Hattie Willis, Co-Founder @ IfWeRaise

Hi everyone, welcome back to The Graduate Guy. Today we have Hattie Willis with us. Welcome, Hattie.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you. We wanted to do this episode for a really long time, so I'm just going to give a little introduction of Hattie. She does a lot of things, a bit difficult to pin it down to something, but I would say she is there to really improve the startup ecosystem, give better opportunities for founders. She has a company called Guessworks where she teaches startup accelerators, companies about entrepreneurship. She's also a founder herself of a VC called If We Race, or company, not a VC, not a VC yet. And she also has her own podcast where she interviews startup founders, so we have a similarity. And yeah, welcome.

Thanks, so excited to be here and hopefully useful episode for your listeners.

Yeah, great. So maybe we can go back to your uni days. What was your career outlook like when you were at university? Were you always kind of thinking about startups, or what did you think you were going to become at that time?

Yeah, so at university I studied history, so entrepreneurship was not really on the horizon. I guess when I started my degree, I thought maybe I'd become an academic. I did love history. I really— that was like a very near miss to me. I was like, well, whether I went down the MA route and tried to then do a PhD, or the other thing I was thinking was marketing. So, I was towards the end of my degree applying for lots of marketing-style grad schemes, and the one I was most excited about being with United Biscuits, because I do love biscuits, so I thought that would be a good, you know, passion fit, and I could eat my weight in biscuits every day. But actually, while I was at university, in, I think, my— yes, in my second year, there was an opportunity to, I guess, get a flavour of what it meant to run a business. So, we had— my university had colleges, and each college, some of them had bars. Most of them weren't student-run, they were run by the college. We were one of the last student-run bars in Oxford at the time. I think about 3 other bars also claimed to be the last student-run bar, so I should be careful and say one of the last. And I applied to kind of run the bar with my housemate at the time, and he was a treasurer, I was the bar manager, and so I was getting this, I guess, introduction to what it meant to run a business. To try and make a profit, to try and think about margins. It was actually a really hard business model to make work because, as I guess our listeners will feel very strongly, students don't want to pay a lot for drinks, but also you need to keep the bar afloat and there's infrastructure costs. Like, we needed things like new sofas and new ice machine, which, like, small cost for a business, but actually for us were huge. So I was learning a lot doing that, also learning as a woman how how to negotiate with people who probably thought I shouldn't be doing the job. So lots of our suppliers at the time were quite dismissive of me. If I sent a supervisor who was a woman to supervise the delivery of the, like, kegs, they would get really annoyed with me because they were used to, like, us sending big brawling men and they would, like, help with the delivery, but actually they weren't supposed to be. So yeah, I learned a lot doing that. And one day when I was doing that, a guy walks into the bar. I was actually doing stocktake, it was a Sunday, I really kind of didn't want to be there if I'm honest, I was very ready to go home and crash, and this alumni walks into the bar and starts telling us about he's a startup founder and he used to go to the college and he has this really cool company that does mobile gifting. So the idea really simply was, let's say I'm missing a podcast episode, which we had a few where I couldn't make it, so I'm I might send you a beer as an apology gift or a brownie, and you can redeem it at a restaurant or a bar. And so he, I guess, had this love of his old university, love of his own college, and wanted us to be one of their first venues in Oxford. And it quite quickly became very clear that was never going to work because they were charging £5 for a pint and no student was going to pay £5 for a pint. And so we I thought I was very polite and told him very nicely it wasn't going to work. He says to this day I was very grumpy, but we kind of sent him away and he gave us as a parting gift a kind of little card and it had a free beer on it. And obviously we weren't a venue, so, but we could, we could redeem it at another venue in Oxford. So really kind. And then I think a week later I come back into the bar I'm supervising, so I'm not working yet, but I'm just checking in every half an hour between writing my essay. And I see he's at the bar and I think, "Oh, how lovely, he's come back." Turns out he was sat there giving out these free pints, but for other venues. So I was slightly unimpressed, to say the least. And I asked him quite abruptly to leave because I was like, "We can't afford this. Like, we're