273 - Best of 2025! How Embracing a Grudge Can Fuel Your Success with Liana Fricker

0:00It's okay to earn money. It's okay to earn a lot of money. Money is not inherently good or evil. It just is. It's what we do with it. Clining Mount Everest and entrepreneurship are two things that only the reckless try on their own, right? The other thing that I love is when a founder has a grudge. I love a grudge. You can turn that grudge up. I often think of myself, I'm not egotistical or anything. This is like the best analogy that I have, like almost like a Thanos. The Purpose Powered Founder wants everything on the other side of the FU money, the freedom, the choice, the joy, and the ability to pay it forward, but they're not prepared to admit it.

0:38All right, Liana, you've played at this really cool intersection between SMB, the venture world, but you're also in Europe, which has required you to do things a different way. You started in Accelerator. You're based in London. You've had over 100 companies go through. Some of those companies have gone on to tech stars and apply to things like Y Combinator and raise money and become very successful. But because there hasn't been a very large, I guess, entrepreneurial culture in the UK, you kind of became the focal point. Go talk to Liana. She can help you in the UK kind of get started. And you were just telling me something as we got started.

1:14Your main message is you want people to understand where you end doesn't have to be where you start. Tell me more. Working with small. And what has really kind of made me feel awestruck about entrepreneurship in and of itself is the idea that you can start with one idea in one place, like with one kind of frame of reference or your mindset being in one way. And along the journey, it changes. It all unfolds. Always changes. Yep. Well, like you, Okay, you were telling me when we spoke last, this is a perfect example. You had a woman that came to you with an idea for a doll. I think the idea was the doll.

1:55And all of a sudden now, here we are, we fast forward. Her company has ventured back and they are, I guess, a defense contractor almost. Material circularity. Tell that story. You know, military wife, ultimately on paper, you know, what I would call like a quote unquote stay at home mom, came to us, wanted to crowdfund 10K, you know, for a prototype. And we were like, okay, but there was just something, it was like the enthusiasm, the ability to like, you know, burn it all down. Like, I love it when people like this really want to challenge the status quo. It's like, okay, this is really interesting.

2:27And so, you know, my business partners and I, we were talking to her and they were like, all right. And so over like three months, we started kind of working with her to shape this idea. And ultimately, we got to a point where we said, okay, well, the thing is, there's not enough water on earth to support organic cotton production at the scale that would be required for you to be as successful as Mattel. And because this whole thing is about, you know, sustainability and, you know, inclusion and all of these things, maybe there's another way. So then we started thinking of it from a materials perspective.

3:01Fast forward kind of another two months. It's all about materials. She got accepted into Antler, was able to turn that place down. And now it's a materials circularity company called Uplift 360. And it just blows my mind every time I think about that, you know. They're venture-backed now? Yeah, venture-backed. Like, they've got amazing contracts. You know, they've moved the team over to Luxembourg. And when we think about what, you know, someone, you know, at a kitchen table at this moment thinks is possible, I love the idea that maybe they don't even know what's possible. Maybe they're only seeing this one shy, like the small kind of thing about like what could be in the future, but they don't, they don't know what they're capable of.

3:45And that's why I love what it is that I do. That's why I love entrepreneurship. That's why I love SMBs, especially in the times that we're on now where everything is in fluff and technology is now ubiquitous. It's like, well, what could we do if we want to just kind of go left while everyone else is going right? Okay. So that's what I think is cool. if anyone's listening and your ears are perking up and you're like, wait a second, she lives in London? She doesn't sound like she's from London. What's going on here? You are not from London. I mean, you're the embodiment of where you start is not where you end.

4:15She is from a small town in California called Valley Joe. Just kidding. That's not how you say it. Vallejo, California in the Bay Area. How the freak did you end up in the UK? Yeah. By way of Boulder, Colorado. It was my last semester of university and I came over. I was Let's stay for six months and 20 years later, I'm still here. It's worked out. It's worked out for you. A small aside, the way that we got connected on Twitter is, I don't even remember who posted, somebody posted something about a suit. I don't remember what it was, but I quoted on there my favorite Kanye West lyric, which is, before he speak, his suit bespoke.

