The Recording Academy

Lunchables just made a wearable charcuterie board called the CharcuteRING 🧀 Does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a ring… that also holds tiny meats and cheeses. You wear it on your finger and share with friends. This is either genius or completely unhinged (or both tbh). They've taken ‘friendship economy’ marketing and conceptualised it as an actual wearable snack accessory. It's launching ahead of National Best Friends Day, and the product itself (Snackables) is just bite-sized versions of regular Lunchables. But the CharcuteRING? That's commitment to a stupid idea taken all the way through. Be so weird people genuinely can’t ignore you. Lunchables nailed it on that front 🤣

F*ck the middleman… A pet tech founder reached out to me asking for connections into big pet retailers as their route to market. It took me right back honestly. When I was building MusicForPets , I thought success meant getting stocked everywhere. I pitched pretty much everyone, and got rejected by almost all of them. Most didn’t understand the concept, while the rest were buried in corporate politics. Then I had a lightbulb moment: ‘F*ck them all.’ I stopped chasing validation from gatekeepers and went straight to the end user by building direct relationships with customers and letting them be part of the journey. THAT’S when everything changed. So when that founder asked for retailer intros, my answer was simple: ‘You don’t need them.’ In today’s world, distribution is no longer the advantage. A genuine connection with your audience is. So build something people actually care about and get it directly into their hands. The rest follows 🫡

Most founders I meet are either product people or numbers people. Elliot's both 🤝 Amazing to speak at The Queens Hotel in Leeds alongside Elliot Roxby from OurPetsLife a few weeks back. I was there an exited founder and investor, and Elliot was there as a founder I’d just backed - but the starts of our journeys looked pretty similar. Both of us come from the enz (a low income background) with basically no safety net. We had to learn how to drive a business and survive alone from day one. Plus, it’s rare to see someone as dedicated as Elliot to building a genuinely good product while being absolutely fixated on the finances. That's what made me invest - pitch deck and projections aside. It's the fact that when you've had to make it work with nothing, you develop an obsession with sustainable revenue that founders with backup plans never quite get. You can't fake that - you either learned to build profitably from the start or you didn't. Simple. Standing in that room reminds me why invested. As an angel investor, founders who operate like savages are the only founders I take seriously.

Justin Bieber headlined COACHELLA sitting at a laptop watching his own YouTube videos… He played his old hits, pulled up home videos on the big screen, and even interacted with live YouTube comments during the set. The night before, Sabrina Carpenter had full production - choreography, costumes, everything. No shade, but Bieber did karaoke to his own music that made him famous at 12 years old and it was more iconic imo. Everyone's so obsessed with making everything bigger and flashier, more produced. He connected with his inner child in front of 100,000 people and made it spiritual. Most authentic performance I've seen in ages 👏

This guy's side hustle ranks higher on Google than his actual job… Zach Schimpf works as content production lead at Kepler. But he's also been making electronic and ambient music for YEARS on the side. He started posting music to Soundcloud in 2012, and Adult Swim quickly slid into his DMs him asking to use one of his tracks. Now he's done multiple commissioned projects with them, creating entire soundtracks that animators build episodes around. He even made an album from recordings of walks with his rescue dog Jack. Called it ‘Music to Walk the Dog To’ - love it, great minds! 🤣 Most people keep their side projects hidden because they think it makes them look unfocused, but this guy built his music into a second income stream and it opened more doors than his CV ever could. Major respect 🫡 (His latest project features his new beagle Betsy - can’t wait to hear it!!)