a tiny bar, really struggling to kind of stay afloat with these tiny, tiny margins." students are not drinking as much as they used to, which maybe not a bad thing, but bad for our bottom line. And so he actually ended up leaving, sending me a really sweet apology email and suggested, look, we still need to kind of get people using the app. Could we run an event with you? So instead of me coming and giving away free pints for other bars, why don't we pay for all the drinks for a night? You can attract people and have like a big night at the bar, and we get access to everyone as long as they download the app. So we did that. He had a few pints and started talking about he had this social media team that he just got rid of in Berlin, and did I want to be their social media person? Because I was behind the bar promoting us on Facebook at the time. I don't think I really knew what Instagram was. I definitely was like not on Twitter. And I was like, yeah, this sounds great. Like, I'm a poor student, I want any income I can get. And so I I guess I kind of pestered him for the next month to get that social media job, and I still remember exactly where I was on Oxford High Street when he emailed to say, okay, let's, let's try it. And I thought, I don't know anything about social media, like nothing. I'm studying history, I'm running a bar, I really don't know what— but I kind of backed myself to learn on the way. And so back to your original question, entrepreneurship was something that wasn't anything to do with my degree. It wasn't really something I was thinking about as a career, but it was an opportunity that I got exposed to, and then I just fell in love with it. And I think, you know, there was a sweetener to the deal, which was I could have unlimited free cocktails and free brownies with the app. So I was like, that's great. But honestly, what I loved most was this sense of I could have an idea in the morning and go and test it with customers in the afternoon. And I was like 18, 19. This was like so addictive to me. And so actually, when I kind of was leaving uni and that first company had kind of failed, but actually the investors, the founder liked what I've been doing enough that they kind of introduced me to other founders in their network. And so I ended up working with a load of different startups, very different business models, and started to realize I just loved this space and that actually maybe it was somewhere I wanted to work. But it wasn't until— and I thought maybe I'd have my own startup, but one of the companies I ended up working with did entrepreneurship education. So they went into universities, they went to ecosystems like Estonia that were really investing in, like, how do we build up entrepreneurship skills? And they taught some of the core things that founders should know to not fall into really common traps. And so I said, very cheekily, having worked for this company for a while, but then stopped because I went to finish my degree, I've got an idea for a startup, but I feel like I know enough that there are all these common traps. I suspect I'm going to fall into all of them. Is there any way I could go on one of the training courses that I've been helping kind of grow and promote? Could I come on one? And so I actually went. It was King's University, and I went along and kind of helped with some of the— I think I recorded the workshop. I think I did like some of the setup for it, but I got to kind of sit in as a student and learn as well. And the founder, who had originally— I'd kicked out of a bar, had agreed to this on two principles. One, that I would help a bit on the day, and the second, that he could buy me lunch and pitch me a job. And I was like, I like lunch and I like jobs. I was like, again, poor student mentality, like, please, please, please, yes. And he pitched me a job to join his innovation consultancy that he had then moved to. And yeah, I joined that and worked there for about 6 years. And so I guess for me, entrepreneurship wasn't one of those paths where I always knew I'd do it. I wasn't the person who was always hustling and selling things at school. You know, I used to do car washes with a friend when we needed to make money and those kind of little things, but I was never— here's so many stories of people who have always just had that deep, deep entrepreneurial gene, and I never saw myself as having that. But I got exposed to it by complete accident and just fell for it. Hook, line, sinker.

Yeah, I think there's an interesting story of like that you managed a bar and just kind of got that exposure for actually like an experience and then saw what it's like. And I think that's the nice thing about studying a social science is that you don't have a, a preset path, right? Like history, like, okay, you can be an academic and historian, but you're not necessarily going to do that. So then you can do anything basically.

Great.

So when you started to work at the innovation and consulting company, were you still in the startup or what were you doing in the first, like, 6 years of your career?

