About Inside Startups
We built the company
we wished existed.
We work with founders and leadership teams from pre-seed to Series D — and all the pressure points in between.
Why We Exist
The problem
we kept seeing.
Every founder we have worked with has, at some point, hit the same wall. Not the commercial wall — the funding gap, the customer that churned, the competitor that appeared. Those are expected. The wall we mean is more fundamental: the moment when the pressure of building compounds into something that starts to affect judgement, health, relationships, and ultimately the business itself.
Most of the support available to founders addresses the commercial layer — strategy, fundraising, GTM, operations. That support is valuable and Inside Startups provides all of it. But it stops short of the question underneath the question: what happens to the human running the business when the pressure exceeds what their current operating system was designed to handle?
Inside Startups was built to answer that question alongside all the others.
The People
The People
Behind It
Inside Startups is built around a small, deliberately chosen team. Everyone here has either worked alongside me across multiple companies or opened my eyes to something I did not previously understand about performance.
Getting a company to its first million is a specific skill. Most people who claim it have done it once, with favourable conditions, and called it a pattern. I have done it in every business I have built — across AI, infrastructure, SaaS, and deep tech — and I have done it repeatedly for the founders I work with. I also turn companies around when the wheels are coming off, and I have been through exits on both sides of the table. If you are trying to get to that first million, or you are past it and something has started to break, that is exactly where I work.
Most commercial problems in early-stage companies are not strategy problems. They are relationship problems — the right partners not found, the right doors not opened, the right funding not accessed. I have spent close to two decades building the relationships and commercial structures that close that gap. Across Web3, clean energy, health, and sustainable infrastructure, I have grown a $200M project pipeline, secured over €1.3M in EU Horizon funding, and helped founders move from proof of concept to commercial reality in sectors where getting it right actually matters.
I have spent over ten years building the operational and financial infrastructure that allows ambitious companies to move fast without falling apart. That includes establishing companies across four countries, sitting on boards, co-founding my own consulting firm, and helping businesses win over €10M in EU and national grant funding. I step into the operational complexity that founders should not be carrying themselves — finance, people, compliance, cross-border governance — and I own it so they can focus on building. I have not just supported founders. I have been one.
I work with founders to examine the relationship between the spatial environments in which they build their businesses and the way they think within them. Drawing on more than two decades spent creating environments and observing how people respond to them, I help leaders understand how the spatial conditions surrounding their work influence the quality of the decisions on which their businesses depend.
I am a former professional rugby player who founded Built For Pressure after sport took me to the edge and back. I have worked with founders, CEOs, and senior leaders across multiple industries, and I know from direct experience what it takes to sustain performance at the highest level when the pressure is relentless and the margin for error is small. Most performance support addresses the symptoms. I work on the foundations: the physical capacity, the cognitive function, and the behavioural architecture that determine how a leader actually performs when it counts.
Featured & Spoken At
"The founders who build the best companies are not the ones who grind the hardest. They are the ones who figured out how to perform at their ceiling, not just work at their limit. That distinction is what Inside Startups is built around."
Ben Sheppard
Founder, Inside Startups