It’s near the end of Q1, and it’s been a good start to the year. The team is very focused and we’re building some of the coolest products we’ve ever built. Everyone’s really fired up about it.

We actually launched a new product today called Quality Video, which we shared publicly on LinkedIn. So it’s been a busy and exciting start to the year.

We built a product called Quality Video, which focuses on improving the quality of video that buyers purchase across the open web.

About 30% of video players in standard buys collapse into a tiny player that sits in the corner of the screen. It’s basically a waste of money. Another 15% continue playing even after the user has scrolled past them and they’re no longer visible.

Our product filters those out. We’ve built extremely granular insights into what actually happens with online video and turned that into something that genuinely helps customers make better decisions.

I grew up in London. I lived there, studied there, and worked there—which is probably why I eventually moved to the U.S. It felt like the right time to change that part of my life.

Before university I thought I wanted to work in the music industry. I did a summer of internships across the industry—music tech, record labels, ad management, the whole gamut.

But I realized it wasn’t for me. What really interested me was startups and technology.

In my final year I was already working with social media data. I studied English literature and language, but I also did a linguistics project analyzing Twitter data using Gnip, which was essentially Twitter’s firehose of data at the time. That world fascinated me.

Straight out of university I joined a mobile advertising startup. What attracted me was that it was a startup—but also that I was a bit of a tech nerd. I liked apps, smartphones, and everything happening in that ecosystem.

My first company did really well and was eventually acquired by Omnicom Media Group. That experience gave me the startup bug. I saw how a company could grow, scale, and eventually be bought.

After that I worked at two programmatic companies, including AppNexus, which was foundational infrastructure for programmatic advertising. That’s where I really learned the mechanics of how the system worked.

I also noticed that a lot of companies were building products on top of that infrastructure. That’s what sparked the idea behind Picnic—whether we could build differentiated products on top of existing systems.

The exciting part was the scale. You could build a product and immediately see it affecting millions of people.

Even early on we were shipping code that appeared on major sites like The Guardian or Mail Online. I’d be reading the news and see our product live on the page. That was incredibly exciting.

What felt broken was the lack of transparency and the amount of wasted money in the ecosystem. It’s also an incredibly complex system. Even the people trying to solve these problems don’t always fully understand how everything works.

I believed that innovation for smaller companies would come from building differentiation on top of existing infrastructure.

It took us time to get that right. There were a lot of failed attempts along the way. But the idea still holds true today.

The infrastructure layer in this industry was largely built around 2012, and the opportunity now is building differentiated layers on top of it. You can still build very impactful companies doing that.

There was about a year and a half where I had this persistent itch. Even in jobs I liked, I kept feeling like I wanted to build something myself.

I remember the moment clearly. I met with my co-founder in April 2016, but we didn’t actually start the business for another ten months. There was a lot of groundwork to lay.

The truth is you can never prepare enough. Everything you think you’ll know—you won’t.

But I was also very young, which made the risk easier. I didn’t have major financial obligations. I was paying about £400 a month for a bedroom. So it didn’t feel like I was giving up much to try.

I’d go bigger, faster, and more ambitious immediately.

I have far more experience now—skills, network, knowledge. All of that would allow me to move much quicker and pursue bigger opportunities right away.

Most pivots weren’t because the thesis was wrong—it was more about execution.

Our biggest mistake early on was focusing too narrowly on a niche. That limited the size of the opportunity.

The best pivot we made was deliberately broadening the market we were addressing.

There’s a startup theory about dominating a niche first, but for our type of business that approach actually constrained growth.

We don’t try to define quality ourselves. Instead we provide the data so buyers can make quantitative decisions about it.

The problem in the ecosystem is that there hasn’t been enough reliable data to support those decisions.

Interestingly, we’ve found that quality and cost are often poorly correlated. Lower-quality inventory can sometimes be 20–30% more expensive than higher-quality inventory.

If you can’t measure quality properly, you can’t price it properly.

Many buyers think they can understand inventory simply by pulling a site list and looking at metrics like clicks or viewability.

Those metrics really aren’t fit for purpose anymore. The future of programmatic relies on trust, and trust requires deeper data.

You need something closer to a visual understanding of what a site actually is—not just a spreadsheet of performance metrics.

The biggest personal impact is stress and anxiety. When the business isn’t going well, you feel it very deeply.

But the flip side is incredibly rewarding. When you show a product to a customer after months of work and they say, “This is great—we want to buy it,” that feeling never gets old.

Even the hundredth time you hear it, it’s still amazing.

When I started, I had never managed anyone before.

Over time we built a culture that prioritizes trust by default. If someone joins Picnic and goes through the hiring process, we trust them to manage their time and their work.

That creates a strong culture because you attract talented people who want to do great work. But it also means the company isn’t the right fit for people who need to be heavily managed.

We’re not building frontier AI models ourselves, but we make sure we use the best tools available throughout the company.

For example, our engineers use AI tools to help solve coding challenges. We used to manually map ad tech providers on publisher websites. Using AI workflows we expanded that from around 40 providers to more than 1,300.

Personally, I use AI constantly—transcribing meetings, generating follow-ups, and automating internal workflows.

Even as a 25-person company, we dedicate part of someone’s role entirely to AI automation and process improvement.

Whenever you raise money, you’re giving away some degree of control.

Early on we raised at more of an angel level, where that trade-off was minimal. But once you get to institutional rounds—seed and beyond—you’re definitely sharing control in some form. Even if it’s things like reporting rights or budget oversight.

The key is making sure investors provide sensible oversight without getting too involved in areas where they don’t actually specialize.

The best way is speaking with other founders they’ve invested in.

Next time I raise money I’d probably be even more deliberate about that. It’s easy to speak to an investor’s favorite portfolio companies—the ones that worked out. But it’s just as important to speak to founders where things didn’t go well.

That gives you a much more honest picture of how that investor behaves when things are difficult.

Probably more than people would like to admit.

You try to gather as much information as possible, but investment is ultimately a people business as much as it is a numbers business.

At some point you have to trust your judgment about the people you’ll be working with.

Ideally it’s someone who grows alongside the company.

You want someone flexible as the business evolves, someone you can have honest conversations with about both the ups and the downs, and ultimately someone willing to support the company with capital when it’s needed.

It’s allowed us to scale without relying entirely on large equity raises.

For most of Picnic’s life we’ve deliberately tried to operate more like a bootstrap business. That might mean slower top-line growth, but it also means greater control over the direction of the company.

Non-dilutive capital helps us stay on that path.

Possibly. We’re building a very technical and defensible product, so there are definitely strategic buyers in the industry that could find that interesting.

But we’re also building a business with multiple revenue streams and a lot of ambition behind it. Private equity could also help push the company to its next stage of growth.

Part of it is competitive—you want to win.

But over time it becomes more about the team. Building a workplace where people feel fulfilled and proud of what they’re doing becomes incredibly motivating.

Exercise, cooking, traveling. But more importantly it’s about mindset—recognizing that overworking doesn’t necessarily produce better results.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is step away.

I’d like Picnic to be known for having the most accurate and granular insights into quality across multiple channels—display, video, CTV, and potentially others.

Not as an arbiter of what’s good or bad, but as a data provider that empowers the industry to make better decisions.

And I’d also hope people recognize the culture we’ve built, because ultimately the culture is what delivers the product.