, around 24%. In entrepreneurship it falls to 19%. That is nearly a 30% reduction, attributable to the act of founding alone.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Wages in employment are determined by managers, promotion committees and HR processes that are, consciously or not, shaped by gender bias. Women’s pay falls below what their qualifications and ability would predict. Entrepreneurship removes that layer of intermediation. As a founder, the market does the valuing: customers, clients and revenue, rather than gatekeepers. Capital markets carry their own biases, but the cumulative toll of employer discrimination across a career is substantially reduced.

The 9 percentage point difference in returns between women and men who transition to entrepreneurship is, the researchers note, equivalent in magnitude to four additional years of labour market experience. That is not measurement noise. That is a career.

The talent that leaves

The entrepreneurial premium is not evenly distributed, and where it concentrates is instructive.

We find that it is largest for high-ability women. In salaried work, the study finds, each additional grade point raises men’s earnings more than women’s. In entrepreneurship the pattern reverses. Returns to ability are higher for women. Organisations suppress what talented women are worth; founding a company restores it.

High-ability women appear to have worked this out. They transition into entrepreneurship at higher rates than equivalently able men, not because they are temperamentally more entrepreneurial, but because they have correctly assessed that their prospects in traditional employment are poor. For the most capable women, the glass ceiling is not merely a cultural grievance. It is a financial calculation.

The premium is also largest in male-dominated industries. In those sectors the gender earnings gap in wage work sits at around 37%. In entrepreneurship in the same industries, it falls to 27%. No equivalent narrowing occurs in female-typed sectors, where the structural barriers are already lower. The more hostile an industry is to women in salaried roles, the more entrepreneurship pays off.

Ruling out the alternatives

The obvious objections do not survive scrutiny.

Women are not earning more as founders because they are working longer hours. Entrepreneurship shifts men into full-time work at a higher rate than women. The premium is not an artefact of risk aversion selecting only the most confident women into founding. Women’s ventures survive and scale less well than men’s, not more. It is unlikely to be explained by the autonomy and flexibility that come with running one’s own business, since men and women gain comparable schedule control on founding, leaving no gender-specific mechanism to account for. And the premium persists among women without children, which rules out the motherhood penalty as its primary source.

What survives every robustness check is the following conclusion: talented women are systematically undercompensated inside organisations, and starting a business is how they recover what employment withheld.

Implications

For women weighing the decision to found, the financial case is stronger than the prevailing narrative suggests, particularly for high-ability women in male-dominated fields who have watched less capable colleagues advance past them. The data suggest the intuition of being undervalued is well-founded, and that founding offers a credible route to correction.

For investors and fellow founders, the pipeline of high-ability female founders is being supplied, in part, by organisations that fail to pay talented women what they are worth. That is not a demographic tailwind to exploit. It is a market failure that talent is navigating around.

For the companies losing these women, the question is not what made entrepreneurship attractive. It is what made employment insufficiently rewarding. A woman who founds a company is, in many cases, a signal that your organisation mispriced her.

For policymakers focused on closing the gender gap in venture funding, on improving access to networks, on tackling bias in investment, all of that matters. But the most consequential inequalities are occurring upstream, in wage employment, before anyone has written a pitch deck. Narrowing the gender pay gap in salaried work would do more for gender equality in the startup economy than almost any intervention directed at founders.

The glass ceiling does not only obstruct. For women with the means and appetite to leave, it also redirects. The startup world is fond of stories about founders escaping bureaucratic inertia to build something new. For women, that story carries an additional charge. Escaping a labour market that was never going to compensate them at the rate their ability warranted.

Aleksandra Kacperczyk, based on “Does Entrepreneurship Narrow the Gender Earnings Gap?” published in the Strategic Management Journal.

