BusinessCloud

In today's #founder story Charlotte Ridley has written movingly about how the death of her father inspired her to set up Memorify Technologies. Her grief at her father's loss was compounded by the fact that she also lost access to his digital memories. In the article she shares the 6 things she'd tell her younger self. It's well worth reading the full article here - https://lnkd.in/gkeu5AK4 - but here are the 5 things she learned in addition to the impact of her dad's death. 1. You don’t need to know it all 2. Listen to advice, but don’t always take it 3. Know your worth 4. Resilience is built 5. Make it personal #founders

After working with Steven Bartlett and THG's Matthew Moulding, Alex Ayin has launched his own high performance business - Tomorrow's Potential - for founders and CEOs. In a far-reaching interview with Christopher Maguire, Ayin spoke about the lessons he's taken from working with some of the UK’s highest profile entrepreneurs. Ayin joined Manchester-based SocialChain in 2015, helping it grow to over 250 employees across five global offices and a multi eight-figure turnover. He said the experience taught him about the importance of culture. “Get obsessive about culture,” he said. “Understand who comes in. I was there from the very early days. The first 50 people determine the trajectory of the company. “We made some mistakes in hiring people in the early days and we didn’t fire them quick enough. “Fire much quicker than you think and analyse based on a set of character traits that we now have.” Ayin said leaders should spend x10 longer on recruitment and measure candidates against metrics like ‘bias for speed’ and ‘independent learning’. He explained: “If you look at the most famous entrepreneurs, they have a significant bias for action and bias for speed. How do you learn quick? Out-fail the competition. “Independent thinking is also really important. You don’t want people to come in who just say ‘yes’. You want people to come in and challenge certain ways of doing things. Often, we don’t get that because you hire people more junior who don’t have that trait. “Another one is curiosity about the field. Are people in their spare time listening to podcasts, reading books etc? If you want to become great at anything consistency matters more than sparks and brilliance. It’s continuous learning.” Ayin also spoke about why he and Social Chain's co-founder Dominic McGregor quit alcohol. Read the full story here https://lnkd.in/gcSFVAnZ #founders

Sara Davies MBE is today one of the most familiar faces and respected voices in the world of business. Best known for her role on Dragons’ Den, she’s an investor, published author and recently launched her own podcast, ‘Mind Your Business’, with her younger sister Helen Goddard. However, her career was kickstarted by the launch of her first business, Crafter’s Companion, from her university bedroom at the University of York in 2005. Davies recently joined and a delegation of 50 North East female founders at 11 Downing Street to meet Chancellor Rachel Reeves and spoke to BusinessCloud about her own founder journey. Her own break came when she went to university in York and was introduced to the world of crafting and founded Crafter’s Companion in 2005. Davies said: “My Dad was my mentor. I started my business in October 2005 and by the time I graduated in June 2006 my business was bigger than the family business.” She said being a female founder presented its own challenges. “I was quite often the only woman or the only young person in the room or I didn’t speak like them,” she recalled. “They assumed that because I had a North East accent I wouldn’t be as clever. They under-estimated me.” She said founding a business can be a daunting experience. “You don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know who to ask,” she said. Her profile was transformed in 2019 when she joined series 17 of Dragons’ Den, becoming the youngest Dragon in the show’s history at the age of 35. She’s invested in a string of dynamic and exciting businesses but said she looks for certain qualities in a founder. “Any business I get involved in, I’m looking for passion, vision and drive,” she said. Read the full story here https://lnkd.in/g-Bh-CRR #founders

North West-based power generator firm STUART ENERGY LIMITED has been named one of the UK’s top 10 best places to work for the third consecutive year. After being included in The Sunday Times Best Small Places to Work list in 2024 and 2025, the family-run business has completed a hat-trick after making the top 10 in the 2026 list. The list shines a spotlight on organisations that champion workplace culture and employee experience and is voted on by their own staff via a survey. To feature in the list, businesses must achieve a staff engagement score of at least 70 per cent and organisers highlighted how Stuart Energy stepped in to provide a generator to a local school after its heating broke down. Stuart Energy was founded in 2017 by siblings Mark Stuart ⚡️🔋 and Lee Stuart, with their sister, Jane Stuart-Puttnam, later joining as Director of Strategic Partnerships. Their father, Fred Stuart, is chairman. Read the full story here https://lnkd.in/g7yukPb3 #founders

