Black Founders Hub with Denise Nurse

10/13/21 • 61 min

My guest today is Denise Nurse. Denise is the co-founder of the Black Founders Hub, a network for black entrepreneurs that started here in the UK but is now increasingly global. She is also a lawyer and entrepreneur, having started and then sold a really unusual law firm. Denise has also worked as a TV presenter for Sky Travel and on BBC's Escape to the Country and Watchdog.

In this episode, we talk about race and how to encourage black entrepreneurs. The journey from starting and growing, to sell a business. And I think you're going to really learn a lot from Denise's outlook and energy. So let's get straight into it.

Denise explains to us why is the Black Founders Hub:

I am a black founder. My goal is to help support others in business and to find ways of creating success. So that's kind of why because instead of us all being on our own, if we come together as a collective, we know that peer networking works.

There's something called the old boys club. That was the thing for a reason. So I just want to create that for black founders. That safe space. That space to be yourself and that space to connect and to do business. The key thing with that, what we're doing, it's for business at a higher level.

And I ask Dennise “What is kindness in leadership and why it is important?”:

Firstly, kindness to oneself. I think great leaders who ever learned or who practice the art of being kind to themselves, have the ability to be kind to others.

If you are running yourself to the ground, if you are not saying very nice things to yourself, if you're being your own worst enemy, it's hard actually to offer kindness to others truly because it will come from a not good place. So there's that basic skill of listening which I think is truly kind, truly.

✔ Links:

Black Founders Hub:

https://www.blackfoundershub.com/

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Edited by Pavel Novikov:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavelnovikovf/

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Denise explains to us why is the Black Founders Hub:

I am a black founder. My goal is to help support others in business and to find ways of creating success. So that's kind of why because instead of us all being on our own, if we come together as a collective, we know that peer networking works.

There's something called the old boys club. That was the thing for a reason. So I just want to create that for black founders. That safe space. That space to be yourself and that space to connect and to do business. The key thing with that, what we're doing, it's for business at a higher level.

And I ask Dennise “What is kindness in leadership and why it is important?”:

Firstly, kindness to oneself. I think great leaders who ever learned or who practice the art of being kind to themselves, have the ability to be kind to others.

If you are running yourself to the ground, if you are not saying very nice things to yourself, if you're being your own worst enemy, it's hard actually to offer kindness to others truly because it will come from a not good place. So there's that basic skill of listening which I think is truly kind, truly.

✔ Links:

Black Founders Hub:

https://www.blackfoundershub.com/

Subscribe to Graham's Newsletter:

https://www.grahamallcott.com/sign-up

Our Show Sponsors: Think Productive - Time Management Training:

http://www.thinkproductive.com

Useful links:

https://www.grahamallcott.com/links

Edited by Pavel Novikov:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavelnovikovf/

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Previous Episode

How to Deal With a Fast Changing World with Azeem Azhar

My guest today is Azeem Azhar. Azeem is a serial entrepreneur, a journalist, startup investor, technologist and is the founder of Exponential View, a weekly email with 200,000 subscribers including many of the leading lights in tech. His new book ‘Exponential’ is a fascinating look at how humans can learn to thrive in an age of accelerating technology.

It really is a must-read for all of us right now. If we want to keep pace with the rapid changes happening right now and perhaps even more importantly, with what's to come. So in this episode, we talk about exponential technologies and it's not all about AI. Azeem talks us through what he calls the exponential gap.

We also talk about the future of work, adapting to shifts in power, and whether he's optimistic or pessimistic for the future.

We talked about what is the world of startup right now:

Startups are super, super hard and the reason it's challenging is that no one knows the answer because you're building something that hasn't been built before. So not only do you not know what you need to build, you don't know how to build it.

And also you have to bring a bunch of people on that journey with you and you have to motivate them. You have market challenges, you have technical problems and you have people problems. And at the same time, you've got to hit milestones given the funding that you have available. It's really intense.

And the other thing that you know is that you're not special.

That the fact that you have figured out that this technology could meet this market need and create a new product means that a thousand other people have figured that out too.

Azeem explains why it is so hard to get what is the exponential gap:

So obviously these things are changing so quickly. And they're driven by the technology and by entrepreneurs and scientists who are able to take advantage of it. But the rest of us live in a world that is much more linear, that changes much more slowly and we don't necessarily understand that there are exponential processes, and we don't necessarily understand what the impact of those processes are.

And one question is, why don't we understand it? And you know, I'm a bit laissez about this, I can explain it in over 20 cases or so, but that is we're really bad at maths. We don't see exponential processes in the real world. Our child goes from one to two to three to four every year. They don't go from one year old, two years old to four years old, to eight years old, to 16 years old. We see linear processes, we experience linear processes.

And so there are probably evolutionary reasons why it's not in our makeup to naturally understand these very, very fast changes. We don't see how quickly things are all shifting.

And, we found out if there is anything that Azeem do that has the biggest impact on his own work and his own experience:

All the things that I do, they're all connected to the main thing that I do that has the impact. I think we are going through a transition to the exponential age. I think it's gonna need new ideas, new institutions and new businesses. And, what I do in my work with my newsletters and my podcast is I use those to learn and to share my learnings. And then, I work with entrepreneurs by investing in them to help them build those businesses as part of the transition.

So it all hangs together in my head, even if it doesn't necessarily look, you know, maybe it looks a bit disaggregated, it's diffuse from the outside, but they are all meant to sit together and be part of this change that we all kind of privileged to be part of.

✔ Links:

Exponential book:

https://www.exponential-book.com/

Follow Azeem on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/azeem

Azeem’s Podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exponential-view-with-azeem-azhar/id1172218725

Subscribe to Graham's Newsletter:

https://www.grahamallcott.com/sign-up

Our Show Sponsors: Think Product...

Next Episode

How to Be Happy with Nic Marks

My guest today is Nic Marks. Nic is one of the world's leading experts on happiness and the founder of Friday Pulse, a tool to help organizations find out how happy their people are at work. Nic also created the Happy Planet Index to show which countries have the happiest people, and he spent years thinking about how to be happy and the relationship between happiness and success.

So in this episode, we talk about how to be happy. Nic talks about his mentor, a Chilean economist who changed his life, his five ways to wellbeing and much more.

Nic starts off by explaining what Friday Pulse is for:

And so I'm a statistician by trade. So I'm looking to create a measure that is useful for organisations and basically, our measure is happy weeks, which is “have people had a good week?”. That builds up into a metric for an organisation that allows them to track how every team, how the whole organisation is and it's very, very responsive. I mean, most organizations don't have a responsive people metric. Most of their people metrics are quite lagging. So they would obviously look at things like retention and things like that, they might look at engagement and tend to do that in a once a year survey, maybe once a quarter. I want to create something very at the moment...

...So by measuring it weekly, you start to get into that it's very fluid and that's what I really like about it. And, we create useful data for team leaders and organizations to understand their happiness and their organization.

✔ Links:

Nic Marks:

https://nicmarks.org/

Nic Marks on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/iamnicmarks

Nic Marks on TED Talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index

Friday Pulse:

https://fridaypulse.com/?__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=pmd_dtjkDJiY_9ZitGC0Z7d4mEl0paXU.DmSXB.ozjsQWD4-1634373516-0-gqNtZGzNAyWjcnBszQpR

Happy Planet Index:

http://happyplanetindex.org/

Subscribe to Graham's Newsletter: