Joe Seddon, Founder @ Zero Gravity

Joe, welcome to the podcast. If you could just start off by telling us a little bit about your company, Zero Gravity.

Sure. So it almost goes back 26 years actually, which is I started Zero Gravity to solve my own problem. That back in the day, I grew up in a small town in West Yorkshire called Morley, which is between Leeds and Wakefield, a single-parent family. My mum's a speech therapist in the NHS. I made a journey through state schools to Oxford University where I studied PPE and saw firsthand just how large the barriers are for students like me to access elite institutions. I didn't have a big network of professionals around me who could give me the inside track on how to succeed. There wasn't really an education culture in West Yorkshire I lived, which, you know, created an environment where I could be inspired, or when you have those, you know, waxes and wanes in motivation, you've got someone to pick you up. And very few people in my school had been to Oxford University before. So I saw the barriers firsthand. And when I got to the end of university, I sort of noticed that every single facet of society was interested in solving this problem. Government would talk about levelling up and they wanted to spread opportunity to the rest of the country. The corporates would talk about diversity and wanting to create a diverse workforce of socially mobile people. Universities were being regulated on being representative of their local areas and the talent across the country. And yet no one could actually really find a solution. So I wanted Zero Gravity to be the solution to that problem and create a world where talent matches opportunity. We've got this catchphrase that talent is spread evenly, but opportunity is not. And the mission of Zero Gravity ultimately is to try and change that.

Yeah, and I want to touch on something you said there at the beginning, which is that you were like really frustrated by the system. And I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently with, you know, The Graduate Guide and why I'm doing it. And I think everyone talks about in entrepreneurship that passion is really important, but I think almost more important than passion is a genuine like annoyance that what the solution you're trying to make doesn't exist. I mean, how has that like driven you, that frustration?

Yeah, I think there was a frustration. I think a lot of entrepreneurship often comes out having a bit of a chip on your shoulder, because if you start a company to try and disrupt a sector, you've got to defy the odds in order to succeed. If you look at the data of startup successes, the vast majority of startups fail. But even when you get to sort of Series B startups that have raised quite a lot of investment, they're still more likely to fail than succeed. So you have to be a little bit crazy and wacky to create a startup. Often that craziness that comes from being really motivated about an issue because it's a problem you faced yourself. Often you've got to have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder. You've got to be a little bit annoyed about the status quo and maybe a bit annoyed about your competitors. You've got to have skin in the game in solving that problem because being an entrepreneur is a real emotional roller coaster. When you do have those dark days when stuff goes wrong, as it does, you need that kind of fire burning in your belly in order to sort of get up and keep going. And often that comes from a sense of chippiness. And it did for me. I'd faced this problem firsthand and I had skin in the game in solving it. And I was just really annoyed at seeing so many talented people fall through the net. When I grew up in West Yorkshire, I was surrounded by so many ambitious, talented people who just were failed by a system that didn't support them into those top universities and careers. And when I got to Oxford, I met lots of people from diverse backgrounds, and though some of them were really intelligent, but a lot of them fundamentally weren't any more talented than the people I grew up with. They just had far more resources. So I had that chippiness and desire to change that, and that sort of certainly got me through the, the dark times on the emotional roller coaster of being an early-stage startup founder.

Yeah, and right now you deal with people getting people from school into university and also university into a job. I mean, How did that achieve— what were the origins of Zero Gravity? Which way around did you do it? Because obviously for me right now graduating, like, I'm around a load of people that are really struggling with that transition into jobs. But, you know, I think university, A-level to university, is actually the biggest step in terms of the education you get, access to the people you're surrounded by, everything. So which one do you prioritize first? Because you obviously can't do it all initially.

