If you're interested in creating an incredible product, training cutting-edge models, or building at-scale infrastructure, feel free to connect and send a message.

Archie Hollingsworth

One year with Harry.

Tonight he joined the team to talk about the road ahead.

It’s so early.

Speed is everything.

LFG.

Sub companies within companies. 

This is our approach: to hire all-star engineers, founders, ex-founders, and CTOs who can be the CEO of their area.

Engineering is changing so fast that we believe having experienced but technically remarkable team members leading small sub-companies within Fyxer's product is the way to build a magical human-like assistant. 

(And of course, each team is powered to the eye balls with hundreds of Opus agents and the like.) 

While separate teams’ magic with AI, the context gathered between each product/sub-company compounds the overall product experience for the user.

We've got some seriously incredible speakers in the Fyxer office at our weekly all-hands over the next few months. 

[Harry at Fyxer last week]

This is a sad headline, but if we put our heads down, in 10 years we could completely change the narrative around our country’s prospects. 

All my time in the US has shown me that we have the best talent in the world. 

It is belief that holds us back.

It starts with celebrating ambition.

Today in the UK, most people lead with skepticism. 

The best thing we can do for entrepreneurs is give them confidence that they can figure it out, and encourage them to think bigger.

What if it works?

Work is changing so fast.  

It's already happened in engineering. 

Why would you ever write code again? 

The same is coming for the rest of knowledge work.  

We're planning a fireside chat at Fyxer on how work is changing in 2026. 

This will focus on how knowledge workers actually want to spend their time versus how much time and money AI tools are really saving for teams. 

Who do you most want to hear from on this topic? 

If you'd be a great fit yourself, comment or DM me.

[Harry Stebbings is in this week for our last fireside]

No alternative text description for this image

In every category; voice, video, legal, email, European startups are crushing their US counterparts. 

We can build mega companies in Europe. 

20VC invested in Fyxer when it was 4 people and $1M in ARR. 

12 months later, it is $35M ARR and 63 people. 

This is our time. LFG. 🚀 

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

In the UK, we're taught that if something good happens, it's just a matter of time before something bad follows.

We don't have a finite number of wins.

As a culture, we put artificial limits on our ambition. 

Tell the average person your new idea and they meet it with nervousness and skepticism.

You spend your life fighting this narrative.

I want to change this. 

I want us all to fill each other with confidence.

What if it works?

Proud to be representing the incredible Fyxer team at Number 10 yesterday.

We are building the worlds best AI for relationship builders.

We've seen the explosion happen for systems builders who no longer write any code. 

This moment is coming for relationship builders.

I'll be honest. We're not for everyone.

Here's why you shouldn't work with ISO Serious:

If you want a consultant who'll stretch your project across 18 months because they're billing by the hour, we're not your people. We'll be done in three months. Rude, really.

If you need a fancy compliance dashboard with loads of green traffic lights to show your board while your actual security remains questionable, look elsewhere. We focus on boring things like whether your security actually works.

If you enjoy receiving mysterious invoices that somehow triple the original quote, we'll disappoint you. Our pricing is on the website. Like psychopaths.

If you want someone who'll tell you everything is fine and you're doing brilliantly, we're going to be a problem. We'll tell you what's broken and expect you to fix it. With our help, obviously, but still.

And if you're looking for a consultant who uses phrases like "synergistic compliance ecosystem" or "holistic security paradigm" without a trace of irony, I genuinely cannot help you.

We're for founders and ops leaders who want certification done properly, quickly, and without the usual consulting theatre.

Don't panic.

Tom Gell

The most unpleasant person I've ever worked with runs a wellness business.

Crystals. Breathwork. Journaling. Gratitude practices. Their Instagram looks like a spa had a baby with a sunset. Every post radiates calm, balance, and the quiet confidence of someone who has life completely figured out.

Behind the scenes? Aggressive emails at 11pm. Passive-aggressive silences that could strip paint. The kind of person who makes you feel like you need a lie down after a fifteen-minute phone call. Comfortably in my top three most difficult people I've ever dealt with professionally, and I once worked with politicians.