Primer, a London-based payments startup, has announced a $100m (£75m) Series C funding round. The round was led by Sofina, with participation from Peak XV Partners, and continued backing from all existing investors, including Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest. The company has clients in 30 countries and plans to grow US revenue to more than a third of its business by 2028 and will hire up to 50 roles in the region to support that expansion. Primer was founded in 2020 by ex PayPal and Braintree employees Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux on the premise that payments needed a single, unified infrastructure layer before they could benefit from the intelligence built on top. In 2021, Primer was valued at $425m after closing a $50m Series B fundraise. Read the full story here https://lnkd.in/gudevMu9 #founders Jean-François Burguet, Aakash Kapoor

Autotrader's big week continues with the news they've grown revenues by 4% to £624m in the last financial year. The news follows the opening this week of their new 130,000 sq ft Manchester HQ. Nathan Coe, chief executive of Autotrader, said: “We continued to grow both revenue and profits this year, despite a challenging backdrop." Read the full story here https://lnkd.in/grefViWH #Autotrader

A campaign to raise £500,000 in memory of Abi Godfrey, a director of Grant Thornton UK’s North West corporate finance business who died at the age of 34, has topped £70,000. A total of 363 supporters have so far pledged £73,505, which will be used to support her baby son, Leo, and her family. Abi died in February just two weeks after giving birth to her first baby, Leo. It’s hoped the total will be given a significant boost next Thursday (May 28th) when colleagues at Grant Thornton will join friends and members of Abi’s family in taking part in the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge in her memory. You can donate here https://lnkd.in/ey58-iGb One of those getting involved will be her close friend Keely Hallworth, who wrote on LinkedIn: “Last weekend, I became Leo’s godmother on a day when we should have been celebrating Abi’s birthday. “I am sharing this because, on Thursday May 28th, I will be taking on the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge. I am walking in Abi’s memory and to raise funds for Leo’s future. “I will be walking with Abi’s family, friends and colleagues. I will also be taking on the 24 miles with a torn quad muscle I picked up while running, so it really will be a challenge. “I’ll be held together by sports tape, painkillers, determination and the knowledge that I am doing the right thing for my friend and my godson. “I would be incredibly grateful for any donation, big or small, to help honour a wonderful person. Thank you very much for your support.” Read the full story here https://lnkd.in/g5z3QBTd

AI workloads are rising faster than legacy infrastructure and national grids were designed to absorb, leading to a ‘data centre reckoning’ in Europe. Cities such as Amsterdam are openly restricting data centre expansion due to space and electricity network scarcity, while London-facing grid constraints are now a mainstream policy issue. Companies such as London-based Nscale are raising extraordinary amounts of funding to build facilities dedicated to serving the energy needs of AI. David Holmes, global industries CTO at Dell Technologies, is at the forefront of the change. “How do we sustainably build the energy ecosystem that's going to support the massive scaling of #AI over the coming years?" he asks Jonathan Symcox at #DellTechWorld. "How do we enable this incredible driver of economic growth to deploy whilst ensuring that the energy ecosystem is reliable, resilient, affordable and sustainable? “There's #energy for AI, the things we need to do to provide the energy the AI ecosystem is going to need; and there's AI for energy - how do we actually apply AI to build this future energy system that's going to look very different from the one we have today? “The last 40 years of experience of operating data centres is largely unhelpful in mapping out what we need to achieve in the next few years. Power density is increasing by orders of magnitude. "Therefore the types of facilities we used to build to operate data centres are very, very different from the types of systems we need to support AI infrastructure.” Read more 👇 https://lnkd.in/eTQyFATW

What would a change of PM mean for founders? Chris Etherington, a tax partner at RSM UK, said a change at 10 Downing Street could have a significant impact on anyone looking to complete a transaction "Those looking to complete a transaction in the next three years may be amongst those most impacted by a change in the government’s leadership," he wrote. "There are various options that could be pursued to raise further tax receipts but the one gathering more pace is an overhaul of the capital gains tax (CGT) regime. "Alongside wider reforms, some influential economists have suggested that an increase in CGT rates, so that they are more closely aligned with income tax rates, could raise billions of additional tax receipts." Etherington concluded: "Founders with a significant transaction on the horizon should therefore be thinking ahead of what this might mean to them and their businesses." You can read the full article here https://lnkd.in/gsJnYn6q #founders #capitalgainstax Darren Griffin Amelia MacPherson Kirsty Fraser