Today, we sit down to discuss the turbulent nature of today’s innovation economy, and the company looking to turn it all around using AI. We talk artisanal scaling, the valley of death, and the endless cash wasted everyday on an uncodified scale-up system in the UK innovation economy. Let’s see how LettsGroup is looking to solve that. See more in their recent analysis: https://letts.group/2025/02/27/from-failure-to-fortune-how-ai-could-revolutionise-the-uks-innovation-economy/
In the competitive arena of global innovation, the UK has established itself as Europe's venture capital powerhouse, attracting £8 billion in investment in 2023 alone. Yet beneath this headline figure lies a troubling reality: the venture building process remains fundamentally broken. With 60% of UK startups failing within their first three years and a five-year survival rate hovering at just 42.4%, we must confront an uncomfortable truth – the traditional approach to building and scaling ventures is profoundly inefficient.
This analysis examines two critical systemic failures in the venture ecosystem: unacceptably high failure rates and the persistence of artisanal, ad hoc venture building methods in an era of unprecedented technological capability. Against this backdrop, we assess whether LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory represents a genuine paradigm shift or merely an incremental improvement to a fundamentally flawed model.
The venture capital model has long operated on a portfolio theory approach – invest in ten companies expecting seven or eight to fail, two to return capital, and one to deliver outsized returns that justify the entire portfolio. This approach, while accepted as standard practice, represents a staggering market inefficiency when examined objectively.
Research from Harvard Business School senior lecturer Shikhar Ghosh underscores the severity of this issue. His study of more than 2,000 venture-backed companies that raised at least $1 million from 2004 to 2010 found that:
This aligns with UK-specific data that reveals:
These statistics represent more than just failed businesses – they signify billions in misallocated capital, thousands of unrealised innovations, and profound opportunity costs for the UK economy. Each failure represents knowledge, talent, and resources that could have been deployed more effectively with proper systems and methodologies.
These statistics highlight an extraordinary level of failure that has become normalised in the venture building industry. Such failure rates would be considered unacceptable in most other sectors of the economy and represent a significant opportunity for improvement through more systematic approaches.
The second critical challenge lies in the persistently artisanal, ad hoc nature of venture building. Despite technological advancement transforming nearly every industry, the process of building startups remains largely unchanged from decades past – reliant on founder intuition, trial-and-error methodology, and highly variable approaches to market development.
This artisanal model creates fundamental limitations that perpetuate high failure rates:
Each founding team essentially "reinvents the wheel," learning venture-building lessons through costly firsthand experience rather than systematic knowledge transfer. The typical entrepreneur must personally discover optimal approaches to product development, go-to-market strategy, team building, and capital raising - often through expensive trial and error. This creates an inefficient knowledge ecosystem where lessons learned are rarely codified or transferred between ventures.
As noted in industry analyses, the venture capital industry "still places the greatest emphasis on financial analysis versus operational capabilities." While financial details are crucial, they "do not contain enough forward-looking information to understand, track, and govern the venture performance of today's ever-changing market brought on by operational challenges and swings." This myopic focus on financial metrics over operational excellence exacerbates the knowledge gaps in venture building.
Without standardised frameworks for venture development, quality control becomes highly variable. Investors must evaluate each startup using bespoke assessment metrics, creating information asymmetries and increasing due diligence costs. This inconsistency extends to operational practices, governance structures, and reporting standards – all contributing to market inefficiencies.
The absence of systematic approaches leads to suboptimal resource allocation. Founding teams typically over-invest in areas of founder expertise while neglecting critical business functions outside their experience. This creates imbalanced organisations that excel in certain dimensions while remaining dangerously underdeveloped in others.
Perhaps most critically, the artisanal model inherently limits scaling potential. With venture knowledge primarily housed in individual founders rather than systems and processes, organisations struggle to scale beyond the direct oversight capabilities of the founding team. This creates growth bottlenecks and governance challenges as ventures attempt to expand.
The UK venture capital market, while sophisticated by global standards, exhibits structural characteristics that exacerbate these challenges. Total venture capital investment in UK startups reached £8 billion in 2023, placing it as Europe's leading venture market with approximately 30% market share. However, this capital remains inefficiently deployed, with several structural factors constraining optimisation:
Investment remains heavily concentrated in London, which accounts for 51% of all venture deals. The concentration of VC firms is even more pronounced, with approximately 80% based in London. This geographic concentration creates resource asymmetries that limit innovation development in other regions while contributing to overheated valuations in prime markets.
The UK venture market shows particular strength in early-stage funding but demonstrates comparative weakness in growth and scale-up capital. This "missing middle" in the funding ecosystem contributes directly to the valley of death phenomenon, where promising ventures secure initial funding but struggle to access follow-on capital required for scale.
This scale-up gap is evidenced by the growing dominance of foreign investors in larger funding rounds:
This reliance on foreign capital creates vulnerability in the UK innovation ecosystem, with intellectual property, strategic decision-making, and ultimately economic benefits frequently flowing overseas rather than remaining in the UK economy.
Investment flows disproportionately to certain sectors – particularly application software (16%), SaaS (8%), cleantech (7%), and data provision (7%) - while other potentially profitable domains remain comparatively underfunded. This creates market inefficiencies where competition drives up valuations in favoured sectors while leaving potential opportunities underdeveloped in others.
Traditional venture capital typically provides financial capital but limited operational expertise. While the UK VC landscape has evolved to include more "value-add" investors, the artisanal nature of venture building means that operational support remains highly variable and often dependent on individual partner bandwidth rather than systematic methodologies.
