Board/C-Suite Narrative and Risk Advisor. Before it’s visible, before it’s expensive. TEDMED • SXSW • StartX
🇬🇧🇺🇸 & Virtual - ✈️ Global
Joined March 2008
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Are you a business leader? Whether you lead a team or a business, of any size, you have an additional title on top of the one in your LinkedIn.
You are the Chief Storytelling Officer.
You have three audiences. Upwards, outwards, and downwards.
Downwards is your existing team, and those you are trying to recruit. If you want a team of A players, believers rather than pay cheque people - you need to be a great storyteller.
Outwards could be podcasts, analysts, the media, large stages such as conferences and TED style stages. How good your story is, and how well you tell it, has a massive impact on perceptions of your and your business.
Upwards is whoever you answer to, the Board or investors/shareholders. This affects how they see you and will impact on your career.
All three of these audiences respond to your storytelling ability - whether it is good or bad.
Being a great storyteller could extend your tenure at the top by years. Being bad at storytelling WILL shorten it.
The good news is that your storytelling ability is a variable, one of the very few, that you CAN influence and improve.
Clients of mine have improved A player recruitment and retention and reduced unwanted churn. They have turned employees into believers. They have improved margins. They have improved the perceptions of their business and themselves.
Whatever your leadership title, you are the Chief Storytelling Officer of your career and your business or department.
I can help you become a better storyteller.
Is it a crazy idea to set up a chemistry test and do an audit of where you are now?
#leadershipcoach
#storytellingcoach
#speakercoach
#executiveinterviewcoach
138 (21.2%) of the current 650 UK MPs are over the age of 60.
Is age a barrier to becoming an MP? Is the lack of new “experience” an issue? Since the 2010 GE only 58 out of 1026 (5.65%) new MP entrants were over 60. Of which, 20 over 65 and only 1 over 70. #elections #candidates #houseofcommons
Is age a barrier to becoming an MP? Is the lack of new “experience” an issue? Since the 2010 GE only 58 out of 1026 (5.65%) new MP entrants were over 60. Of which, 20 over 65 and only 1 over 70. #elections #candidates #houseofcommons
Peter Botting retweeted
StartX Fellows applications are now open! 🚀
A year inside Stanford’s premier startup accelerator: work with our team, own real projects, and meet founders and investors.
No startup experience needed. Applications close Nov 1, 11:59 PM PT.
Apply 👉 web.startx.com/fellows?utm_s…
Peter Botting retweeted
Ben Horowitz on treating your story as your strategy, and why founders often skip writing it even though it's one of the most important parts of the job:
"The story of the company is also the strategy of the company... In your mind, you're kind of adjusting that strategy a little bit at a time every day. But then a quarter later, it's actually pretty different than what you started with."
"So it's really important that you keep upgrading your story. The articulation of your story. I would definitely recommend it be in written form."
"Something that you can share with everybody in the company, and everybody you're recruiting, everybody you're trying to raise money from, all your constituents, every customer."
"The problem that I think founders have is it doesn't feel like work. Like, 'What are you doing today?' 'I'm working on my story.' That doesn't sound like work."
"Because it doesn't feel like work, people don't do it, but it's probably one of the most important parts of the job."
@bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @Tocelot
Peter Botting retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Peter Botting retweeted
Today, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton delivered a speech in the @UKHouseofLords using an AI recreation of her voice, built by ElevenLabs. A first for the UK Parliament.
Baroness Campbell has spinal muscular atrophy, which affects her speech. The Baroness has now created an AI voice that replicates the tone, rhythm, and pitch of her original voice.
Our technology has now been used to restore the voices of more than 11,000 people who have lost their voices through injury or illness, and we’ve committed to help one million people living with voice loss around the world.
Peter Botting retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Lib Dem MP Charlie Maynard has resigned as Treasury spokesperson in a bid to oust Ed Davey as leader and trigger a vote of no confidence
Peter Botting retweeted
Fine moment of theatre at the @Conservatives Party Conference: @kevinhollinrake (always a good turn) greets his far-right black labrador onstage with a pint of ale (at 10.20am). #CPC26
Peter Botting retweeted
this would have been the UK's most valuable AI startup had it not relocated in December last year.
Very painful for the UK
Two Oxford grads have built an $18bn company that is enabling Google to take on Nvidia.
Gary Wu and Jamie Cox started Fluidstack in 2017, renting out spare gaming GPUs to AI researchers who couldn't get compute any other way.
Now @fluidstack builds and runs the data centres that house Google's AI chips (or TPUs).
Anthropic just agreed to buy up to 1 million of these TPUs from Google in a $200B deal, and Fluidstack is the company building and running the sites to put them in.
The company announced its first-ever funding round earlier this year - a $750m round in July at $7.5bn.
However, it has also closed an unreported $1.5bn round led by Jane Street at an $18bn valuation.
Google's TPUs are a real alternative to Nvidia, but only if someone can get the data centres up and running fast enough to run them at scale.
Fluidstack is claiming it can build a data center in 3 months vs. a year for the hyperscalers.
The interesting, and PAINFUL, part of the story is that Fluidstack was HQ'ed in London until December last year.
If it had stayed it would be Europe's most valuable AI startup.
Great write up from @_IainMartin in @Forbes linked below.
Peter Botting retweeted
The Tory Shadow Chancellor, @griffitha, has more private sector experience than the entire Labour Cabinet….combined.
Wild.