4:53And I just think it's such a cool lyric because obviously, you know what bespoke means, but also he's saying before he speaks, his suit is speaking for him. There's layers to it. And Liana commented, I don't remember if you've continued the lyric on or if you just said, oh, I love this lyric. And I was like, oh, who is this cool person? I'm going to go look at her profile. And that's how we got connected. So thank you, Kanye West. It's such a good song. The UK is different, right? It's not the same type of entrepreneurial ecosystem and ethos. you have done a bunch of things. You've worked within a bunch of companies.

5:27How did this accelerator start in the UK? You've helped over a hundred companies go through it now. What was the, I guess, genesis of that? So the genesis was the community that I started. So I started a community and we, you know, it grew really quickly. And the whole point of the community was to bring, you know, founders together to swap skills and knowledge and to network in ways that you know i find really enjoyable is networking so instead of you know 7 a.m with bad croissants and coffee you know we would do stuff like going out and you know taking over a bridal shop and having a supper club where you get to like meet like you know and it's not just any bridal shop it's like this incredible family owned like every single detail thought of like she's cool as anything so it was it was always around like bringing to the surface what typically laid beneath like everything that we would see in like our traditional kind of suburban, you know, small business space.

6:25What were you doing at the time? So at the time I was consulting for companies in California. So video is cool, but I have what scientists call a face for radio. And so what's even cooler is long form audio via my podcast and my newsletter, nickonomicspod.com. Go there for free, subscribe to my newsletter. It's one email per week, super tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. I do three to five episodes a week, depending on how curious I am. and it's stuff like this. It's all free, no sleazy sales pitches, nickonomicspod.com. So I just had my first baby. The time difference worked. My husband was going into London and so he was coming home really late.

6:58And so it was a way of kind of just using all of my skills. I get bored easily and I love to create and make stuff happen. And that's where it started. And your consulting was marketing, branding, communication, like what was? Everything. So it was, I'm very much a strategic thinker. And because of my background in marketing, comms, community, biz dev, you know, content. I just kind of understand how to put it all together and to find the path of least resistance. And that's where like my PR background really comes in handy because when you've got very little budget and you're expected to make a splash, you learn how to sell great exploits.

7:37This is true. So you just decided, hey, I'm going to start this peer group effectively, right? Like, hey, let's start this entrepreneurial peer group will meet in cool places. And you just noticed within that group that, hey, people are looking for funding or advice. So like, how did it bleed into the accelerator? What's more, I started to realize where some of the gaps in knowledge were. And I realized that I also had those gaps. And as luck would have it, you know, I went on an accelerator, met my two mentors who ended up being my business partners and investors. And they were like, we love what you're doing.

8:08How can we support this? And then we spent about 12 months finding ways to work together, COVID hit. And that was at the time where we had basically mapped out a network of digital enterprise hubs that were going to go across our region. We had like five out of 10 already set up and running. And then COVID hit, we brought it online and everything really went from there. That's how it became international. And that was when we first road tested the content for what is now our new big games accelerator. All right. So let me ask you some questions. I'm really curious. How do you know what ideas are worth pursuing and what ideas aren't?

8:42I know that's like a very broad and loaded question, but in entrepreneurship, we get ideas all the time, right? And there's some people who are like, oh, Mark Zuckerberg just had the grit and stick-to-itiveness to, you know, fulfill his vision. But on the flip side, there's also this component of you got to know when to cut bait, right? And so, like, I don't know, how do you kind of evaluate when an idea is worth pursuing and when it's like, all right, no, we're cutting bait? I very much use my thematic intelligence, which is like my body response, and I take it from the outside in. So I'm very much one of those.

9:16I don't know if it's old school or what, but I love a pestle analysis, right? Politics. I know what that is. I know what that is, but other people don't. So a personal analysis is a, it's a framework that you use to basically understand market forces, right? And the P stands for political, the E stands for economic, the S stands for sociological, T is technological, L is legal, and E is environmental factors. And ultimately, now we can identify opportunities and threats and make informed decisions. And then, you know, your strategy kind of pulls from there. So I'm a sucker for a pestle analysis.

