I wasn't supposed to
end up here.

A mate shared a post: a pet-sitting marketplace called Mad Paws was looking for their first hire. No job description. No process. Just a founder with a vision and a lot of energy.

I said yes before I'd really thought it through. Grew their Instagram from 400 to 4,000 followers in six weeks. Learned more about business in that first month than in two years of consulting.

I was hooked. The speed, the chaos, the feeling of building something from nothing - I knew I'd never go back to corporate.

From there I joined Expert360, a talent marketplace. Came in when it was 7 people. Left when it was 60. Helped raise a $14M Series B along the way. That was the real education - watching a startup scale, seeing what breaks, and learning how to fix it whilst everything's on fire.

I joined Startmate as Head of Operations in 2018. It was small, scrappy, and had enormous potential. By 2019 I was CEO.

Over the next eight years, we turned it into something genuinely different. Not just an accelerator - an entire ecosystem. The numbers tell part of the story, but they don't capture the thousands of conversations, the late nights, the moments of doubt, or the founders who went from zero to something extraordinary.

The Fellowship programmes alone put more than 1,000 women into the startup ecosystem. Forty-two per cent of the companies we backed were women-founded. Not because of quotas - because we changed who we went looking for.

I stepped down in December 2025.

Eight years is a long time to lead anything.

I never thought I'd stay anywhere this long. But Startmate had this gravitational pull - the founders, the community, the feeling that what we were building actually mattered.

There's a weight to being the person everyone looks to for answers. The one who holds the vision when others waver. The one who makes the call when the call is hard. You carry it everywhere - at dinner, on runs, at 2am when your mind won't switch off.

But alongside the weight, there's a privilege most people never get. You see someone go from a half-formed idea on a napkin to a company worth hundreds of millions. You watch people grow into leaders they never imagined they could be. You get to say “I was there at the start” - and mean it.