Tech entrepreneur Steven Bartlett was born in Botswana in 1992 to a Nigerian mother and an English father and found fame as the youngest-ever Dragon in the Den.
He describes his mother as the ‘hardest working person’ he has ever encountered and his father as one of the ‘most loving and caring man’ he knows.
Bartlett grew up on Plymouth and attended Plymstock School, where he quickly showed his entrepreneurial flare.
He’s spoken of his tough childhood, which didn’t involve birthdays or Christmases.
“My parents had no money,” he reflected. “I’d be lucky to get a card. I came to realise fairly quickly that if I was going to have stuff in my life, it was going to be down to me.”
Writing on LinkedIn he said: “My Dad worked a full time job late into the evening and when his work was done, he would go and join my Mum at her job in a small, hot, fast-paced restaurant kitchen until the early hours of the morning.
“They came home when I was asleep and went to work when I was asleep. When my mum left the restaurant, she opened a corner shop called KJS and would work all day and all night.
“She would end up sleeping in the back room of the corner shop on a bag of rice because local kids would break in, steal things and vandalise the shop because she was pretty much the only black women in the area.”
Bartlett, now a multi-millionaire, added: “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realised that they were my biggest professional inspirations and influence – not because they gave me profound advice like some parents do, but because they set a profound example without needing to say a word.”
In 2010 Bartlett enrolled on a business management course at Manchester Metropolitan University at the age of 18 but famously dropped out to pursue a career in business.
One of his early business ventures was Wallpark, which was where students from the same cities could connect and share everything from advertising to selling old textbooks.
His big break came in 2014 when he joined forces with Dominic McGregor to launch Manchester-based social media marketing agency Social Chain after identifying how social media could connect an audience with a brand.
During the company’s meteoric rise, Bartlett was the public face and McGregor was the hard-working but low-profile COO of the business.
Rarely pictured without his trademark black baseball cap, his social media accounts pictured him catching planes to New York, dining with clients in LA and speaking to budding entrepreneurs.
He used to capture details of his exciting life in video blogs – or vlogs.
Tellingly he identified the power of podcasts as a platform for storytelling.
In 2016 Bartlett boldly predicted Social Chain could be a ‘billion-pound’ company but the unicorn valuation never materialised.
Steven Bartlett during his Social Chain days
Controversy was never far away and Social Chain was criticised for plagiarising content for the company’s hugely popular social media pages.
Bartlett openly admitted to reusing content from Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit but said it was a two-way street as their content was also plagiarised.
In October 2019, Social Chain merged with German-based Lumaland AG to form The Social Chain AG and list on XETRA and the Düsseldorf Stock Exchange.
Less than a year later it was announced that Bartlett and McGregor were exiting the business completely. However, eyebrows were raised in 2023 when it was revealed Brave Bison had acquired the entire issued share capital of Social Chain Limited for an initial bargain price of £7.7m.
The revelation prompted a story in The Times headlined ‘Why Steven Bartlett is not the tycoon he claimed’, in which he was accused of ‘misdirection and half-truths’.
Bartlett took to LinkedIn to explain that at the time of his departure, Social Chain Group was generating in excess of $300m in revenues and would go on to reach a valuation of $600m+ on the stock market.
The controversy did nothing to slow down Bartlett’s meteoric rise, which saw him start his hit podcast Diary of a CEO in 2017 and launch his best-selling book ‘Happy Sexy Millionaire’ in 2021.
Also in 2021 he co-founded marketing, media and investment company Flight Group before becoming the youngest Dragon in the Den at the age of 28 in Series 19.
“I’ve been watching Dragons’ Den since I was 12 years old,” he gushed at the time. “It was my first window into the real world of business and investing.”
Dragons’ Den – Steven Bartlett, Touker Suleyman, Deborah Meaden, Sara Davies, Peter Jones. (Credit: BBC)
During his time on the show so far, Bartlett has invested in companies including Planthood, The Little Loop and Little’s Coffee.
You can see all of Bartlett’s investments during his time on the show here.
However in 2024, Bartlett started making the sort of headlines he probably wished he hadn’t.
One in The New Statesman read ‘Steven Bartlett’s empire of bluff’ and the closing line was particularly cruel.
“He’s a door-to-door salesman flogging not a product, but a way of being – a used car dealer for the soul,” wrote journalist Clive Martin. “He is the voice of a generation, but not necessarily the voice we’ll choose to remember in years to come.”
Bartlett, who featured in two adverts for brands Huel and Zoe, saw them banned after Advertising Standards Authority said they were misleading.
In December 2024, a BBC investigation claimed guests on his Diary of a CEO podcast were making an average of 14 harmful health claims on each episode.
Bartlett didn’t comment on the allegations specifically but his company Flight Studio hit back by saying the show offered guests ‘freedom of expression’.
Today Bartlett’s wealth is estimated to be between £50m-£70m and the 32-year-old has more than 10 million followers across LinkedIn; Instagram; TikTok; and X.
He rarely posts personal information, preferring instead to promote his Diary of a CEO podcast.
Bartlett is in huge demand as a public speaker and recently interviewed Umar Kamani as part of PrettyLittleThing’s high profile relaunch.