‘It’s not about you.’
That’s the single most valuable piece of advice I could give to anyone starting a business.
When a prospect didn’t buy, when a client pushed back, when a colleague challenged a decision early in my career, I spent too much energy on the wrong response.
Most of the time, what feels personal isn’t. Most criticism isn’t about you but about a situation.
Someone having a difficult day. A business problem that has nothing to do with you.
The founders who move fastest are the ones who learn early to separate the signal from the noise, absorb the feedback that’s useful, and move on from the rest. It’s a skill worth developing deliberately.
The reality of building to scale
Starting a business has been glamorised by Silicon Valley mythology.
The reality is that building something to scale is one of the hardest things a person can do. And making it to seven years, which we have, is a genuine achievement.
The most honest way I can describe the journey is snakes and ladders. Just when you’re making real progress, a significant client win, a key hire, a product breakthrough, something knocks you back.
A contract lost. A key person leaving. A decision that looked right at the time and wasn’t.
Holly Moore: Rubbing shoulders with the stars to living with OCD
At the scale we operate, individual events carry real weight. Unlike larger organisations that absorb setbacks without noticing, a scaling business feels every one.
What carries you through is resilience. Not the performative kind, but the quieter, more stubborn variety. The ability to truly believe in what you’re building, absorb the setback, and go again.
If you don’t have genuine conviction in your proposition and your competitive advantage, the hard moments will find you out.
The mistake most AI founders make
When we founded HyperFinity, we were steeped in data and analytics for consumer brands.
We knew the market, we understood the problem, and we were convinced that better technology, applied to retail decision-making, would speak for itself. It doesn’t.
The gap between a correct recommendation and an acted-upon recommendation is filled entirely by human judgement, trust and commercial context.
That gap is where most AI businesses either win or lose, and it’s the thing that gets the least attention in the early stages, when founders are naturally focused on building the technology itself.
The human layer is the product
As HyperFinity evolved, we developed what we call a people + tech model, embedding retail data scientists directly inside client teams, rather than handing over dashboards and stepping back.
At the time, it felt like a practical response to what clients needed. In hindsight, it was the most consequential strategic decision we ever made, even if we arrived at it instinctively rather than by design.
The technology became the engine, the people became the differentiator.
Clients didn’t just need the intelligence. They needed someone who could help them interpret it, pressure-test it, and give them the confidence to act on it.
Someone who understood the commercial context well enough to know when the model was right, and when it needed to be interrogated.
To any founder building in AI: Don’t treat the human layer as a workaround while you wait for the technology to mature. It is the product.
In a world where algorithmic output is increasingly abundant, the scarce and genuinely valuable thing is the judgement that turns insight into action.
Everything above points to the same underlying truth: AI businesses succeed or fail on trust, not technology.
The trust deficit in AI is your biggest opportunity.
Most organisations don’t act on AI recommendations because they don’t know how to trust them yet, not because the recommendations are wrong.
Building that trust, systematically and repeatably, is a very good business to be in.
We started HyperFinity in the craft ale pubs of Leeds, sketching ideas on flip charts and convinced that better technology applied to retail would be enough.
Seven years on, the technology is stronger than anything we imagined back then.
But the thing that has actually built the business, the thing I’d go back and tell my younger self to focus on from day one, is far more human than that.
Trust takes longer to build than any algorithm. And it’s worth considerably more.