Against this backdrop of persistent challenges and market inefficiencies, LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory represents a potential paradigm shift in venture development methodology. Rather than accepting the traditional artisanal model of startup building, the AI VentureFactory applies systematic methodology, technology automation, and standardised processes to fundamentally reshape venture creation and scaling.
The core innovation lies in the systematic application of the Innov@te methodology - a comprehensive seven-stage venture-building framework encompassing 49 distinct steps and hundreds of sub-steps. This methodology essentially codifies the venture-building process, transforming what has historically been tacit, founder-dependent knowledge into explicit, transferable systems.
LettsGroup claims that this systematic approach can double conventional success rates, achieving one successful venture (defined as worth $100M+) from every five companies, compared to the industry standard of one in ten and the corporate venture standard of one in fifteen or twenty.
Analysing this approach against the two systemic challenges identified:
LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory tackles the high failure rate problem through several mechanisms:
More fundamentally, the AI VentureFactory represents a shift from artisanal to systematic venture building:
LettsGroup's tiered subscription approach – offering Startup Lite (£1,599/month), Startup Ultra (£3,999/month), and Scale-up (£7,999/month) services - demonstrates a clear commercialisation strategy that aligns with different stages of the venture life cycle. This tiered approach provides accessibility for early-stage ventures while offering enhanced capabilities as ventures mature and their needs become more complex.
The AI VentureFactory also addresses a clear market need for systematic approaches to venture building. With increasing competition for venture funding and growing pressure on capital efficiency, ventures that can demonstrate systematic approaches to growth and risk mitigation are likely to gain advantages in fundraising and execution.
While the AI VentureFactory offers compelling advantages, several considerations warrant examination:
The standardised methodology must maintain sufficient flexibility to accommodate diverse business models and market conditions. Overly rigid frameworks risk constraining innovation or forcing ventures into suboptimal structures for their specific market contexts.
Industry experts have identified several critical operational difficulties that any systematic venture-building approach must address:
Successful implementation requires founder buy-in and discipline. The methodology's effectiveness depends on ventures faithfully executing prescribed processes rather than selectively implementing components while ignoring others. The cultural shift from entrepreneurial intuition to systematic methodology represents a significant adoption barrier.
If LettsGroup's claims of doubling venture success rates prove accurate, the aggregate impact on the UK innovation economy could be substantial:
The persistent challenges of high failure rates and artisanal venture-building approaches represent significant inefficiencies in the UK innovation economy. LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory offers a promising systematic alternative that directly addresses these fundamental limitations through structured methodology, technology enablement, and process standardisation.
While not without implementation challenges and requiring further validation at scale, the approach represents a potential step-change in how ventures are built and scaled. By transforming venture creation from an art to a science, the AI VentureFactory may contribute to a more efficient, productive innovation ecosystem with far-reaching economic implications.
For entrepreneurs navigating the challenging startup landscape, particularly those building technology ventures in capital-constrained environments, the systematic approach offers compelling advantages. By reducing unnecessary risks, optimising resource deployment, and providing structured pathways to growth, the AI VentureFactory addresses precisely the factors that cause most ventures to fail.
The true measure of this innovation will be demonstrated through longitudinal performance data. If LettsGroup can indeed double venture success rates while maintaining capital efficiency, it will represent not merely an incremental improvement but a fundamental reimagining of venture development - with implications that extend far beyond individual company outcomes to reshape the broader innovation economy.
As industry observers have noted, "saying, 'But this is how we've always done business' isn't sufficient for today's challenges. That's the old seat-of-the-pants model." In a world where up to 75% of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors, systematic approaches like the AI VentureFactory that establish specific objectives and apply reliable performance indicators may be the key to dramatically improving these dismal statistics and transforming the venture capital landscape.
This market analysis is based on data from the British Venture Capital Association (BVCA), publicly accessible market data and LettsGroup research.
LettsGroup HQ
In February LettsGroup launched its new V3 website designs, as well as further extending its AI VentureFactory capabilities. The team added the Startup Lite plan for pre-Seed and Seed stage ventures and those looking to start their VentureFactory journey. It is a streamlined, go-to-market focused offering. Now all 3 non-Enterprise plans can be purchased online. The team has also been working on a new 'Agents' Dashboard organised by function for release in March, as well as a bundle of pre-built 'Go To Market' auto-processes. The first being an AI-driven pre-Seed and Seed Business Plan process. Work has also started on an AI powered business plan-to-investor-deck system using Innov@te + Advanced-Reasoning-AI with the goal of reducing the lapsed time to build quality, investor-ready business plans and decks from 6 months to just 6 days.
LettsCore
LettsCore's final pre-beta release work continued with the integration of Stripe's payments platform, plus dedicated billing wallets for each registered user on LettsCore - managed centrally. This enables individuals and organisations to purchase subscription plans and top-ups to access the media blockchain and its API's. And it provides the infrastructure to manage subscription payments, including automated transfers for Solana credits used to add, update and amend content in LettsCore. This is the last pre-launch work, enabling users to effectively operate and monetise content atoms in our next generation distributed content management platform. To support this final work, the team also built an admin dashboard for internal users to oversee customers and payment flows. LettsCore's SaaS portal and full payments stack will have gone through final development and testing by the end of Q1 2025, ready for market launch in Q2. This nearly 3 year R&D project is coming to fruition. We believe it will be worth the wait.
LettsNews
Since launching in beta last month, LettsNews has evolved nicely based on user feedback. The team added and extended 'hints' and a guide system to help newcomers navigate features, while also developing an exciting new 'Promotion' tool that will let users share auto-distributed stories directly to their social media channels. This 'newsroom tech for everyone' is seeing good early adoption from both small businesses and independent journalists. Also, its mobile apps have been updated for faster speeds with better sync performance, quicker loading times, and a new "Offline Mode" for journalists on remote field work. The tech team is targeting finalising the "Promotion" feature and preparing its mobile apps for full release in the Apple and Google Play stores at the end of Q1.
LettsArt
LettsArt had an impressive acceleration in users and online galleries started with most of its key numbers doubling in the last 2 weeks. As we head towards 1,000 online art galleries powered by LettsArt, the team can start to look toward the future - developing LettsArt 2.5, and targeting advanced users including professional studios, independent gallerists and leading curators. This no-code AI platform helping sell art online better operates highly efficiently, to date comfortably supporting its rapid growth in artists, art collectors and gallery users without significant effort on support or patches. In February LettsArt also updated back end LLM's for more advanced AI reasoning to auto-generate curator quality artwork descriptions and art posts.
LettsSafari
LettsSafari subscribers continued to grow as its influencer-heavy early adopters began to spread the word more widely, while the team also launched a broad Instagram campaign. Some of the latest updates from its rewilding safari parks included 'A day in the life of a LettsSafari fox' and 'A winter wildlife's photo shoot' thanks to the work of the amazing wildlife photographers at LettsSafari. LettsSafari's team will be hosting a day for influencers and rewilding and wildlife experts in Exeter on Saturday June 14. Subscribe today to get your private, VIP invitation.
Other LettsGroup Ventures
We highlight just a few of our ventures in each monthly edition of The LettsGroup NewsFlash. To explore other LettsGroup ventures go to LettsGroup/ventures.
While venture capital firms are actively investing in artificial intelligence as a transformative technology, evidence suggests that AI may fundamentally disrupt the traditional venture capital model itself.
In an AI-enabled environment, human capital is poised to become more valuable than financial capital. This represents a significant departure from conventional venture funding frameworks. Artificial intelligence technologies are empowering entrepreneurs to transform concepts into products using large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools, rather than relying solely on traditional resource-intensive approaches that demand substantial capital investments.
The implications for venture development are profound: entrepreneurs can now progress from ideation to product development and market scaling with significantly reduced time frames and capital requirements. What previously demanded years of development and millions in funding may now be accomplished in months at a fraction of the cost - effectively creating a form of "venture building deflation."
Many established venture capitalists currently view AI primarily as an efficiency tool - automating business plan screening, expediting due diligence processes, enhancing market research capabilities, and accelerating document creation. While these perspectives are valid in the near term, they fail to recognise the more transformative potential that AI presents for the venture ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence can substantially reduce human capital requirements across virtually every aspect of venture development that entrepreneurs previously depended upon. With AI support, a small founding team of two or three capable entrepreneurs could effectively operate a technology company generating multi-million dollar revenue. This is possible because:
The appropriate venture building methodology, when combined with purpose-specific AI tools at each development stage, will construct the venture with minimal human intervention. In this environment, the conceptual innovation becomes the primary asset.
Once products and services are developed, AI can:
The core operational expenses will shift toward software subscriptions, hardware, computational resources, and compensation for experienced business leaders who oversee the AI-driven product development. Consequently, AI-powered ventures may achieve profitability substantially faster than traditional counterparts.
AI systems will also be capable of identifying optimal board members and advisory resources. The new generation of entrepreneurs will have access to strategic and market expertise without traditional venture capital intermediaries that often impose preference shares and dilutive terms.
Perhaps most significantly, AI and AI assistants will connect entrepreneurs directly with funding sources, potentially bypassing traditional venture capital firms entirely.
This phenomenon parallels how younger generations have moved from public social media platforms to private, encrypted communications channels. Similarly, AI will enable business founders to connect directly with individual investors and specialised, entrepreneur-friendly funds that provide targeted value at critical junctures in the venture development process.
Each business function traditionally required by entrepreneurs will be constructed and managed by AI systems - spanning finance, legal, human resources, recruitment, product development, operations, marketing, sales, and customer support. Forward-thinking entrepreneurs will have the capability to build businesses generating tens of millions in revenue, serving thousands of customers, primarily through AI implementation with only a small team of highly capable entrepreneurs managing the overall strategy, product design, and essential customer relationships.
What entrepreneurs will require is access to superior venture development methodologies and the expertise to select appropriate AI tools and create effective AI prompts. In the near future, AI prompt engineering may become a central competency for venture development.
This transformation is not theoretical - it is already underway. Innovative ventures are being developed using these approaches, and pioneering investment firms are creating AI-powered venture development platforms to support and build next-generation companies through networks of entrepreneurs leveraging their AI infrastructure.
The fundamental shift occurring is that venture firms will prioritise human capital over financial capital.
The venture capital organisation of tomorrow will need to possess the most advanced AI venture development platform operating sophisticated company-building processes, and will connect this infrastructure with exceptional entrepreneurs to manage each venture generated from the system. Effectively, the venture capital firm itself will function as an AI system with an associated network of entrepreneurs.
One example of this new venture model is Steel Perlot, backed and led by former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. This relatively new firm aims to identify, invest in, and develop multi-generational platforms capable of attracting billions of users and transforming entire economic sectors.
Their stated objective is to catalyse systemic change in domains where exceptional talent and technology can produce breakthroughs with widespread adoption. They employ a hybrid approach - sometimes investing, often building directly—but only supporting initiatives they believe will achieve global scale. While still in early stages, this organisation represents an emerging paradigm.
LettsGroup, a European entity (and parent company of The LettsJournal), represents another example of this evolution. This organisation positions itself as a new category of venture capital group that builds and backs capital-efficient ventures through their AI VentureFactory, which they believe delivers superior returns through systematically improved venture success rates.
The company has progressed further along this trajectory with several successful ventures launched through their methodology. Rather than expecting all portfolio companies to reach billion-dollar valuations, they focus on developing profitable, sustainable enterprises. Their investment thesis concentrates on platform businesses in Web3, artificial intelligence, and climate technologies. Their growth strategy emphasises technological leverage rather than human resource expansion.
This UK-based organisation maintains a substantial and expanding network of experienced venture leaders who each contribute to multiple ventures, presumably to maintain engagement and enable the firm to capitalise on group dynamics and ecosystem-driven portfolio synergies. In essence, they support experienced entrepreneurs with tools, technologies, and systems designed to accelerate and enhance outcomes, with capital access integrated into their methodology.
If pioneering AI-enabled venture capital firms like Steel Perlot and LettsGroup represent the future direction, tomorrow's entrepreneurs may integrate with venture factory platforms rather than traditional legal structures that offer limited value beyond capital while often transferring ownership to the venture firms intended to support them.
The AI-enabled future should ultimately empower entrepreneurs more effectively than simply enriching venture capitalists, creating more direct connections between entrepreneurs and the institutional investors that have traditionally funded venture capital organisations. This represents a fundamental restructuring of power dynamics in the entrepreneurial ecosystem—a transformation that shifts greater control and value creation potential to innovative founders.
This article was developed from insights first published on LettsJournal.
Picture your favourite action hero: resourceful, scrappy, always tinkering with gadgets in the nick of time. That’s the quintessential entrepreneur in “Founder Mode”. Now, swap in the polished office exec, presenting slides with perfect bullet points - enter the corporate boss in “Manager Mode”. Both are crucial in their own settings, but mixing them up in a high-growth startup can be like asking your house cat to catch a Frisbee.
According to Paul Graham of Y Combinator, Founder Mode calls for an intense, almost obsessive focus on building and iterating. Founders need to operate in a perpetual state of urgency, wearing multiple hats (or even all the hats if they have to). They thrive on incomplete information, tight deadlines, and big leaps of faith - like jumping out of a plane and assembling the parachute on the way down. Brian Chesky at Airbnb has famously emphasised laser-like devotion to product experience and user satisfaction, which propelled Airbnb from a wacky airbed idea to a global phenomenon.
By contrast, Manager Mode demands a systematic approach that relies on structure, process, and delegation. This style works wonders in a more established environment: think big corporations with hierarchies, detailed processes, and an HR policy for everything including “who ate my yogurt in the fridge”. Managers excel at ensuring stability and efficiency, implementing metrics, and optimising for incremental improvements - crucial traits once a company matures past its hectic toddler years.
However, in a high-growth startup, overemphasis on Manager Mode can be dangerous. In early to mid-stage ventures, speed trumps structure. If managers are too focused on tight protocols, they risk slowing down innovation, frustrating agile teams, and ultimately losing ground to nimbler competitors. Let’s not forget the wise words from LettsGroup : in a scale-up context, you need a founder’s grit and creative chaos to maintain momentum. Corporate managers can inadvertently crush that spirit by demanding evidence and processes for every tiny move - at a time when rapid experimentation and pivoting on the fly are the startup’s lifeblood.
Let's face it: putting a traditional corporate manager in charge of a high-growth startup is like asking a librarian to DJ at a rave. Both are professionals, but one of them is about to have a very, very bad time. The fundamental divide between "Founder Mode" and "Manager Mode" isn't just about different approaches to business - it's about different species of leaders altogether.
Imagine being someone crazy enough to bet their future on an idea that most people think is stupid, while simultaneously being sane enough to actually execute it. That's your founder in their natural habitat. And these beautiful weirdos share some distinct traits:
Delicious Delusion: They possess a level of conviction that would make a cult leader blush. We're talking about people who see empty apartments and imagine Airbnb, or look at a bookstore and envision Amazon. As Brian Chesky demonstrated, sometimes you need to be just delusional enough to imagine a world where sleeping in strangers' homes becomes normal.
Learning at Warp Speed: LettsGroup's research shows that founders are essentially human sponges on steroids. While corporate managers are perfecting their PowerPoint skills, founders are learning everything from coding to cap tables to customer psychology - usually all before breakfast.
Resource Wizardry: These folks could sell sand in the Sahara. They don't just manage resources; they conjure them out of thin air through sheer force of will and the occasional blood sacrifice to the venture capital gods.
Uncertainty Addiction: Where others see terrifying ambiguity, founders see a playground. They're comfortable making massive decisions with about 1% of the information any sane person would want, and somehow, they sleep just fine at night.
On the other side of the business universe, we have our corporate managers. Bless their process-loving hearts, they also have a number of common traits:
Resource Hoarding: These folks have their grip on a budget like it's the last crumb on Earth. They excel at optimising what exists, which is great until you need them to create something from nothing.
