Founded & Grounded

Meet the filmmaker who had an arrow aimed at his crew in the Amazon, then inherited a business he never asked for. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/founded. Application times may vary. Rates may vary."This young lad with his shirt off, with a bow and arrow, pulls it tight and aims it at Gus's head. And at that point, Charlie grabs the camera, yanks it down: 'Look behind you, mate. We need to get out of here.'"That's how this episode opens. It's one chapter in one of the most winding routes to running a business we've ever heard.Adam Laister was told to study something with a fallback because his parents didn't think he'd make it in photography. He failed at a sales job, tried to sell surf photos to tourists in Morocco until the locals ran him off the beach, ended up as an extra in American Sniper, and broke his leg two days before Christmas. Then a friend asked if he'd ever thought about being a runner. Seven years at Bristol's Icon Films took him from making teas to filming hippos fighting in Malawi, and on to shoots for Vice and National Geographic.When the TV industry shrank, he co-founded Purpose Built Films to tell the stories that never make the main edit. A month after Adam was made a director, his business partner took a new job and left. The company was suddenly his.In this episode, Adam talks about the Amazon roadblock that ended with his kit smashed and set on fire, losing his dad while filming in the Guyanese jungle, why broadcast TV's middle ground has collapsed, whether audiences will ever watch fully AI-made films, and how he's building a values-led business with a network of freelancers instead of a traditional team.Please note: this episode includes a story about bereavement and a threatening encounter with weapons.3 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. Dead ends aren't stopping points. As Becky puts it, they're opportunities to pivot. Morocco, a broken leg and a closed production company all looked like endings at the time. Looking back, each one pointed to the next step.2. Surround yourself with amplifiers, not blockers. Adam's break came from a camera operator who said, "You crack on, mate", instead of taking the shot himself. When you build your own business, you get to choose your people, so pick the ones who move your work forward.3. Adapt without losing your values. Adam's industry is being disrupted by streaming, YouTube and AI. His response is to adapt the format and the funding while keeping the purpose: environmental stories, told by real people, with integrity.WHAT WE COVER- "Something to fall back on": the parents who didn't think he'd make it- Failing at sales, and getting run off a Moroccan beach selling surf photos- Two weeks as an extra in American Sniper, then a broken leg on 23 December- Runner to camera operator at Icon Films, and the hippo shot that made the title sequence- The Amazon roadblock: surrounded, kit smashed and burned, and the one camera that survived- Losing his dad during a jungle shoot in Guyana, and the van named Joni- Becoming a director in November, then sole owner in December: inheriting a business- Funding films for charities and conservation when nobody has a budget- Building with a network of freelancers instead of a traditional team- Why the mid-budget TV world has collapsed, and "adapt or perish"- AI and filmmaking: the 3D cinema comparison, and does it matter if a story is real?- His advice: get help, invest in yourself, and build alongside your freelance work💬 Adam has a question for you: would you watch content made entirely by AI? Vote in our LinkedIn poll or tell us in the comments.Guest: Adam Laister, Purpose Built Films (Bristol)https://www.purposebuiltfilms.comLinkedIn: Adam LaisterHosted by Ollie Tiramuragan Collard and Dr Becky Sage.🎧 New episodes every fortnight. Search "Founded and Grounded" on your favourite player.👍 If you got value, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow.#FoundedAndGrounded #StartupPodcast #Entrepreneurship #Filmmaking #AccidentalFounder Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week: the founder with one GCSE who bootstrapped his way from roadside marrows to a full agency exit. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/founded. Application times may vary. Rates may vary."No one thought I'm gonna get through school. No one thought I'm gonna go to college. No one thought I'm gonna get to university. F*** it, I'm gonna do a business, 'cause no one's gonna think that either."That's how this episode opens, and it's the engine behind everything Oliver Bruce has built.A military kid who went to seven schools and was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia in an era when teachers just told him to stop being stupid, Oliver left school with a single GCSE in art. At 13, he was selling marrows on the roadside for 20p. At university, he built an app nobody downloaded, noticed businesses would pay for the videos instead, and pivoted into what became Pinpoint Media: a search, social and creative agency he bootstrapped for over a decade without raising a penny, then sold in December 2025.It wasn't a straight line. Oliver gets honest about losing 110K during the pandemic chasing a side venture instead of focusing on the main business, and why even founders of rocket-ship companies have stared down payroll and wondered if they'd make it.Then he opens up on the exit itself: why both sides used professional dealmakers, why he'll never negotiate his own deal again, and the 18 to 24 months of relationship-building that made the sale possible. Plus why retained revenue made the business sellable, what joining a big board has taught him, the burnout that paused his podcast for 14 months, his all-in bet on agentic AI, and the small matter of training to row 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.Please note: this episode contains strong language.3 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. Ask for help as early as possible. Don't grind through it alone to prove a point. Asking is a quick hack; people genuinely want to help, and the founders who ask compound faster than the founders who don't.2. Selling is a fair exchange, not a pitch. From marrows at 13 to agency retainers, Oliver's sales lessons come back to the same thing: trust, timing, and a clear understanding of what the other person actually needs. Get those right and confidence in your price follows.3. Focus is what buys you freedom. Oliver's pandemic side venture brought in lots of turnover and no money. What actually built the business was staying on the core, building recurring revenue, and now learning to use AI well. That stability gives founders the freedom they were chasing in the first place.WHAT WE COVER- Selling marrows at 13, pricing confidence, and why every founder must learn to sell- Cultural differences in selling: the US vs UK gap, from an Alex Hormozi event in Vegas- Seven schools, one GCSE, and the neurodiversity the system missed- The university app that failed, and the accidental agency it became- Bootstrapping for a decade: reinvest everything, raise nothing- Why distribution and strategy matter more than content alone- Losing 110K in the pandemic, and the cost of getting distracted from the mothership- Failure as feedback: "I have failed more times than I have succeeded"- Nearly missing payroll, and why it's far more common than founders admit- The exit: dealmakers, relationships built 18 to 24 months early, and staying friends with your buyer- Why retained revenue makes a business sellable- Life after exit: what a big board teaches you, and how to build one- Burnout, the 14-month podcast pause, and relaunching as The Unlock- Agentic AI, running content with agents, and rowing the Atlantic- His curveball answer: why bother at all?💬 Oliver has a question for you: what's your biggest fear around AI agents? Vote in our LinkedIn poll or tell us in the comments.Guest: Oliver BrucePinpoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.globalWebsite: https://oliverbruce.co.uk | LinkedIn: Oliver BruceThe Unlock podcast: Spotify, Apple and all podcast playersHosted by Ollie Tiramuragan Collard and Dr Becky Sage.🎧 New episodes every fortnight. Search "Founded and Grounded" on your favourite player.👍 If you got value, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow.#FoundedAndGrounded #StartupPodcast #Entrepreneurship #Bootstrapping #FounderStory Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The introvert who was told he looked too free-spirited, and whose software now runs ordering for the UK's biggest food brands. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/founded. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. "This poor lady had to say to me, 'There are concerns that you look a bit free-spirited.' They were worried I was suddenly gonna disappear and become a yoga teacher in Goa or something." Simon Bos has spent more than 20 years building other people's startups at Gravitywell, his Bristol venture studio, watching entrepreneurs' hearts break over cheap builds that couldn't be rescued, and learning exactly what separates the products that work from the ones that die. Then he found his own gap: one of the UK's largest food-to-go manufacturers taking thousands of daily sandwich orders through a call centre. "Three BLTs, two chicken and bacon... no, three chicken and bacon." On the phone. Every day. That absurdity became Mezze, the B2B ordering platform for food manufacturers. Since we recorded this conversation, it has grown into exactly what Simon describes planning here: the platform now handles over £10M of orders a month for names like Samworth Brothers, Pieminister and The Real Wrap Co. It has expanded into AI features and the US market. The playbook he lays out in this episode is the playbook that worked. Along the way: a prime example of being an introvert founder, from months without networking to discovering that one-to-many content is the introvert's cheat code, plus the no-suit mantra, the three-month reset in Laos, and the client work (including the ADHD Love app) that reminds him why any of it matters. 