Let me introduce you to the founder of a UK business. A year or so after starting, he was putting together a document describing what the business was about and why people should join the team. But his advisers were uncomfortable. “You shouldn’t say this stuff,” he was told. “It’s not going to attract a lot of people.”

The founder wanted staff who were ambitious, were relentless with high standards, were obsessed with the consumer and weren’t afraid to speak up if they disagreed. “This stuff sounds a little harsh,” he was told. “We need to have a message that appeals to more people.” 

So the founder relented. The advice seemed to make sense – didn’t he need as many people as possible to apply for jobs? Plus, these advisers were the experts, what did he know really? But he now realises this was wrong.

“You need to understand the type of person you want and filter for that,” he says. “You want someone to be excited when they join and not like: ‘Oh, I was expecting something totally different.’” The founder is telling this story 10 years later as an example of what he would have done differently. There’s not much on that list, because he’s built a multi-billion-pound business.

The founder is Will Shu, who started Deliveroo in 2013. The online delivery service is now valued at more than £2bn on the stock market and is one of the most successful new businesses in the UK this century.

“I think I could have had more confidence in my own decisions,” Shu says. “You start the business, it’s going well and then you hire these people who worked at XYZ company. Surely they know what they’re doing? Because I don’t know what I’m doing.

“You realise over time that actually, you, the founder, do know what you’re doing. Maybe not all the time, but certainly better than other people who might have a great CV. I think building that confidence in yourself earlier is probably important. For me, it was just a recognition that a lot of my instincts were probably correct.” 

Shu is an unlikely figure to be at the forefront of UK plc. He was born in Connecticut in the United States and arrived in the UK to work as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He founded Deliveroo with childhood friend Greg Orlowski, who provided the coding expertise for the app. Shu created the business because he couldn’t believe how poor the takeaway food options were in London at night. Deliveroo was almost called Boozefood.

Since launching, Shu and Deliveroo have clashed with the establishment at times. This includes a debate about the labour rights of Deliveroo’s delivery riders, a competition investigation about Amazon buying a stake and criticism from fund managers and City analysts over the valuation of its stock market flotation in 2021, which saw Shu get special shares that allowed him to keep control of the business even though he owned less than half of it.

But Shu’s unlikely journey to the top of British businesses is at the heart of Deliveroo. In this age of data and analysis, it is difficult to quantify the impact and influence of one person on a business, of the founder. Apart from the most obvious way, that is. Before Shu started Deliveroo there was nothing.

Today Deliveroo generates more than £7bn in annual sales, has annual profits of well over £100m and is delivering products from 160,000 restaurants and retailers. As the UK looks for ways to spark economic growth, the brilliance of the founder poses a conundrum. These founders often succeed outside the system, or even despite it. Not because of it. So how can you replicate that or encourage more success?

“I’ve realised after doing this for 12 years that there is no single way to do something,” Shu says of building a business. “There are so many ways to approach a problem. You have to figure out what works for you. For me, being in the details is a prerequisite. Some people might disagree.

“But there are many different ways to run a company. You could have 50 direct reports. You could have two. Probably not great, but you could try it. You could not have one-on-one meetings, or you could have a bunch of them. The conventional wisdom of how a company is managed through these layers and one-on-one meetings probably comes from a good place. But that doesn’t mean it has to be that for you at all.”

The UK economy grew by just 0.1 per cent in the final three months of 2024. Across 2024 as a whole, GDP grew by just 0.9 per cent, way below the 2.8 per cent growth in the US. GDP per head fell 0.1 per cent, meaning the economy is shrinking on a per-person basis. And the Bank of England does not expect things to get much better. It is forecasting growth of 1.4 per cent in 2025 and 1.6 per cent in 2026, with much of that from an uptick in government spending. Businesses are being hit by higher national insurance contributions from April and consumer confidence is weak, according to the closely watched GFK barometer. 

Various reports have proposed ways to get the economy moving. Research by NatWest and the consultancy Oliver Wyman suggests that mid-sized businesses could be the “engine of growth”. It reported that these companies, which have a turnover of between £25m and £500m a year, account for just 0.5 per cent of the total companies in the UK but 27 per cent of the annual turnover. These 13,400 businesses could grow faster with support, says the research.

