PURPOSE-DRIVEN: BUILDING STARTUPS THAT CHANGE LIVES | PANATHĒNEA 2025

And the journey has been pretty challenging in the beginning, and I'm, I'm sure that finding investors is always like a key to, to kind of make something sustainable. And often, like startups at an early stage, they hit a dead end. They either lose cash or conviction or both. Uh, how did you navigate that phase?

Yeah, so just to explain Chatterbox's business model, when we first started out we were what's known as a hammer in search of a nail. So I had an amazing resource that I thought I'd identified, and that resource was refugee talent. You know, my family are refugees from Afghanistan. My mom in Afghanistan was a civil engineer. My dad was a math professor at Kabul University. And in the UK, the 6th or 7th largest economy in the world, depending on which year you look, My dad became a builder and my mom became a cleaner. And you all know stories like this. I don't need to explain the taxi drives you've had talking to former politicians, your cleaner who has maybe a master's degree. So this is a huge issue. And I was like, in this talent-starved market, surely there's a home for these, these people. And at the same time, you know, my mom's story inspired me again. My mom used her language skills to become a language teacher, and to get into skilled work again. And really, at Chatterbox, we've just built software that makes that more scalable. So using our software, anyone here can become a language teacher if you have a degree and if you have the right sort of presentation skills. And so we take that technology, we give it to refugees, women returning to the workforce after having career breaks, and over-50s who are finding it a challenge to get work. And they use that technology to become teachers, build their confidence, build their experience, and we package it and sell it to some of the biggest companies in the world. You know, our clients are Visa, PwC, Bacardi. We've worked with Unilever, like you name it. So hyper-commercial but hyper-impactful. That's, that's for me the, the, the sweet spot of entrepreneurialism, when you can really believe in a mission, but you're also able to make a return. I think investment was very challenging because when you say the word refugee in a pitch to an investor, that's going to turn off about 90% of people. It was a real challenge.

The cap table is 50% impact investment and 50% traditional VC. Yes. It's a rare mix. How did you come to that conclusion that this is the way you want to go?

I think entrepreneurs often think about their business model and how to make that successful, and I don't think they think as much about funding startup fit as much as they think about product-market fit, because the funding that you can access is very much determined by the type of company that you have and the type of founder that you are. When you're an impactful startup, everyone will refer you on to impact investors. But I'm going to level with you here because I'm not a friend to investors. I am a friend to founders. So founder openness and honesty here. The impact investment space in Europe is broken. It does not function. It did not function when we raised our first round of investment 4 years ago. It hadn't changed much 3 years ago. And today, Chatterbox is a big enough company that people are coming to us and want to invest in our companies. So that valley of death that affects a lot of startups, it's not just a valley, it's like a crater to the center of the earth if you're an impact startup. So really, Chatterbox is an 8-year journey. The first 4 years was me playing the game in social impact, doing the funding, doing the startup pitching competitions. applying to the funding, you know, application incubators and all this kind of stuff. 4 years on, we'd made such little progress that I just decided to ignore completely the impact space and fully focus on commercial investors. And that's when the company really took off. So that's more of a reflection of our pivot towards commercial investors.

So the impact investors are like, oh, we love your idea, we love what you're trying to do, Let me get back to you after my vacation in Tuscany, and then it never happens.

I mean, just think psychologically, right? The urge to make money is so much more urgent than the urge to have an impact. You can have an impact tomorrow, but you need to feed your family today. So in that basic level, the timeline to make a return for investors, for commercial funds, is much stricter. Whereas when you're in the world of making people feel good about the investments that they have, And if it's such a tiny amount of money as there is currently in social impact investment compared to all of the VC and commercial investment there is, people are just going to take their time. And, and the real truth is they're going to invest more so in commercial models than impact models. So, you know, when I talk the language of CAC and LTV instead of theories of change, the money comes in faster and it's bigger checks.

That's great. And I think the most important element here is the, the focus you had right from the get-go, the clarity. A lot of companies, a lot of startups, they struggle at that particular stage. They're like, okay, I'm going to raise Series A, Series B, Series C, even I go IPO, and then maybe somebody else will figure out how to make money. But in your case, I think the clarity was right from the get-go. And there are a lot of youngsters here who would want to kind of have a similar kind of clarity and do a gut check at some point. Like, if that's the idea they want to go through, what are the parameters they need to sort of, you know, figure out or consider before taking that plunge? How would you— how would you—

So the question is, how does a founder know if they found the right problem?

