Something felt different about Climb 25.
Maybe it was following a live band performance with speeches from entrepreneur Richard Harpin, who scaled HomeServe from the ground up to a £4.1bn valuation, and the CEO of Leeds City Council.
Potentially, it was interviewing the mastermind behind the event, Gordon Bateman, whilst he managed to find a quiet spot to eat nachos and drink a deserved pint.
Or it could’ve been walking around a tech festival and seeing Dame Laura Kenny as well as the Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, prepping for a talk just a few yards away.
It may have even been something as simple but unique as looking at multiple food stalls, from coffee carts to Asian street food, right by the entrance.
Outside at Climb 25
Now this might be an easy thing to say for someone without a wealth of experience in attending tech conferences, but Climb 25 just felt like a welcome change to your usual UK event.
And that’s exactly what Gordon wanted – a unique, intimate event that genuinely helps attendees. It’s about people, not exclusively business.
The goal of ClimbUK
“By doing what we do, I can help 2,000 people at this event in one whack,” he tells me.
“It’s up to them whether or not they take that any further themselves. Some won’t but it’s probably different here because we do attract an amazing quality of audience and this allows us to do what we do.
“Ultimately, I want to help people. And that might be about their wellbeing, it might be about their business, it could be about whatever.
“We just focus on business, because that’s what I know more about.”
There are nearly 400 speakers here in the heart of Leeds across the two-day festival.
Situated on Leeds Dock, it’s a daunting task to even figure out where to go with the sheer number of goings-on when you get there.
Giant living room
After the buzz of the launch event, which saw Bateman, Climb Group executive partner Ian McAtee, Brabin and Ed Whiting of Leeds City Council take to the stage – all expertly panelled by veteran journalist Tanya Arnold – I head to the quieter cinema room.
It’s a bit of a mooch from the main ‘Summit Stage’ and it’s a completely different atmosphere.
It’s almost like sitting in a giant version of your living room, with comfy sofas and a real relaxed feel to it.
Cinema room, Climb 25
One of the speakers in this room is Laura Harper, partner at Lewis Silkin, which recently won ‘Firm of the Year’ at the Lawyer Awards 2025.
“It’s a really prestigious award for us,” she tells me after being on a panel chaired by Game Republic managing director Jamie Sefton.
Laura specialises in advising businesses in the gaming and creative industries, where AI is even more of a key figure than it is elsewhere.
She adds: “I think it is very important. It solves quite a lot of complicated problems in terms of regulatory issues.
“You can also use assistive AI to monitor content on a game or a platform, for example, or to monitor chats and user content.”
From New York to London to Leeds
Most Climb 25 attendees would’ve got their steps in on the first day, but not many would’ve travelled as far as Nell Daly over the past few days.
Nell Daly at Climb 25
Despite the ‘slight jet lag’ after a Transatlantic flight, the American-born practising psychotherapist, TV regular and now-venture capitalist is still determined to tell her story in West Yorkshire.
Nell used to be a social worker and saw first-hand the discrimination people had suffered.
This fuelled the fire to launch Revenge Capital – a London and New York-centred, evergreen, sector-agnostic venture capital firm focused on investing in usually-overlooked founders.
“When you’re a psychotherapist, you become obsessed with the idea of self-agency and people being able to live free lives and fully expressed lives,” she explains to me in the media room.
“I was treating a lot of people with depression and anxiety in my office as a psychotherapist, and I realised that what I really needed to do, after doing that for 13 years, was to make that move.
“I wanted to figure out how I can help more people have economic empowerment in their own lives in order to improve their mental health.”
Revenge Capital is now a $70m fund – just five years after the self-taught investor birthed the idea.
The harsh truths
“Nobody likes being told that their baby is ugly,” specialist mentor Nicky Dibben tells the Elevate Stage.
She isn’t to be taken literally, but metaphorically – responding to being quizzed by Naomi Timperley on why some entrepreneurs are too scared to have conversations with potential customers and investors.
“If we just continue developing the way we thought we were going to develop, nobody’s going to tell us what not to do,” she continues.
“But also, when you’re going out there into the market, I keep saying, ‘you’re having conversations, they’re only conversations’.
“You’re only making notes, you’re not making promises. You don’t have to pivot just because someone suggested it. Your strategy is not the last sentence the last person said to you in the last meeting – it’s much more than that.
“So you have to balance getting this input. You make notes and you ask them who else you should speak to and you keep repeating that.
“It’s the customer discovery and market research side of things that’s tricky if you haven’t done it before, but you have to remember: don’t ask people what they want, because they can’t tell you.
“People can tell you what they don’t want and they can tell you what they’ve done before, but they can’t tell you what they want. So if you go out saying, ‘what do you want?’, you’re not going to get the right answers.”
Going for Gold
It would be wrong to miss out on listening to Britain’s most decorated female Olympian and the first British woman to win gold medals in three consecutive editions of the iconic Games.
In case you needed a reminder, Dame Laura famously won gold at London 2012, Rio 2016 and finally at Tokyo 2020 – after giving birth to her son, Albie.
Dame Laura Croft, Climb 25
Despite being a national hero, she exudes modesty when discussing her achievements.
“I was always going to come back (to competitive cycling after giving birth), there was no question about it,” she recalls.
“I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with Sir David Brailsford, and he said to me, ‘what do you want to do after?’
“We were just talking for a while and I said, ‘I really want to be a young mum’.
“Now, when I said it, I’d never really thought about an ‘after’. I was 19, I didn’t even know Jason (Kenny) at the time, but then we got married and I was in a position where I really wanted to pause my career.
“People thought I was absolutely mental in doing so. To be honest, I didn’t start questioning myself until Christmastime; it was just after I had told my mum and dad.
“I was pregnant and I remember sitting up in bed on Christmas Eve at about 3am and I was saying, ‘Jason, I can’t do this’.
“His response was: ‘Well, you should have maybe told me that before. This is happening.’
“So this is way too much to have to deal with on its own, but even with those thoughts, I always knew I wanted to try and win another gold medal. I wanted to prove that it was possible and you’ve got to set insane targets.
“There were obviously times where I was thinking, ‘why have I done this? This is just beyond me, it’s just way too hard’, but I’ve surrounded myself with a really tight group of people.
“I don’t like to work with a big team. It’s never really been me, and my people managed to get me to where I was.”
There will be more exclusive BusinessCloud content from Climb 25 as the crowds flock to Leeds for day two of the event.
And after getting my tech festival chops, I’ll be heading to Lisbon in November for Web Summit!