Risk Allergies: If uncertainty were peanuts, these would be the folks carrying an EpiPen. They've been trained to spot and eliminate risk like it's a game of corporate whack-a-mole.
Process Worship: They've never met a workflow they couldn't flowchart or a meeting they couldn't schedule another meeting about. Their natural habitat is a room full of Gantt charts and KPI dashboards.
Hierarchy Heroes: They navigate corporate politics with the skill of a Renaissance diplomat, though they might break out in hives if asked to operate without a clear reporting structure.
That’s not to say Manager Mode doesn’t have its place; it absolutely does - once a scale-up hits a more stable, mature phase. After all, no founder wants to be the reason the company has zero processes and the accounting books look like a teenager’s messy bedroom. But until then, strong entrepreneurial leaders should remain in Founder Mode, keeping the original spark alive. Their traits - fierce passion, relentless drive, and a willingness to fail fast - are the key to continuing that rocket ride.
With the growing debate about Founder Mode versus Manager Mode, LettsGroup, who use their AI VentureFactory to help founders scale systemically, has researched the key traits required of an entrepreneur to stand a chance of being successful at Founder Mode. They have also looked at the traits required to be a successful corporate manager and how these two seemingly 'opposing' skill sets can interconnect - or not...
Innovation Suffocation: Nothing kills the startup spirit quite like a manager insisting on a 12-step approval process for testing new ideas. While founders are playing jazz, managers are trying to write a symphony for an orchestra that doesn't exist yet. Plus, corporate managers are taught to be risk averse and cautious, not quite the vibe of your average startup team.
Premature Process-ification: Corporate managers love building infrastructure like teenagers love TikTok, or did... They'll create departments, hierarchies, and processes for a company of five people, essentially building a corporate cage before the startup butterfly has even emerged from its chrysalis.
Cultural Catastrophe: Watch in horror as the "move fast and break things" ethos transforms into "move cautiously and file a report about it". The high-ownership startup culture crashes headfirst into permission-based paralysis.
Timing Tragedy: By the time a corporate manager has finished their risk assessment spreadsheet, three competitors have launched, iterated, and pivoted twice. As Chesky would tell you, Airbnb would still be selling election-themed cereal if they'd waited for perfect market analysis.
The brutal truth? Neither mode is inherently superior - they're just catastrophically wrong when misapplied. Manager Mode is like a fine wine: perfect for mature companies but wasted on a startup that needs the entrepreneurial equivalent of Red Bull. Meanwhile, Founder Mode in a large corporation can be like letting a bull loose in a china shop - exciting briefly, but ultimately expensive. Beware DOGE...
In the early stages, your startup needs a chaos pilot, not a process prophet. Save the corporate managers for when you're big enough to need someone to optimise your ping-pong ball budget and design your company cafeteria's tasting menu. So, next time you’re considering who to put in charge of your early-stage or rapidly scaling startup, ask: do you need an inventor or a caretaker? Either way, remember you can’t cat-proof a Frisbee, and you can’t always plan a revolution with a spreadsheet. Sometimes you’ve just got to build, iterate, and hang on for dear life.
This article first appeared at The Letts Journal.
LettsGroup HQ
LettsGroup had a busy January extending the AI VentureFactory with added features, onboarding processes and pricing plans for new users, while also migrating its venture building process, Innov@te, to a more advanced platform, including a wiki-type system with AI. The team continue to extend the installed AI apps and infrastructure, while adding more connectors across core business processes - getting to a level of automation that can fundamentally alter venture-building economics. The power of the AI VentureFactory will be further tested this year as LettsGroup's more developed 'branded ventures' begin recruiting dedicated, specialist leaders to take them beyond startup, through scale-up, with the AI VentureFactory acting as the bridge from the first-start team to the scale-up team.
LettsNews
LettsNews launched in beta last week offering 'newsroom tech for everyone' . It had a strong first week with a number of businesses signing up. Alongside its fully featured web app, which is now available to everyone, LettsNews is adding mobile apps for Android and Apple devices in the coming weeks. The mediatech Cloud software company offers 4 paid single user subscription plans, and will be adding a Company plan. The platform adopts a viral growth model as users invite co-workers, freelancers and agencies to their LettsNews Teams to share news items and stories, gathering inputs, copy edits and sign-off's for stories prior to release with LettsNews' auto-distribution tech. Any journalist, writer, content manager or PR can now sign up to LettsNews' web app at LettsNews.com.
LettsCore
LettsCore, the web3 distributed media platform, started building its full commercial website ready for market launch later in Q1. The team also completed the platform's subscription plans and billing mechanisms with a pricing model that reflects the underlying economics of web3 - similar to other leading blockchain platforms. They have also implemented individual subscription wallets for every subscriber so their accounts can be auto topped-up following subscription payment and one-off credit purchases. The platform offers flexible pricing with 3 tiers for individuals, plus a company plan with secure, managed top-up for higher levels of activity / content and larger teams. This work continues through February delivering integrated subscription / top-up directly in the SaaS portal. Further to this the team implemented NFT minting and auto-distribution to Magic Eden's NFT Marketplace - a leading marketplace for Solana NFT content.
Want to escape the city? Book your 2025 company retreat or family break today at LettsRetreat.com.
