This week, our CEO Callum Sommerton spoke at Business Academy Live; the Department for Business and Trade's learning platform for people starting and growing businesses. Alongside talks on using AI in day-to-day work and expanding into international markets, Callum shared lessons from his own entrepreneurial journey.
It was a good day. And it sharpened a few things worth putting on paper.
What Callum shared
The talk covered the pivots, the compounding experiences, and the friction points that eventually led to FOUNDRS. Four things stood out:
1) Your background is never wasted. Even the career moves that don't look connected at the time compound into something. The skills stack up, whether you can see it or not.
2) Pivots aren't failures. Flexibility is a strength. The ability to respond to reality as it unfolds is what separates founders who keep going from those who don't.
3) Build things you've lived. The best ideas come from direct experience. Callum has experienced every friction point FOUNDRS is designed to remove.
4) The UK needs better founder infrastructure. The ambition of British founders should be matched by the quality of support available to them - from day one through to scale.
If you missed it, you can watch our earlier webinar with Business Academy (covering the key steps from company formation to growth) on YouTube here.
What the day made clear
Britain has a broad network of support for business owners - growth hubs, chambers of commerce, Business & IP Centres, national programmes. Much of it is free. Most founders have never heard of it.
That's not a knock on the organisations doing the work. Many of them have spent decades building trust with communities across the country. The problem is structural. The support is fragmented; spread across organisations and platforms that don't connect. Finding what's relevant, at the right time, is a job in itself.
FOUNDRS exists because founders deserve something better than a scavenger hunt. One place. Clear next steps. No noise.
We'll keep showing up in these spaces - contributing, learning, and building alongside organisations that share the belief that British business owners deserve better. But the product we're building is our primary answer to the gap.
We'll keep showing up. And we'll keep building. Because we want FOUNDRS to be where business begins.
