Ben Kaye

SURREAL

Gimme a sec to settle into the role, and then I'll tell you what I've been up to!

Category & Commercial Manager

Spin Tennis App

• Drew up an events plan to add an additional USP and revenue stream for Spin Tennis App
• Creating and hosting events to further engagement within the Spin Tennis Community
• Sourcing venues to deliver an enjoyable experience for Spin members
• Initial events in 2025 have had 100+ attendees with a positive experience and demand for further events

Event Manager

2 Sisters Food Group

Category Manager within the Poultry division, working across a variety of retail customers:
• Responsible for analysis of all protein space & sales performance for a large convenience retailer, helping deliver "the best presentation across the supply base" (retail buyer), resulting in 20% incremental space and additional SKUs worth £m of pounds to the business
• Led and delivered the development of best-in-class insights reporting website, delivering the team’s category insight, in-store reports and data analysis all in one centralised place for customers
• Produced comprehensive consumer insight report to assist retailers in understanding Christmas purchase decisions
• Used data and analytics skills to redesign and rebuild the Co-op Sales Reporting process to give more profound and more powerful insights to the commercial team, resulting in the award of Employee of the Month
• Led the delivery of category insights for BBQ Season 2024, featuring new image-based market maps

Category Manager

Well Fruited

Co-founder of a drinks brand that used product innovation and fun to address the fact that only 28% of adults consume 5 portions of fruit & veg a day.

Some key accomplishments:
• Co-created the first fruit drink made using all of the fruit, designed to maximise fibre and nutrient content, whilst limiting sugar impact
• Bootstrapped the business through initial product testing phases by using self-taught skills such as web design, branding, financial modelling & prototyping
• Sold over 5,000 bottles as part of initial testing phase, through various channels such as D2C, B2B and live events
• 7m video views across TikTok, YouTube & Instagram
•Charted the growth of the brand alongside my insights into what makes a consumer-business stand out

Co-Founder & CEO

Unrest

Participated in the programme to help strengthen the foundations of the business and fuel the growth of the Well Fruited brand.

As part of the programme:
- Refined our Pitch Deck & proposition
-Built out Financial Projections & models
- Refined brand strategy
- Engaged in the wider Unrest community

Entrepreneur at Unrest (London)

Year Here

Working on solutions to societal problems to deliver positive impact and social change.

Mar - August 2021: Population Health Team, Bromley-by-Bow Health Partnership. Projects included:
• Project Best Start: analysing data to build a profile of young people within Tower Hamlets and help inform decisions on how to give every child the best start in life
• Project Ways of Working: delivered a report that assessed ways of working across the Health Partnership, with recommendations on how to improve ways of working across areas such as meetings, project management and document sharing
• Project Talking Food: organised and facilitated sessions around nutrition and healthy diet for local community members to help improve wellbeing, which results in some "life-changing" results

Sep - Oct 2021: Consultant on a project for Guy's & St Thomas' Foundation around equitable and representative employment for the local area

Social Innovation Fellow

Bakkavor

Working across UK & Ireland on one of the UK's largest retailers on multiple fresh prepared food categories.

Role included delivering first-to-market innovation, long-term strategic planning, stakeholder management, building customer relationships and commercial analysis.

Key accomplishments:
• Shortlisted for Bakkavor Group Innovation Awards for work on Post-Launch Review Process
• Led the introduction of a new software tool to deliver faster, more accurate and in-depth sales reporting on a weekly basis to transform the way the sales teams reported on performance, whilst saving countless hours of data collection
• Worked on a bespoke strategy for Tesco Ireland to adapt offerings to fit the market need, resulting in cutting wastage by 20%
• Launched new product ranges across multiple retailers, cuisines and tiers, worth over £10m in annual sales revenue

Testimonials:
• Attention to detail is fantastic and it’s been a great support

Commercial Manager

Managing key retailer accounts across a variety of Fresh Prepared Foods categories to deliver first to market innovation and profitable business growth.

Responsible for Category Strategy, Promotional Planning and International Projects, achieved through cross-functional working and a commitment to innovative and new working practices.

Key accomplishments:
• Improved forecasting accuracy by c.15%pt through the creation and implementation of an analysis tool
• Established a clear set of category information documentation that enabled the team to become category pioneers through easy-to-access information on product & promotional performance
• Grew an e-commerce account 28% YOY, ahead of the growth trajectory for the retailer overall
• Improve margin performance of at-risk lines through Product Development work to recover of £50k p/a

Testimonials:
Ben is a self-starter and is constantly looking at avenues and ways to add value to the business. 
He has proactively volunteered for add on projects and has been working with grit and determination on PLR (Post Launch Review) project which has been identified as a big opportunity.

Account Manager

Part of the Commercial Team, working directly with two of the UK's largest retailers and a wide range of various stakeholders.

