Made in the UK: Two Founders, the Full Stories

Granola's Made in the UK series brings founders of homegrown British businesses in to tell the real version of their story. I went to the first two, with Anne Boden of Starling Bank and Cameron Leslie of fabric. What follows is the recap: the journeys, the near-death moments, and the role the state played in both. I have kept some people to their roles rather than their names, out of respect, and linked out where the full names are on the record.

The room

The space itself did something most event spaces get wrong. Granola gave you options: a couch, armchairs, low stools, high bar stools, a scatter of places to land depending on your mood. The sound was clean, the lighting was warm, and nobody herded you into forced networking. Both nights started on time, which in this city counts as a small act of respect.

You wrote your name by hand on a sticker at the door. A tiny thing, and I liked it. Most of us have outsourced handwriting to our devices so completely that a felt-tip pen now feels like an event. The snacks were good too. They had swapped their usual empanadas for sausage rolls to fit the Made in the UK theme, which made me smile.

Anne Boden: the bank that had to argue for its own existence

The first Monday belonged to Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, in conversation with Matt Robinson of Accel, who co-founded GoCardless. I have never held a Starling account. I did, though, benchmark Starling's designs closely during my years in fintech, so hearing the founder tell the origin story felt like meeting the author of a book I had studied.

Anne's route was not the startup cliché. Computer-science graduate, Lloyds in the early eighties, then decades as a senior executive across the big global banks. She left after concluding that the technology had moved on and the banks had not. The moment she describes as the turn is almost anti-climactic. One morning she got up and quit, with no plan beyond a conviction that someone should build a new kind of bank.

Two structural gifts made Starling possible, and both are worth understanding if you care about how the UK actually works. First, in 2013 the regulator introduced a two-step authorisation process. Until then you needed all the capital before you could get a banking licence, and you could not raise the capital without the licence. That deadlock broke, and a category of new banks became legally buildable.

Second, competition created the category in the public mind. The rivalry between Starling and Monzo meant the press wrote about a movement rather than a single company, and readers decided, one by one, whether they wanted one of these new orange or teal cards.

The part I keep retelling is about the team. Anne hired a CTO who had co-founded GoCardless in 2011 with Matt Robinson, the man now interviewing her. He then left, and as Anne tells it, took the founding team of sixteen with him to start a rival challenger bank. There was a full page in the Financial Times about it. Starling secured its banking licence one week before that rival did, and then Anne spent close to two years unable to raise a penny, partly because a team walking out makes investors nervous. The rival, by contrast, raised its first million in ninety-six seconds. The man asking Anne the questions on stage had co-founded a company with the man who nearly sank hers. Nobody said it out loud, but it sat there the whole evening. The full story, with the names, is on the record if you want it.

The rescue reads like fiction. A hedge-fund billionaire read about the rival bank, tried to invest, fell out with them, and asked who else was building in the space. Anne flew to the Bahamas, was grilled for hours, ended up on the yacht, and at the end of it was offered £48m when she had come to raise £3m. The way she tells it, the thing running through her head was that this was the only offer she had ever received.

The government kept showing up in her story too. When RBS was forced by the EU to divest after taking crisis funding, a £325m competition fund appeared. Starling built a business bank in roughly three months to compete for it, won a £100m grant with no equity attached, and hit the targets it had promised, going on to take an 11% share of UK small-business banking in three years. Miss those targets and the money came back with interest. That is the deal, and she took it.

Matt was a generous interviewer, mostly because he kept puncturing the myth of the smooth founder. His line on fundraising stuck with me: a good raise is one acceptable offer, a great raise is three, and both sit behind a rejection rate of ninety per cent or more. He told a story about posting GoCardless on a landlord forum in the early days and being told to go and get a proper job and earn an honest penny. Two founders on that stage, both now lionised, both remembering the exact sentence that stung.

Anne is now CEO of AI by Boden, and she thinks a wave is coming as big as the fintech one she rode. Her framing was sharp. In 2014 the whole industry obsessed over who was in the App Store. There will be an equivalent in the AI era, some new surface where financial services get delivered, and the customer may well be an agent. She admitted she does not yet have the answer, only the same itch she felt in 2014, and no intention of sitting the next decade out.

Cameron Leslie: the club that refused to become a brand

The second Monday belonged to Cameron Leslie, co-founder of fabric, in conversation with Yoni Fialka of Granola. Cameron chairs the Mayor of London's Nightlife Taskforce, which turned out to matter for the second half of the evening.

fabric opened in late 1999 in a former cold store on Charterhouse Street, under a Grade II listed building at Smithfield Market. Cameron's background was hospitality and leisure consulting at Deloitte, where his job had been to get his co-founder Keith Riley "lender ready" and take him to the bank. Leaving a safe corporate post to join a client was, in his words, a professional no-no, and it only happened because his team was disbanded in a reshuffle that voided his contract on the very day he had decided to jump.

The founding principle was an anti-principle. In the era of the packaged super-club, fabric set out to do the opposite. Cameron's phrase for it landed cleanly: "fabric was about the ears. It wasn't about the eyes." They booked residents nobody had heard of, Craig Richards and Terry Francis, and line-ups agents told them were commercially suicidal. He was blunt that no bank would fund that today, and that no bank has lent to a nightclub in a long time.

The early days were chaos wearing the mask of control. On the first night they had outsourced the promotion, the promoter oversold, and roughly five thousand people turned up with perhaps eight thousand outside. They then ran fifty-two or fifty-three nights straight with no chance to catch breath, while Cameron held the floor essentially alone after his one experienced manager went home in exhaustion on night three.