So hilariously, they— and bless him, he knows this, we laugh about it— so the original founder, I've now worked with him in, like, 4 companies, we're really great friends still to this day, haven't kicked him out of a bar, and he'd kind of pitched, look, you're someone who's very driven by impact, why don't you work with, you know, we want to get into universities, why don't you work with universities, and why don't you work with 'ecosystems.' We do also do corporate innovation, but I don't think you'll really want to touch that. And we do also have a startup accelerator, but I don't think that's going to be right for you either. So let's do the universities and the ecosystems. So I worked there 6 years, never worked with a single university or ecosystem. We did do once a tender for an ecosystem development, but sadly we priced it too high. So I, so I started off as a project manager and we were running innovation projects and we were working with clients like Jaguar Land Rover, Lloyds Banking Group, were my two first kind of big clients. And with Jaguar Land Rover we were setting up a startup studio, with Lloyds Banking Group we were doing a kind of little mini pop-up lab to test new ideas, and I loved it. And I think I was quite surprised by how much I loved it because I had this idea that corporate innovation was going to be quite stale, but the people were amazing, I I really enjoyed giving people a chance to learn new skills and watch them kind of grow. And in the beginning, I wasn't running any of the workshops or training, but I was kind of running the programs. And I increasingly realized, and actually I think one of the programs I ran kind of a couple years in, one of the founders turned around to me and said, "Hattie, why are you doing this role? Like, you shouldn't be doing this role. Why aren't you the one teaching?" like, what, why are you— this isn't— this doesn't feel like a good fit for you. And that really got me thinking, and I ended up pitching to this founder boss at the time, I'd really like to actually start delivering some of these workshops and training. I've joined a load of them, and I, and I pitched at him as saying, I have kind of 3 hypotheses. I have a hypothesis that I'll enjoy it, and I'll get energy from it, have a hypothesis that I'll be good at it, and I have a hypothesis that if the other two are true, it'll be really good for the company because then there's another person who can go and do this. And so they kind of agreed and actually trained me up to become a workshop, uh, someone who could actually design workshops and deliver them. And they really— huge credit— they really invested in me. They got me an incredible coach trainer, a guy called Devin Hunt, who's just truly exceptional at this. They gave me hours and they gave me some really big workshops to run pretty early, and I loved it. And I still remember my first workshop, it was so nerve-wracking because it was for a big, big client, and that client had not been terribly happy with another facilitator they'd had. So I think they'd said— and they'd previously had the CEO of the whole company, so they'd kind of had the CEO of the company, then they had a different facilitator, they didn't like the different facilitator, so they'd said We'll try one more, and if we don't like them, we only want the CEO of the company, who was not thrilled about having to deliver workshops for the rest of, you know, this client's purchasing with us. And so he said to me, Hattie, you really can't mess this up. And I was thinking, this is my first ever workshop, it's terrifying. What if they— other facilitators have been here for years, what if they don't like me? And so I ran this workshop, and it was quite funny, the CEO came up to me afterwards and said, Hattie, that was awesome. And I was like, thanks. And he was like, 'Do you know why I said the word awesome?' I said, 'No.' And he said, 'You said the word awesome at the end of every single sentence.' I was so nervous about whether I was doing a good job that subconsciously I didn't feel I could pause at the end of saying anything. So rather than have a pause, I would just finish the sentence, awesome, finish the sentence, awesome. And, um, yeah, but luckily the client liked it and did think it was awesome. And so started running workshops and training Eventually became head of training, and so was designing whole accelerator programs for clients, new kind of training, new workshops, new courses. I then, after a certain point, kind of had this hypothesis. We were working a lot with clients that were all around the world, and they were kind of struggling because they'd have to get— if they wanted to run an international accelerator for the global company, they'd have to bring in lots of different people. And that was really expensive. Like, you've got people flying in from America and Finland and Copenhagen. And so I started to realize that we needed maybe to have like a digital version of this. This is a few years before COVID And so I kind of pitched, I think we should make a digital product that takes all of the learning we do and makes it scalable. And then, A, we can sell it to these clients that have this problem of how do we get everyone together, but also like it's a much cheaper product for us to run, so we make better margins. And so again, the company very kindly backed the idea and invested in it and gave me budget. And I did— it was like a small budget, and I really hacked together this digital learning course. I sold it to a client actually before we delivered it, which actually gave me some more budget. And, um, yeah, so I had quite a few different roles at that company, always evolving. And I think, I guess, if it's helpful for anyone listening Every time I made a transition, I asked myself a couple of questions. One is like, what does— what energizes me about my current role? So what do I really enjoy? Where do I come away and I'm grinning ear to ear? And so in that first transition to workshops, like every time I came out of a workshop, even though I wasn't running them, everyone's energy in it was addictive. So I was like, okay, I can see these energy points. And then I thought about what am I not doing that I've done before that I really enjoyed? And at school, I had loved performing, like any play I wanted to be, you know, like if I'm being honest, I wanted to be the lead. And like I loved, I loved, loved, loved being on stage. Got a massive buzz from it, loved public speaking, and I wasn't doing any of that. And I also loved writing and kind of creativity. And again, wasn't doing any of that. And so increasingly I would kind of pitch these pivots in my career that were about how do I get more of the things that energize me and more of the things that I love?