LettsArt
LettsArt now has over 800 artist and art galleries using its subscription based, no-code AI software platform. A year after its market launch LettsArt is increasingly establishing itself as the all-in-one platform for artists and gallerists. In conventional art marketplaces, artists often struggle to stand out and connect directly with potential buyers. LettsArt turns this model on its head by providing each artist or gallerist with their own independent online gallery. From managing and distributing art to coordinating sales and managing collectors, LettsArt consolidates all of these once-siloed tasks into a single, streamlined dashboard. It's early validation with emerging artists will be extended in 2025 to higher value customers including professional studios, commercial galleries and art dealers.
EA Global AI
EA Global AI, which pioneers 'autofill' technology for company reporting, had their busiest month yet in January, with 2 enterprise customers, Hogan Lovells and Novartis, and 5 SMEs entering trials. Another 7 companies will kick off trials in February. On top of this, EA was featured in Asia Media’s ESG Investor publication. The senior team uses LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory to automate and accelerate processes, currently focused on organic and content marketing (with LettsNews in the stack) while also streamlining its SME onboarding, aiming to complete this in Q1, to increase capacity and confidently acquire smaller customers at scale and with lower friction.
LettsSafari
LettsSafari enjoyed a large jump in subscribers over the Christmas period and into January. This pioneering rewilding and nature restoration platform now boasts many known wildlife and conservation experts and influencers as subscribers, which should serve it well as it starts to extend its reach and capabilities. It has exciting plans for 2025. For any land owner or wildlife enthusiast that dreams of building their own mini rewilding safari park - here's how!
Other LettsGroup Ventures
We highlight just a few of our ventures in each monthly edition of The LettsGroup NewsFlash. To explore other LettsGroup ventures go to LettsGroup/ventures.
A rare bit of good news for journalists, an ambitious news publishing system from the LettsGroup stable went live today. It's called LettsNews and it describes itself as "'Newsroom tech for everyone". The British startup wants to reduce the cost and time taken to gather, publish and deliver news in the increasingly fragmented and real-time news industry. It could be a boon for overly stretched, under-staffed news rooms, and the growing number of freelance and self-employed journalists, writers and PR's.
Today LettsNews launched its cloud software platform for ever increasing news gatherers, commentators, freelancers and PR's that are looking for a better and more efficient way to gather, build and distribute the news. Their web app can be accessed from a laptop, PC or Mac and the all-in-one system can give any writer or PR a fully fledged newsroom in the Cloud. Mobile apps will also be available soon for work in the field.
More than ever, newswriters are freelancers, independents and even citizens, but their tools for news gathering are rudimentary or wildly expensive. They write in MS Word or Google Docs, they use their phones for photos and videos. They publish their news into proprietary systems like WordPress or WiX, Substack or Medium, X or Bluesky, one at a time - cutting and pasting, at best, each time.
From the family that invented the diary, LettsNews is a slick, cost effective, all-in-one news gathering, publishing and distribution system designed to streamline this fragmented industry and the digital age. When you write in LettsNews, it automatically makes HTML news pages ready for global distribution. Images, video and audio can be cropped and basic-edited in the app, in the field. And its entire approach is quite revolutionary - adding individual Content Items (text, image, video, audio) - one at a time.
It's object-oriented programming but for content! Each Content Item you load gets tagged, sorted and organised ready for you to drag and drop into news stories. As your library of Content Items grows, your ability to instantly create news stories multiplies.
While LettsNews users focus on adding new Content Items, the software can take care of the rest - from story building, to team collaboration, editing, auto-distribution and even auto-promotion of the distributed stories. With LettsNews each News Item component gets dragged and dropped into a News Story and can be shared with collaborators in virtual teams, supported by version tracking and sign off. Teams can be added for each publication, project or work stream, whether it's a company blog, journalist's Medium page, a small publication's site, investor comms or more.
When a news Story is completed it gets filed by the LettsNews system and published ready for auto, one-click distribution to a number of leading news sites, publishers and social media platforms - with more to come. LettsNews users can write once and distribute to multiple different places, including their blog, at the push of a button, doing what used to take many hours in just a few minutes. And Content Items (notes, images, video, or audio) can be re-used any number of times, dragged and dropped into numerous versions of the same story or new stories, leaving more time in the field or office to research, write and work on new stories.
LettsNews plans to add to its V1 offering launched today, introducing advanced AI to speed its system and the process even more, followed by a Content Item marketplace to help creators monetise news items better than before. Their writers and publishers will be able to buy 3rd party news items or clips (text, photo. video, audio) safely, securely and cost effectively - instantly dropping them into their own news stories - while providing a vital new income stream for news creators.
Add this all up and, in a couple of years, LettsNews could become a next generation, crowdsourced and machine-driven news agency for the masses. One fit for this new, fragmented, digital age. Step aside Reuters and Associated Press? We'll keep you posted.
This article first appeared at The Letts Journal.
'Founder Mode' hit Silicon Valley last September like a mini tremor in a fault riddled landscape. You know, the place where San Andreas teeters on the edge... Never quite taking the whole show down - but always there, hanging over the existing status quo. Threatening its very existence. In this case, threatening the essence of traditional management theory.
And it awoke something within our Mothership . After all, we are founders, we've worked with founders and backed founders - and we were one of the early ones to do it. You could argue that 'Founder Mode' is our only mode. We have called it other things, and we have been talking about, writing and developing what is now thought of as 'Founder Mode' for decades... Maybe longer. As a result, we thought it might be time to extend the concept of Founder Mode. You know, take it on a bit - like a jackhammer to the fault line.