Exactly.

I think it's when you're working on it in the evening and no one's asking you. It's like if I was actually working on another startup idea that was a better team, more money, more commercial. And I was working on that during the day, and in the evening I was working on the idea behind Chatterbox. Like, the startup journey is hard, and when you give up, you fail. And sometimes people fail and give up after 3 years of their life has been invested and they've made all the sacrifices. The best thing you can do is pick a problem that you actually care about. Now, we talked about this the other day, and, you know, most entrepreneurs also want to make money, right? That's great. Money is energy, and having energy to create the change you want in the world is a good thing. But if all you want to do is make money, what's the difference between you and everyone else? What's your differentiator as a founder in the first place? Everyone wants to make money. You know, the person playing the guitar, you know, in one of the tourist attractions I was at is trying to make money. It's when you have a niche that you're so passionate about that you will become the world's leading expert. That's how passionate you have to be. Are you really that passionate about payday loans? Are you really that passionate about Google Ads? Yes. Finding the right problem that you will read about for fun, that is the first step to knowing that you have found the right problem. And then the second step is how quickly can you turn it into money? We started becoming revenue generating after 1 month. And I think that's the PMF kind of second— the other aspect is, does the world want what you have to offer? That's the other step.

So what are the things that you learned along the way, the things that you probably wouldn't have done and, you know, that you would want to share here amongst all of us today that like, you know, please don't go down that path. I've been there. Yeah, let's not go there.

First of all, to all the founders in this audience, just so much love to you. Like, I'm 8 years into this journey. It's so fun. You're going to learn so much wherever you are, and it's worthwhile. These are the things I wish I'd known day one. Number one, read the book The Magic Box, uh, Paradigm or Paradox. I can't remember what it is. Your investors, the people who will give you money, already know how they're going to make money from their startup, you need to be just as clear. And that book is a fantastic framework for you to understand how you can position yourself in a great way to help your company exit. Not everyone's going to have a huge IPO. Fantastic if you do. Most startups exit to other startups or other, you know, corporate entities. So reading that book and being actually really clear in your own head how, how you're actually going to get a return from your years and years of hard work and investment That book will outline things like make sure you're known as a thought leader, known by others in your industry. We're at the stage now where we're not only being approached by investors, but also acquisition and merger propositions are also coming in. And that's probably because, you know, I've become a thought leader in my space a little bit, completely by accident. But I would have cultivated that a bit more. The second thing I would have done is be extremely careful and thoughtful about how you want to that this journey to feel. I think there's an over— I would say even a reification of venture capital and that really narrow way of building a business, which is, you know, drive fast and it's okay if you crash the car as long as you tried something risky. And I don't know if everyone here really wants that to be the journey that they're on. We went on that journey sort of took the first exit we could. We were like, wow, this is not suitable for an impact startup. But yeah, I think really carefully about how much money do you actually have to raise to build the type of company that you want, and don't get overly sold by the amazing champagne receptions that VCs are going to throw at you.

So the key part is like not to get taken— blown away by the traditional Silicon Valley blueprint. maybe like think either outside of it or beyond it, especially if you're coming from a place like Europe?

Yeah, I think second-time founders are probably more so likely to be thinking about these things, about how they want the journey to feel, what kind of company do they really want to build, what the exit that they're happy to have will be, or if they want it to be a lifestyle business. I think first-time founders are just, you know, learning this for the first time, and it's really easy to be bought into the sexy Silicon Valley, you know, way of the world. And I think that spending a little bit of time that most people probably don't have thinking about what do I want it to feel for me as an entrepreneur. You can be an extremely successful business owner without being, you know, some sort of prototype of Elon Musk.

That's a good one. Scaling up is one of the essential aspects of, you know, making a startup sustainable. So is reinventing, like, with every stage. How much reinvention has happened from the get-go up till you brought the startup to this point?

Oh, just huge. I'm— you're going to— everyone's going to pivot, right? And if you're not pivoting, you're probably doing it wrong. You're probably not reading the feedback that the market is giving you. Chatterbox started off selling our language learning product delivered by refugees and other marginalized professionals to universities. Universities were cash poor and, you know, not likely to spend as much as we wanted. We pivoted to B2C. We found that we had a 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio. Great. We looked at how much investment we'd need to have to capture a decent size of the market, and we were like, you know, we're not going to beat Duolingo in raising that kind of cash. And we started to receive inbounds from B2B. At each stage, the story that I told about Chatterbox has changed. I honestly think that if you're the CEO founder, your number one job is storytelling. Your number one job is being able to tell the story of your company in the way that it can achieve what it wants to in the world. And I spend actually a really long time every time we have one of these changes retelling that story. And I think I've become a really good storyteller.