The challenges that need to be addressed include a lack of collective identity, a lack of data and transparency, insufficient access to skills and problems with infrastructure and planning restrictions. In response, Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, said: “This government’s number one mission is growing our economy – this report provides clear evidence for the vital role that mid-market corporates can play in achieving that.”

At present, less than 5 per cent of medium-sized businesses in the UK go on to become large companies, according to data. There are just 8,250 large businesses in the UK, the government says, which classifies ‘large’ as employing 250 people or more. Any improvement in the proportion of medium-sized businesses becoming large would have a substantial impact on the economy. 

A separate report by Goldman Sachs looked at how to tap into the potential of small businesses. It proposes a series of “growth shots”, including a Small Business Investment Summit to connect funds with promising start-ups, training courses on artificial intelligence and changes to the education curriculum to include more business and enterprise, which could “foster an enterprise-ready talent pool, with the skills that employers truly need”.

These reports are noble pieces of work, but they look at what needs to be improved, not what is going well. The UK will never be better at being the US than the US or better at being Europe than Europe, so what about its strengths?   Many recent proposals to boost the economy have followed a similar path. Think of “levelling-up” under Boris Johnson’s Conservative administration. It aimed to boost the economy in other parts of the UK to the level of London and the South East. This did little to support one of the UK’s actual strengths: London’s status as a world-class city. Plus, it was perceived as patronising to places such as Manchester that were developing their own economic identity.

These proposals also risk undervaluing the one thing we know is at the heart of business success – the brilliance of founders.  Shu says that resilience was the most important trait in building Deliveroo. “It’s probably the singular trait that’s been most important. I think in starting almost any type of business,” Shu says. “We compete against the likes of Uber, Meituan and Delivery Hero. When you’re playing the game at a high level, everyone’s smart and everyone has a great business strategy – that’s kind of a level playing field.  

“The ability to deal with the ups and downs when you build a new business separates you quite a bit. So, not being super down or being super up when something happens. I think I’m lucky, that’s just my personality. I don’t think it was something I trained myself on. I can remain calm when things are high or low and I can deliver a message to my team that is positive. That is such a critical skill in business building, that ‘relentless’ bit. That ability to keep going when something’s not going well and being emotionally able to deal with that. I think that separates a lot of companies.” 

Andy Gregory is chief executive of the BGF (the Business Growth Fund), a government-backed initiative. No other organisation puts more money into new UK businesses. Since its launch in 2011, the BGF has invested more than £4bn in more than 600 businesses. Gregory also picks out resilience as a key quality in building a new business.

“It’s a quality we’ve consistently witnessed across hundreds of SMEs that BGF has supported since its inception,” he says. “It’s time to celebrate our entrepreneurs – their resilience, their ingenuity and their pivotal role in shaping our economy and communities. By amplifying their voices and giving them the tools they need to succeed, we can ensure that the UK remains a global leader in entrepreneurship and innovation. Together, we can create a future where SMEs flourish, driving growth and securing prosperity for the generations to come.”

But this touches on an uncomfortable truth: that being an entrepreneur takes unique skills and resilience. And not everyone has that. Tom Blomfield is co-founder of Monzo, the digital bank, and now works for Y Combinator, an accelerator programme that invests in promising start-ups.

“An uncomfortable truth: a small minority of people are dramatically smarter and more effective than average,” he said in a social post towards the end of 2024. “Most folks have never seen these people operate first-hand. It’s both awe-inspiring and humbling. These people aren’t always particularly ‘relatable’ or ‘electable’, so we are generally left with populist dancing monkeys running the government and a distinctly average civil service.

“I know I’m going to get a world of pain for this tweet, so some caveats. Intellect is necessary but not sufficient. Empathy, communication, courage and a strong sense of moral principle would also be nice. I don’t for a second think these people are ‘better’ or ‘more worthy’ in any general sense. But I do think they make more effective decisions and have dramatically more impact than the average person – and I wish they were in charge.

“I don’t necessarily think that intellect requires expensive further education. Some of the smartest, most effective people I know never went to university. But, in general, top universities (especially in the UK) try hard to accept the smartest people they can find, and it is an increasingly strong signal that these folks are bright. 20 per cent of Oxbridge students came from state schools in 1920, when acceptance was strongly correlated with wealth. Today, it’s about 70 per cent. There’s still progress to be made here.”