Sure. I think in terms of the vision of Zero Gravity, there's a couple of core beliefs. That are quite distinctive to our company. I think one is that I've always believed that social mobility as an issue is an economic issue as much as a social one. So, like, social mobility is a very academic phrase, and what does that actually mean? It's essentially about untethering that link between background and opportunity, and then making sure that if you're a talented person, you can reach your potential in, in society. And often that's not the case. Now, if you're somebody from an affluent background and you're 6 times more likely to make it to a top university than someone from a low-income background, like, the disparities are huge. And, um, and that's not just a social problem, that's not just about social injustice and not living in an equal society of a level playing field. It's a massive economic issue as well, because when you think about it, those societies live and die on their ability to utilize talent. And, and currently we're only utilizing a very small part of the talent in this country. No, people are living in affluent areas, often in London, in the Southeast, going to a small subset of schools, small subset of universities. And there's a whole group of people outside that system who currently, though, probably aren't in jobs or sectors where their talents can best be utilized. And that has a massive effect. If we could just get social mobility in the UK to the same level as some of our Western European counterparts, we can increase GDP by £39 billion a year. That's enough to give every household £1,000. So social mobility is an economic issue as much as a social one. And that's why I started Zero Gravity, because I thought that all these big institutions and societies, whether they're government, employers, universities, have a financial interest in solving this problem. And if we can create a platform that makes that work, We can also then monetize this as well and create a self-sustaining business model. Now, this can be a business rather than a charity, which has been the traditional model to tackle this social issue. And that links into the second core belief, which is this idea about the power of compounding. Like, I'm sure you've seen it yourself, but often to achieve a massive goal, you can't do that overnight. There's no one thing, silver bullet you can do to achieve a massive goal. It's all about getting 5% better. That every single day over a long enough period of time, you get that compounding effect or a domino effect, whatever you want to call it, where if you do get 5% better every day in a year's time, then you can achieve something that would have seemed extraordinary only 12 months ago. And I think that principle applies to getting into top universities. I think it applies to getting into top careers. But the traditional model in the kind of higher education and career sector in terms of helping students has been like one-off interventions. They put on a summer school or they do a talk in the classroom or create a seminar series for students to go to. But one-off interventions don't lead to exponential outcomes. What leads to exponential outcomes is that getting 5% better every day. So I wanted Zero Gravity to be that kind of anytime, anywhere platform that students would have access to on a daily basis. They're in their pocket. They can connect with a mentor, connect with great content and community. And it was the, the app in your pocket that would allow you to get better 5% every day. And that is what unlocks those transformational outcomes, and for me, and makes social mobility a reality. So those were the two defining beliefs behind the business and how we differentiated ourselves in a sector which would traditionally be dominated by the small and medium-sized charities.

Yeah, one of the actual practicalities of achieving that improvement in social mobility, like, one thing I found fascinating is how you managed to get names like HSBC and big corporate companies actually linked to your company. And I mean, with HSBC and those other companies, I was wondering, did they approach you because of the work you were doing, or did you think they were the necessary— the necessary next step was to get people like that on board?

I think building a startup with a B2B business model, which is what we have at Zero Gravity, it's really tough because the vast majority of institutions are risk-averse at heart, especially big ones. If you build something that's valuable, then you want to protect it and not lose it. And ultimately, people who work in those institutions often don't have an interest in taking big risks to further their careers. So if you're a B2B startup trying to find your first customers, that can be really, really tough because who wants to take a risk on an unknown unproven entity with no credibility that might not exist in 18 months' time. So it took a bit of time to find our first clients. Now, in the first 18 months of Zero Gravity's existence, we didn't really make very much money. In all honesty, it was really difficult to survive as a startup. And in terms of sort of acquiring the first clients and getting them on board, our first two flagship businesses we worked with were HSBC and KPMG. I think what stood out about them is they both had a genuine genuine commitment to solving this problem. KPMG were the first big UK employer to put an explicit target on having working-class people in their workforce. HSBC, they put diversity at the core of their graduate recruitment strategy. And often these businesses had tried stuff before, it hadn't quite worked, it'd been expensive, and wanted to sort of try different approaches. I was just lucky that I was connected in with people in those businesses businesses who had a slightly higher risk tolerance and were willing to take a risk on an innovative startup doing things in a different way. And from that, you then get that compounding effect which I spoke about before, which is, you know, getting those two big names on board, getting results, proving your credibility, then opens up the door to everything else. But it takes time to acquire initial clients. Now, one of my favorite quotes You're probably too young to remember the Stone Roses, Peter Wood. I'm not sure if people still listen to them. At university, they were sort of my dad's generation of a band, and they sort of did a comeback when I was at university. I'm not sure people listen to them now, but there's a famous interview with the lead singer Ian Brown where he says it takes time for people to fall in love with you, but it's inevitable if you've got the vision and disruptive way of doing things. You will get there, but you have to remember that things don't happen overnight. And I think often people going into business for the first time who've seen the kind of zero-to-hero stories, and they've watched The Wolf of Wall Street or they've watched The Social Network, they expect things to happen overnight. Actually, the reality of most businesses, especially B2B ones, is struggling for the first 18 months and then having your breakthrough moment.

