At some point, every business needs to make a transition from relying on its founder to employing a CEO. It’s true that some businesses have made the transition from founder to CEO without switching captains: Think Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, or Mark Zuckerberg. But this is the exception, rather than the rule.

In this article, we’ll set out why every business must confront the decision of moving from its original founder to a CEO, and four practical steps you need to take to manage that transition if you think that this crossroad might be coming up for your business.

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The world of innovation and entrepreneurship feeds on information. For startup and scaleup founders the world over, being the first to have access to innovation can mean the difference between being first to market or a follower, between unicorn potential and straggler status.

That’s why most entrepreneurs read. And they don’t just read, they devour.

Understanding the world just one smidgen more accurately can be the key to predicting and often building the future. From Bill Gates to Mark Cuban, world-famous founders and investors take multiple hours a day out of their mind-numbingly busy schedule to read. …

One highly successful technology entrepreneur once described to me the role of a founder as consisting of two things, and two things only:

“Hiring people and ensuring cash flow.”

Though hiring will certainly make or break the company in the longer run, cash is indispensable for the company even getting to the long run. The simple truth is: a company operates on cash and a founder needs to find ways of providing it. The issue that many tech entrepreneurs run into is that before their idea is proven in the market, the company has a weak negotiating position when it…

In this complete (really) guide we’ve tried to round up every single UK startup and scale-up financing option in one compact place. With over two hundred useful links and resources, if you still are clueless about how to finance your company after reading this, it’s on you.

Developing a great business takes commitment, diligence, patience and in most cases, quite a great deal of money. Navigating the tricky waters of dialing in your MVP or finding product/market fit is one thing, finding and securing the resources that will allow you to focus and grow is another.

Finding financing for your…

The R&D tax credit loan is still a largely uncharted form of finance in the UK.

This guide will give you all the details you need to understand this new form of alternative finance. It will help you figure out if it can be useful to you and get the most out of your future R&D tax credit payments.

What is an R&D tax credit loan?

An R&D tax credit loan is a new type of financial instrument that uses a company’s future R&D tax credit payments as collateral for a debt facility.

The R&D tax credit is a predictable source of cash for many UK companies…

When I was a young girl and dabbling in the art and science of knitting, my grandmother instilled in me the value of “measure twice, cut once”.

She was an old lady, tormented by fears of wasting yarn by the memory communist-era shortages, but the rule made sense to me. Thrift and efficiency were big themes while I was growing up.

As I unwittingly carry the mental models of my childhood with me, I’m struck by how antiquated my grandmother’s wisdom is for doing business today.

Today’s aspiring businesses seem to work in more of a “cut — measure —…

In this series, we do a deep dive into the success stories of companies that managed the leap from wide-eyed foal to splendid unicorn, and try to bring back 3 core ideas. The goal is to distill the basic principles that propelled these mavericks to great heights and use these actionable insights in our own lives and businesses.

Today we look at Slack. A company that seemed set to be just another messaging app, but somehow became the fastest growing B2B SaaS product in the world (ever). …