Mati Staniszewski

Spoke with Richard Einhorn from Minoa the other day. Founders from LSE are outliers - it's not what your supposed to do after LSE. Had a great chat about the quicky emerging adjacent categories of Value Engineering, Presales, and the Implementation Agent Stack. The stack changing how enterprise software is packaged, sold, and set up.

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Last week an investor asked me why we're only focusing on London. It's a fair challenge. Hyperlocal marketplaces are notoriously difficult to scale - every new city is effectively starting from scratch. No shared supply, no shared demand. You're rebuilding the flywheel from zero each time. But here's why London is the right starting point, and why that's not the constraint it sounds like. London isn't just a large city. It's one of the densest experience markets in the world. A new immersive bar in Shoreditch. A gallery night chalked on a board near the tube. A rooftop cinema that wasn't there last month. Something genuinely new, almost every week. And the people who live here - particularly the under-30s - came to this city specifically to explore it. That's the demand side. On the supply side, London has thousands of independent operators with no efficient way to reach that demand. That gap is exactly where Deck sits. Marketplaces live or die by network effects. In a single city, those effects compound fast. More venues means more choices for users. More active users means more value for venues. The flywheel doesn't work across cities - it works within them. The hyperlocal risk is real. We know that. Which is why we're not just building transactions - we're building social engagement loops that make Deck a habit with network effects, not the afterthought. That's what makes the model defensible. And if we can crack London - really crack it - we won't just have users. We'll have a playbook. One we can take to other cities. £12bn annual leisure spend. London first. Then the world.

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The UK doesn’t have a startup problem - it has a scaling problem. Only 4–5% of seed-backed companies now reach Series A. In a new piece written alongside Adam Shuaib of Episode 1 Ventures for Silicon Valley's Journal, I break down what’s driving the gap and how to fix it. 🔗Read the full article here: https://bit.ly/3MFr7RQ

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🚀 Zilch Raises $175M: Holding Its $2B Valuation and Eyeing a 2026 IPO The UK’s BNPL unicorn isn’t slowing down. Zilch just secured $175M in equity and debt, keeping its $2B valuation intact, a strong signal of investor confidence in fintechs that are scaling and controlling their path to profitability. 💡 Why it matters: E-commerce Innovation: Zilch’s new one-click checkout (Zilch Pay) intensifies the battle at the point of sale. Expect merchants to push faster toward seamless, flexible payments. AI-Driven Growth: The company’s 'Intelligent Commerce' platform aims to give merchants real-time engagement data, positioning BNPL as a data-insight and ad-tech play, not just financing. M&A Expansion: Zilch is scouting strategic acquisitions to deepen customer and merchant relationships across the e-commerce journey. Market Signal: Holding its valuation in this environment shows confidence returning to late-stage fintechs, particularly those with meaningful revenue (Zilch hit £110M in FY 2025) and scale potential. 🧩 Context: Most BNPL players have struggled to raise at or above previous valuations - Klarna: took an ~85% down round in 2022, from $45B → $6.7B. - Affirm: market cap has swung wildly with rates and investor sentiment, and remains below pandemic highs. - Block (Afterpay): Afterpay’s acquisition value has fallen dramatically on a mark-to-market basis. - Zip (Australia): multiple down rounds and business model refocus. Against that backdrop, Zilch maintaining a $2B valuation, while raising both debt and equity, is notable. It suggests investors see its hybrid BNPL-plus-data model as more resilient than pure-payments peers. 📈 The bigger picture: A successful 2026 IPO could would be much needed relief for the UK tech listing market, restoring momentum to London’s fintech ecosystem and attracting renewed global investor interest. #Fintech #BNPL #Ecommerce #AI #IPO #FutureofFinance https://lnkd.in/ev5BBkeT

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Excited to finally share this 👇 Techstars is teaming up with NatWest to launch the Fintech & AI Community Development Studio in London. Qwantify Finance has been invited to participate. Over two days, founders will benefit from expert-led workshops and clinics on growth strategies, using AI tools to optimise their businesses, and breaking into international markets. There will also be an opportunity to connect with an incredible roster of Mentors and industry leaders who are generously giving their time to tackle founder challenges head-on. The UK is a powerhouse for startup creation, but we need to strengthen the bridge from early traction to scale. We're proud to be a part of it!! Thobith Abraham Jordan Lisnow Anne-Katrin S. Daryn Edgar Paulina Redel Techstars NatWest Group

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The UK has built world-class fintech companies. But we have a scaling problem. Too many of our best fintechs are raising growth rounds outside of Europe. That is not a talent issue or a product issue. It is a capital issue. I will be moderating a panel on exactly this at IFGS 2026 on 21 April, digging into the scale-up capital gap and what needs to change to back the next generation of globally competitive UK fintechs 🇬🇧 #IFGS2026 #UKFinTechWeek #InnovateFinance