Founder Mode is a bigger deal than a few scant searches and a couple of notes might reveal. The term itself was first coined by Paul Graham from Y Combinator. He described a talk by the founder of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, who described getting bad advice from VC's and corporate managers about how to scale his startup. Even business schools seem bereft of management techniques for founders of fast growing, often tech-enabled startups.
Paul Graham's defining article on Founder Mode dug into how founders struggled with traditional school of thought which stated that you should scale your startup by hiring great senior managers (often from large corporations) then leaving them alone to build, manage and lead their function. 8-10 such corporate leaders should be able to run the business for you. Hey, you might even hire a COO to manage them! Except, it seemed, they don't.
Similar sentiments were expressed across the Valley and beyond by founder after founder. And this, following a legion of techniques, systems and training around Manager Mode, first developed during the industrial revolution, by academics, thought leaders and corporate managers. Today 'Manager Mode' is the system, the institution, the accepted norm. Founder Mode versus Manager Mode feels like a very young David versus one massive Goliath. Like Nigel Farage against Elon Musk.
Even Steve Jobs stumbled on the 'Manager Mode' curse. He ended up getting booted out of Apple by his leading corporate manager when Apple was experiencing some scaling challenges. Indeed, the stark differences between Manager Mode and Founder Mode were best revealed by John Sculley (Manager Mode) and Steve Jobs (Founder Mode). Steve Jobs was a product genius, but also a highly instinctive and effective Founder. When he returned to Apple in the 1990's he showed us all how 'Founder Mode' should be done. He had learned his lesson.
But, there have been equally effective founders before him - check Thomas Edison, Walt Disney and Enzo Ferrari. Thomas Edison was an inventor, Walt Disney a cartoonist and animation film producer. Enzo Ferrari was a racing car driver, turned racing car designer and maker. And they all had one thing in common - Founder Mode.
Founder Mode is comparable to 'parent mode' - there is no manual, each child is different, and they grow in their own different ways. The optimal way to bring up a child is to be hands on and deeply involved in their early, first-start (startup?) years. Parents seem to somehow know best and they have a powerful natural instinct for their children's safety, development and health. Like Imelda Marcos and her passion for shoes, except with kids.
But to be a successful parent you have to be a great parent. You have to stay the course and be always on for your child, putting the kid first. Founder Mode is no different. To be a successful founder you have to be a great founder and not just any old founder. You have to stay the course and be always on, putting your startup first. You have to keep shaping and building your product until it breaks through in its market, and you have to know your key customers better than anyone. You have to build a great scaled-up company and a culture where your team is your family.
Founders need to stay nurturing their product and market for as long as they physically can. Deep in the weeds. They should remain hands-on - developing circles of expertise and trusted partners around them. They should manage from the middle, not from some arbitrary office up above with a bunch of corporate yes folk surrounding them (and often failing them).
Structures should remain flat - no hierarchical pyramids. Founders are like a senior trader on a trading floor, with specialist teams around them, and their eyes and fingers on the pulse of any key trade or major moves in the market. Corporate Managers should learn 'Founder Mode' before ever joining a startup or scale-up.
And this trend toward 'Founder Mode' might explain the inexplicable rise of Donald Trump and the coterie of tech titan founders that he is surrounding himself with - just waiting to smash big government like a founder!.
AI and increased automation make Founder Mode more possible than ever. After all, teams can stay small for much longer. A billion dollar company could have less than 20 people - maybe even less than 10 people. Perhaps this is Founder Mode. Perhaps this is the future.
Our Mothership wrote a book about it called 'The Size Zero Handbook'. They plan to serialise aspects of it as they develop a management theory and a set of practices for 'Founder Mode'. We thought you should know. And we welcome anyone who can share their experiences with 'Founder Mode' versus 'Manager Mode'.
In Part 2, coming next Month, we will explore how 'Founder Mode' is developing. Stay tuned - 2025 might usher in a whole new founder led world. God save us!
This post first appeared at The Letts Journal.
As we approach the end of an incredible 2024, it’s the perfect moment to reflect on LettsArt’s journey. This year has been nothing short of transformative, marked by innovation, growth, and connection. Here are six key themes that defined our year:
This year, we achieved unprecedented growth, with the number of online art galleries built using LettsArt surging from less than 100 at the end of 2023 to nearly 800 today. Similarly, the number of artworks hosted on galleries using LettsArt grew to over 3,000. The art industry is starting to pay attention to our more advanced users building expansive, fully featured, new generation galleries. LettsArt's phenomenal expansion underscores the trust and enthusiasm of artists, gallerists, and collectors in the LettsArt platform.
LettsArt introduced several cutting-edge product updates designed to empower artists. From enhanced Art Intelligence (AI) features for creating digital galleries to improved collector engagement tools, our software now offers even more ways for artists and gallerists to showcase their work and build meaningful relationships with their audiences. New features in 2024 included extended support for all art types, multi visual assets for each artwork, text-to-image art creation for digital sketching, modelling and more, usability enhancements, and lately the migration of galleries to a new Web3 platform readying for auto-distribution of art on sale from your LettsArt dashboard to 3rd party digital art marketplaces in 2025. And to get new users up and running faster we created a comprehensive Getting Started Guide.
Building stronger connections between artists and collectors remained a central focus this year. Through our blog and new product features, we emphasised the value of direct engagement and building an active following, fostering a vibrant and interactive community. Indeed many of LettsArt's features drive this and help manage it for you. Our efforts have resulted in deeper relationships and increased support for artists, enabling them to thrive in today’s digital art landscape.