In other fields, this would not be a controversial observation. Sports teams look to improve by getting the best talent. “With sports people, it’s easy to see who’s scoring goals in a 90-minute game,” Blomfield says. Well-run sports teams also don’t try to win simply by copying others. They learn from rivals but use that insight to improve themselves.

For example, trying to beat Manchester City under manager Pep Guardiola by being the same as them is a forlorn task. Manchester City will a) always be the best at playing like Manchester City and b) use their Middle Eastern millions to outspend you. The only team that finished ahead of Manchester City in the Premier League between 2018 and 2024 was Liverpool. And a key part of Liverpool’s strategy was finding players with stand-out strengths and doubling down on them.

Ian Graham was director of research at Liverpool during this period and has written a book called How to Win the Premier League. In the book, he explains how Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool’s then-manager, thought about football: “Rather than demanding the perfect player, he was willing to find creative solutions to maximise each player’s strengths and minimise their weaknesses. He often talked of his preference for players with one or two ‘extreme characteristics’ – game-changers. If and when those game-changers had weaknesses, he was willing to use other players to compensate for them.”

This is a path to success in any field: know your strengths and use them. However, the strengths of a founder are often not obvious and can even cause them problems in education or employment. For example, a report by Bayes Business School showed that between one in five and two in five founders showed traits of dyslexia. This is much higher than the proportion of people in the wider UK population who say they are dyslexic – which is one in 10.

A separate report by Barclays found that two-thirds of founders who are neurodiverse said that their neurodiversity made them better at business. Neurodiversity includes dyslexia but also conditions such as autism, ADHD and dyspraxia. Before succeeding in business, these founders often struggled at school and to get a job. Two-thirds said they found it hard to find employment before starting their own business.

“The system focuses so much on weaknesses rather than building the strengths,” says Chris Oglesby, chief executive of Bruntwood, a family-owned property developer that is one of the largest businesses in northern England. Oglesby’s father Michael founded Bruntwood and was dyslexic.

“Having a father with neurodiversity and then looking at my kids, you see how the things that make them different are such strengths, yet the system focuses so much on the weakness. I am sure my dad’s creativity was a massive byproduct of [his dyslexia],” Oglesby says. “These perceived weaknesses are often shadow sides of massive strengths.”

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has been even blunter on this topic. Gates has said that he would have been diagnosed with autism if he were growing up today. However, he told The Times: “If they ever invent a pill where they could say: ‘OK, your social skills will be normal, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal,’ I wouldn’t take the pill… I needed my neurodiversity to write that software, I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration. I wrote my first code as a young teenager on a hike in the snow when I was tired and wet, and I used it later for Microsoft.”

Given the challenges that founders can face before launching their business, some organisations have realised that one way to try to cultivate their success is to focus on getting brilliant individuals in a room together. Entrepreneur First is an incubator scheme that brings a cohort of individuals together after judging their applications.

It then encourages them to form teams to launch a business and invests in the most promising. It was co-founded by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, who is now advising the government on AI. “We’ve made founding not just viable but an aspirational pathway and career for a bunch of people who didn’t even realise that was possible,” Bentinck told The Economist recently.

Like Shu, Mark Slack is an unlikely figure to represent UK plc. But his story highlights what can happen when you put brilliant people together. He co-founded CMR Surgical, another multi-billion-pound business, but admits he didn’t know a lot about business.

“When we started out, I used to sit in board meetings with my phone on my lap. People would talk about CAGR and so I would quickly look up what CAGR is,” Slack says. “I had a very good understanding of business concepts and process. Detail? Nothing at all.” (CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate.)

Slack grew up in South Africa and was a promising 800-metre runner. Injuries held him back and he became increasingly interested in medicine. Slack became a doctor and moved to Cambridge where he became fascinated by how robotics could be used to improve surgery.

However, it took a chance meeting with future colleague Luke Hares to turn this passion into a business. “We sat around a table with Diet Coke and pens and paper. I was telling him what I wanted and he was telling me what he could do.  When he left, I said to my wife: ‘I think the man’s mad. He’s overly confident of what he can do, but he could do it.’ That’s where the journey started of building a robot that would replicate keyhole surgery.”

Hares introduced Slack to Keith Marshall, Paul Roberts and Martin Frost, whom he had worked with in Cambridge. These five men founded CMR Surgical in 2014. Today CMR Surgical is valued at £2.4bn and is one of the most promising businesses in the UK. It has developed a robot that can be used for keyhole surgery and has attracted big-name investors such as SoftBank.