Peter Botting retweeted
Sharing our own horror story:
In December we’ve closed our Seed round with a UK lead investor. Since our company was incorporated in Italy and participated by a Belgium fund we had to translate a PoA in 3 languages and almost lost the deal because the Italian and Belgium notary couldn’t agree which language would prevail in case of inconsistency in the translation (of which there was any).
Our invoice was 21k and we had to be all physically there to sign and bring official apostilles with us as e-Apostilles where somehow controversial too.
Peter Botting retweeted
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
Kinda love this. So much time wasted in meetings for so many bad reasons; not least lack of prep, lack of purpose, too many irrelevant or non-contributing attendees, meeting membership “status”, scheduled meetings because it’s scheduled…
A Tesla employee once described what happens when Elon Musk walks out of a meeting. Mid sentence. While someone is still talking.
Elon has told his teams explicitly: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave. It is rude to waste people's time."
The employee said the first time he saw it happen the room froze. A senior vice president was presenting a quarterly update and Elon simply stood up, nodded slightly, and left. No explanation. No "excuse me." The presentation continued but nobody was listening anymore. They were all processing what just happened.
Over time the employee said it became normal. People understood the rule. If Elon leaves it means one of two things: the meeting doesn't need him, or the meeting shouldn't exist. Both are useful signals. The meetings got shorter. The presentations got sharper. People stopped scheduling meetings to feel productive and started scheduling them only when a decision needed to be made.
He said the rule sounds brutal in theory but in practice it created the most efficient meeting culture he'd ever experienced. Nobody rambles when the CEO might stand up and leave. Nobody pads a presentation with filler when the audience includes someone who values his time in 5-minute increments.
Most companies worship the appearance of collaboration. Elon worships the elimination of wasted time. And the difference between the two is why Tesla moves faster than companies ten times its size. The discomfort of watching someone leave your meeting is smaller than the cost of keeping someone in a meeting they don't need to be in. Most leaders aren't willing to make others uncomfortable to save time. Elon considers it a moral obligation.
Peter Botting retweeted
Badenoch's Purge is a Mercy Killing, not a Massacre
For years the Conservative Party's problem was not policy. It was character. It kept promoting people who talked like conservatives and voted like technocrats, who nodded along to net zero targets they privately doubted and treaties they privately resented. Kemi Badenoch has just done something rare in British politics: she has looked at that habit and called it what it is. Cowardice dressed up as pragmatism.
Her decision to block former MPs from standing again if they still cling to net zero, or still defend Britain's subjection to Strasbourg, will be painted by critics as ruthless. It is not ruthless. It is honest. A party that lost catastrophically in 2024 does not get to relitigate that defeat by recycling the same faces and the same instincts. Voters did not reject the Conservatives because the party wasn't nice enough to its old guard. They rejected it because it had stopped standing for anything distinguishable from the consensus it claimed to oppose.
Net zero and the ECHR are not minor technical disputes. They are the clearest tests going of whether a politician actually believes in national self-government, or merely enjoys the theatre of it. A candidate who still insists Britain must hit arbitrary carbon targets, whatever the cost to industry and household bills, has not learned anything from a decade of rising energy prices. A candidate who thinks Strasbourg's rulings are compatible with controlling Britain's own borders is not being moderate. They are being evasive.
What makes this striking is the alternative Badenoch is proposing. Not more career politicians, not more special advisers who have never run so much as a corner shop, but people who have actually built things, taught in classrooms, served in uniform, or kept a small business afloat. It is an unfashionable idea: that competence and conviction matter more than polish. But it is exactly what a party trying to prove it has changed needs to demonstrate, not merely announce.
Compare that with the government it is up against. Much of the current Parliamentary Labour Party arrived from the charity sector and NGOs, backgrounds built around advocacy and institutional compassion, not the harder trade-offs of running a country. It shows in the instincts on display: a preference for managing sentiment over confronting problems. Badenoch's bet is that Britain needs fewer people trained to represent a cause and more who have had to deliver a result.
There will be a cost. Some of the rejected will go to the papers. Some will drift to Reform, adding to a defection story that has already dented the Tories once. Badenoch's response, "so be it", is the correct one. A party terrified of losing people who do not agree with its direction will never have a direction. Every serious political project involves deciding who does not belong in it. The Conservatives spent the last parliament unable to do that, and the country noticed.
Contrast this with the alternatives on offer. Reform's vetting has produced candidates that make its own leader wince. Labour, with over four hundred MPs, could not find anyone better to replace Starmer than a man who once lost to Jeremy Corbyn. Against that backdrop, a party willing to say no to its own former MPs looks less like an act of cruelty and more like the first sign of a functioning institution.
None of this guarantees electoral success. Polling still has the Conservatives level with Labour and behind Reform. But recovery has to start somewhere, and it rarely starts with comfort. Badenoch is betting that voters can tell the difference between a party performing seriousness and one practising it. That bet is worth taking.
ALT Kemi Badenoch
Peter Botting retweeted
Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Greens: I demand you stand down in Clacton. I will be a unity candidate and pledge to build at least one affordable house.
Nigel Farage says he wants The People versus the Establishment. So be it.
Leave him to me.
Peter Botting retweeted
My guess is that we are days, even hours, away from a resignation announcement. For those still trying to run the "good man, bad politician" line, have a look at this.
I sense that political obituarists are preparing to run with the line that @Keir_Starmer was a decent fellow, but ill-suited to politics. Honest but naïve.
Well, have a look at this and then try to tell me he was honest. The signs were there from the start.