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Will AI do away with developers? After a few weeks of taking one out for a spin, I can safely say... ...not for a fair while yet. I've been using Claude Code for a month. For the uninitiated, you plug it into your codebase, it has a look through, and then you can ask it to make changes. You can review those changes one by one, or if you're feeling particularly brave, you can tell it to just plug on without review. My thoughts? It's still just clever auto-complete. But if you're not specific enough, or if there's scope for confusion, then it will get confused. An example - my little side project (https://projectboo.co.uk) allows people to run boardgame conventions. Those will have three different types of labels - one for the attendee themselves, one for games listed in the bring and buy and one for games provided in a gaming library. Historically all three were the same size, but one convention wanted smaller labels for the attendee. So at that point, attendee labels had two size options, the others weren't configurable. This year, one convention wanted larger labels for the attendees. So I first asked Claude to create a new size of label for attendee labels, and then also implement the same choice across the other two types of label. I'll say this much, it worked pretty well - it had a look through the codebase and realised that the settings for the label sizes were stored in the database, so amended all three options to allow for corresponding values to be stored. It also picked up that when new settings were implemented, there's a job that's run as part of the push process that populates the defaults of the new settings to each convention, and added to that. Where it didn't perform as well, however, was where it couldn't easily intuit from existing code what needed to be done. The labels themselves, when generated, are built as HTML and then rendered via DomPDF as a PDF. New sizes mean new HTML templates (well, Blade templates, technically) but with the added complication that the organisers can choose to show / hide the attendee's barcode (on attendee labels) and the convention's logo (on all labels) so the amount of space available would change. It approached this as one would do for building any HTML page, which is to use flex to take up the whole height, then specify the amount, in percentage terms, each section (barcode, name, logo) can take up. But because the output was being rendered as a PDF, which doesn't like percentage terms, it struggled. A lot. For simple tasks it lightens the load, but for anything more complex it struggles. I'll probably keep using it, but treating it as a very junior developer. Patiently explain what it is that I need, chat through questions, and check carefully over what it does. But it does help, to a degree. Plus, when I asked it, it reckoned that Project Boo's codebase was well-built, feature-rich and functional, although it could be a bit more elegant. Not unlike myself, really.

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Proud to see ClickMechanic featured in the Financial Times’ latest report on how startups are using AI in their operations. For us, this isn’t about AI hype, but about solving very real problems facing UK drivers and mechanics right now: 🔧 Nearly three quarters of automotive professionals say repairs are taking longer due to the mechanic shortage 📈 Parts and equipment costs are up 18%, but garages can only pass on around 7% 💬 34% of UK drivers feel they’ve been overcharged or scammed, with average losses of £652 Solving these problems is exactly why we built ClickMechanic. By embedding AI into how we operate day to day, we’re delivering faster repairs, fairer pricing, more work for mechanics, and a better experience for drivers. Read the full FT piece here: https://lnkd.in/eX-wErdG #ClickMechanic #Automotive #CarRepair #IndependentMechanics #AI #Startups"

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Dear UK Visas & Immigration, polite rant if I may [alt: building a research-heavy AI start-up is hard, don't make it harder please] Semilattice is a software startup developing complex AI technology. We're trying to enable our globally mobile engineers to work from the UK because we have made a deliberate choice to be based in this beautiful, if (at least compared to other places our engineers could work from) somewhat rainy and high-tax country. We have a visa sponsorship licence and want to employ a recent Oxbridge graduate with a Master in advanced computer science who is already working in the UK for a global tier 1 tech company. You would think it shouldn't be hard to justify a quick decision. Instead, we have re-answer the questions we already answered, file 6 months of 'everything', while your boilerplate email template has a habit of calling our future employees 'migrants.' The decision of the US to make highly skilled immigration harder should be a natural opportunity for an advanced, education-based economy like the UK. To quote a recent speech by our prime minister: "[...] Britain must compete for the best talent in the world in science, in technology, in healthcare. You cannot simply pull up a drawbridge, let nobody in, and think that is an economy that would work." Some polite suggestions for improvement: 1. Consistently apply your policies instead of slowing things down by needless paperwork and hoop-jumping. We'll jump through the hoops, but would rather focus on building our company, make some money (and pay some taxes in the UK). Also wondering if your "culture of customer satisfaction" could do with some improvements? 2. Recognise the value of skilled graduates as assets. We have to fight hard to convince every software engineering candidate to work with us. Global AI talent has options. 3. Treat the people that want to live and work on this island with respect. The highly trained and globally mobile engineers we want to employ should not be called 'migrants'. No-one should be, frankly. Why don't you call them "your future employees". Let’s please support UK companies and nurture the next generation of innovators. 