3 KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Cheap builds break hearts. Simon has had to tell founders "there's no way of fixing this, it's gone." Under-investing in your foundation doesn't save money; a bad build is often unrescuable, and rebuilding costs more than doing it properly once. 2. Introversion is a design constraint, not a defect. Simon went months without networking and felt guilty. The fix wasn't forcing himself into rooms; it was one-to-many: content, talks, a strong product. Build the version of visibility that suits your wiring. 3. Perspective is a tool you have to schedule. From regular stakeholder mapping to three months in Laos, Simon's pattern is to step back deliberately. When the day-to-day consumes you, you can't see the business; distance is what shows you where you actually sit in the ecosystem. WHAT WE COVER - 25+ years of Gravitywell: what building hundreds of products teaches you about founders - "Entrepreneurs' hearts breaking": the truth about unrescuable builds - The call-centre absurdity which became Mezze - Spotting your place in the supply chain instead of trying to be the big thing - The introvert founder: networking guilt, one-to-many, and deep 1:1s over room-working - "You look a bit free-spirited": appearance bias, procurement, and the no-suit mantra - The ADHD Love app, body doubling, and the messages that say "it changed my life" - Three months in Laos and what stepping back showed him - Asking for help with an explicit ask, and failure as raw material - Simon's question for you: is introversion a barrier or a gift? 💬 Answer Simon's question in the comments or vote in our LinkedIn poll. Guest: Simon Bos Mezze: https://mezze.io | Gravitywell: https://gravitywell.co.uk | LinkedIn: Simon Bos https://www.linkedin.com/in/sibos/ Hosted by Ollie Collard and Dr Becky Sage. 🎧 New episodes every fortnight. Search "Founded and Grounded" on your favourite player. 👍 If you got value, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow. #FoundedAndGrounded #StartupPodcast #Entrepreneurship #SaaS #IntrovertFounder Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Meet Greg, the adviser who built a career on saying what 1,000+ founders didn't want to hear. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/founded. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. The opener to this episode tells you two things about Greg McCallum: he's funnier than most business advisers, and he's more honest about the cost of the founder life than almost anyone we've had on the show. 3 KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Ask strangers, not friends. The most common founder mistake is failing to ask prospective customers whether the idea is good. Do it early and you're not just validating, you're building a pipeline, learning the language that sells, and writing your first sales playbook for free. 2. Sales is listening, not pitching. Professional sales hires get a three- to six-month ramp before anyone expects a deal, so give yourself the same grace. Never ask for the sale. Understand the need, demonstrate the solution, and let them ask you. 3. Honesty is the strategy. With customers, with investors, and hardest of all with yourself. Audit the skills you actually lack before you buy the domain or design the logo. Self-awareness is cheaper than failure. Greg got kicked out of school at 15. By 16, he was running a restaurant floor. By 18, he'd quietly consulted for almost every bar and restaurant in Oxford. By his mid-twenties, banks were asking him into the boardroom. Then he deliberately took a soul-destroying telemarketing job for a year, because nobody would take his sales advice seriously until he'd done the hard yards himself. That decision led to sales leadership at Booksy (now unicorn status), C-suite roles across startups, and a mentoring practice that has helped over 1,000 founders worldwide, under a name he's turned into a brand: The No Bullshit Adviser. In this episode, Greg gets honest about the mistake almost every founder makes, why working in sales won't teach you founder sales, the AI industry's dirty data secret his new startup Peer is built to solve, and the part nobody talks about: the anxiety, the dark years, and the alliances entrepreneurship never lets you make. Because when it all goes wrong, the question that matters is who you actually call. Please note: this episode contains strong language throughout. Greg is called the No Bullshit Adviser for a reason. WHAT WE COVER - Kicked out of school, child of immigrant entrepreneurs, and managing hospitality floors at 16 - Accidentally becoming Oxford's teenage restaurant consultant - A year of telemarketing to