Yeah, let's talk a bit more about those early stages then, because obviously I think when you were at school, you would have been working really hard with this idea of getting to Oxford and really improving your career hopes and trying to aim for the biggest companies, probably. That was probably your idea of success at the time. And then you get to the end of your time at Oxford and, yeah, with a first in Oxford, you can almost go into anywhere. And you decided yourself that, yeah, you want to go into the startup world straight off the bat. You had this idea, you had something you were passionate about. You know, all your peers, they would have been going off to earn this wage and, you know, living in London, having this lifestyle. And obviously you're doing something for more than just the money. Um, now, you know, you've got— I think there's 14 awards listed on your LinkedIn, Forbes 30 Under 30, and these are like things that everyone in your cohort would have aspired to get. I mean, how do you reflect on that? That first year or this first, that first step to actually decide, no, listen, I'm going to do my own thing here and really try and give it a go?

Yeah, I just want to first like correct something you said, which is, you know, you mentioned that I got a first, my degree at Oxford University, all those opportunities were open to me. That's what I actually thought when I was at university, but it's not true in reality, which is that if you go to a highly selective university and you complete your degree that does create a certain floor underneath you that you can't fall below. You're always going to have access to some kind of fairly well-paying employment. In terms of really getting those top, top graduate jobs that everyone wants, just getting a really good degree isn't going to get you there. And that isn't necessarily commonsensical because I think a lot of people like me who come from state schools, small towns in the UK, thought that was the way the system works. You got your degree, and then you think about getting a job. I actually realized quite quickly that even having a first-class degree from Oxford doesn't open doors unless you've got the internships and work experience to back it up. And most big graduate employers now are pipelining talent all the way from the first year of university. So if you don't get that spring week in first year, it's almost impossible to get access to a graduate job. And that's a big change in the system which has happened over the past 10 years. Now, our, our parents didn't face a system that looked anything like that, but that link now between work experience and getting access to employment is super strong. So having a degree, it can create that, you know, that barrier that you don't fall below but isn't going to allow you to get the top opportunities. In terms of what that looked like for me, that I'd jumped on the internship bandwagon quite late. All my friends in second year have got these internships and I started to panic. I thought, actually, I need to get one of these as well. I didn't know how the system worked and I just decided almost on a whim to apply for some legal internships. I got a summer vacation scheme at Slaughter and May, the Magic Circle law firm, without really knowing anything about the firm. In all honesty, I had one of those— sounds quite cliché, but embarrassing— interviews where I got asked about the Magic Circle, didn't know what that phrase meant, and presumed it was something to do with magic. And then that's a cliché in the industry, but that did actually really happen to me. In the interview, which just shows how underprepared I was. And I got a training contract offer at the end of that, which was life-changing in terms of the amount of money being offered. But I ended up turning it down because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And even though my friends and family thought I was a little bit crazy for turning down a stable career, potentially with a very steep earnings trajectory. I had that passion for solving this social issue, so it wasn't actually a difficult decision for me. But that being said, having to move back home after graduating from university whilst all my friends went to do their grad jobs in London and sort of moved into their own houses and started doing cool things, that was quite difficult because I became quite socially dislocated from my friends. And it was only when I moved down to London that I was able to solve that problem. But the first couple of months of starting Zero Gravity, I had to move back to Yorkshire, they were tough. And it's always a difficult decision in the UK to start a business because I don't think the culture in this country is very friendly to entrepreneurship. Everyone celebrates entrepreneurs once they get some degree of success or credibility. You know, you mentioned Forbes 30 Under 30 awards. Now everyone celebrates that decision I took now, But when I made it at the time, people thought I was nuts. People thought what I was doing wasn't going to succeed. And in some degree, you know, who can blame them? The stats tell a story, right? That most people don't succeed. But I had that passion, I had that chip on my shoulder. I thought, why not give it a go?

Yeah, I can massively relate to this. And it's sort of brought up a question I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is, you know, with these consulting and law and banking jobs, like it's already so competitive. The people that do know about and have got that background, you get to see people with like 5th places from UCL, whatever, like top unis, top experience, and still not getting those jobs. But then there's also this group of people that don't even know about it. I didn't know about it in first or second year. I was too busy having fun, enjoying myself, like getting over COVID, like seeing people again. And then all of a sudden you're behind. And it's amazing where are the jobs? Where do you even find them? How do you start early and even exploring different career paths? Obviously one thing you do with Zero Gravity is mentorship, and I've really benefited from mentorship myself. Almost every single person I've interviewed has been de facto mentor, and I think that really is the way to succeed. Somebody giving you that opportunity, you can have the connections, you can have the resources that you want, but it ultimately does come down to company or a person giving you a chance. So what are your opinions on that? Because I, as a student who's just been through it, and, you know, I'm doing this podcast, I'm doing a company, but that's kind of only because, like you, I didn't— you know, I've missed that completely.