About the author: Aleksandra (Olenka) Kacperczyk is a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. Her research examines entrepreneurship, innovation and labour markets, with a particular focus on how individuals transition into founding new ventures. Her work has been published in leading academic journals and widely cited in research on entrepreneurship and gender

The post The Founder’s Premium: How Women Boost Earnings by Founding Companies appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

Mohamed Mohamed is the Founder and CEO of Smart Bricks, an AI-powered real estate intelligence platform, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Middle East 2025 honouree.

Since founding the company in 2024, Mohamed has raised approximately $5 million in pre-seed funding, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Global, Sanabil Investments, Techstars, and angel investors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. Smart Bricks has also been selected for the Google AI Accelerator, NVIDIA Inception Program, and Microsoft GrowthX, placing it among a small group of globally recognised AI-first companies.

Today, the Smart Bricks platform analyses and consolidates over a million data points to help investors make better real estate decisions, bringing institutional-grade intelligence to a much broader market.

But the story behind the company is rooted less in inspiration and more in experience.

Seeing the gap up close

Before founding Smart Bricks, Mohamed worked across investment banking, private equity, venture capital, and consulting, including as part of McKinsey’s AI and data practice.

It was there that he saw something clearly.

The world’s largest funds were using advanced data, proprietary models, and AI to guide investment decisions. Entire teams were dedicated to analysing risk, forecasting performance, and optimising capital allocation.

At the same time, most retail, and less sophisticated investors were making decisions with limited data and outdated tools.

The gap was structural, not incremental.

That insight became the foundation for Smart Bricks.

Rather than building another real estate tool, Mohamed set out to build infrastructure that could give individuals and smaller investors access to the same level of intelligence used by institutional players.

Building infrastructure, not features

One of the clearest themes in the conversation was Mohamed’s focus on systems over surface-level solutions.

Smart Bricks was designed from the beginning to operate at scale. The platform consolidates over a million data points across pricing, transactions, rental yields, and market dynamics, allowing users to assess opportunities with depth and consistency.

This approach was shaped directly by Mohamed’s time in consulting, where he saw how often companies failed by layering tools onto weak foundations.

The philosophy was simple: if the system is right, performance follows.

The role of London Business School

London Business School played a key role in shaping how that idea became a company.

As a MiM student, Mohamed was deeply involved in the entrepreneurship ecosystem, using the School as a place to test ideas, pressure-test assumptions, and learn from peers building in very different sectors.

That connection continued beyond graduation. Smart Bricks joined the LBS Startup Incubator and The Entrepreneurship Lab at London Business School. More than 20 LBS students and alumni have worked with Smart Bricks across strategy, research, and operations. Several became long-term collaborators and advisors as the company scaled.

The value, Mohamed noted, was not just access to talent, but access to perspective. The partnerships at LBS and beyond (with global accelerators like Techstars), made sure that they had answered all the questions investors had, and made it easy for them to invest.

What building at scale actually looks like

During the conversation, Mohamed spoke candidly about the realities of entrepreneurship.

Hiring does not always go to plan. Regulations evolve. Market conditions change. What matters is how a founder responds.

His background in high-pressure environments shaped how he approaches these moments. Decisions are made calmly, with a focus on understanding the root of the problem, and focusing on solutions, and contingency plans. His calmness has fed a culture and company that is solution-oriented, and incredibly flexible.

He also spoke about the importance of sustainability. As the company has grown, managing his energy has become part of how he thinks about performance. Not as lifestyle advice, but as a leadership discipline.

Looking ahead

Smart Bricks is now entering its next phase of growth, expanding its platform and deepening its role as infrastructure for global real estate investing.

For Mohamed, the ambition is clear. Build a company that gives people access to the same quality of insight once reserved for the largest institutions. Build it properly. And build it to last.

His journey from McKinsey’s AI team to Forbes 30 Under 30, and now to leading a globally backed technology company, reflects what is possible when experience, clarity, and execution come together.

The post From LBS to Forbes 30 Under 30: How Mohamed Mohamed Is Building Smart Bricks appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

When companies lay people off, they rarely imagine they might be creating their next competitors. In this piece, Dr Bukky Akinsanmi Oyedeji, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School shows how layoffs don’t just release workers, they can also release future founders.