9:57And that's where I start. I'm like a walking pestle analysis. It's like I'm constantly like reading and researching and social listening and taking notes and almost like, you know, the closest I can ever have to an invisibility cloak to understand where things are shifting, moving, where one thing might like, that's probably not worth it anymore, you know, whatever it is. And I think that's probably, that's always where I start and how I react when I hear an idea. And what I love the most is what I'm like, oh my gosh, yes, this is exactly the kind of thing that I've thought would be a solution to this intersection of problems.

10:36And so again, for me, I'm an intersectionalist. I like when it's multifaceted and it's like, I can see how this solves some systemic issues. I can see how this, you know, it can make money. And I, and when you put it all together, it's, you know, business for good, ultimately. You're not essentially, or I guess what you're not doing is, oh, I have this framework of analysis and I'm going to individually use it on this business that is pitching to me, you've kind of got this framework running in the back of your mind where you're constantly thinking about, okay, what's going on? And I don't remember all of them politically, economically, sociologically, environmentally, et cetera.

11:16Where are there intersections of problems? And then when a company pitches to you, it's like, oh, you're hitting on that social, political, and economic problem that I've identified. I like this. I'm going to invest So it's almost like the filter is where have I already identified problems and does this company fix it? Is that fair? Yeah, exactly that. And are they thinking of it in another way? You know, we work with an energy design consultancy for the built environment. And we got on like a house on fire in the first instance because when he was kind of sheepishly telling me his ideas for technology and things like that, I was like, well, it's funny you mention that because I've been racking my head.

11:56This isn't even like my zone of genius. And every time I come across anything in the built environment, like someone should be doing, you know, this, this, this. And, you know, because we work with like scale ups and quite early stage, there's also that element of founder enthusiasm. Because sometimes like we just don't know what we don't know. And that willingness to see beyond kind of maybe first, second, third kind of, you know, I guess point of view to widen out what we think might be the opportunity. Did you say we got on like a house on fire? Mm-hmm. I never heard that. That's amazing. What the freak?

12:39and we got on like a school breakdown, like a house on fire. Okay, we got on like a house on fire. That's a cool colloquialism I've never heard. I do not. I don't know if that's American or British. I've been here so long. It must be British. It has to be British. We grew up in the same area. In Northern California, we're not like, oh, yeah, John and I got on like a house on fire. That's not a thing. As you're thinking about this, do you like write this down or is it just all in your head? Are you kind of just constantly thinking about each one of these ideas over time? Or is there like, how do you keep yourself organized?

13:14I sense make. You know, I think what I've learned to do over time is to play to my strengths. And, you know, trend spotting, opportunity spotting is, you know, one of the things that I would say I'm exceptional at. Just being able to see, yep, that's going to be a thing. But yeah, like, you know, I sense make. And because I'm so interested in the world that I always have been, the same thing that led me to PR, that led me to marketing, that's led me through everything. It's just my curiosity. I'm so curious about how the world works. I'm curious about people. I'm curious about systems and structures.

13:48And I've found that business is probably the best, I guess, canvas that I have accessible to me to allow me to explore it all. So lots of people are curious though. How do you spot trends? I feel like curiosity is like, oh, that's interesting. What's this? What's this? what's this? There's a next step where there's, I guess, pattern recognition that says, oh, actually that's going to be a trend. Like what have you seen that, that might help you understand? Definitely the pattern recognition. And again, I think maybe part of it is just an innate ability that I have. Tell me some trends. Are you seeing any trends right now?

14:22What's something that you're like, oh, this is an emerging trend. Okay. So something that I'm definitely seeing as an emerging trend is going to analog. It's everything like physical. And I mean, we've seen this for a while, right? It's everything from the resurgence of vinyl. When we think about smartphone free schools, like my kid, like literally got an SD disc today. Cause we, he now, like we took the smartphone, he got an SD disc today and now he's downloading like music old school style. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, being offline and being in community, you know, I think everything has become so digitized.