I think that's like probably as a student, one of the hardest things to do, right? Because you're in that like pressure bubble of getting a job as soon as you graduate. And then maybe one or two years later down the line, you kind of realize, ah, this is not really for me. And I think with that philosophy of actually trying to figure out what is it that I really like to do and I'm not doing at the moment is like really helpful.

So sorry, and just on that, if it's helpful, I still remember the bit of advice my dad first gave me when I was coming out of university and I went back to him when I'd been offered this job at the innovation consultancy, my first ever like proper job. I remember going to my dad and saying, should I take it? Like, what do you think? Is it a good idea? And he said to me, A, I mean, like, it doesn't sound like there's anything bad about it, so yes. But he said, you've got to get out of this mindset that you've got to pick the right career now. He said, your career is a marathon, not a sprint. And you can— he said, every job should be teaching you something, and it doesn't have to be that that's the right path. So it's— he kind of instilled in me this idea that it's as valuable in your first job to realize, I hate everything about this, I don't want to be in the space, I don't want to be in the sector. What an amazing thing to learn, like, super quickly. I mean, not enjoyable, but amazing to learn super quickly. And he'd had a very, you know, squiggly career path himself. He studied to be a lawyer and then became a priest and then became a fundraiser for a charity and then started doing kind of funerals. So he's gone all over the place. And I think I'd seen him I guess, prove that to me, that you don't have to have it all worked out, that you can make these big pivots when you realize actually it's not bringing what you need.

Yeah, I think it's— I agree with you because it's like, ultimately, the fact that you realize that something really isn't for you and then you have the courage to quit and do something else, like, that already, right, is something. Um, and so, like, now for students, right, you're doing, like, all these accelerators now and, like, workshops for companies, and I'm curious, like, Of course, now I think it's changed, like, at least in the people that I'm with, there's so many students already that come with startup ideas and really want to do their own thing, or thinking about, you know, doing it in a couple of years. So I'm really curious, what would you say is like a good startup accelerator, or like what is a good workshop if I was to identify that as a student?