Yeah, it's pretty difficult being a student nowadays because the, um, the kind of university culture that our parents enjoyed of kind of, you know, doing a bit of work, also getting pissed quite a lot It's kind of gone away nowadays. It's difficult to afford university. The default is probably to do 20 hours a week at a part-time job to make ends meet, and then you've got to get all these work experiences as well. And as you said, I think the one thing people often don't understand is that work experience is far more competitive than getting a place at university. But when you look at the success rates to get into most universities, the most competitive universities— Oxford, Imperial, their success rates are around 25%. Well, if you look at most graduate jobs, the success rate to get those jobs is between 1 to 5%. So most graduate jobs are far more competitive than even the most competitive universities. And everyone makes 5 applications to universities. So it's not actually surprising that people should have to make 20, 30 applications in order to secure a graduate job. But I think because people don't understand how that system works and the competitiveness, it can be massively dispiriting because When you apply to university, you at least expect to get a couple of offers, right? Whilst applying to graduate jobs, actually the norm is to be rejected from the vast majority of those, those roles. And then why have we ended up with a system where work experience is so important? Well, I think that's because employers have actually lost faith in the academic system as a good judge of merit. I think that's happened for two reasons. I think one, employers can see how the academic system creates massive disparities look at the gap in attainment in GCSE and A-level grades between state and private schools. It's huge. Or even between London and Yorkshire and the Northeast, the gap is massive. So if you recruit on academics and education alone, you're going to skew towards certain groups of society. And employers have decided they don't want to do that. I mean, the second reason is I think they've lost faith in academics being a good judge of talent. There's been so much grade inflation over the past 10 years, not only at GCSE and A-level but in degrees as well. The first class degree today isn't what it was 10 years ago, and that's just true if you look at the data of how many people get first class degrees at university. And when you take a step back, it's a pretty crazy system when you think about it. Now, when you're doing your GCSEs, there's kind of like 7 or 8 grades you can get, but university, there's only really 3 types of grade people get: a first, a 2:1, 2:2, and like you're putting people into 3 different categories. It doesn't allow many employers to sort of differentiate in terms of how hard you work to university. Like, if we're being honest, if you look at that 2:1 category, people achieve 2:1s in their degrees, there's people there who absolutely work their bollocks off every single day at university and just missed out just having a bad day on an exam. And there's people just coasted throughout their entire time there. And, um, so the, the academic system doesn't allow employers to differentiate. So I think that's why they've all defaulted to a system where they have these internship and work experience schemes, because they're using those as their new arbiters of, of talent. And that creates a really bad experience for students, because now students, whilst they're at university, having to apply to 20, 30 roles, having to spend their summers doing internship and work experience rather than having a good time with their mates. So it is a really, really difficult system for young people. And unfortunately, I think the only way to succeed in the system is to kind of work out the cheat codes. And that is, you know, find a way to compile all the information that you're using for applications and reuse it. They're like, you know, utilizing ChatGPT, for instance, which can be a great tool if you've got a huge bank of information about yourself, questions you've answered different employers. It can be much easier to, you know, go through different application systems without having to start from scratch every single time. Those are the things students should be thinking about almost from day one of university. They're building up that databank of information about themselves, application questions, and finding a way to reuse that across, you know, 30, 40 different employer applications without having to start from scratch every single time.

Yeah, as someone who's just been through uni, what I think was the biggest problem in terms of achieving what you want to achieve both in your degree and getting the work experience you want is that loss of accountability, you know, from school with having your teachers and your parents being like, do this, do that, and then suddenly you're all on your own, you know, you've got an ID now, you can go drink, you can do whatever, you don't have to do any work, nobody's going to tell you off for not doing it. And, you know, I want to hear about your own sort of personal relationship accountability, because it might be a presumption, but to get to where you got to in terms of Oxford, and even without, you know, the resources like you often have at Zero Gravity, like, you must have had to put a lot of accountability on yourself. So maybe that drive's always been there, but for someone who maybe doesn't have that, you know, who is very talented, and I imagine there are people that you find with Zero Gravity that have all this talent but like nobody told them to count, whether it's their parents always working or you know, there's something wrong at home. Like, what is your advice to people on generating that accountability for themselves so they can actually, like, hit the ground running at university, still have a good time, but then also, you know, succeed and feel fulfilled?