15:01There's a real push towards offline. And I think what we're going to see over the next kind of five to eight years is the convergence between millennials like myself, who are parenting the youngest Gen Zs and the oldest Gen Alphas, whilst also feeling really, really overwhelmed with the digital world, just being like, forget it, take the tech, and we're going to go analog with this. So I'm definitely seeing a lot more, a lot more now. That's really interesting. Are you just seeing it anecdotally? Like, are you seeing it in, I don't know, Twitter posts or media, or are you also seeing it in the types of companies that are now forming around solving problems?

15:44That's a really good question. So I'm seeing it anecdotally offline. And then I'm also seeing the kind of evidence that I would look to, to make me say, okay, this is going to be a thing like the latest research from MIT around how chat GPT made your brain rot. And then if you add that to things like Bophouse, which is apparently a content creator house for only fans, creators. Bophouse? called bop house bop and it's like tiktok and snapchat now if you have a 14 15 16 year old you may or may not be aware of how much time your child spends on these platforms and i read something online a couple of days ago about the bop house we were checking our son's phone and in his for you page was a bop house thing and i was like uh-huh so when we think about this And then on Saturday, we were at school and they were doing the smartphone free school thing.

16:44So you see how like all of this starts to then come together, like creates snowball effects. And I think when we're thinking about things being analog, looking online might be the wrong place to look for the Cigna. because a lot of the people that feel the most passionately about this aren't necessarily online and they're not necessarily talking about it in public spaces. They're in parenting Facebook groups. There's one that I'm in, and I think it might have 20 ,000 parents that are all just like, we have no idea what to do about our kids in tech. Did you read the MIT study about Chatsy Patinkas?

17:15No, I just saw like a high level. Oh man, I got to read. The same. I saw that. My My wife sent it to me as well. I need to read it because this is how I feel about it. I think that every time there's a new technology, people think that, oh, it just makes you lazier. Remember when we were kids and they're like, you have to learn how to do long division because you're not just going to have a calculator in your pocket. It's like, I do now actually have a calculator in my pocket. They might look at that and be like, oh, brain rot. You see, you don't know how to do long division anymore. There's a hundred examples of that.

17:46I wonder if it's brain rot in the sense that your muscle for complex problem solving is atrophying to a certain degree, but are you developing another muscle where you can identify how to bring AI into the mix so that you can get ahead faster? I don't necessarily think it's a zero-sum game where just because one muscle atrophies, the whole body atrophies. It could be that one muscle atrophies and another muscle just becomes a lot stronger. I don't know. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract. I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business.

18:28And you would like, subscribe, and leave me a five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value. But I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. So the study was looking at like 18 to 39-year-olds. And it was a really, really small sample size. I think that's quite important to remember. And if you think that it was from 18 to 39, you know, depending on like what the age mix was, there could have been a significant proportion of people that were in the study that are not our age.

19:11So don't remember a world before the Internet. So then how much of the atrophy did they already have? Have. You know, and I agree with you that it's not a zero sum game. what I can say for myself, and I've been on like ChatGPT, like I remember when it first launched, and that was another one of those trends that I had spotted really, really, really, really early around AI. And I remember in, you know, 2019 saying to copywriters that, you know, if your challenge is how do you scale your content business, imagine a world where you could create these bots of yourself instead of hiring people. And then you could train them with different filters.

19:48So you could have your lifestyle filter and your fashion filter and then ChatGPT, right? Right. Like, yeah, yeah. You know, I was saying that in 2019. And, you know, anybody else, anybody who's listening to this is like, yeah, and you were old, like you were late, you know, because this has been in development for a while. And so, you know, I think it's what I've seen for myself is I use it to brainstorm, to make sense, to rapidly keep up with how my mind thinks. But there are times where because I haven't necessarily imprinted it into my head because I've not taken like the labor to write it out and I'm kind of doing the thinking part, but I'm not cementing the thinking.

20:30It does kind of wash through a little bit and I do have to reference it. And so I'm coming up with my own ways of doing that, doing a lot more handwriting. I find that that's actually really helpful to like write my ideas down by hand first because it kind of like cements it in and then I can talk to chat. Totally. You know, and then it feels like in conversation that I can like almost like take. Yeah, exactly. I've started using the chat function with a chat GPT and it's like it just helps me sort of work through problems internally. I think that's a great way to do it. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. All right.