So I guess two things. So we do a lot of work with universities, so check what your university runs. I didn't do any of that at Oxford, and I regret it. Like, there was a ton of resources I just never used, and so, because I didn't know it existed. And actually, I would go and search, and in your university it might be called something like Enterprise, it's often called, or it might be called Innovation, or it might be called Accelerator. But go and have a little look, because most universities have something, and maybe it's evolving and getting stronger and better, but most will have something. So I would, I would look at what provision there is at your university. I think in terms of accelerator, there are so many, and honestly, it's hard to say what's best because it really depends on you. There are, there are accelerators that have the best reputation, so Y Combinator still has an incredible reputation, but they're getting very, very big in terms of their cohort size. You don't get the same support you used to get if you went through it. Still really good reputation and will help you, but Yeah, but what I find with a lot of accelerator programs is they're slightly pushing you towards getting investment for your startup. And my company, If We Raise, our whole, I guess, thesis and why I was very deliberate— we're not a venture capital fund ourselves, and I don't know— no, no, no, but, and I think a lot of people get it confused because we're talking about how do we get more investment into the space. But a big thing for us and why we're called If We Raise, it's not because we're not optimistic that the right founders will raise. We want to back every founder who comes through us to the hilt. We don't want to take a kind of unoptimistic approach. It's because we don't think every founder should raise for themselves, for the journey that they want to go on as individuals, and also sometimes for the company. Not every company can handle an injection of capital that's really big. Not every company can pitch to investors and get backed because sometimes the company actually doesn't fulfill what an investor would need it to. And so a big thing for me is before you go into an accelerator that is touting, you know, we'll put you in front of these investors and we'll help you raise, which a lot of them will do, I would really be asking yourself some questions first about what I want out of this company. And actually, is it that I want to create a lifestyle for myself that I really enjoy today, that isn't pressured, that allows me to manage anxiety, that allows me to manage stress, where I'm not working crazy hours, that might not be as compatible with things like venture funding as other routes. And so I would really encourage founders— yes, I love accelerators, I teach on a ton of them, I think they're incredible— but to actively do some questioning first about why you want to do this startup. And then I would say there's a couple of books. So even before, like, workshops, there's a couple of books I would read. Um, one is called The Lean Startup. It's been around 13 years or so now, it's not new, but it's still really helpful. And the basic principle of The Lean Startup is our ideas start as piles of gases, and we've been kind of taught as founders that we should be trusting our intuition, that it's about gut instinct and sticking with it through everything and persevering when everyone tells you no. Perseverance is important because lots of people will tell you no, But that needs to be data-driven perseverance. You need to be testing with real customers much earlier whether, in the first place, they even care about what you're doing. So, the idea behind Lean Startup is how do we get quick data to test our assumptions that's maybe not going to be statistically huge numbers of people saying yes or no, but is going to give us an indication of whether we should keep going. So, just enough data to keep going, just enough data to tell you when to change your idea or tweak it. So Lean Startup is amazing. Another book I think every founder should read, and most founders I interview on the podcast, this is one of the favorite books that comes up so often, it's called The MOM Test, with the American spelling M-O-M, by a guy called Rob Fitzpatrick. So Lean Startup is by a guy called Eric Ries, and The MOM Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is this brilliant approach. If you say that in The Lean Startup we need to go and get this data of does anyone care. The Mum Test is a really practical guide of how to start doing that just with conversations. So how can I interview you to find out if you're likely to want, need, and use my idea without biasing you? The reason it's called The Mum Test is because in Rob's life, at least, his mum is the person who's most biased about him. Like, Rob, you're amazing. Rob, you're incredible. You can do no wrong. And so for him, he wanted to devise a methodology where he could even interview his mum about an idea and find out whether she would want, use, and need it without bias, without it being this bias of actually she's just going to tell me I'm great. And so that is a brilliant book, and I think those two books are really helpful because certainly when I had my idea and I went to that training company and said, can I come and join these free sessions, those sessions killed my idea. And thank God I would have invested so much time, energy, effort, probably money in trying to do something And I was going about it totally wrong. And I think it's really important to kind of, yeah, find some tools early that will help you do that testing. And we have a resource which we can link in the show notes called the First Time Founders Roadmap, which is free resource through If We Raise, and it outlines some of these steps that we think any founder should go through to test their idea. And I'd actually recommend doing that before you go on a fully blown accelerator, because sometimes they do have a kind of move towards investment, and that might not be right for you, and we don't want to assume it is.

