Creating Value in Business: Lessons from a Life Spent Building Things

I’ve been building things since I was sixteen.

Back then it was small projects and experiments, but the instinct was the same as it is today: create something people find genuinely valuable and share what I learn along the way. That simple idea has taken me through six startups, a global video advertising network, an exit to IBM, and now into Radiate B2B.

Along the way I’ve sat in a lot of different seats – founder, operator, mentor, CEO – but the through-line has always been the same: understanding how new technology can create real value for businesses and the people inside them.

From early internet experiments to global video advertising

I was an early adopter of the internet and even of some of the services that came before it. What fascinated me wasn’t just the technology itself, but what it made possible: new ways to reach people, new models for storytelling, and new business models entirely.

That curiosity led me to build one of the world’s largest video advertising networks. We ran the first cinematic-style online launch of a paid-for movie, helped brands scale globally and proved that digital advertising could do more than replicate TV spots on a smaller screen.

One of those companies exited to Silverpop, which itself later became part of IBM. That experience – taking something from idea to global scale and then through an acquisition – taught me a lot about the gap between what technology could do and what teams, customers and markets are actually ready for.

It also cemented something that still shapes my work today: technology only matters when it changes behaviour.

Radiate B2B and changing how B2B marketing works

Today I’m founder and CEO of Radiate B2B.

We help B2B companies win more enterprise customers faster by combining intent data with account-based advertising and outreach. In simple terms, we help you see which companies are in market and get in front of the right people inside those companies, at the right time.

Our vision is to change the way B2B marketing is delivered. When people use our platform, they stop thinking of their market as a big, anonymous list of leads and start seeing it for what it really is: a set of specific companies with different contexts, behaviours and needs.

That shift sounds subtle, but it changes everything:

• You stop shouting at the entire market and start talking to the right accounts.
• You stop optimising for volume and start optimising for relevance and timing.
• You stop measuring marketing in isolation and start thinking in terms of pipeline and revenue.

It’s also where my broader work sits now: helping founders and leaders translate AI and new technology into clear product bets, go-to-market plans and simpler ways of running the business.

The values that drive how I build

Over the years I’ve worked out that there are three values I keep coming back to, regardless of company or role: curiosity, drive and being supportive.

Curiosity

Curiosity is what pushes you to explore what might be possible next.

For me that’s meant:

• Being early into digital and data
• Exploring how video could work online long before it was obvious
• Now, spending a lot of time on AI and how it reshapes the “operating system” of a business

Curiosity is uncomfortable because it takes you into places where there aren’t playbooks yet. But it’s also where most of the value is created.

Drive

Curiosity on its own isn’t enough; you need the willingness to push.

Drive is what keeps you going when:

• The product is half-baked but needs to ship
• Sales cycles are long and uncertain
• Markets change underneath you (Covid-19 being a recent example)

You don’t control everything, but you can control how you show up and how consistently you move the work forward.

Being supportive

This might sound softer, but it’s critical.

You get further, faster, when:

• Teams feel like they have space to do their best work
• Clients feel heard and understood
• Partners trust that you’re trying to create value, not just extract it

My job as a leader is often to get obstacles out of the way and create conditions where people can succeed.

The best advice I’ve had

One piece of advice I keep coming back to is:

Hire right and people will want to succeed. Take the time to understand them and then give them the space to do so.

It’s easy to forget this when you’re under pressure – chasing numbers, raising money, dealing with customers. But most problems I’ve seen inside companies come from:

• Misunderstanding what someone is trying to do
• Not being clear about outcomes
• Micromanaging the how instead of aligning on the why

Whether it’s your team, your customers or your partners, starting from the assumption that they want to succeed changes the conversation.

A hard lesson: hiring the wrong person at the wrong time

Not everything has gone smoothly.

One of the more painful lessons for me was hiring our first senior commercial person and misunderstanding what that role needed to look like. What was critical vs what was wanted.

We brought in someone who wasn’t laser focused on opening deals. We thought we had the right person. Strategic, previous startup experience. But it was mismatched with what we needed at that stage.

It taught me the difference between need and want and prioritising skills:

• Want is often about ease: “If only we had a senior sales person, everything would be fine.”
• Need is about the real bottleneck: clarity of proposition, proof that the model works, the right kind of customer insight.

Hire too early, or for the wrong reasons, and you put someone in a role where they’re almost guaranteed to struggle. That’s not fair on them or on the company.

Getting people to buy into your ideas

Every founder or leader faces the same problem: how do you get people to understand and believe in something that doesn’t exist yet?

For me, the answer has always been translation.

• Understand who you’re talking to – engineer, marketer, investor, board member, customer.
• Work out how your idea shows up in their world.
• Strip away jargon until the idea is clear enough that they can repeat it to someone else.

If you can’t explain it in plain language to different audiences, you don’t have a strategy – you have a wish.

Looking ahead

When I think about the future of Radiate B2B – and of my work more broadly – a few things are constant:

• We’ll keep pushing on product innovation: using data and AI more intelligently to show who is in market and what they care about.
• We’ll keep improving how sales, marketing and customer success work together – because in the real world, they’re part of one system, not separate silos.
• We’ll keep helping companies focus on the right prospects right now, especially in markets that are noisy, uncertain or changing fast.

The tools and language will evolve. They always do.

But the underlying question remains the same as it was when I was sixteen:

How do we create something people genuinely value – and how do we share what we learn so others can move faster too?

That’s the work I’m interested in, whether it’s through Radiate B2B, consulting and fractional roles, mentoring founders and leaders, or speaking about what AI and new technology really change in business.

The interview with Rachel Nielsen for Leadership Gazette can be read here.