I'm not telling you this to be cruel. I'm telling you because you've probably spent this morning scrolling LinkedIn and feeling like everyone else has it more together than you do.

They don't.

The founder posting about their "incredible team culture" had two resignations last month. The CEO sharing morning routine content is quietly having a nightmare Q1. And the wellness guru telling you to "protect your energy" is absolutely obliterating everyone else's.

When you're running a startup or scaleup, it's easy to look at other people's feeds and wonder what you're doing wrong. Why does everyone else seem so calm? So strategic? So bloody serene?

They're not. They're only showing you the good bits. Same as everyone else.

You're not behind. You're not broken. You're just seeing everyone else's showreel and comparing it to your behind-the-scenes footage.

So next time someone's LinkedIn makes you feel like you're failing, just remember: the most zen person on your feed might be an absolute terror on a Teams call.

DISCLAIMER: Obviously none of the above applies to me. Everything you see on my feed is 100% real and I am absolutely nailing it. Everything is fine. Stop asking and buy my stuff.

Don't panic.

Making Compliance Human for Startups & Scaleups | CEO @ The Serious Group | Book an appointment below

I need to talk about something slightly awkward.

As ISO Serious has grown, so has the number of people reaching out to "pick my brain." Founders building GRC platforms. People working on compliance tools. Folks who want 30-60 minutes of my time to get feedback on what they're building.

I'm genuinely flattered. Truly. The fact that anyone considers my opinion worth seeking out is not something I take for granted.

But I have to be honest with you.

We've just crossed 50 contracts. Our Q1 targets are the highest they've ever been - and we're smashing them. We're onboarding record numbers of customers. I'm building a business, and every hour I spend giving free advice is an hour I'm not spending on the people who've actually hired us.

So I've started saying no. And I want to be upfront about why rather than just ghosting people in their LinkedIn DMs.

It's not that your idea isn't interesting. It's not that I think I'm above it. 

It's that my time has a very real cost, and giving it away for free means taking it away from the customers and team who've earned it.

If you really want my time, you can pay for it - I offer paid advisory sessions and I promise I'll show up engaged and give you my honest, unfiltered opinion.

But if the answer to that is "nah, I just wanted a free chat" - that's completely fine too. No hard feelings. I genuinely wish you well with whatever you're working on. The compliance space needs more good people building good things.

I do love you all. But I love my business more.

Don't panic.

I run a compliance consultancy. I talk about compliance every single day. And even I sometimes find it boring. But that's actually kinda helpful.

See, nobody in the history of business has ever woken up excited about compliance.

Not once. Not ever. And if you have, I say this with love: you might need to get out more.

Because the moment you accept that nobody cares about your opinions on risk assessments, something magical happens. You stop talking about yourself and start talking about the only thing your prospect actually wants to know.

Can you make this problem go away? How fast? And how little of my time will it take?

That's it. That's the entire buying criteria for every founder, COO, and head of ops who's ever been told they need ISO 27001 to close a deal. They don't want to understand clause 6.1.2. They want to know if they can get back to building their company by Thursday.

When I started ISO Serious, I made a deliberate choice: never talk about compliance like a compliance person. No jargon-laden LinkedIn posts about framework updates. No thought leadership about the philosophical underpinnings of Annex A. No earnest explainers about why everyone should care more about information security.

Instead, we just kept saying the same thing: three months, we do the heavy lifting, money back if it doesn't work.

We've just signed our 50th contract, and I'm fairly confident not a single one of those clients chose us because of our opinions on internal audit methodology.

They chose us because we made the boring thing sound painless.

The compliance industry has a self-importance problem. Consultants love talking about frameworks and methodologies and maturity models because it makes them feel clever and makes their work seem impossibly complex. It's the oldest trick in consulting - if the client can't understand what you do, they can't question what you charge.

But your prospects aren't buying expertise. They're buying an outcome. And the fastest way to lose them is to make them sit through your masterclass on why you're brilliant before you've told them whether you can actually help.