Worked across a variety of Fresh Prepared Foods categories on both projects with retailers and supplier-related projects. This has included forecasting, promotional activity, category management and using specific data sources and systems.

Key achievements:
• Winner of Graduate's Graduate Award (2018) for contribution to the business and experience of graduates on the programme
• Won monthly innovation award for leading a project to save M&S over £1m in food waste on their Italian ready meal category

Testimonials:
Ben has made an impressive start to his career at Bakkavor and is a pleasure to have on the team. His approach is humble, respectful, resilient and committed.

Commercial Graduate

Tesco

Primarily working on promotional strategy and ranging across the Plant-Based ranges within Fresh & Frozen. Helping to deliver double-digit growth in one of the emerging areas within the food industry.

Additionally assisted in the delivery of the 2019 Christmas Party Food Range.

Key accomplishments:
• Ranging recommendations delivered possible incremental sale of £31m and £14m margin for Tesco across chilled & frozen ranges
• Ensured timely launch of Christmas Party Food ranges to ensure all lines were correctly executed in-store

Product Analyst

The Holiday Place

Working in the Product Department which involves:
• Dealing with contracts with suppliers
• Content writing for the website
• Using the dedicated software to manage hotel and flight details

Administration Assistant

XpressionFM

I was:
• Head of Marketing at Xpression FM (www.xpression.fm)
• Xpression FM Saturday Sport Show pundit (www.facebook.com/xpressionsportshow)
• Producer of Highly A-Newsing (www.facebook.com/highlyanewsing)

Head of Marketing

💥 MY BACKGROUND
👨🏻‍💻 I work in Category Management across multiple customers, covering insights, sales analysis and consumer trends
🛒 I've worked with some of the UK's largest retailers on their own label ranges, launching over 100 products
📈 Focusing on sales growth, product assortment and category strategy
🍲 Seconded to work for the UK's largest food retailer in supporting the launch of two new brands
🍊Co-founder of Well Fruited; developing first-to-market innovation; a drink with half the sugar of a juice/smoothie, with 4k+ units sold and over 7m times across TikTok, Instagram & YouTube!
🎾 I once won the Junior Tennis Tournament at my local tennis club, so am always up for a game

💥 TESTIMONIALS
▶️ "The guys who created and make the product [Well Fruited] are extraordinary, they fully deserve the success coming their way!"
▶️ "Your ability to spot the smallest details in a giant spreadsheet of numbers is unreal"
▶️ "A deserved winner of Employee of the Month for going above and beyond in helping the team"

Feel free to connect with me to chat...or for a game of tennis 🤝

Co-Founder

Co-founder of a Food & drink brand using product innovation and fun to address the fact that only 28% of adults consume 5 portions of fruit & veg a day.

Some key accomplishments:
• Co-created the first fruit drink made using all of the fruit, designed to maximise fibre and nutrient content, whilst limiting sugar impact
• Bootstrapped the business through initial product testing phases by using self-taught skills such as web design, branding, financial modelling & prototyping
• 6m video views across TikTok, YouTube & Instagram
•Charting the growth of the brand alongside my insights into what makes a consumer-business stand out

Table for Ten

Built for investors. (We host monthly dinners for investors and some founders, DM for more)

Founded in 2024, Table for Ten is built around the theme of connections, relationships and people-first.

For years, the ecosystem has been riddled with backroom dealings, exclusive clubs and non-inclusive investments.

We're not changing that.
We're just different.

Co-founder - Operating Partner

Twinn Health

With Twinn’s advanced AI and MRI technology, you gain early insights into potential health risks like cancer, long before symptoms appear. Get ahead of the curve—because having the facts today means a healthier tomorrow.

Chief Revenue Officer

Squared

Squared - We make ​founders better ​fundraisers.


I also help with:

- Fractional COO/CCO (Paid)
- Startup Advisory (Paid/Equity)
- Idea to Revenue (Paid)

Clients include:
- TOSHI
- Bodo
- Evermile
- Klymb
- Deliverwize
- XeroE
- Voyage
- Cobi
- UProspr
- PediVan
- Hatch

Founder

UProspr

Connecting employers with talented people, without bias.

UProspr Language Bias Decoder helps you instantly decode hidden stereotypes in your text, catapulting your recruitment process towards true diversity.

The tool is perfect for recruiters, talent managers, and business professionals who want to make a difference.

Strategic Advisor

Cobi

Cobi, is your personal money guru, one that is a tap away living on your smartphone to help you understand your money and spend it wisely. Achieving financial independence is challenging and not understanding money makes that 10x harder, Cobi is here to make financial journeys simple and help you enjoy the things that matter most to you along the way.