When companies announce layoffs, attention usually turns to the immediate fallout: morale, hiring freezes, and how quickly displaced employees will find new jobs.

What’s discussed far less is what happens when some of those workers don’t look for another employer at all.

Instead, they start businesses.

My recent research, published in the Strategic Management Journal (Perceptions of knowledge transferability, Strategic Management Journal, 6 August 2025) shows that firm-initiated turnover, layoffs, dismissals, and restructurings can quietly seed entrepreneurship, sometimes in ways that directly matter to the firms left behind.

And the driver isn’t just a necessity or risk tolerance. It’s how workers perceive the value of what they know, and how they react when long-held expectations about employment are suddenly broken.

A different kind of post-layoff decision

Most studies of employee entrepreneurship focus on people who leave voluntarily. These are the carefully planned exits: employees who save, spot opportunities, and choose entrepreneurship on their own terms.

But nearly half of all job separations are initiated by firms, not workers. And the psychological context is very different.

When people are laid off unexpectedly, especially after years of building what they believe to be firm-specific expertise, they face a stark question: If my knowledge doesn’t transfer easily, where does that leave me?

For a surprising number of workers, the answer is entrepreneurship.

What the evidence shows

Using longitudinal data from the Korean Labor Income Panel Study, I examined what workers did after losing their jobs and why. One pattern stood out clearly.

Workers who believed their knowledge was not transferable were far more likely to enter entrepreneurship after a layoff than after a voluntary exit. In fact, the likelihood increased more than fivefold.

The effect became even stronger when expectations were high. Among workers who expected to remain with their employer, perceived non-transferable knowledge sharply increased the probability of starting a business after termination.

This relationship persisted even after accounting for local labour market conditions and economic pressures. In other words, this was not simply about a lack of job options.

The role of broken expectations

To understand what’s happening, it helps to look beyond skills and into relationships.

When employees invest deeply in firm-specific knowledge, they are also forming expectations, often implicit, about stability and reciprocity. The unspoken deal sounds like this: I will specialise for you, and you will provide continuity in return.

Layoffs violate that psychological contract.

Research shows that such breaches can fundamentally reshape how people view employment. Trust declines. Long-term commitment feels risky. Traditional jobs start to look fragile.

In that context, entrepreneurship becomes less about ambition and more about control: a way to deploy knowledge that still feels valuable when the labour market appears unwilling to absorb it.

This pattern isn’t new

We’ve seen this dynamic before. During China’s state-owned enterprise reforms in the late 1990s, mass layoffs affected workers who had expected lifetime employment and developed highly specialised skills.

Entrepreneurship surged, not simply because jobs were scarce, but because expectations had collapsed. For many, starting a business felt safer than re-entering a labour market they no longer trusted.

What looked like “necessity entrepreneurship” was often a response to perceived immobility and broken promises.

Why perception matters as much as reality

A key insight from the research is that perceptions of knowledge transferability matter, even when they are imperfect.

Workers routinely overestimate how firm-specific their skills are. They anchor on internal systems, routines, and language. They underestimate how adaptable their expertise might be elsewhere.

Yet behaviour follows belief. Those who perceive their skills as non-transferable approach job search cautiously and see entrepreneurship as a more viable path, even when alternatives objectively exist.

Implications for founders and leaders

For founders, scale-up leaders, and executives, the implications are uncomfortable but important.

First, layoffs are not just cost decisions. They are acts of knowledge release. The employees you let go may carry insights, routines, and capabilities you assumed were safely contained inside the firm.

Second, there is a trade-off in how talent is developed. Firm-specific training can reduce voluntary turnover, but when layoffs occur, it can increase the likelihood that former employees channel that knowledge into new ventures.

Third, expectation management matters. Promising stability to employees whose skills are highly specialised may strengthen commitment in the short term, but it raises the stakes if circumstances change.

