Jessica Christiansen-Franks calls entrepreneurship f**king fun, and she's one of the rare founders who actually made it to an exit.

Only 2% of startups ever get acquired for enough to return capital to investors and be worth the trouble. This is the story of one that did.

In 2025, eight years after founding, Neighbourlytics had 20 buyers interested in acquiring the company. REA Group, a global proptech giant listed on the ASX, won. It was a fitting end to a journey that started ten years earlier, when Jess met Lucinda during her masters and ended up working for her in the non-profit Lucinda ran.

Their close working relationship, including Jess running the company while Lucinda was on maternity leave, led to the two of them accidentally founding a startup. They'd gone to pitch at what they thought was a grant competition. When they won $100k, they had to register a limited company to claim the award, and Neighbourlytics was born.

In this episode we cover:
🔹 How she accidentally founded a startup by entering the wrong competition
🔹 Why she killed $1.1M of revenue to force a pivot the board was scared of
🔹 How she ran the sale, and why you hire advisors even for a small deal
🔹 How she timed the exit to the AI shift that tripled the valuation
🔹 Why she turned down VC money that would have pushed her into advertising

Guest: Jessica Christiansen-Franks, now Managing Director at the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship.

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Jinesh Vohra spent fourteen years at Goldman Sachs, then left to build Sprive. He raised £240,000 on a PowerPoint, didn't pay himself for four years, and built the wrong product first.

Today Sprive is at £12m ARR with 160,000 homeowners on the app. He's backed by three Dragons after his Dragons' Den pitch in February, and Sprive was the most downloaded financial app in the UK that week, ahead of Revolut, Monzo and Trading 212.

In this conversation he covers leaving a well-paying job, validating an idea while still in your day job, raising across many rounds, and why he thinks now is the best time to start a business.

Most founders start businesses as a means to getting rich so they can retire happy.

But Amber Vodegel found out at the end of a very rare, successful exit that it's not the case.

In her words: "I can guarantee you money brings zero happiness."

She bootstrapped Pregnancy+ to 12 million users which culminated in a sale to Philips in an 8 figure deal, with her still owning almost 100% of the company.

It wasn't all smooth sailing as her first app with a friend fell apart, and she had to work Pregnancy+ as a side hustle for many years which meant she worked on it 7pm to 11pm every night while her kids slept.

Instead of retiring after her stint scaling Pregnancy+ inside Philips, she's back doing what she does best, building apps that help women. 28X is a free, privacy-first women's health app where your data never leaves your phone.

This conversation covers how she engineered the exit, what it actually cost her, and why she went back for more.

Charlie Fletcher advised on over 100 M&A and fundraising deals in 2025 as Partner at Mishcon de Reya.

In this episode, he explains how to run exit conversations while fundraising without killing your round, the legal mistakes that destroy founder economics even when deals close, and how to model your exit waterfall at each funding round so you understand what you'll actually make at different valuations.

You'll also learn why £20M+ growth rounds became harder to access after 2021, how to position dual-track strategy to boards that resist it, and why 85% of VC-backed exits happen through M&A rather than IPOs.

If you're raising or thinking about an exit, this will help you prepare better.

The wealthiest people Kiran knows never raised venture capital.

They built businesses, owned 80-90% of the equity, and exited for 7-8 figures.

Kiran Mehta spent four years as a VC at Mercia Ventures.

He invested in 11 companies, sat on every board, and reviewed thousands of pitch decks.

Then he walked away to work directly with founders through Catenae Advisory.

In this episode:

1. Why the wealthiest founders he knows never took VC money
2. The maths VCs won't show you: why your exit needs to be £500m+
3. Why some accelerators are giving founders bad advice
4. Hard work is only a ticket to play, not a guarantee of success
5. How to start your next thing without quitting your job cold turkey
6. Why the warm intro beats the cold pitch deck every time
7. Building a career through relationships and steady steps, not grand leaps
8. Why the UK should stop comparing itself to the US and measure its own progress

If you're thinking about raising venture capital, you absolutely have to listen to this episode

James Green lost $3 million falling for the gung ho propaganda of the tech world. He describes the end of his startup as a period of grief that took 18 months to process. In this episode, James breaks down why Scaled Networks failed, highlighting a 30% worker turn-up rate, and why building software before proving behavior was his primary mistake. He now advocates for the rational startup: building for multi million dollar outcomes and autonomy rather than the venture capital treadmill.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Gung Ho Propaganda. Why survivor bias leads professionals to ignore the 90% failure rate of startups.