“We all had different skills,” Slack says of his co-founders. “It’s one of those Beatles moments where you put a group of people together with different skills. In the beginning, Paul and I, who are both quite strong personalities, would fight like hell. On a weekend, Martin, who was the first CEO, would calm me down and get us to talk. I’m sure the company wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for that. 

“Luke was this amazing technical genius and Paul was bright beyond belief with an energy that drove it. Martin was the glue that kept us all behaving and kept us in the right direction. Keith was an unbelievably skilled engineer who did a lot of the primary work on the instruments, which are more complex than you can believe. We worked really well together. We went from a computer-generated image to the first human [operation] in five years, which is just extraordinary.”

This meeting of five minds could not have happened anywhere other than Cambridge, where medicine, science and technology collide. “The ecosystem that existed around us contributed hugely to the success of building the robot and getting it out there,” says Slack. If putting brilliant founders together in organisations or local ecosystems is one way to drive business success, empowering them is another.

Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, wrote about the unique skills of the founder last year after Brian Chesky, who started Airbnb, gave a talk. He called the essay ‘founder mode’. Graham wrote: “The theme of Brian’s talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarised as ‘hire good people and give them room to do their jobs’.

“He followed this advice and the results were disastrous, so he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

“The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful founders we’ve funded, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them… Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me.”

Graham added: “In effect, there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Until now, most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a start-up meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.”

Alex Depledge is one of the leading female entrepreneurs in the UK. She has founded two businesses, Hassle.com and Resi, been given an MBE for her achievements and is a non-executive director at Persimmon, one of the UK’s largest housebuilders. She introduced chancellor Rachel Reeves’ speech at the Labour party conference last year and the pair are close. Depledge founded both Hassle and Resi with Jules Coleman, who she met at Accenture.

“I probably shouldn’t say this in public, but Jules and I always laugh at ourselves and say that we’re complete shysters and just make everything up,” Depledge says. “I think what we really mean is that we like the chaos – the bit at the beginning when you’re just figuring everything out and your rate of learning is really, really high. For people who are super curious, like we are, that just suits our personality.”

Depledge worked in the venture capital industry and has pitched for investment in her businesses hundreds of times. “I’m probably not even in the top 1 per cent of founders in the UK. But I’m aware of my own limitations and I often meet investors that are just not,” she says.

“They think that everything is about numbers on a spreadsheet. Well, guess what sits behind those numbers most of the time? People. People who write your code and people who market the software. Everything can’t be dictated by numbers. There’s knowledge in people’s heads, an instinct and a sense of things that is not quantifiable. I feel like investors miss that human element.”

After more than a decade of building his business, Shu has his own views on founder mode. “I think [Graham] intentionally wrote something that was controversial, right?” Shu says. “Look, I strongly believe that people leading companies need to be in the details. I really think that’s important. The concept that I am just a manager and not a doer is one I really hate. So that resonates.”

Shu is involved in parts of Deliveroo that would surprise people. This includes writing copy for Deliveroo’s apps, making deliveries himself to test systems and investigating why certain orders went wrong.

“I don’t think founder mode is an excuse for people not to listen to other people,” he says. “I think you have to listen to your users, your investors and your employees. But overall, I think it makes a lot of sense. It’s OK to be in the details, you’re leading the thing. It’s OK to micromanage a bit. Just make it happen and don’t let things happen to you. I think that’s really what it’s about.”

More than 50 people who used to work in Deliveroo have gone on to found their own businesses. “I think why people started businesses out of here is actually quite simple,” Shu says. “They saw something from the early stage, they saw that it got traction and they saw that there was success.

“If you have an ecosystem where you have generations of businesses being built, it’s like: ‘Hey, I worked at this company, I saw it grow. I joined this company early and it grew. Now I think I can do it myself.’ There’s enough mythology and stories about what went well and didn’t go well to make you want to take that step.”

As we look for ways to boost UK plc, this looks a surer bet than any: a virtuous circle of founders learning from each other: Founder plc. “It’s not about how low your taxes are,” Shu concludes. “In my mind, it’s about ‘Have you seen other people succeed?’ ‘Have you seen other people fail and been OK with it?’ That’s the type of culture you need.”