Yeah, I think it's very difficult because a lot of these traits like resilience, you know, grit, being a kind of hyper-responsible, accountable person often stem from your childhood experience. And when I reflect on my own journey, I think the reason I was so driven and had that resilience, like Bruce Lee, was probably due to a little bit of childhood trauma, which is not— I didn't necessarily have a perfect childhood in a way. I did grow up in a single-parent family, and then my mum was a huge inspiration in my life and, um, was incredible in terms of looking after me and my two siblings. It wasn't an easy existence, and that probably did instill a lot of drive in me because I probably did have a little bit of escapism, you know, honestly, like wanting to escape some of the situations that I found myself in sometimes growing up. So that's where the drive came from. And I think that dark truth is actually at the core of a lot of social mobility. You know, when I sort of see the data on our Zero Gravity members and hear some of their stories, that often a lot of them have experienced like some degree of childhood trauma in some different way. And that has been the thing that's instilled that drive within them. So I think if you are someone who's come from a tricky background, like you can repurpose some of the disadvantage you've experienced as a positive force, almost driving force in your own life and own that as part of your identity. And the root of your success. If you're not somebody who's experienced that, then maybe you've grown up with a very stable family, nice area of the country, you know, good schooling. You've just got to find that thing that makes you tick at the end of the day. And I know there's a massive debate at the moment about, you know, should you, you know, do a job that you're passionate about, or should you do the thing that you're good at? But I think it's it's too simplistic to try and divide those two things. Now, ultimately, you tend to get passionate about the things you're really good at, and vice versa. I think trying to find that thing that makes you tick is, is so important. If you are someone who's obsessed with football, for instance, I don't— be a spectator on the sideline and find a way to get involved in that industry. And whether it's starting your own side hustle business, you know, running the social media accounts of professional footballers, or doing photography— and I met a entrepreneur a couple of months ago who's now started his own business. But the way he got his kind of first taste of entrepreneurship is he just reached out to Anthony Joshua and said, I want to photograph you, I'll do it for free. And they went to his training camp, took a load of videos and photographs which Joshua put on his social media, and from there became almost part of his team, an extension who followed him around the country. They're taking these videos and from that experience, they're learning how to you know, do social media, build someone's personal brand. He took those lessons and, and worked into his own business. So finding a way to not just be a spectator in the things you're passionate about but get involved, I think, is a really important principle. And naturally, the things that you are good at, you will get passionate about, and vice versa. And that is how I think you can create that responsible, accountable culture within yourself if you don't necessarily have resilience and grit inherited. From your childhood situation, those values often stem from experiences. And if you're doing something that you're good at, you feel like you're succeeding, your natural cognitive, um, response is going to be to try and hold yourself responsible and accountable because you want to succeed. If you're in a situation where you don't care, you're not passionate, it's quite difficult to be accountable at the end of the day, and especially if you don't have people around you pushing that accountability on you. And one of the big problems I think with universities nowadays is there are not cultures of accountability, that the university has become in a way a commercial product. If you don't do your essay on time or you hand it in late, often there's no repercussion to that, and that doesn't naturally create a culture of accountability that you can then take with you into the workforce. So often you've got to try and find that culture elsewhere outside the academic system because you're not necessarily going to get it from a university environment.

Yeah, I'm going to ask you a question that you're probably not used to given the nature of your— what your business does. But for me personally, I, I, I was very privileged and I went to private school education, and a lot of the people around me, you know, there were very few that felt like really driven about their career or finding out what they wanted to do because there's a lot of a lot of nepotism, there's a lot of like, you know, spoon feeding in terms of your career. And I feel like for me, and you know, my dad was somebody who benefited from social mobility massively, like born in Birmingham, has built his own architecture company. And having that balance of the education, the opportunity with him to keep me accountable has been very helpful for me. But I think there should be an onus on people in a more privileged position to utilize and make the most of what they have available, and I feel like it is often wasted, actually, and they see university as a chance to just go drink and not actually excel at anything and not try and get internships or anything. What would be your advice from your own, like, personal upbringing and your life and also the people you work with, uh, this is called education, that you would give from them to a more privileged person in terms of excelling in their career?

