Founders Unplugged

This Week’s Episode of Founders Unplugged was Brought to You by Peer! 🚀 AI is revolutionizing business. The question is: Will your company be ready, or left behind? ❌ Most businesses are stuck with messy, unstructured workforce data. ✅ Peer transforms it into AI-ready, structured insights—without the headache. 🔹 No more guesswork—Peer converts subjective feedback into verifiable, structured datasets. 🔹 No more messy data—Peer provides a plug-and-play AI data infrastructure so you don’t have to build one. 🔹 No more delays—Businesses using Peer are already AI-ready and future-proofing their workforce. 📢 AI is only as good as the data it learns from. Will your business be ahead of the curve or playing catch-up? 📍 Book a free discovery call & get 20% off your first audit: https://lnkd.in/e9jf9Xmb #FoundersUnplugged #AIReadiness #FutureOfWork #Peer #StartupGrowth #AIData

Startup life comes with a hidden weight – the constant comparison to others. In this clip, Yuru Guo of Hey! Food is Ready and host Greg Mccallum reflect on how social media, pitch culture, and the lack of transparency around failure can lead founders to believe they’re falling behind. They explore the pressure to show success, the danger of comparing against curated narratives, and the importance of founder communities that create space for honest conversations. This theme threads through much of the episode – alongside insights into business building, fundraising, and the value of starting with sales before tech. 👇 Clip below. Want to watch the full conversation? Part One and Two now live across all platforms! -------------------------------------------- This clip is sponsored by FounderCatalyst Make sure your legals don't slow you down. FounderCatalyst provides founder-friendly, fixed-fee legal solutions for startups raising SEIS/EIS investment. 🔗 Get 5% off: https://2ly.link/1zDIJ #foundersunplugged #founderwellbeing #startuplife #mentalhealth #sponsored

Praise is easy. Capital is rare. And actionable feedback? Even rarer. In this clip, host Greg Mccallum and Yuru Guo of Hey! Food is Ready, dive into the common experience of receiving vague encouragement from investors without any real follow-up or critique. They discuss why meaningful feedback is so hard to come by, how it impacts founder decision-making, and what it means to move forward without clear signals from the people you're pitching to. This moment is one part of a wider conversation covering resilience, rejection, cultural authenticity, and the challenges of building a platform in real-time. 👇 Clip below. Part Two out NOW! -------------------------------------------------------------------- This clip is sponsored by FounderCatalyst – helping early-stage founders get their legals, structure and fundraising tools in place before the next round. Make sure your legals don't slow you down. FounderCatalyst provides founder-friendly, fixed-fee legal solutions for startups raising SEIS/EIS investment. 🔗 Get 5% off: https://2ly.link/1zDIJ #foundersunplugged #startuplessons #earlystagefunding #feedbackloop #sponsored

Investors said it was brilliant. They said the founder was compelling. They said they’d stay in touch. But they didn’t invest. In Part 2 of our conversation with Yuru Guo, founder of Hey! Food is Ready, we explored a familiar experience for early-stage founders — the strange limbo between positive feedback and zero funding. This article dives into that disconnect. Why it happens. How to deal with it. And what it means when you stop chasing validation and start building traction instead. 👇 Article below. 🎧 Catch the full conversation in our two-part podcast: Part Two drops TODAY at 14:30 GMT Part One is available now --------------------------------------------- 📢 This week's article is sponsored by FounderCatalyst: Raising investment? Make sure your legals don't slow you down. FounderCatalyst provides founder-friendly, fixed-fee legal solutions for startups raising SEIS/EIS investment. 🔗 Get 5% off: https://2ly.link/1zDIJ

Many startups begin with a slide deck. This one started with a university project. In this clip, Yuru Guo shares with host Greg Mccallum how she founded Hey! Food is Ready while completing her Masters at Durham University. What began as a classroom assignment quickly grew into a live platform connecting independent chefs from diverse backgrounds with corporate clients looking for something more meaningful than standard catering. It’s one of several insights from a conversation that covers everything from cultural identity and commercial traction, to the personal grind behind making an idea real. 👇 Clip below. Part One is out now. ------------------------------------------------------------------- This clip is sponsored by Peer – the expert-led auditing solution for sales teams. Looking for a more accurate picture of your team’s strengths and gaps? Get a free sales skills audit here: https://lnkd.in/e9jf9Xmb #foundersunplugged #earlystagemomentum #founderjourney #salesaudits #sponsored