We’ve been proud to expand our network of emerging and independent art professionals using our software across the UK, adding galleries from key regions such as Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, Devon, Cornwall, and many more. This focus on regional art scenes not only enriches our platform but also provides diverse opportunities for artists and collectors to discover and connect with unique artistic voices.
Through our blogs and articles, LettsArt has positioned itself as a thought leader in the online art industry. Topics ranged from fighting the talent drain crisis to building trust and transparency and the hidden art market . These insights have inspired thousands of users and solidified LettsArt as a go-to resource for navigating the ever-evolving art market.
Community-building was at the heart of everything we did this year. With new Featured Galleries and Featured Art sections we’ve brought together artists, gallerists, and collectors in new and exciting ways. We also kicked off an "Artist in Focus" series ( see the latest on Soft Wasp ) to share interesting artists using LettsArt. The LettsArt community has grown stronger and more connected, with countless success stories emerging from these collaborations. We aim to do even more of this in 2025.
As we look to the future, LettsArt remains committed to driving innovation and growth with its software and emerging community of users, while staying true to our mission of empowering artists and independent gallerists and connecting them with passionate collectors - helping to sell art better. With exciting plans already in motion, we can’t wait to see what the next year will bring.
Thank you to everyone who made this year extraordinary. Here’s to another year of creativity, connection, and inspiration!
In 2024, LettsSafari worked hard to promote rewilding and biodiversity restoration. Our efforts encompassed expanding our rewilding initiatives, engaging our community through educational projects and content, and participating in global environmental movements. And, of course, we were never happier than doing the work on the ground in our very own LettsSafari parks.
Our rewilding safari parks have been developing well, and are making quite an impact. The parks are carefully designed to restore natural habitats, support diverse wildlife populations, and combat climate change. We emphasise a collaborative approach, encouraging public participation in building the parks both physically and with LettsSafari subscriptions that fund tree planting, animal introductions, habitat development and brand new rewilding safari parks.
For every 10 subscribers we plant a 5 year old, naturally grown tree annually, every hundred subscribers support the introduction of new wild animals each year and every 10,000 subscribers we add a whole new safari park a year.
This year we planted more than thirty 5 year old trees across our parks - all grown naturally in LettsSafari's Capability Brown gardens. We created habitats for yet more diverse bird life with our extended waterways and further growth of natural hedgerows. This was the first year that we heard Nightingale in our parks and, at the same time, our birds of prey kept adding to their numbers. Our efforts to protect a resident herd of black fallow deer has been very successful.
One of our network of rewilding safari parks, Hill Crest , sent us their year end update: "All is well here in Devon's wildlands with the Pine Martens released back into our landscape, fledging barn owls and two more sites coming on board this winter, things are coming along nicely." They reminded us of the great words of Dr Seuss, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
Through our direct initiatives, the wider LettsSafari network of parks , our subscribers and our digital outreach, we have inspired hundreds of new rewilding parks and gardens in 2024. We know it because you tell us. Many in southwest England but also now a growing number across the country and even further afield.
Throughout the year, LettsSafari has provided valuable resources to educate the public on rewilding practices. Our "Creating Your Very Own Safari Garden" series offers practical advice for individuals to transform their gardens into wildlife havens, promoting urban biodiversity. Additionally, we've highlighted the importance of participating in initiatives like "No Mow May," encouraging people to let their lawns grow to support pollinators and other wildlife.
In celebration of Earth Day 2024, LettsSafari emphasised the significance of combating plastic pollution and embracing nature restoration. We provided guidance on how individuals can contribute to these efforts, reinforcing the idea that collective small actions can lead to substantial environmental benefits.
Sculptures installed at LettsSafari's Capability Brown gardens in Exeter underlined this - with a series of fascinating trees made by Robert Marshall MRSS from recycled plastic bottles.
Aligning with global environmental movements, LettsSafari participated in World Rewilding Day by showcasing some of the world's most significant rewilding projects. The initiative aimed to raise awareness about large-scale rewilding efforts and inspire individuals and communities to engage in similar activities locally.
LettsSafari was one of the first to develop the concept of urban rewilding. We're excited to see it starting to take off - and in 2024 we highlighted a great number of large institutional projects like the transformation of Derby's Allestree Park into Britain's largest urban rewilding space or the exciting transformation of the moat at the Tower of London. But also photos and description of the many small gardens owned by individuals who have pursued our techniques and created mini rewilded spaces in back gardens or front gardens that line London streets. By highlighting projects, large and small, our advocacy inspires evermore integration of natural habitats within urban settings. It's so important to promote biodiversity even in densely populated areas.
Looking ahead, LettsSafari plans to expand its reach by making its services more universally available. This expansion will involve an even broader audience in rewilding efforts, enabling more people to contribute and benefit from restored natural environments. You never know, we might even pop up in other countries helping them to discover the LettsSafari approach to mass market rewilding - one garden, one park, one plant, and one animal at a time.
Our activities in 2024 have significantly contributed to rewilding and biodiversity restoration - creating a strong platform for growth. Through expanding rewilding parks, providing educational content, and engaging in global environmental initiatives, we are making strides fostering a collaborative approach to environmental conservation, empowering individuals and communities to participate in creating a more biodiverse and sustainable future. We thank you for sharing our journey in 2024 and are excited about doing even more in 2025.
Help us build more rewilding safari parks together in 2025 - subscribe to LettsSafari today.