Finally, how exits are handled shapes what happens next. Transparent communication, transition support, and alumni relationships can influence whether former employees become competitors, collaborators, or future partners.

Rethinking “necessity” entrepreneurship

These findings also complicate how we think about entrepreneurship itself.

Some founders are not chasing opportunity in the classic sense. They are responding to a breakdown in trust, reassessing employment as a safe option and choosing to build something of their own instead.

Supporting these entrepreneurs may require more than capital or training. It may require recognising the emotional and cognitive aftermath of organisational exits.

The bigger lesson

Entrepreneurs are not always born. Sometimes they are made, by layoffs, by violated expectations, and by beliefs about where knowledge can still create value.

For leaders, the lesson isn’t to avoid difficult decisions. It’s to recognise that how employment relationships are built, and how they end, can shape the competitive landscape in ways that only become visible later.

The employee you let go of today may not be updating their CV. They may be building a company.

And whether that company becomes a threat or an ally depends, more than you might expect, on how the relationship ended.

The post The workers you let go today may be the founders you compete with tomorrow appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.

Last week I hosted a conversation with Joanna Jensen, founder of Childs Farm. Joanna’s story is well-known in consumer brand circles. She turned a personal need (gentler skincare for her daughter’s severe eczema) into a category-leading brand and exited with a £40 million deal. What made this session valuable, however, was getting to see how she actually thinks: practical, evidence-led, and refreshingly unsentimental about what makes a business investable.

From doing the maths to knowing when to let go, this conversation reveals the discipline and relationship-building behind one of the UK’s most successful consumer brand exits.

Below is a summary of our discussion, with strategic takeaways for founders.

Joanna, what’s the origin story – without the mythology?

My starting point wasn’t a trend report or a brainstorm session. It was my daughter’s severe atopic eczema, and the shock of walking into stores and seeing products that looked unchanged since the 1970s.

The market signal was strong. If a problem is widespread, persistent, and poorly served, there’s probably a venture-shaped opportunity hiding in plain sight.

But here’s where most founders would have stopped: “I believe there’s a market.” I didn’t.

I came from an investment banking background. I understood numbers. I understood commerciality. And I knew that no matter how passionate you are, if you don’t do the maths, you don’t have a business.

I started with NHS statistics (easily accessible): one in five children under five have atopic eczema. That’s half a million kids per age group in the UK alone. Multiply that across age ranges, add international markets where English is spoken, and suddenly you’re looking at a real customer base, not a hopeful guess.

Strategic takeaway: The days of building a business on gut feeling alone are over. But “doing the maths” doesn’t mean complex financial modeling. It means being honest about whether the numbers actually work, and being able to defend them.

How did you validate demand before raising money?

My validation process ran on two parallel tracks: data and experimentation.

On the data side, I used publicly available sources: NHS stats, consumer research from the British Library’s Business & IP Centre, YouGov surveys. I also emphasized something investors quietly reward: write down your sources. Not “a report said…” but exactly where your numbers came from.

On the experimentation side, I manufactured a small batch (funded with £5,000 of my own money) and distributed products to real users, starting with my daughter’s reception class, then expanding through my personal network to families with eczema-prone children.

The combined effect was powerful: numbers that made sense and early evidence that the product genuinely worked.

One parent called me in tears: “You have no idea—my daughter just had her first bubble bath ever. We’ve been using your moisturizer for a week and all her eczema is gone.”

I knew I had something. But I also knew anecdotes weren’t enough. So, when a Waitrose buyer told me I needed clinical trials, and the quote came back at £40,000, I hit what I call the “go or no-go moment”, the decision point where you either back the idea or walk away.

I backed it.

You talk a lot about “doing the maths.” What does that actually look like?

My version of “maths” isn’t a fancy spreadsheet. It’s a mindset:

Be honest about pricing and unit economics.

Be conservative in your assumptions.

Build a plan that can survive scrutiny.

Expect investors to challenge it and be ready.