So in the startup ecosystem, I think my perception is sort of changing a little bit now anyway. So I feel a couple of years ago, VCs or angels used to throw a lot of money at startups and be like, 5 mil, 10 mil, like, go. And now, um, at least that's what I'm being told, is that you need more proof of traction at the moment. And it's not even the best idea to just have, you know, 5 million, but product-market fit is not there, like, what are you going to do with them, with all that cash? Um, what's your view on how things are right now in the ecosystem? Like, obviously you are a strong advocate for bootstrapping if you can, or first getting more traction. Um, do you think it's changing now with VCs? Like, are they a bit more careful or hold back? What, what type of startups do get investment now also from, from angels?

Yeah, so we're definitely seeing— so part one is VCs have kind of historically needed more traction than angels anyway, so traction being proof points, often around have you got users, have you got something, ideally have you got revenue, kind of in the hierarchy revenue's become even more important. I think what's changed is that there definitely did used to be this kind of growth at all costs, we'll work out how to kind of monetize the business model later. And so we've seen this with some huge companies that have actually always just really have done really well for growth. So think about Citymapper, massive company, lots of us will have used it, it's like an alternative map for cities, and really great product, but they've always struggled to work out how to make money from it. Same with Clue, an incredible startup for menstrual tracking, incredible, love it, really struggle to make money out of it. And so I think VCs are simultaneously seeing that they're having to do huge layoffs in the companies they have backed at a later stage, but we're definitely seeing lower valuations at the moment. We're definitely seeing that you need more traction points. I think sadly some of the— I think that's actually in some ways the good side of it, that actually founders, what's best for founders, which is having a bit more optionality. So if you have revenue, you can actually start to make some choices about, is it going to be faster to grow that revenue to a point where we're profitable, or is it faster to get investment, and which is the right choice for my company? I think that's really exciting, and I kind of hope it lasts. I worry that once the, the kind of economic environment becomes better, that that will go again a bit. Um, but I think that's really exciting. I think what's not good is that in times of economic uncertainty, we see investors revert to bad patterns. So it's still so much easier to get money if you're a white, public school educated, Oxbridge educated guy. It's going to be much easier for me as a white, Oxbridge educated woman to get money than it is if you're a Black female founder, or if you've not gone to the university that they see as "right." I'm doing air quotes for anyone listening online. So I think my worry is that it makes it harder to get capital for groups that have always been under-backed and overlooked, because investors get more cautious, and cautious to them means more reliance on what we call affinity bias. Affinity bias being if I have an affinity with someone, they look like me, trigger something in me that makes me think they're going to be great because that reflects something of why I think I'm great, then I'm more likely to back them. And so that does really worry me about the ecosystem at the moment, which is why we have a big focus on how do we back more underrepresented founders? How do we— so for instance, if we raise, we're building a pool of angel investors who are actively looking to support more underrepresented founders, and we're trying to do that so that they have not just like more advice and more mentorship because Often these groups are over-mentored and underfunded, but so that they can work out if funding is right for them, first question, how do they get into these ecosystems and get the introductions? Because we're still seeing these warm introductions are what get people funding, which shouldn't be the case, but is. Yeah, yeah.

And I was actually gonna touch on that earlier on, but the fact that you work with under-reserved founders, and I mean, numbers are a bit bleak, you know, like I think 2% of, I mean, if it's VC-backed investment, 2% of women-led startups It's like the percentage that compared to like 90% are led by men in the UK at least. So how do you, and I think at the same time there is push for diversity, but I actually had another guest on called Tunde, and he was very strong talking about the fact that yes, there is some change, but ultimately like VCs, they don't really care. There might be at the front some talk about, oh, we're going to invest in XYZ, but at the end of the day, at least for big investors, you just want to make money. Um, so what do you think if you are an underdog founder building your idea when you're really young? Um, do you think it's even smart to want to raise from VCs, or, um, because the chances are so low? Yeah, you have more positivistic to be like, oh yeah, your chances are low, but still go for it and try that route, and doesn't matter.

So, so it's a— so I think it's really important to be nuanced in this. So I think firstly, I would never encourage anyone to limit their aspiration based on in the system. Never. Someone's got to break it, right?

Right.