Yeah, it's, uh, it's an interesting, uh, question. I think one of the things I really don't like, um, in the UK and the US is I think we've sort of fallen into a kind of cultural war around education. Where if you look at a lot of the narrative in the traditional media and sometimes on social media about that gap between state and private schools, often it can turn into just stereotypes that are wrong. I don't really like when people talk about the 93% who went to state schools versus 7% at private schools, because there's a lot of variation within those categories, right? Though in that state school 93%, you've got people who went to Tiffin Girls' School in London, in a very affluent area, results that are better than most private schools. And then people who went to a state comp in South Shields. So that 93% of people at state schools masks a huge amount of variation. And the same as private schools as well. You've got some really incredible public schools with incredible outcomes, Westminster, St Paul's, Eton. But a lot of private schools nowadays aren't that good, in all honesty. So there's a huge amount of variation in those categories, and I don't think it helps to have this sort of cultural war of no pitting, like, Bullingdon boys versus the underprivileged state school students, because it doesn't create a culture of collaboration. I don't think it's— it reflects the reality of the situation either, due to that massive amount of variation. And, um, I think we need a more sort of sophisticated analysis of things. And I think when I saw some of my best friends from universities went to private school— they didn't really know anyone growing up who went to private school because there aren't too many in West Yorkshire. But some of the people I met at Oxford who've gone on to be my best friends, they went to private schools. And like, when I, I sort of see the way they operate, I think one of the big differentiators is I think people who are privately educated often know how to build really good professional networks. Because if you've inherited a good network from your parents and you've been to a school surrounded by people who've got good networks, you sort of build that network instinct of knowing how getting access to people can be really important for kind of driving your personal growth. And I think that's something that people from state schools often don't understand. They think that success has to come exactly through their own, like, merits, or, you know, succeeding in the academic system, or doing a great piece of work. They don't necessarily see how building a network can be a way to accelerate all those things. So I think that's something that people at private schools do really well. I think where people with private schools probably struggle is that if you do come from a good background, you've often got the tyranny of expectations. One of the great things about growing up in West Yorkshire is I was able to, in some ways, mould my own future and ambitions because I didn't have my mum pushing any kind of version of the good on me. Um, but if though you, your parents know both successful investment bankers and know from a young age being surrounded by their friends who also work in investment banking, you go and go to a school where most people's parents work in professional services, you kind of inherit not only the resources of your parents but also their hopes and ambitions as well. And that gets pushed on you as an individual. So I think one thing that people who do go to private schools or go to good state schools in good areas of the country could think about more is actually what is the thing that makes them tick? They're trying to move beyond the expectations, ambitions of your parents and your environment and work out what is it that actually makes me passionate or what gets me up in the morning. I think that's a more difficult challenge to face sometimes if you are somebody who comes from a a good background versus someone who's faced disadvantage, because people from disadvantaged backgrounds can almost start with a blank slate when it comes to their ambition and hopes in life.

Yeah, 100%. I think that's great advice. Um, yeah, I want to learn a little bit more about how you actually built Say Gravity, because a lot of people I interview on this podcast, entrepreneurs, that they, they normally have a co-founder or someone they've been doing it with, but as far as I'm aware, you're the only founder and you've been doing this all by yourself. And I wonder what the decision behind that was. Um, and also then the next step comes, you know, building your team, right? But that— if you're going to do it by yourself as a founder, then you need to have a great team around you that hold you to account and, you know, build this good ethos. What was that? Yeah, what was that process of actually building Sir Gravity out like?

I agree that from speaking to other founders, I think it's often much easier to succeed if you do have a co-founder. It's not just about having somebody with a complementary skill set who can do the things that you're weak at, but it's actually mainly about having a partner on the emotional roller coaster of being a founder, because often the reason why most early-stage businesses fail is that the founders lose motivation. And hope about what they're doing. And it's far easier to lose motivation and hope on a lonely journey when you're the only person, because at that point the world feels like it's on your shoulders and your shoulders alone. You don't necessarily have somebody you can speak to who's going on that same journey. So actually, the main reason to have a co-founder is not about complementary skill set, it's about having that kind of emotional partner to go on a very difficult journey with. The reason I didn't have a co-founder is I wasn't in an environment where entrepreneurship was encouraged. There was no real culture around entrepreneurship when it came to tech startups in West Yorkshire. That was seen as a very strange thing to do. People wouldn't even really understand the phrase startup. And even when I was at Oxford University at the time, there was no culture of entrepreneurship there either. And everyone wanted to go work in professional services, law, investment banking, and very few people wanted to be entrepreneurs. So I didn't really have a co-founder I could access to go on that journey with me, so I had to do it alone. And it was difficult. There was many times early in my journey where I banged my head against the wall thinking, this is never going to work. And the only thing that got me through that is I was so passionate about what I was doing, and I was also maybe naive/delusional. And I thought my vision of the way things should work is fundamentally right. If I keep plucking away at this, this something will happen eventually. And that's the way it turned out. The first 6 months of bootstrapping were really tough. Often the things that I thought were really going to propel me to the next level didn't do so. But then I ended up just getting little bits of luck that came out of nowhere. And then when we got our first sort of cohort of people who'd used the platform, who got offers to these top universities and they were telling their stories online, journalists coming across those people and being like, wow, this is a great story. I've never heard of this platform before. I want to cover this. And that sort of provided a springboard for me. I can— when I look today and see how we've managed to raise so much social impact investment, we've raised £4 million. That would have seemed unfathomable 3 or 4 years ago. But the reason we are able to do that, if I sort of trace it back, is that some of those early media articles we got in like the Times and BBC News, they enabled me to build my network of people who eventually went on to become investors in my company. And that's just a kind of lesson in how, you know, plugging away at things, eventually I had my lucky break. Some of our stories got picked up by traditional media. That enabled me to build a network which then brought the funding in to take the business to the next stage, and I could have very easily have given up before getting to that point. And, you know, there were days where I wanted to give up, but I think it was that resilience that got me through the tricky earlier stages, and that's really difficult to do in a solo founder situation.