So what's the process like? What was the process like? You know, just like, like a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer, you just step back and like have your notes. Okay, this is what my startup is, step 1. Yeah, this is how I'm gonna tell my story. Did that process start at the back end, or it just came at once? Like, you know, this was in your idea, in your head, the idea was in your head, you didn't have to kind of do a lot of hard work to put it on the paper? What's the key?

Well, at every stage you're selling your business, whether you're selling it to your clients, whether you're selling it to investors, whether you're selling it to strategic partners. Your job is a salesperson's job, and it's exactly the same process to creating a sales deck as it is creating a fundraising deck. You're, you're selling a piece of your company to someone else. So it's— I don't think it's any different to, to any other kind of sales activity the organization will have. So use exactly the same tools. Of course, the psychology is different, and you need to spend a good amount of time understanding investor and funder unit economics and how they think about the returns for themselves to be able to pitch to them. But that's the same as working with any type of client, right? You need to think, put yourself in their shoes and think about how you can position yourself to solve their problems.

And the social focus, which is like core— at the core of your startup, is something you have never diverted from. You're still on that. And in fact, you have taken a cue from there to involve other people as well. So what's the inclusion like? You've gone beyond refugees to women, and what other layers of society are you attracting?

Yeah, if anyone here is like rolling their eyes at the idea of building a social impact business, okay, I would simply ask you to look at consumer trends and business trends towards social and economic governance and environmental governance in organizations. Over 90% of the S&P 500 report their ESG goals in their annual and quarterly reports, okay? 60% of consumers make purchasing decisions based on whether they think that the company they're buying from is socially conscious, okay? And Gen Z are even more so aligned with that than millennials— us millennials are. And I'm assuming there's a lot of millennials in this audience. So the general trend of the world is towards that, because realistically, we cannot continue with the system of economic and social governance that's in the world right now. We will go extinct, literally. So Everyone is catching up with that. And the best thing you can do as a founder is to build for the future world. If the world is moving in the direction of veganism, environmental and social governance, social justice, peacebuilding, then building for that world is just good strategy, right? Then the second argument for that is we've been through so much. You know, we, as a startup, we went through the eye rolls when I would mention refugees as teachers. You know, the first pitch I ever did was to a social impact investor who was like, are there even enough refugees that can teach? That kind of thing. And I was like, oh God, this is going to be a real uphill battle, right? We rode the wave of the huge crash in investment for startups that happened just after COVID, just after we raised our pre-seed round. And we knew— I knew that we weren't going to raise again because we weren't an AI startup. Having to pivot towards a cash flow positive business, bootstrapping. It's been hard. The best testament to me is how well I've been able to retain my team. One of our software engineers is reaching his 6th or 7th year with the business, right? Through all of these ups and downs. And it's because every morning on a Monday, when I sit in front of them, I say, you know that bullshit that we saw in the news? What's happening in Gaza, what's happening in the environmental degradation around our world, we are one piece of the solution to building a better future compared to that. There's nothing more motivating to people than that sense of purpose in a time of uncertainty and loss and challenge.

The return is also great that there is empowerment of truly disadvantaged, and you're able to pinpoint that talent and say, okay, here's what— who I'm going to work with. And there is a return to that too, which is fantastic.

You know, you and I talked yesterday evening, and tell me if this was true or not, but we talked about how we were going to cover these topics together. And I said to you, you know what, if we have this conversation and we inspire even a few of the entrepreneurs and founders in this audience, to pivot their business model to be a bit more conscious about social impact, we would have done something really impactful. And you looked really motivated when I said that, and I was like pumped as well. It's just energizing to benefit your community, and I think that is a secret sauce really if you could cultivate it.

I think that's a brilliant place to end this conversation, and it's amazing to talk to you and be with you on that stage. Real honor, and I love Greece, Athens, brilliant city, beautiful city, and I mean, this event is fantastic, isn't it? Like, everybody is—

Oh my God, congratulations. What an amazing inaugural year.

A round of applause.