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I interviewed OpenClaw's creator Peter Steinberger at AI Engineer London Meetup last month. Peter is dealing with problems most founders haven’t hit yet, but will soon: too much inbound for one person to review, people gaming automated systems, and the tension between letting agents act freely and keeping a human in the loop. To solve this, he set up an agent to read all his Discord conversations, correlate complaints with open submissions, and hand him the five things he should focus on each day. Agents handling volume and freeing up humans to provide judgment, is a pattern that we’re seeing across many small, AI-native teams. Full interview → https://lnkd.in/egCBWxZe Thanks to Tessl for hosting and Mastra for recording the event!

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🚀 Kicking off the week with a fantastic evening hosted by Attio and Headline. The panel brought together hands‑on operators from some of London’s fastest‑growing startups to unpack “Building Relentless Momentum in the AI Era” — sharing concrete, no‑nonsense examples of what’s actually working on the ground today. 🔥 Key takeaways that really stood out: 1️⃣ Token consumption ≠ productivity. In the AI age, effectiveness matters far more than volume. 2️⃣ Authenticity scales. Being genuine in public can grow an audience of 1.3 million on LinkedIn — and turn it into a powerful distribution channel. 3️⃣ Free PLG can fuel enterprise SLG. Product‑led growth can create massive awareness that unlocks sales‑led motion. 4️⃣ The PM role is evolving. Product engineers may increasingly replace traditional product managers. Sharp insights, practical lessons, and a strong reminder that while AI is moving fast, momentum still comes from focus, clarity, and execution. 👏 Huge credit to the host Anna Faulkner and speakers Alexander Christie Chris Donnelly Luke Harries for a brilliant evening. ElevenLabs Attio Searchable #ukfintechweek #scaleup #growth Innovify Notchup

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We've just launched a new, in-depth guide to SaaS commercial models, covering what they are, how top platforms structure theirs, and how you can use Salable to build and manage your own

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Big moment for Dwelly! Dan Lifshits and I sat down with Seb Johnson 📊🇪🇺 to talk about entering London through the acquisition of Eden Harper — our third acquisition of the year. We got into why this is such a significant step, what makes the London market different, and how we think about scaling our buy-and-build model through automation and integration. Really enjoyed this conversation; check out the full interview here 👇

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Honored to be one of just 60 founders selected for the London AI Startup Conference 2025 at Google HQ yesterday. Thanks to Startup Network Europe for the invite. First impression? By a quick show of hands, only ~10 of us were focused on Consumer AI. Here are insights I took away for other AI founders from speakers: 1. Show data usage simply Edward Keelan ar Octopus Ventures highlighted that VCs need easily understandable product usage data. For enterprise founders, getting your product into user hands early (think Loveable) to show real usage data before an enterprise adopts it can be a game-changer. 2. Huge opportunities in vertical AI Barry Downes at SVV (Sure Valley Ventures). Especially in building domain-specific context, memory, and document management. The most defensible products will become embedded "operating systems" in workflows that are hard to replace (encouraging for what we’re building) 3. The "Wrapper" debate is dead. Lucile Cornet at Eight Roads argued that the "is this just a wrapper?" question can be left in 2025 (thankfully). Investors now recognise there is massive value to be built on top of foundation models. Other panel views: Build vs. Buy: Consensus that for start up founders building with voice, it's better to integrate ElevenLabs, which has emerged as a clear category winner rather than build internally. Prediction that China will overtake the US in AI models by 2027. Brand Power: Still massively underestimated in the AI space, especially in enterprise. 🎧 Listening Rec: On brand strategy for AI startups - Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers on the Acquired podcast https://lnkd.in/eu3SakMg . #AI #LondonTech #StartupLife #VentureCapital #ConsumerAI #VerticalAI

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Reform UK is now leading election polls, and if you’re a startup founder, here’s what you need to know! Far from expectations, 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝟏𝟔% 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐬. Like it or not, they’re not just beating Labour but are even projected for 344 seats. So I went through their manifesto 😥 on behalf of all of you. Here’s what they offer the tech sector, kept easy to digest, but still buckle up! Directly about tech: not much. Just a vague line of “we’ll help it grow faster!” What!!! The only detail → Incentives and tax breaks for Britain’s defence manufacturing and tech sectors. 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡: → A corporation tax-free allowance of £100k profit → VAT threshold raised to £150k (from £90k) 𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫. A win for small, profitable startups and sole traders approaching VAT registration. Tech goes hand in hand with immigration and foreign investment, but Reform’s core pillar is freezing non-essential immigration. → Employers would pay 20% NI for foreign workers vs 13.8% for British staff (exceptions: health, social care, very small businesses). 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐈, 𝐛𝐢𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐊. No word on global talent policy [yet]! Scrapping net-zero targets is another. 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧-𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 (𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫, 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐝, 𝐄𝐕 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐛𝐨𝐧) 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 the most as they rely on policy certainty to draw investors. Many will have to pivot abroad. Reform doesn’t show a clear “tech spokesperson.” Buuuuuttttt they did set up a “Department of Government Efficiency” briefly led by tech entrepreneur Nathaniel Fried (later resigned). Somehow like Elon Musk and his Doge 👀. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐩 𝐃𝐄𝐈 𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬. UK gov grants like Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund or Disabled Facilities Grants will be gone and the ones that have partnership with gov might be affected. Like F100 Growth Fund and Black Founders Programme (Creative Industries). UK tech is already behind, only 2% of VC funding goes to women. So imagine this. So what do you think? Terrified or looking forward to it? Follow Jasmine Sayyari for more on the future of work (and a bit of politics).

