23mile Podcast
23mile Podcast
Podcast Description
Your startup has survived the early, unpredictable days and you're now wondering: what's next?
23mile is your guide to the massive opportunities and complex challenges founders face when scaling up. We focus on the game-changing moves that define a company's legacy: mastering growth, navigating mergers and acquisitions, and overcoming the obstacles that stand between you and the next level.
Each week, hear the hard-won wisdom from the founders, investors, and deal-makers who have built, bought, and sold companies for a living.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on significant startup growth topics, including mastering exit strategies, navigating mergers and acquisitions, and facing scaling challenges, with episodes like Yasen Dimitrov's journey to a $100 million exit and Frances Simowitz's management buyout adventure.
23mile is the podcast for founders who want to know what it actually takes to scale, exit and survive everything in between.
Featuring founders who’ve done it, from bootstrapped operators scaling to seven figures to venture-backed teams navigating boards, preference stacks and the pressure to grow at all costs.
Plus the experts on the other side of the table.
Exit negotiations, cap tables, founder economics, go to market, due diligence, fundraising and all the stuff that keeps founders up at night.
Hosted by Kayode Odeleye, former investment banker and tech founder turned investor
Jessica Christiansen-Franks calls entrepreneurship f**king fun, and she's one of the rare founders who actually made it to an exit.
Only 2% of startups ever get acquired for enough to return capital to investors and be worth the trouble. This is the story of one that did.
In 2025, eight years after founding, Neighbourlytics had 20 buyers interested in acquiring the company. REA Group, a global proptech giant listed on the ASX, won. It was a fitting end to a journey that started ten years earlier, when Jess met Lucinda during her masters and ended up working for her in the non-profit Lucinda ran.
Their close working relationship, including Jess running the company while Lucinda was on maternity leave, led to the two of them accidentally founding a startup. They'd gone to pitch at what they thought was a grant competition. When they won $100k, they had to register a limited company to claim the award, and Neighbourlytics was born.
In this episode we cover:
🔹 How she accidentally founded a startup by entering the wrong competition
🔹 Why she killed $1.1M of revenue to force a pivot the board was scared of
🔹 How she ran the sale, and why you hire advisors even for a small deal
🔹 How she timed the exit to the AI shift that tripled the valuation
🔹 Why she turned down VC money that would have pushed her into advertising
Guest: Jessica Christiansen-Franks, now Managing Director at the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship.
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