Hatch Enterprise UK

Hatch Enterprise supports underrepresented entrepreneurs to develop the knowledge, confidence, and skills needed to launch and grow a business. They do this through delivering workshops, events, and 1-2-1 volunteering support, connecting entrepreneurs in a vibrant supportive community, and building networks and partnerships with other organisations who share our vision.

Operations Consultant

Jumpstart

Mentor

City, University of London

Professional Mentor

Curve Club

Curve Club is the only private members club exclusive to founders. Backed by prominent angel investors and launched in 2023, Curve is an exclusive community of high calibre founders and investors looking to stay ahead of the curve.

Founding Member

Operations Nation

Operations Nation (ON) is a community-powered digital ecosystem designed to showcase the people, systems and processes that power our businesses and make the world go round. The Community Advisory Board assists ON with bringing the ON Community to the next level and making sure that the community leaders always serve in the best interest of the group. 

As members of the Board, we 
- Give feedback on the day-to-day running of the community, along with ideas for the future and how to implement them
- Share our thoughts and perspectives on making the community work even better for everyone
- Advocate for the community and connect them to the ON Team
- Assist in sharing information with the community
- Provide our support and knowledge on specific projects

Community Advisory Board Member

Hey! You listened!

I'm Rayan 👋🏼

This is how I spend my weeks:

- I have breakfast with founders and investors
- I advise early stage startups at a board-level (for equity)
- I advise early stage startups on a practical level (for £250/month)
- I am building the future of angel investing (see Table for Ten)
- I help founders understand how to become better fundraisers (see Squared)
- I host 1:1 founder retreats just outside London (They're £1.5k - ask me about them)

And solve bunch of other things. Just message me, I'm usually responsive.
Please don't DM decks, use https://www.tableforten.ventures/apply-now to submit.

ps. You can also probably get my attention if you talk about CrossFit 🏋🏻‍♂️ or Yoga 🧘🏻‍♂️

Rayan Bannai

We had our biggest weekend yet. 

We planned for it.
'The biggest weekend in retail' truly delivered.

And when you're already prepping for the most chaotic weekend of the year, the founder in me goes 'how can we make this more chaotic'.

So we hosted an in-person event too, with the team at By Teddy.

Brands often use events to push volume at the top of the funnel, I've always been a fan of curating smaller and more intentional gatherings to make sure the experience really sticks.

I do it with 1:1 breakfasts.
I do it with my slightly larger, yet intimate Table for Ten(s).

And we did it yesterday at Bow Wow London.

When you focus the event curation on experience, the best channel ever starts to play its part:

Word of Mouth.

Was everything perfect? Absolutely not.
But were dog tails wagging and mouths slobbering?

You bet.


photo: Captured in the moment - because unfortunately 500sqft of shop floor space needs some queue management 🙈

Rayan 🎈

I lay there in a pool of sweat.

Another hot vinyasa class. Brutal instructor. 
All I could think of was what would £1k do for one founder today..?

I hosted 10 founders today (3 that no-showed..) for a practical fundraising breakfast.

When they signed up, they didn't know this.

But yesterday, I made the decision to up the stakes.

One will walk away with £1k.

A nano-sized angel ticket.
but an intent, none-the-less.

The 90min breakfast saw us breaking down:

- to co-founder or not. Why investors use it to de-risk, but also why there should be. 
- fund dynamics and metrics. Why funds behave the way they do and how you can use this understanding to your advantage. Metrics are good, they can also kill your chances.
- advisors and shares. When the timing is right or wrong, how much equity is too much and the mistakes of moving too fast on advisors. 
- thinking of your investors as a map, not a list. I've gone on about this for ever, always happy to explain to those interested.
- be human.

A massive thank you to all everyone who made it this morning:

Nimi Singh - The Table App
Tarek Moursi - Better Sundays
Ojasvi J. - Cauldron
Billy Holmes - Sigh
Anoop Antony - NeuroX
Anh Duong Nguyen - Nimi

No decision like this is easy. No matter how small or big.
I'm giving today's investment to Tarek from Better Sundays. 

I'll break down some of the dynamics that went through my head as a separate post. 

(here's hoping Tarek doesn't tell me his valuation is £20m.)

Breakfast with Founders


-------

Thank you as ever to Vestd for supporting my series!


If you're a founder keen to meet, I'd love to have breakfast with you in London. Link to waitlists are in my featured section. Naturally, I can't meet with everyone, but I'll always try to make time to speak!

Are you about to fundraise? 
I usually host breakfasts for founders to sit back and share stories.

This time I'm focusing in on early fundraising.

I've got 10 spots at my signature Table for Ten - Breakfast with Founders in King's Cross on the 11th December.

Stuck at the first part of your journey?
Don't know what valuation or how much you should raise?
Struggling to reach your investors?
Don't know if you should cold reach or look for intros?

This is for you.

Sign up in the comments!

ps. This is not for service providers or consultants.

A marketer might think they know how to retain customers... but a neuroscientist might prove how.