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We’re excited to announce our new partnership with SeedLegals, connecting the UK’s most innovative startups with governr: the control centre for AI risk and assurance! We’ll soon be live on the SeedLegals Marketplace, and all SeedLegals members will have access to an exclusive offer to help them quantify, monitor, and communicate AI risk with confidence. We are the risk management platform that identifies, quantifies and manages in real time the risk of any AI product; systems, models, datasets, agents, and APIs. A big thank you to Liliana Conrad, Luc Saglio, and Dana F Tolontan for making this partnership possible, and to our amazing team at governr for pushing the frontier of AI risk management every day! We’re thrilled to join the SeedLegals ecosystem and support more startups on their journey to safe, trusted, and accelerated AI adoption. 🚀 Rajen Madan Vinit Sahni Thushan Kumaraswamy Jaidip Banerjee Sophie Monga Irène Roche

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Really interesting article by Gavin about the undercurrents in AI the market on X: https://lnkd.in/d3za7ZX9 Highly recommend giving it a full read. Key points he raises: • Gemini 3 proves that scaling laws still hold. • Blackwell’s impact (which we’ll only see next year) will widen the gap between the U.S. and China. China made a mistake by not taking Trump’s outstretched hand. • Because of energy constraints, the only thing that really matters in token economics in the foreseeable future is tokens per watt. • Gavin actually likes the energy constraints, which reduce the likelihood of uncontrolled data-center build-out and the growth of an inefficient bubble. • Optics will allow training across multiple campuses, but it’s going to be expensive and complicated. • OpenAI’s odds aren’t great, but it doesn’t matter much for the market. This is the third thoughtful article I read in the last couple of weeks arguing for a ‘smoothing out’ rather than bubble popping in the coming years. I tend to agree.

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Genuinely proud of Saul Klein for all the work he does to build and advocate for the UK's tech ecosystem. It is existential to the UK that our tech sector continues to grow and thrive: - the UK's national debt is 96% of GDP, and our growth is low - our share of global financial services is in decline - our manufacturing sector is in decline - our services sector is stalling It is critical that the UK's tech sector continues to develop and thrive to step up and carry more of the load. We have some very large long term public and private (pension, insurance etc.) liabilities, as well as an ageing population with all the associated future costs and complexities. Here's a snapshot of the Saul at the heart of government spelling out the opportunity, and why and how the UK should be incredibly ambitious for our tech sector. It's a small public window into work he's been doing for years behind the scenes as an NED at Department for Science, Innovation and Technology https://lnkd.in/eA77pN7N It's worth a listen.

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The Founder’s Paradox: Why the harder you work, the slower you scale. 🛑 Huge congratulations to the 25 scaleups recently chosen for Tech Nation’s Future Fifty. It’s a massive milestone for the UK tech scene. But for every founder on that list, there are thousands of brilliant SMEs currently stuck in the "Owner-Operator Trap." You know the feeling: * You are the primary salesperson. * You are the chief problem solver. * You are the bottleneck for every major decision. In the startup phase, being the "everything person" is a badge of honour. But in the scaling phase, it’s a death sentence for growth. As Warwick Business School recently highlighted, the transition from "owner-operator" to "strategic manager" is where most small businesses become "vulnerable and fragile." You can’t build a £10m company with a £1m infrastructure—and you certainly can’t do it if you’re still horizontal in the day-to-day weeds. Scaling isn't just about doing more; it’s about doing less of the wrong things. Whether you were selected for a national cohort or not, the challenge remains: how do you build a business that can breathe, grow, and innovate without you in every meeting? At Business Growth Support Services, we specialise in helping founders break the cycle. We provide the strategic framework and operational support to move you from the engine room to the captain’s bridge. You don't need a prestigious title to scale. You need a system that works when you aren't there. Stop working in your business and start working on it. Let’s build your exit strategy from the day-to-day. 👉 Start your scaling journey by booking a Clarity Call: link in the comments #ScaleupStrategy #FounderLife #SMEGrowth #TechNation #BusinessSupport #LeadershipTransition #OwnerOperator Mathew Boyle Belinda Boyle Simon Drake Roland Emmans Dirk Schaefer ------------------------------

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