21:01Let me ask you this. These are going to be two hard questions. What are the top five traits that you see right now? in successful founders? Well, I guess my first question is like, what a success? I can define it for you. Okay. Okay. I define success as a little bit of a cop-out answer, but I define success in a founder as them hitting their well-grounded goals. It's because for one founder, it may be, I want a lifestyle business. And I'm not just talking tech. I'm just, I'm like talking to anyone. It may be, I want a lifestyle business where I can spend as much time with my kids and I make$200 ,000 a year.

21:39Cool. And for another founder, it might be, I want to build a company and exit for$50 million. Okay, cool. So those are two different definitions of success for them individually, but they're both success for them, if that makes sense. So for me, success is just achieving your grounded goals. And the reason I say grounded is because if you're somebody who's like, I want to be a billionaire, I think that you're an idiot. Do you know how hard it is to become a billionaire. I don't actually think you're an idiot if you're a billionaire, but it is so freaking hard to become a billionaire. There are not many of them in the world.

22:15That's a lot of freaking money. So I don't think that's a well-grounded goal, so to speak. Anyways, I don't know. Maybe you have a better definition of success. I share that. And what I love about what you've said is that I love nothing more that when they start kind of saying, I want a lifestyle business that earns 200K and then after three years, like, yeah, I want to exit for 50 million. You know, these are journeys that I take people on. And I love that. And that is, and so for me, what I feel is, you know, the traits of a successful founder is that openness. It's curiosity, right? Being curious about yourself, being curious about the world, being curious about others, humility.

22:56And that's a lesson that you learn, right? You You know, he get batted around a few times in particular. If like you start like, well, like I started well. So I was very much in that, you know, two, three years. Like, oh God, I'm infallible. And then it's gone hard. Then I started taking. Right. So I learned humility like real well. And like now that's like a really core part of my being because your ego can only get you so far. And it's something that you have to be really, really mindful of. So that humility I think is key. And there's a difference between humility and insecurity. right like you can be insecure that doesn't mean necessarily that you have humility in my opinion humility comes after you've gone through and you've seen oh yeah I have some skill sets to still understand that you don't know everything that's humility that's much harder than just being insecure and like am I good enough to you know did my mom love me enough when I was a kid hundred percent and that reason to my next one was like being of service because having a business is a lifestyle choice.

24:01You know, I'll never forget, I was talking to Amy Arrett, who is the founder of Madison Reed Hair Care and Coloring. She was, you know, an early kind of person who worked with Starbucks and, you know, she's got a venture fund and all these things, like very, very successful. And I'll never forget, she said, you know, this is a lifestyle choice. This is almost like a vision quest. This is not an easy thing to do when you think about all the other ways you ultimately could pay your bills. right yeah it's true being of service is so important because it helps you to remember the why and sometimes you're in service of yourself and your own needs right like your own like pursuit of what is possible what am i capable of you know sometimes it's being in service of like the commitment that you made to your family and saying right like i'm doing this for that sometimes you're in service of the problem that you want to solve.

24:56And it's not like one kind of box, but it's understanding that you are of service. And I think the other thing that I would say that I always consider to be like a great trait is the willingness to collaborate because climbing Mount Everest and entrepreneurship are two things that only the reckless try on their own, right? Like you can't do that on your own. What? at all, you know, at all. There are only so many Shackletons or is it Shackleford or great mountaineers in the world in the same way. There's only, you know, so many lone wolf founders that have done it and got to a billion on their own.

25:34And in reality, if you actually go back and look at the stories from the time, they probably weren't really, really doing it on their own. It's the, you know, we've created that myth afterwards. So I'm going to recap these and I really like them. So curiosity, I agree. I think curiosity is a superpower. Humility, openness, being of service, willingness to collaborate. The one in here that kind of surprised me, but I really like as you were talking is the being of service one. Because back to what we talked about earlier, well, what is success? I think that when you're getting into this game, you have to know what your goal is.