The story that had the room laughing was the shareholder war around 2003. A majority investor who wanted a flashy West End club, incompatible with everything fabric stood for, tried to split Cameron and Keith apart, and had them both suspended over invented financial irregularities with a 150-metre exclusion zone around the venue. So they ran the club from a battered Nissan Micra parked exactly 150 metres away, measured with a tape, coordinating the team by Nokia like a low-budget Sopranos. Cameron kept his sense of humour about it, but the point underneath was serious. Ownership and personal investment are among the strongest forces in any organisation, and the ones that go wrong can be the hardest to remove.

Then 2016, when fabric's licence was revoked after drug-related deaths. What moved me at the time, and what I asked him about, was the scale of the public support. Cameron was clear that they ran no clever campaign. A moment simply caught. People who had never set foot in the place still recognised that closing a venue over complex social problems, when you would never shut an opera house or a five-star hotel for the same, said something about whose culture gets protected. They raised over £400,000, which they ultimately gave to music charities, and reopened. The cost was momentum. Print Works opened that January and inherited fabric's diary, and getting the flywheel spinning again after seventeen unbroken years proved harder than surviving the closure itself.

Then COVID, which he was oddly ready for. Having shrunk the company from 130 people to three in 2016, he knew how to deconstruct a business fast. The lifeline this time was public: furlough, and the Arts Council's Cultural Recovery Fund, designed to keep the whole ecosystem of a venue intact. That meant more than the furloughed staff. It meant the graphic designer you would otherwise lose before the green light came.

That thread led straight to policy. Cameron chaired the Mayor's Nightlife Taskforce, which started in August 2024 and reported that November before a delayed publication the following February. They took around 180 recommendations and boiled them to what could actually be delivered. The headline was a review of the Met's licensing functions, and the primary recommendation was a standing Nightlife Commission of ten people with a real voice across the bodies that shape the night. His example of what is broken has stayed with me. A jazz club, the Blue Note, wanted a 1am licence rather than 12, and the Met objected on the grounds that its own customers might become victims of crime on the street. Westminster refused the extra hour. A five-million-pound club took itself to Europe instead. One hour, one entrenched view, a venue lost.

His bigger correction to the lazy story was geographic. London has no natural centre in the way Manchester or Leeds does. It is a collection of villages consumed into one city, and when a journalist wanders through Soho at midnight and declares nightlife dead, they are simply standing in the wrong village. The life has moved to the edges, to places you have to go and find.

fabric today is still restless. Cameron had just announced contemporary live music nights at St Paul's Cathedral, which had generated its own strange controversy online, and he was pushing for a nightlife seed fund aimed at small operators in the parts of London that never get represented. The constant thread through all of it, he insisted, was people. He named Judy Griffin, a booker in her late fifties whose ear the whole team still defers to, and mourned the loss of the old flyer boys and girls who learned marketing on the street and went on to run it professionally.

The same game on two different fields

Fintech and nightlife could not look less alike from the outside. Sit with the two stories, though, and the same underlying game shows up, played on different fields with different clocks.

The first parallel is timing. Each founder read a rule change before the competition did. Anne saw the 2013 licensing reform and built the technology-led bank the incumbents could not. Cameron saw an underground space nobody knew what to do with, and a super-club formula ripe to be rejected. Neither invented a new human desire. People have always wanted a bank that respects them and a room where the music comes first, so what each found was a new way to serve an old want, which is most of what building actually is.

The second parallel is the state, present in both stories from start to finish. Regulation opened the door for Starling and a divestment ruling handed it £100m. A cultural fund kept fabric alive through COVID, a licensing regime very nearly killed it, and a taskforce later gave Cameron a hand in rewriting the rules. Build in this country and treat government as a spectator, and these two nights would correct you quickly.

Underneath both runs the same instinct about structure and people. Anne rebuilt a founding team from scratch after sixteen walked out, and Cameron shrank a company by 97% twice and grew it back, neither treating what they had built as sacred once it stopped serving the work. When each account reached for what actually lasted, it landed on people: the colleagues and investors who backed Anne when the market had written her off, and the team Cameron credited for twenty-five years of fabric.

The divergence is just as telling. Anne built a category and wanted the press to write about the movement, because a movement sells a new bank. Cameron built an anti-brand and refused to franchise fabric to Ibiza or New York, because the moment you hand your name to strangers in a city you do not understand, you are on the road to ruin. One founder scaled by becoming legible to the whole market. The other protected the thing by keeping it rooted in one postcode. Both were right, on their own field.

One more to come

The series is not finished, and neither is this recap. On 8 October, Granola hosts a third Made in the UK evening with Corin Mellor, Creative Director of David Mellor Design, in conversation with Sam Garson of Granola. I plan to be there, and I will come back and add it here once I have.

The pull is a little poetic. David Mellor Design makes the Granola spoon, the one Granola named itself after, so this closes a loop the first two nights only hinted at. Corin trained as a product designer at Kingston, joined his father's company, and took over as Creative Director in 2006, carrying a craft business built by David Mellor CBE and Fiona MacCarthy OBE into a new era. The billed subject is the one I care about most right now: designing things people actually want to use, and what happens when that world meets AI.

A last thank-you to Eva Greneveckyte and Isana Barr, and most of all to Shreman Shrestha, for a programme that started on time, put no pressure on anyone, and made a room of strangers feel easy.