The Founders' Way

The Founders' Way is a coaching podcast for founders and founding teams building start-ups and scale-ups. Earned wisdom, walked and lived, not theorised from a stage. I boil down what I've learnt along my journeys on ten founding teams and through six exits. I'm sharing thirty years experience of what actually moves the needle for founders.

The Founders' Way includes three different threads:

Thoughts Along The Way - key learnings and insights from my journeys.
Reflections - exploring Founding and Scaling journeys through conversations with other Founders
Thinking In Real Time - conversations about what's on our minds with Founding Team members on my current Start-up journey with Reelflow Limited.

The Start-up journey is one of the most challenging - and rewarding - adventures that any of us go through. As Founders we have to grow personally as we grow our businesses. On the Founders Way, I provide you with the space to think through what's important and the toolkit to deal effectively with growth, product, people, cash, business evolution and exit.

If you're looking for an experienced companion along your founder's journey, that's what The Founder's Way podcast is for. Always glad to hear how other founders are thinking about it.

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Latest episodes

The Impact of AI on Scaling

‧ 4m 18s

Gareth Cadwallader and Reelflow co-founder Chris Wickson dig into how AI is reshaping what "scaling up" even means. Chris makes the case that meaningful, scaled businesses can now be built by teams of 5–20 people — even one person orchestrating agentic workflows — using direct before-and-after comparisons from his own companies, Akkroo and Reelflow. They discuss the widening gap between people with strong AI-orchestration skills and equally experienced people without them, why leaving teams to explore AI tools on their own is no longer enough, and Chris's prediction that AI capability is fast becoming a baseline requirement for employment, not...

Reflections - Getting Things Right From The Start

‧ 7m 33s

In this Reflections conversation, Gareth Cadwallader and Reelflow co-founder Andy Higgs look back across multiple startup journeys to unpack what actually needs to be nailed down early versus what you can muddle through. They cover founding team cohesion and cash runway discipline, then dig into a sharper thread: deciding things deliberately rather than leaving them to chance, discussing values and culture before you've even settled on what to build, and documenting concepts and terminology from day one. Andy closes with an unexpected upside — how early documentation becomes a serious advantage when building with AI. Practical, candid reflections from two...

Thoughts Along The Way: Getting Things Right From The Start

‧ 8m 26s

In this first episode of Thoughts Along The Way, Gareth Cadwallader — recorded on his regular walk with poodles Gus and Pippin — shares the four pillars every founder needs in place before they start building or selling. Drawing on lessons from a dozen startups he's been closely involved in, Gareth breaks down: getting crystal clear on the job your solution does for the customer, defining culture and values as a founding team, building a small, trusted, "joined at the hip" team, and setting a realistic cash roadmap. Practical, experience-led advice for founders in the earliest stage of the journey.

Welcome To The Founders Way

‧ 6m 18s

Hello, I'm Gareth Cadwallader, I'm the host and creator of The Founders' Way. My vision for The Founders' Way is that it will become an invaluable companion and guide for founders of startups and founding teams.

On The Founders' Way, my aim is to boil all that experience down into the things that I found most valuable, things that I've used every week, some every day, still some using every day, and boil it down in a way that I hope will be really valuable

I'm really pleased that many of the comrades that have worked with me over these...