Someone has to be the difference, the change, because if we want those numbers to change, ultimately the only way it changes is if more people are backed. So if we encourage everyone to move away from those spaces, those numbers don't change. That said, what I would say is don't play a broken game if you don't need to. So if you want to go and get VC backing because your company needs it, because you are really excited by that massive growth curve and that's the journey you want to go on, Amazing. VC is a really exciting path, but if that's not right for you and the company, don't waste your time and energy when it's going to be harder anyway. Let's be— and let's be— I think we need to get the balance between not kind of kowtowing to this brokenness and also not being ignorant of the fact that exists, because then we don't support those founders more, and they, they do deserve more support proactively because this space is so broken, and they're going to have to go through just inordinate extra mental tolls. And I don't say that to try and put someone off it, I just say it so that they can go into it and know it's not you. I know that, like, because if you're going to have enough resilience to beat this system, you're going to have to also know, like, some of this is biased against you. And I think for founders, I often encourage them to try and really do that thinking up front so that you can then make the decision. Now, what I would say for any university student is that like I would also really value some like work experience as well. Go and work in a startup, see what it's like. If you think you want to go and do a startup, go and work in a startup because it will give you A, incredible skills. If you work in a startup, you get like insane responsibility early, so often you can kind of, for me at least, I could rise much more quickly than I could have at a corporate. There's no way I could have had the trajectory I had at a corporate. I just didn't have it, like annual promotions wouldn't have done it. So I would really encourage going and working at startups. It'll give you a sense of what you do and don't want. It'll give you a sense of the leader you do and don't want to be. It will just inform so much. And so, and I'm a big fan again to bootstrapping. One of the best ways to bootstrap is if you have personal kind of wiggle room. And if you don't have a financial safety net with home, if you don't have savings, then a good way to get that wiggle room is to have a job. And be actually earning while you're building. It's slower, it's more frustrating, it's more tiring, but actually let's be real about some people won't need to do that, and let's actually be real about that does come with its own challenges, also comes with its own massive benefits. You're building a network in the ecosystem, you're really, really having understanding and empathy, and you've got champions. And actually quite a few of the founders, interestingly, I've interviewed, kind of a surprising number, Some of their first investors were their bosses who had seen them work, and so backed them because they'd seen how they deliver. So I think there is this slightly like glorification of like the, you know, university dropout who goes and starts a startup and like later gets arrested, but you know, has a great journey for that process. Like, don't undervalue what going and working can do as you build, or even, you know, before you build.

Yeah, and I think like most— isn't there a study that say like the average successful founder is like over 40?

100%. Um, 100%. Yeah.

And I think at university, like, for sure you're very like— if you are in that startup world, you're like, oh, you know, like, I'm gonna quit my, my university degree and just start something. And then, um, I've actually met people like that that did that, and they are successful. But then there's also probably people that, you know, it didn't work out.

You'll hear about them because they're like so interesting, because they're an edge case. I think that's the other thing to remember is like What you see in the news about founders is because they're an edge case, it's because they're exciting, or it's because they've been massively funded, and therefore, like, remember, when a venture capital firm backs you, they have normally PR budget and PR team, and so you're going to be in the news more just because, like, there's someone literally paying to get you in it, or paying to kind of work out how to get you in it.

Yeah, so I think there's definitely, like, this bias of view that, you know, you can do it easily because that's what you see, but that's actually much harder. So I think maybe as a final question to wrap it up, when you were back at university, what did success mean to you then? And if you look at your definition of success now, how has it changed?