This applies well beyond compliance, obviously. If you're selling anything that your buyer considers a necessary evil - legal, accounting, insurance, IT - the rules are the same. Lead with their problem. Speak their language. Be the person who makes the annoying thing disappear, not the person who makes it more annoying first.

I still have strong opinions about risk assessments. 

Don't panic.

I've written a fair few myself, but honestly, most company policies are written to be seen, not read.

Credit to Des Ward for that line, because it's painfully accurate. 

I've lost count of the number of times I've walked into a startup and found a 40-page information security policy that nobody - including the person who signed it off - has actually read. It exists because someone Googled "ISO 27001 policy template," downloaded something clearly written for a bank, changed the logo, and called it done.

The policy says passwords must be 16 characters with special symbols rotated every 30 days. The actual practice is everyone using "CompanyName2024!" and sharing credentials over Slack.

Most people would call that a compliance problem, or a communication problem.

It's a leadership problem.

When your policies are impenetrable, what you're really telling your team is: "We don't care enough about you to make this easy to understand." 

You're saying the act of having the document matters more than whether anyone can actually follow it. 

And it cuts deeper than people realise. Des made the point that policies define the rules by which someone can ultimately be fired. He's right. So when leadership can't be bothered to write those rules in plain language - or worse, copies them from a template designed for a completely different organisation - they're setting people up to fail against standards they never had a fair chance of meeting. That's not accountability. That's a trap.

The best leaders I've worked with treat their internal documentation as a reflection of how much they respect their people. Short enough that someone will actually read it. Specific enough that people know what to do. And realistic enough that the rules reflect what's genuinely happening in the business, not some aspirational fantasy about how a Fortune 500 company operates.

If your policies are gathering digital dust, stop blaming your team for not reading them. Look at the people who signed them off and ask whether they cared enough to make them worth reading in the first place.

Don't panic.

The best thing I've done for my business is try to fire myself from it.

Not dramatically. Not some LinkedIn fantasy about "stepping back to step up." Just a slow, deliberate campaign to make myself irrelevant to the day-to-day running of ISO Serious.

The hustle bros will tell you to grind harder, work longer, be the first in and last out. They're wrong. You are the bottleneck. Not your systems. Not your team. Not your tech stack. You. Sitting there with your fingers in every pie, convinced that nobody else can do it quite like you can.

And you're right, by the way. Nobody will do it quite like you. Sometimes they'll do it better. Sometimes worse. Doesn't matter. 80% done by someone else is better than 100% done by you, because you're also trying to close deals, plan strategy, answer emails from your accountant, and remember whether you've eaten lunch.

I knew this before I even started ISO Serious. I've held senior roles before, and the pattern is always the same: the more involved you get in the day-to-day, the worse everything gets. Not because you're bad at it, but because your presence creates dependency. People stop making decisions. They wait for you. And suddenly you're not leading, you're just busy.

It feels counterintuitive. You start a business because you're good at something, and then your main job becomes making sure other people can be good at it without you. That's a weird emotional adjustment. There's a grief to it, honestly. You built this thing, and now you're deliberately writing yourself out of the story.

But the alternative is worse. Every minute I spend doing work that someone on my team could do better is money the business is pissing up the wall. That's not what I'm here for. My job is to work on the business, not in it. Strategy, growth, partnerships, culture, direction. The stuff that actually moves the needle long-term.

The founders I see struggling most are the ones who've accidentally become the most expensive employee in their own company, doing work that's three pay grades below what they should be focused on. They're exhausted, their team is frustrated, and the business has hit a ceiling that's shaped exactly like them.

Your job as CEO isn't to be the best at everything. It's to find people who are better than you at the things that matter, get out of their way, and focus on the handful of decisions that only you can make.

It's not abdication. It's the job.

Don't panic.

I stopped asking the compliance industry for permission to have an opinion about it. Best decision I ever made.

For years, a small number of very loud voices have controlled the narrative around information security. They've decided what's "proper." What's "rigorous." What counts as a "real" ISMS. And they've made damn sure everyone else knows that questioning them is career suicide.