And here's the thing.

Loyalty programmes have been dying a death... but FANKS to Alex Revill, they might have a place going into 2026.

Alex is one of those rare founders who is obsessively curious.
He'll ask questions. And he'll follow up with 'why though'.
Almost borderline uncomfortable. Because I had to think.

It's probably what took him from his journey studying the brain, to pharmaceuticals - a little stint at urban fertility at Zinc to eventually come round to ProblemKit and now, FANKS.

An IRL-first loyalty platform that makes generosity easy. 

We spoke about:

- IRL events and communities. Is this something hosts are doing to be authentic or as their full time gig? Does the essence of create mechanisms and funnels for IRL change its purpose in the first place? The question really looked at challenging the balance of rewards vs experience. 

- Demand generation as a means to market. It's very easy to go out and build the perfect product. Alex's focus? Proving demand. No calendly links, no sales cycles. And how does he do it? He turns up to a pilates class, he asks the hottest brands how they do it, he becomes a user of his own product. I'll let Alex release the good tip on call to actions.

- Product market fit. Especially in an IRL-first world, where the signal is simple. People show up. People stay. People return. If this doesn't happen, there is no fit. There is no market. There is no product.


Thank you as ever to Vestd for supporting our series!


-----


If you're a founder keen to meet, I'd love to have breakfast with you in London. Link to waitlists are in my featured section. Naturally, I can't meet with everyone, but I'll always try to make time to speak!


Breakfast with Founders 🥐

I've just upped the stakes on tomorrows breakfast.

One founder will walk away with £1000 towards their raise.
I've never met any of them before.
I have little to no context about their startups.

It's a nano-ticket, but it's an intent towards a founder. 

Angel investment is about taking risks in the people you have a good feeling in. 
I've realised sometimes being too measured has been my downfall.

Being measured in an asset class which in effect can't really be measured.

I'm sure there won't be much movement on the waitlist at this stage, but I'll drop the link again in any case someone does jump in.

So tomorrow, I'm putting my money and breakfast where my mouth is.

Founders, remember. 


It's not the quantity of your interactions, it's the quality.

You can send 1000 sh*t emails or you can send 50 really good ones.
You can go to 100 pitch events or you can network really well at two.
You can download lots investor lists, or you can curate a really good one.

When I think of the founders I remember, I remember their interactions.

Clear, thoughtful, intentional.

The ones that made every time count.

They are the winners.

If I was a tech founder about to launch, I'd forget about the final or even the first product.


I'd just focus on two things:

- Validating the problem.
- Creating demand for the solution.

I am going to keep banging  the drum, but I've recently flipped most of my 'experiments' and ventures into professionalised demand generation channels and here my focus is just on driving volume into them.

Most will fail.
I know it.

But with each micro-failure, I'm getting closer to understand what works.

The ones that are failing the hardest are the ones where I deviate from being intentional with my actions because I'm expecting my customers to find me, rather than me finding them.

This wastes time and social currency.

To find them, I need to know who I'm looking for.

Which is determined by asking the right questions.

Start with an open question and then dig deeper.
Be curious. 
Be open.

Personally, I've been going old school and going back to Facebook groups and Reddit threads.


ps. using Lovable is helping get me there faster.. (and I promise this is not a paid ad - although feel free to @ me cus I would totally stand by the platform)

British people don't brag, but there's one thing some do brag about.


How much they drank.

It's like some competition. 
How much they spent on booze.
How wasted they got as a result.
How they felt the next morning.
The fact they kept drinking the next day.
How craaaaazy it all was.

This is such a powerful trait, that could be directed to other use.

Now imagine we replaced alcohol with our startup during a fundraise.

Brag about it.

I wrote about this recently and the impact it can have on startup progress and fundraising, particularly when a lot of it is down to narrative, momentum and how confidently you tell your story.

If you can brag about a hangover, you can brag about your traction.

And here's the thing.
If we applied the same energy we do after a night out, founders would move twice as fast.

'How much I drank' becomes how many customers you spoke to this week.
'How wasted I got' becomes the hardest problem you solved.
'How I felt the next morning' becomes what you learned and what you fixed.
'We kept drinking the next day' becomes consistent progress and visible momentum.
'How craaaaazy it all was' becomes the story of how you're building something worth backing.

Use the same comfidence.
That same storytelling energy.
That same enthusiasm you somehow have after bottomless brunch.

If you want investors to believe in you, you need to give them something to remember. 

Brag responsibly.
Brag strategically.
But brag.


ps. Drink responsibly.
pps. I'm hosting an intimate breakfast on Thursday for founders that are raising. Link in comments or DM me.

taplio

The Battle

Ben Kaye

Rayan Bannai

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The Battle

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Rayan Bannai

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Rayan Bannai's LinkedIn Performance

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