One point deserves to be printed and taped to every pitch deck:

If an investor asks where your numbers came from, you should be able to answer immediately, or go away and come back within 24 hours. If you’ve got someone who’s actually shown up to a meeting about potentially investing, that’s a hot lead. You super-glue them to the floor.

I also warn against what I call “mortifyingly embarrassing” presentations where founders clearly haven’t done the work. Investors can spot flawed numbers instantly. And there’s no excuse! The data is out there if you’re willing to look for it.

Product decisions: why not go fully organic from the start?

This is where my strategic thinking came into play.

I worked with a manufacturer who understood natural and organic formulations, but I chose not to go fully organic early on, not because I didn’t value it, but because it would have pushed the price beyond what my target consumer could afford.

My anchor was concrete: “How much am I prepared to pay? No more than £4.”

That price ceiling shaped everything—ingredient choices, formulation, margin structure. I positioned performance as the marketing engine.

I didn’t have the power of celebrity to sell my products. My products had to sing for their supper.

I also made sure every ingredient had a story. The coconut oil came from a cooperative in the Philippines, not a conglomerate. So, farmers were growing organic coconuts and processing them into coconut oil. It was about creating a legacy that children using the products could feel good about, almost by osmosis.

Packaging in a “clinical” category: why go bright and playful?

I saw an industry norm: children’s eczema products often look like pharmacy labels: muted colors, clinical cues, a subtle signal that something is “wrong.”

Childs Farm chose the opposite: rainbow colors, playful cartoon illustrations of my kids and their pets done in photo decoupage which is cut out of bits of wrapping paper and candy wrappers with tiny nail scissors.

The logic wasn’t “be different for the sake of it.” It was empathy-driven design: children with sensitive skin don’t want a neon sign above their heads saying “I’ve got poorly skin.” They just want to feel normal.

And crucially, I tested it. Parents loved the packaging. Kids loved it. One industry veteran told me it would never work because the category was “boring, bland, beige, and white.” I knew he was wrong because I’d already validated it with real users.

Strategic takeaway: Don’t enter a saturated market by being louder. Enter through a niche you understand better than anyone else (for Joanna: children 1-5 with eczema), make sure the product genuinely works, protect your IP early, and then outwork the category on relationships.

Speaking of relationships, how did you actually get into Tesco, Boots, Waitrose?

My answer has nothing to do with “growth hacks.” It was relationship-building with a level of intentionality most founders don’t have the patience for.

I hand-delivered products to every major retailer—driving to Leeds, Bradford, Nottingham, you name it. And I got to know the receptionists.

I would drop off products, plus a bit of stuff for the receptionist and some nice chocolates. That’s how I got the names of buyers. Then when I came for meetings, the receptionist at Boots—Bridget—would say ‘Hi Joanna!’ She sold more Childs Farm than anyone else. People would come into reception, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I hear you just had a child, you need to go buy Childs Farm.’

Bridget gave a bottle of Childs Farm moisturizer to a neighbor whose daughter had chronic eczema. The neighbor tried it, saw results in two weeks, and posted before-and-after photos on Facebook. The post went viral—65,000 shares—and that was a game-changer.

All because of Bridget, the receptionist.

My broader point: ecosystems sell products, not just founders. Show up. Be kind. Be memorable. Know names. Treat suppliers like an extension of your team.

When Childs Farm went viral and sold 1.5 million bottles of baby moisturizer in a week, I could call my suppliers and say, “Sit down. I’ve got to tell you something. How many shifts can you add?” And they were excited because I’d spent years building those relationships, visiting warehouses every Christmas with gifts for workers, making YouTube videos to help with packing, leaving my phone number in case anyone had questions.

Strategic takeaway: Distribution isn’t just logistics. It’s human. Build relationships, invest time, go face-to-face. But when it comes to hiring, don’t hesitate to let go of poor fits. Knowing how to build relationships and when to end them is critical.

What do you look for now, as an investor?

I’m candid about this: at early-stage, you can’t fully “prove” the business. So, the founder becomes part of the product.