So people stopped questioning them.

Founders who knew the process felt overcomplicated stayed quiet because some consultant with 47 acronyms after their name told them they just didn't understand. Ops leads who thought the documentation was absurd kept their heads down because the auditor said that's how it's done. 

Heck, even perfectly competent compliance professionals convinced themselves they needed permission from the compliance clergy before they were allowed an opinion on their own security.

The whole model relied on one thing: information asymmetry. If you make the standard sound incomprehensible, people pay you to translate it. If you make the process feel dangerous, people pay you to hold their hand. The complexity was never a bug. It was the entire business model.

And then AI turned up and kicked the door in.

Suddenly anyone can read the standard and get a plain-English explanation of what it actually requires. Suddenly founders can ask "do I really need a 200-page ISMS manual?" and get an honest answer instead of a sales pitch. Suddenly the gap between what the standard says and what consultants claim it says is visible to everyone.

The gatekeepers are furious about this, obviously. You can see it in every LinkedIn comment section where someone suggests that maybe, just maybe, compliance doesn't need to be a twelve-month odyssey staffed by a small army of specialists. The tone is always the same. Patronising. Dismissive. "You clearly don't understand the complexity involved."

But the gates are open now and they're not closing again.

The companies coming to us aren't coming because they've been scared into it by some doomsday webinar about regulatory risk. They're coming because they've done their own research, they understand what's actually required, and they want someone who'll get it done without the theatre.

AI didn't replace the need for good consultants, but it did destroy the moat the gatekeepers were hiding behind. 

And if your entire value proposition was standing between people and information they could access themselves, I'd probably start updating your LinkedIn profile.

Don't panic.

Every world leader is someone you've worked with.

Starmer is the compliance officer who believes policy defines what is right, what is right is a moral good, and therefore anything outside policy is morally wrong. Would never approve an exception, but will happily scrap the policy and fully rewrite it if everyone makes enough noise.

Trump is the Head of Sales who doesn't even know there's a policy. Has never opened the staff handbook. Keeps closing deals on terms nobody agreed to and then acts confused when Legal gets involved. Technically hitting his numbers though, so nobody says anything until it's far too late.

Macron is the CEO who knows there are policies but needs to be constantly reminded that they also apply to him. Nods thoughtfully during the reminder, then carries on exactly as before. Somehow makes it look elegant.

Milei is the COO who read one book on a flight, decided the entire organisation is structured wrong, and wants to fire half the company by Friday. Terrifying energy. Occasionally has a point, which makes it worse.

Scholz was the CFO who wouldn't approve a £50 expenses claim without three rounds of review, a committee, and a formal impact assessment. By the time he made a decision, the opportunity had died of natural causes.

Trudeau is the Head of People & Culture who says all the right things in town halls, looks great in the company photo, and has somehow been in the role for years without anyone being able to point to a single concrete thing he's delivered.

The thing about running a business is that you'll meet every single one of these people. Sometimes in the same meeting. Sometimes in the same person. Sometimes in the mirror.

Don't panic.

I wrote a post last week about the compliance industry's gatekeeping problem. 

AND GUESS WHO SHOWED UP.

I'm paraphrasing, but their argument went something like this: firms don't actually want compliance, it serves zero business purpose, the concept of gatekeeping is an immature idea popularised by whining entitled millennials, anyone who trusts AI to help them understand things for themselves is dangerously stupid, and if consultants do their jobs well, clients get compliance for free.

I want you to read that again slowly.

Compliance serves zero business purpose. But also, industries need gatekeepers to protect standards. But also, the people questioning those gatekeepers are entitled whiners. But also, if consultants do their jobs well, clients get compliance for free.

So the thing nobody wants needs to be guarded by serious people who get very cross when you question them, and if those serious people are good enough at their jobs the thing nobody wants just happens anyway?

This is the compliance industry in a single comment.

The absolute confidence. The contempt for anyone who might see things differently. The assumption that asking questions makes you immature rather than curious. And the complete inability to see that every sentence contradicts the last one.