Gosh, what does success look like to me at university? It really changed. Um, so when I joined university, I felt like an absolute fraud and failure, honestly, when I joined. So I'd been, since I was 13, shown around Oxford and Cambridge by my school, telling me you should be going to one of these. I fell in love with Oxford, like, the city is just so beautiful, and I just really wanted to go. And I kind of went through this process to get there where I was told by one of my teachers, 'You're not Oxbridge material.' I was told by the deputy head, 'You're the worst Oxbridge applicant, like, your application's the worst we've ever seen.' Like, it was pretty kind of— but I got accepted, and then I did the International Baccalaureate, and I missed my offer by a point. And so I had a month or so to wait while they waited for the A-level results to tell me whether I was even going to get in. And like, actually, by the time it got to A-level results, I was pretty happy about my backup. I was excited. Um, but you know, I think at the time I'd been like so trained, and I think this is part of what's broken, by the way, but I've been so trained to think that I was a failure if I didn't get in, if I didn't go. And then I remember, like, my first week at university, my— one of the tutors who, when I'd done my interview, had impressed me so much that I'd been obsessed with being taught by him— I thought, oh my gosh, I just want to learn from him— kind of came up to me and said, oh, don't worry, we'll just pretend your results never happened. And I felt so embarrassed and everyone around me, I just thought, no one else has had this, everyone else is smarter. And it was this like, everyone was so smart and I just felt really thick. And so I spent my first year at university like, for me success was like passing, and I really like limited my own beliefs in what I could do because I'd had these like little things that made me think I couldn't achieve highly. And actually it wasn't until I got into my third year I had a different tutor and they said, you should be aiming for a first, which I never got, but you should be aiming for this, you're capable of this. And suddenly I thought, I, I should aim for it again. I was again devastated when I didn't get it, but I think what it tells me at the time is that at university I really let my sense of success be led by everyone around me. Um, and some of that was what I wanted, but like, it was about validation from other people, it was about living up to expectations that other people had for me. And I don't think that was very healthy for me. And I think actually a lot of people kind of at uni related to that sense of like, I've got to live up to this expectation because you just had it hammered into you so much from so many different angles. And just to be clear, like, I didn't get it from my parents. My parents were like, you know, I have like a million and one cards from my mum being like, we couldn't be prouder, whatever you do. Like, they're amazing for that, my dad too. But like, from people I respected, teachers, everyone, I'd had that hammered in. Like, I had this kind of— I had to meet this threshold of expectation. And I think now, for me, success is very different. So for me, success now is much more mission-led. It's about what am I having an impact on? And so, you know, when I quit my job, I kind of— after being head of training, I went into a venture studio and started building ventures from like the ground up, which was really fun and really intellectually interesting, but it didn't have any impact. Or it didn't have the impact I wanted. That's not that, it didn't have the impact I wanted because I was really interested in like social change and social enterprise and impact-focused startups. And so actually when I quit, it was because I wanted to have this different impact, and I quit not knowing what I was going to work on. Didn't have a company idea. I kind of knew I needed time and energy because venture building for me is— I know I said have a job and build your startup at the side, venture building for me was the exact job you couldn't do that in because you spent your entire day— I mean, technically every idea I came up with was owned by the company, A, and B, like, I spent all my days trying to understand a new industry, trying to come up with new ideas, and then a new founder would be put on them once we got them funded. So they were never going to be my ideas. That's the exception to the rule. But all that to say, when I left, for me the big focus was where do I want to spend my time having an impact? And so that's why If We Raise became so important to me and the mission behind it and the way that If We Raise works today. So it's like a community that anyone can pay to join. It's super affordable, like £25 a month, or pay what you can. We want it to be affordable to any founder to come and join and get that support, access to me and my co-founders at a serial founder, exited founder, an angel investor. So we wanted to make that kind of knowledge super accessible and the network behind us super accessible. And so now I really judge myself on not like necessarily what am I doing, but what are the founders I'm supporting doing and how many founders am I supporting and what's the overall impact? And so it's very much changed from, don't get me wrong, I still like, there'll be bits of external validation that make me feel great, but they don't last very long. But the feeling that I'm working on something where the, the bigger purpose really matters to me, and I want to make even a small— and I want to give my time, even if I make a small dent, I want to make a small dent in it. That's for me, success has changed so much.

Great. Yeah, I think that, that impact that you want to build, like, you're definitely building it, um, and you can see that you're passionate about it. I think that's the most important thing. Thank you, Hattie, for coming. Thanks, Sasha. We're going to end it here. Thank you.