My rule of thumb: fifty percent of my decision-making is on the founder. I want to see the whites of your eyes. I want to know that you’re determined, resilient, robust, that you’ve done the preparation.

I frame the pitch meeting as a behavioral signal:

How you handle tough questions in that room is how you’ll handle customers.

How prepared you are is how prepared you’ll be in the market.

How quickly you follow up tells me whether you can execute.

Early-stage investing is as much about the person as the product, maybe more.

I’ve invested in brands that weren’t performing as expected because I was so impressed by the founder. And I’ve passed on good ideas because the founder didn’t show up right.

Team-building as a solo founder: what did you get right (and wrong)?

I built Childs Farm solo, and I won’t romanticize it. It was lonely, intense, and sometimes brutal.

My first “hire” was a friend’s daughter fresh out of St. Andrews who gave riding lessons to my kids in between doing graphic design and learning Sage accounting. We were on the helpline so often we became better than the bookkeeper.

My first real hire was a commercial director from P&G. His interview was in my dining room, during which the cat came in, threw up under the table, and left. We just carried on.

To this day, neither of us knows why he took the job. But he said, ‘I’m bored of sitting in meetings. I actually want to do something.’

(Apparently the cat did this at every interview. The dogs would fart. It was chaos. But it worked.)

My people lessons were sharp:

Keep teams tight early. Even at £12 million in revenue, we were a team of 10.

The people who get you from £1m to £10m may not take you from £10m to £20m.

Hire slowly, fire quickly. Better an empty seat than the wrong person on the bus.

I also learned that when you’re desperate, you make bad hires. I brought in an MD when I was exhausted and “took a bloke with a pulse.” It was a disaster. The team ballooned from 20 to 50 people, and half of them were twiddling their thumbs.

The replacement MD? We interviewed 17 times. Psychometric testing, Hogan testing, practically blood testing. Because we couldn’t afford another mistake.

Why sell? And why then?

I had three reasons:

Shareholders were ready. They’d been patient for 8–10 years and wanted a return.

I was exhausted. I’d barely seen my kids grow up. My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and needed me.

The market context shifted fast. We were preparing for private equity when PZ Cussons (a UK PLC) made an offer. Then Putin invaded Ukraine.

That made our decision. We went from final bid to transaction in 2.5 weeks. We were the last deal in wellness, health, and beauty for 12 months. Sometimes you just take the deal.

I’ll add something that keeps turning over in my mind:

You can fall out of love with your own brand. And knowing when to take the deal can be wisdom, not weakness.

Strategic Takeaway: I (Bukky) quoted Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler”: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em…”)

Closing reflections

If we had to distill Joanna’s operating system into a few principles, it would be this:

Do the maths. Not as an afterthought, but as a vital filter from the start. Build a plan you can defend equanimously in a room full of skeptical appraisal.

Move fast and verify. Not “move fast and hope.” Many entrepreneurs believe in speed but rarely have patience for verification. The product has to genuinely work. Make. Sure. It. Works.

Enter saturated markets through a niche. Find the segment you understand better than anyone else, make sure the product earns its place, and outwork the category on relationships.

Investors fund founder behavior. How prepared you are. How you answer hard questions. How quickly you follow up. Early-stage investing is as much about the person as the product.

Know when to let go. You can fall out of love with your brand. Knowing when to take the deal can be wisdom, not weakness.

If you’re building a consumer brand (or thinking about it), this is the kind of conversation that saves you expensive mistakes—and maybe a few years of your life.

Watch the full conversation here: https://vimeo.com/lbssummitseries/joannajensen

Joanna Jensen is the founder of Childs Farm and author of “Making Business Childs Play.” She is an active investor, mentor, and advocate for women-led businesses.

Bukky Akinsanmi Oyedeji is Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School.

The post From Eczema to Exit: Joanna Jensen on Building Childs Farm (and Knowing When to Let Go) appeared first on LBS StartHub Blog.