Yeah, you just mentioned that investment into a company and how beneficial it was for getting to where you want to get to. You yourself invest in a lot of companies as well. Um, and I'm curious, uh, just as someone who's yet to build a portfolio of investments, companies, or to any students for advice in that, how do you choose who you're investing into? Like, what are your drivers behind like which one? Because obviously as a founder who's got investment, you would have taken learnings from that. And then, yeah, and how do you apply that in terms of finding who you want to invest in?

Yes, I think the, um, especially in the UK, there's been an explosion in the past 5 years in investment into early-stage tech startups. And, and part of the reason for that is everyone's seen what's happened in Silicon Valley over the past 2 decades with so many success stories of breakout tech companies. But also a really boring reason as well is that it's actually really tax advantageous to invest in, in startup companies. There's these schemes in the UK called SEIS and the EIS, where any early-stage company you invest into, you're at minimum going to get a 30% tax credit back from the government when you invest in that company. So if you put in £1,000 into a, into a startup, the government will give you £300 back straight away of that. And if that startup does eventually fall and go into administration, you can write the loss off against your income, um, and reduce your income tax burden. So like, the maximum amount you can really lose of your own money in a sort of tech startup investment is sort of 70% if you do it through one of these schemes. So actually it's really tax advantageous, and that's driven lots of investors to invest in these early stage companies because they've seen the breakout success stories and there's these tax advantages. And I think it's something that for a lot of young people to, to think about as a potential opportunity, like, it's always going to be much safer to invest in an index fund where over a long-term period of time you can rely that index funds will increase by 8% per year on average, and it will provide a good passive income, uh, flow for you eventually. Whilst investing in early-stage companies is risky, they might fail, they might not do well, um, but I think the good thing about doing that is that it does give you exposure and experience of actually evaluating other people's companies and that is a skill set that's actually quite useful if you want to found your own company because it gets you to think more strategically, like an investor, about what you're also doing. So the reason I invested in these other tech startups and put all my savings into startup investment is that not only do I really like startups, I want to be involved in the ecosystem, I find it really fun and interesting, but it helps me build a skill set that makes me think more forensically about what I'm doing at Zero Gravity. I get to see how other people run their business, their strategies. I work out the things I don't like about other businesses, and that also tells me something about mine as well. So it's a really good skill to pick up. And even if it won't necessarily be as financially successful for me as just plonking that money into an index fund and leaving it alone for 20, 30 years, I think the skills that you get out of it are worth are worth doing the investment for.

Yeah, and I think, like you said, that the startup space is really rising at the moment, and investment into it. And yeah, I'm hesitant to say that it's because big institutions are completely failing or anything, but you know, for example, at university, I feel like there's so many problems, be it like, you know, actually awarding degrees and marketing things, and you know, the actual practices of running a university that there are a lot of things that just aren't being solved. And that's where I think startups can come in and solve those issues that need solving but don't get the attention from those big institutions. And obviously what you're trying to solve is kind of like that. And you've received all this recognition from, you know, BBC and big, big, big news outlets, you know, Forbes on the 30 under 30, And also, with that influence and your connections with the government as well, how would be your advice to future governments or universities to actually improve, like, those looking into those smaller problems and not just, yeah, focusing on the big things?