• The 30% Trap. Why building an app before proving market behavior through manual simulation was a $3 million mistake.

• The Traction Ladder. How to distinguish between polite feedback and real traction where customers pay more than once.

• Building for Autonomy. Why mid-career founders should target multi million dollar exits instead of unicorn valuations.

Three Founder Takeaways:

1. Failure requires a mourning period. James describes the end of a startup as a grieving process that requires time before starting again.

2. Traction is behavioral. Real traction exists when a customer pays for a product more than once.

3. Ownership drives wealth. A rational exit for $10 million is often a better goal for experienced professionals than a high risk unicorn target.

Connect with James: linkedin.com/in/jamesgreen1

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Matt Williamson and his co-founder James targeted $1.5M for their seed round during YC Demo Day. They walked away with just $750K.

At the time, it felt like failure. A year later, Matt realised it was the best thing that happened to them.

With under $1M raised, zero marketing spend, and a 4-person team, they scaled Vizzly to a life-changing exit to WPP's Gain Theory in under 3 years.

In this episode, Matt breaks down the 100% customer churn that forced a pivot six weeks before Demo Day, why Tom Blomfield told them to stop fundraising and focus on revenue, and how a small preference stack turned a modest exit into a major outcome.

If you've ever wondered whether raising less might actually be more, this one's for you.

Most founders don't understand how venture capital actually works. Sion Evans does. He sits at the top of the capital stack, picking the VCs who pick the founders.

Sion is Managing Director at VenCap, a fund-of-funds that's been in the game for almost 40 years. $2 billion deployed. 500+ fund commitments. Exposure to Google, Airbnb, Stripe, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic.

In this episode, Sion breaks down the venture maths that most founders never see: why top funds lose money on 60% of their deals and still outperform, what a "fund returner" actually means for your startup, and why the top 1% of exits generate over half of all venture returns.

If you're raising capital or thinking about it, this is the episode.

"Give me 50% of the shares and we'll get this thing sold for eight figures within five years."

That was Rachel Murphy's pitch when she joined a small recruitment firm in 2017. Most people would call it delusional. She called it a plan.

1,000 days later, she sold Difrent for £13.3 million. Her team had built the NHS Jobs platform and delivered the UK's COVID home-testing service in just 8 days.

Then came the part she hadn't planned for: the exit left her empty. Her identity was gone. She went to war zones, did plant medicine, and eventually built The Grafter to help other founders avoid the same blindspot.

This is the complete story of building to sell – the hard graft, the highs and surviving what comes after.

For 10 years, Lloyd Lobo told his wife the same thing: "I'm retiring at 40." She thought he was delusional. He'd already burned through $6M on failed ventures.

But Lloyd understood something about neuroscience: when you repeat something in present tense obsessively, your brain rewires to spot the opportunities that make it real.

In 2020, the wire hit his account. Week of his 40th birthday. Exactly as predicted. He'd built Boast AI to $10M ARR with $0 spent on ads. Community replaced his entire marketing budget.

Then 2 weeks later, he was in the ICU unable to breathe.

In this episode, Lloyd shares the unfiltered story of building, exiting, and nearly dying:

• The manifestation neuroscience that actually worked (not vision boards)
• How pizza nights scaled to $10M ARR with zero ad spend
• The Wizard of Oz MVP strategy that beat KPMG
• Why their first conference literally caught fire
• The brutal health cost of success nobody warns you about
• How his wife rebuilt him from ICU to Ironman fitness

I'd love to say this is a highlight reel but it's not. Lloyd talks about being absent at all 3 of his kids' births, the minority shareholder trap after selling majority control, and the moment in ICU when he realised his kids didn't know him.

From refugee to life-changing exit to nearly dying to transformation.

Real stories about exits, scaling, and the messy stuff that doesn't make it into press releases.