VIB : Very Important Business

What does a genuinely strong company culture look like - and how do you know if yours is working?

Carl and Emily are joined by Brett Putter - founder of CultureGene and author of Culture Decks Decoded, to get into the culture challenge every growing company faces.

They dig into what Uber's "toe-stepping" value reveals about how a startup culture can become its own undoing when it fails to adapt. Why Brian Armstrong paid 20% o...

"Hey, let's 'circle back' on this." You already know what that really means - and the chances of you ever discussing it again, let alone 'circling back' are pretty slim.

Carl and Emily are joined by Scarlett McCabe - CEO of Debate Mate Training, a UK company teaching people to speak well, think on their feet and, crucially, disagree better - to get into the communication crisis every founder can see but few know how to fix.

T...

What does a genuinely agentic marketing operation look like in practice - and can a founder actually build one that runs itself?

Linda Du, Founder and CEO of Moola, has built it. A full content and distribution pipeline - blog posts written, creatives built, posts scheduled across every channel, ad spend tracked and attribution mapped - running on a weekly loop, almost entirely without her having to step in. And it works.

Car...

At some point, every founder gets the question: have you thought about getting a coach? But is coaching the same as therapy? And what happens when you go into it as a client - and come out so transformed that you retrain as one yourself?

Carl and Emily are joined by Richard Titus - serial entrepreneur and certified executive coach, now CEO of Kimono, an AI identity platform - to get into the coaching question every founder event...

Nineteen banks said no. Sahar Hashemi's perseverance answered every one of them - and Coffee Republic opened anyway. Then came 108 stores, a London Stock Exchange listing, and an OBE.

Carl and Emily are joined by Sahar Hashemi OBE - serial entrepreneur, co-founder of Coffee Republic and founder of Buy Women Built - to get into what actually separates the founders who keep going from the ones who preemptively stop.

Sahar's rej...

We uncover a breathtaking example of bootstrapping: can a two-person team - no investors, no wider team - build a real enterprise business? What happens when you turn down every VC cold call?

Carl and Emily are joined by Daniel van Binsbergen - co-founder of Draftpilot, an AI-powered contract review tool built for law firms - to find out how far a lean founding team can go in the age of AI.

They dig into why Daniel turned dow...

By the time you hear this, Carl and Emily are (hopefully) on a beach somewhere with a cocktail in hand. But are they actually switched off?

In this second holiday break episode, they get honest about the reality of taking time off as a founder — and whether a true disconnect is even possible. Emily talks about needing a festival with no phone signal to actually stop checking in. Carl explores the three-week neuro pattern t...

Carl and Emily are heading off for the summer - no guest interviews this week - but there's just enough time for Founder Diaries before they go.

Carl managed to embarrass himself on a sales call - by asking a series of confident questions about a very interesting book he'd spotted in their video call background. There was just one problem with the book..

Emily spent two to three days locked in a room reviewing Bluebella colle...

It should have been a dream exit. Mark McDermott closed the PE deal after ten years building ScreenCloud. Company sold. Cash in the bank. But he didn't celebrate. Didn't socialise. Barely left the house for six months. This is the exit that burned him out and nearly broke him - but does he have any regrets?

Carl and Emily are joined by Mark - co-founder and CEO of ScreenCloud, a global digital signage platform - to find out what...

How do you get in front of the people who really matter - and generate solid opportunities in the process? Plus how our guest made a CEO cry.

Carl and Emily are joined by Pete Ward - co-founder of The ICE Network for Entrepreneurs and CEO of Humanity, the longevity health tech app - to get into the real art of power networking - and why you're doing it wrong.

They dig into: the one counterintuitive hack for getting time with ...

Carl and Emily step back from the interview chair for an honest check-in on their own businesses. Emily is trying to forecast through the noise of Trump tariffs - when one man's mood can move your top line overnight, the numbers stop looking like a business plan and start looking like astrology.

Carl is six months into ThreadHound, his new SaaS business, picking up early customers - but starting to worry that saying yes to ever...

How do you hire the best people - and then make sure that they stick around? 

Finding the right people is tough. Spotting the wrong ones before it's too late is tougher.  Do you hire for culture or for skillset? What makes for a good (and a dreadful) interview?

Carl and Emily are joined by Anouk Agussol - co-founder and US CEO of Foundation Partners, where she helps companies on both sides of the Atlantic sort out t...

Business awards — are they worth the bother? ...genuinely useful for your startup, or just pay-to-play with a nicer trophy? And what's it actually like to receive an MBE? Carl and Emily are joined by Rajeeb Dey MBE - serial entrepreneur (Learnerbly, Hutora) and, as it happens, winner of one of the biggest gongs going.

They get into the serious stuff: whether awards actually build a business. And then the questions that re...

The Very Important Business Podcast. Every week, two founders give you the unvarnished truth about what it's really like running a business. With Carl Partridge - broadcaster and two-time tech founder, and Emily Bendell - founder and CEO of Bluebella.

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