Yeah, I think social mobility is the big existential question, not just for the UK, but for every single developed economy in the world. In the UK, it kind of feels at the moment like everything's broken. Now, wherever you look, from the train services to the way public services are run, schools falling down, inflation, economic growth, everything seems to be broken everywhere you look. And I think a big reason for that is, you know, we got complacent about the sort of success story of the UK, and, and we didn't think deeply enough about how to utilize talent from across the country. So I think this is the fundamental issue for government to solve. Now, how do you make talent match opportunity and make sure if you're an ambitious person growing up in a small town in West Yorkshire, your, your full talents can be utilized? And I think there needs to be a far more radical plan for action. This is not an issue that can be solved by just fixing things around the edges. We need to almost go back to first principles and think about how we can solve some of these problems. So just to give you an example, when it comes to the education system, we have a massive gap between state and private, north and south, in terms of what students achieve at school. And if we don't solve that gap, that gap's going to exist for another 332 years. At the current rate. So clearly what's being done now is not working fast enough. Like, how about if we thought more fundamentally about how do we get more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to start school a year earlier? Or, for instance, how do we make sure that the screen time that young people in Birmingham are having on their mobile phones is being used in a productive way? Young people nowadays spend more time on their phones every week than they do in a classroom. If government's not thinking about that from a policy point of view, uh, they're not actually utilizing 50% of the time young people spend. And as far as I know, I don't think there's anybody in the Department of Education who's thinking about how they can reach people and allow them to inspire them and to bring them educational resources through their mobile phones at home. That's a massive missing piece of policy. There needs to be more thinking about that area. And the reason I create Zero Gravity is I didn't think the school system and the classroom was the, the route to create social mobility. I thought it was far easier to connect with young people where they spend most of their time and where they actually want to spend their time. If you engage someone through their mobile phone in an experience which I think is cool, you're going to get such far higher engagement than anything you could do for a classroom. Because if you do something in a school environment, it becomes uncool. By definition. Um, so, so government really needs to actually think about creating a proper digital strategy around education, not just a strategy about how you improve the school systems. If using the school system strategy alone, the rate of progress is going to be too slow to actually solve this issue.

Yeah. As we come towards the end of the episode, uh, there's a question I like to ask all my guests, and so this idea of success, and I'll be fascinated to hear yours given what it might have been when you were younger, you know, heading into Oxford and, you know, got these amazing A-levels, looking forward to the future, and now 4 years into running your own company, what does success mean to you?

That's a big question, isn't it? One of the things that makes me so— I think the only thing that makes me slightly uncertain or uneasy about the mission behind Zero Gravity is I think meritocracy as an idea is fantastic from a societal point of view. Everyone wants to live in a country which is dynamic, where things actually work, well-run public services, fantastic companies, new innovations, scientific breakthroughs. That is what meritocracy delivers you. Like, the meritocratic miracle we've lived for over the past 200 years has completely transformed the lives of people like us sitting here today versus our ancestors, you know, 4 or 5 generations before us. So meritocracy, I think, is incredible at societal level. But you bring it back to the individual level, I think there's a question mark about does living a meritocratic life make you happier? As I've been through this journey, running Zero Gravity, and we've got all these headlines of success, and I'm so passionate about growing this company and making an impact. And the thing I just want to make sure I always kind of don't lose track of is, you know, does ultimately propelling people into socially mobile environments and make people happier? Like, can we find that magic formula where people can go into these very intense, highly competitive industries where they can succeed not only financially but also in terms of the impact they can have? but also fundamentally be a happy, fulfilled person? I mean, that's a really big question and that's what people shouldn't lose track of. And that's why I think it's so important to do something that you're passionate about. Because if I was just running an early-stage tech startup into— I wasn't passionate about— I have all these incredible headlines about what I've achieved, but would I actually feel good about myself day to day? Would I feel happy and fulfilled? Probably not. But because I am doing something that is— I'm passionate about, relates to my own journey, and now I see people almost every day now and get messages on LinkedIn or letters in the post, people who benefit from the platform have been on journeys like me. It's very difficult not to feel fulfilled in that environment. So I think entrepreneurship can be actually a bit of a curse unless you found a business that ultimately relates to your passion. And personal mission. If you don't have that, you can have the kind of tropes of success but not necessarily feel like a fulfilled person, which brings that passion point into real clarity. It's not just about doing something you're good at, it's actually meaning that when you do somewhat make it, you come out the end of the process feeling a happy and fulfilled person.

Yeah, that's a great answer. Joe, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, really appreciate it.

Great, it's been a pleasure.

See you later. Awesome.