earn the right to give sales advice - Booksy, C-suite roles, and 1,000+ founders mentored - The one bad Trustpilot review that's secretly a five-star review - Why psychometric tests are (mostly) bullshit, and skills audits beat personality labels - Founders Unplugged: the podcast born from client calls that ran three hours over - Peer and the dirty secret of AI: the data ceiling nobody talks about - "Stop preaching work-life balance": Greg's unfiltered take - Anxiety, depression, CBT, and becoming your own therapist - The real sacrifice: friendship, founder loneliness, and why your support network is a survival mechanism - The SaaS bubble, the bootstrapping comeback, and his one piece of advice: two words 💬 Greg's story got us thinking: when it all goes wrong, who is the one person you'd call? Tell us in the comments. Greg also offers a free one-hour, no-strings advisory session to founders and executives. Details on his site below. Guest: Greg McCallum The No Bullshit Adviser: https://www.gregrcmccallum.com/the-no-bs-session Founders Unplugged: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/founders-unplugged/id1688034102 Peer - https://peerlab.ai/peer Hosted by Ollie Tiramuragan Collard and Dr Becky Sage. 🎧 New episodes every fortnight. Search "Founded and Grounded" on your favourite player. 👍 If you got value, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow. #FoundedAndGrounded #StartupPodcast #Entrepreneurship #Sales #FounderAdvice Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The ex-model who turned an exploding kitchen of cauliflower into the pasta brand. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/founded. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. "My husband was just like, 'What's happening?' The kitchen was just an explosion of cauliflower." That's how Sunny & Luna started, and this episode opens with it. Giulia Berretti spent her teens modelling in New York on as little as 800 calories a day, inside an industry that treated food as the enemy. The daughter of a winemaker and a restaurateur, taught to make pasta by her nonna, she walked away. When COVID hit, she rebuilt her relationship with food into a business: vegetable-packed fresh pasta, born in her own kitchen. She sold her first batches to neighbours on Nextdoor, pitched at the Bread & Jam festival with four gnocchi in a plastic bag, and Whole Foods and Planet Organic loved it. She then spent six months knocking on the doors of Italian manufacturers who kept asking "who are you?" until one said yes. When we recorded this conversation, Giulia was days from her first national listing and closing a £500K angel round. Today, Sunny & Luna is on the shelves of Sainsbury's, Ocado, Whole Foods and Planet Organic. Proof that everything she talks about in this episode worked. 3 KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Never compromise on your non-negotiables. When the Ukraine war sent costs spiralling, Giulia held her quality line and raised prices instead of cutting corners, and customers rewarded her for it. Know what you won't trade, and price accordingly. 2. Passion plus authenticity beats playbooks. She built a standout brand in a category nobody had disrupted (fresh pasta) by staying close to what she genuinely knows and loves. Innovation came from her story, not from copying someone else's. 3. Persistence needs patience. "When the train is coming, you don't have to jump straight away." Ups and downs are the job. The founders who make it are the ones who keep going without rushing decisions that compromise the long-term vision. WHAT WE COVER - Modelling in New York at 18: the money, the pressure, and restricting to 800 calories a day - Nonna's kitchen: the pasta-making childhood that became the business - Testing demand on Nextdoor, and pitching retailers with a plastic bag of gnocchi - Six months driving around Italy to find a manufacturer, and selling them the dream - Why she'd never compromise on quality, even when costs exploded - Two days of maternity leave, pitching Ocado ten days after giving birth, and the lesson in slowing down - "A company fails when the founder is tired": mental health, therapy, and switching off - Funding: bootstrapped on modelling savings, then a £500K round from angels who back her - The future of food: real ingredients over fake meat, and Sunny & Luna as a lifestyle brand - Why the business is named after her cats 💬 Giulia has a question for you. See the pinned comment and tell us your favourite. Guest: Giulia Berretti Sunny & Luna: https://sunnyandluna.co.uk | Instagram: @sunnyandlunaeats Hosted by Ollie Tiramuragan Collard and Dr. Becky Sage. 🎧 New episodes every fortnight. Search "Founded and Grounded" on your favourite player. 👍 If you got value, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow. #FoundedAndGrounded #StartupPodcast #Entrepreneurship #FoodStartup #FemaleFounder Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.