This is what founders are up against. Not complexity. Not technical difficulty. A culture that treats asking "does it need to be this hard?" as a personal attack. A professional class that responds to challenge with condescension instead of curiosity. An industry that would rather call you stupid than consider you might have a point.

And they wonder why startups dread the process.

The good news is that the walls are coming down whether the gatekeepers like it or not. AI has made the standard accessible. Founders are better informed than ever. And the consultants who built their careers on mystique rather than value are the ones updating their LinkedIn headlines right now.

If your response to people trying to understand your industry better is to call them dangerously stupid, the problem isn't millennials. The problem is you.

Don't panic.

"We don't want to restrict our people."

That's what a company told me when I asked about their AI policy.

Noble sentiment. Sounds progressive. Sounds trusting. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing a modern, forward-thinking leadership team should say.

It's also completely backwards.

I know this sounds a bit 1984. "Boundaries make you freer" is exactly the kind of thing you'd find on the wall of the Ministry of Truth, right between "War is Peace" and "Ignorance is Strength." But hear me out, because Orwell would actually be on my side here.

What "no restrictions" actually looked like in practice: nobody knew what they were allowed to use AI for. Nobody knew what data they could put into it. Nobody knew if they were supposed to be using it at all. So most people just... didn't. Or did, but quietly, with one eye over their shoulder, hoping nobody asked too many questions.

The absence of rules didn't create freedom. It created paralysis.

I was chatting to them about AI governance, and what struck me was how simple the fix was. Not a 40-page acceptable use policy. Not a committee. Not a "Centre of Excellence" (the corporate equivalent of putting a lanyard on a problem). Just some clear, simple boundaries. What tools are approved. What data stays out. What's fair game.

That's it.

Suddenly people weren't frozen anymore. They knew the edges of the pitch, so they could actually play. They went from tiptoeing around AI to actively experimenting with it, because someone had finally told them where the lines were.

We assume governance means control. Bureaucracy. Red tape. But done properly, governance is the opposite. It's the thing that lets people move fast without looking over their shoulder.

It's the same principle behind everything we do with ISO 27001. Companies come to us thinking certification means locking everything down. It doesn't. It means deciding what matters, putting sensible guardrails in place, and then letting your team crack on with building the business. Structure creates speed. Clarity creates confidence.

Total freedom sounds great in a manifesto. In a real company, it's just confusion wearing a motivational t-shirt.

Give them boundaries. Watch them fly.

Hopefully that's a cringe enough sign-off for LinkedIn.

Don't panic.

Let me tell you about one of the maddest things I've ever seen with my own eyes.

I lived in Rúgāo, China, in 2011, when the government was building MEGA-HIGHWAYS everywhere.

They were building them faster than they could explain them - laying down 5-lane motorways next to villages that had never seen a slip road in their 5000 year history.

And they were always so empty. So you could really cane it.

Anyway, one day I was driving along at 90mph when I spotted a car stopped dead in the middle lane. Slowed down to help. 

There he was - the driver - lounging on the bonnet...

...reading a newspaper. 

Turns out he was just a bit tired and fancied a break.

Nobody had explained that you don't do that.

I think about this when I see companies hand their team a 12-page breach response policy and assume people will follow it. Or when consultants deliver a pile of documents and call it done. Or when founders are baffled that nobody's following a process that "obviously makes sense."

The thing is obvious to you because you built it. You're familiar with it. You swim in the same fishbowl as it. 

It might be genuinely alien to everyone else.

Good compliance isn't about producing documents. It's about writing things that are simple, proportional to where you actually are as a business, and then - crucially - backing them up with training so people actually understand what they're supposed to do.

You can't just build the motorway. Someone has to explain that you don't pull over for a nap in the middle lane.

And to be clear, I'm not saying that you should assume that people are idiots. 

Just remember, nobody, not even you, was born knowing not to stop for a rest on a motorway either.

Don't panic.

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The Battle

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Tom Gell

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