Food connects people in ways few other things can. In this clip, host Greg Mccallum speaks with Yuru Guo, founder of Hey! Food is Ready, about the idea that food is a kind of language — one that breaks down cultural barriers without needing translation. They explore how social media has brought underrepresented cuisines to the forefront, why demand for authentic cultural experiences is growing, and how that’s creating a new kind of opportunity for chefs and food entrepreneurs from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. This clip touches on just one of many themes discussed across the full two-part episode, including cultural entrepreneurship, sales-led execution, and the realities of early-stage startup life. 👇 Clip below. Full episode available NOW across all platforms. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This clip is sponsored by Peer – expert-led sales performance audits for growth-stage companies. Want to know what your sales team is really capable of? Book a free Sales Skills Audit here: https://lnkd.in/e9jf9Xmb #foundersunplugged #culturalinsight #startupstory #salesenablement #revops #sponsored

Some startup stories begin with a market gap. Others begin with a meal. This week on Founders Unplugged, we sat down with Yuru Guo, founder and CEO of Hey! Food is Ready, to talk about how a student project evolved into a catering platform built on identity, storytelling, and community. This isn’t just another food startup. It’s a platform giving independent chefs from immigrant and refugee backgrounds a real chance to earn, grow, and be seen. And it all started in a university kitchen. In our latest article, we dive deeper into the origin story, the power of cultural entrepreneurship, and why this model is resonating with modern businesses. 👇 Article below. 🎧 Part One out today at 14:30 GMT across all platforms. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article is brought to you by Peer – the expert-led audit service for sales teams. If you're a sales enablement leader or RevOps manager looking to uncover the real gaps in your team's performance, we’re offering a free skills audit to help you do just that. Because you can’t fix what you haven’t measured. Book your FREE Sales Team Skills Audit here: https://lnkd.in/e9jf9Xmb #foundersunplugged #heyfoodisready #founderstory #salesenablement #revops #inclusionmatters #sponsored

🍜 COMING UP ON Founders Unplugged… 🍜 "Food is a language without words." That was Yuru, founder & CEO of Hey! Food is Ready 🍽️, on why she’s on a mission to connect independent chefs—many from refugee and immigrant backgrounds—with companies looking for diverse catering options. 🔹 From uni project to full-scale marketplace—how did it happen? 🔹 The power of storytelling in food & why authenticity sells 🔹 How different cultures approach food, business, & trust 🔹 What UK food gets wrong (and why a Cornish pasty is marketing genius) And of course, we get into startup pivots, fundraising, and how a smoothie bowl side hustle led Yuru to rethink her entire career. 🎙️ Episode drops tomorrow at 14:30 GMT across all platforms. Stay tuned! 💬 What’s one dish that instantly connects you to your roots? Drop it below 👇 #FoundersUnplugged #FoodStartup #CulturalDiversity #Entrepreneurship #Podcast

Most founders I know are decent people. But there’s a dangerous default that creeps into startup culture: “If it’s legal, it’s fine.” After two hours of conversation with Alex Neill (CEO of Consumer Voice) on my show Founders Unplugged, I’m more convinced than ever that compliance isn’t enough. Especially if you're building in AI, data, or anything that moves faster than regulation. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: The law is slow. Ethics aren’t. We spoke about AI models being trained on user data scraped from platforms. Voice, video, text; often used without meaningful consent. Sure, the terms and conditions technically allow it. But was it right? That gap between legality and ethics is exactly where trust breaks down. And once you lose it, you can’t buy it back. When I started building Peer, one of the first things I did was bring in legal advisors, not because we had to, but because I didn’t want to build something I’d be forced to defend later. If the law changed tomorrow, would we still be proud of how we operate? That question has become a kind of compass. In this article, I’ve pulled together some reflections from that conversation and my own journey on why founders have a responsibility to operate above the line, not just on it. Because no one’s coming to save us. And I’d rather be part of the solution. 👇 Article below. Would love to hear what others think about this line between legal and ethical. Where do you draw it?

This Week’s Episode of Founders Unplugged was Brought to You by Peer! 🚀 💡 Every business generates valuable workforce data. Most are wasting it. AI has the power to transform hiring, performance, and decision-making—but it can’t work with unstructured, disorganized data. 🔹 Peer turns workforce expertise into structured, AI-ready data. 🔹 Peer transforms subjective feedback into clear, actionable insights. 🔹 Peer makes AI implementation effortless by providing a pre-built data infrastructure. 📢 Every day you’re not structuring your data, you’re falling further behind. 🎧 Tune in to this week’s Founders Unplugged to hear how smart companies are getting AI-ready now. 📍 Book a free discovery call & get 20% off your first audit: https://lnkd.in/e9jf9Xmb #FoundersUnplugged #AIReadiness #FutureOfWork #Peer #StartupGrowth #AIData