Tired of startup hype? So are we.
We bring you the honest, human side of building a business, from founders in the trenches.
Ranked in the top 2.5% of podcasts globally and a top 5 startup podcast in Europe.
Hosted by Ollie Tiramuragan Collard, Becky Sage, Laura Rawlings and Andrew Parsonage
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.
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.
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 25 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
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. Kicked out of school at 15, consulting for Oxford's restaurants by 18, and now mentor to over 1,000 founders worldwide: Greg McCallum has built a brand on brutal honesty. The No Bullsh*t Adviser shares the mistake almost every founder makes, why sales is about listening rather than pitching, the AI data secret behind his new startup, Peer, and the real cost of founder life, from dark mental health years to the friendships that never got made.
