Alex Depledge

Why organisations work with Alex Depledge

• She has built, scaled and exited a venture-backed UK consumer marketplace, and is currently advising the Chancellor of the Exchequer on entrepreneurship policy. Few speakers can hold both a founder’s lens and a policy lens at once.
• She speaks to boards from inside the boardroom. Her FTSE-100 seat at Persimmon and NED role at Goodlord mean her advice on innovation, governance and growth is grounded in current PLC reality, not consultancy abstraction.
• She frames the gender funding gap and the women-in-tech question with hard numbers and self-implicating honesty rather than the standard talk-track, which is why programme committees book her for conversations they want to feel more honest than usual.
• She has a working view, formed through Hassle.com and Resi, on why corporates struggle to copy start-up behaviour, and what they can realistically take from it.
• She talks about regulation, sharing economy policy and UK scale-up barriers as a current operator and current government advisor, which gives those sessions weight that retrospective speakers rarely match.

Biography highlights

• First ever Entrepreneurship Advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed by Rachel Reeves in June 2025.
• Independent Non-Executive Director, Persimmon PLC (FTSE 100), since May 2023; sits on remuneration and nomination committees.
• Founder of Resi.co.uk, the UK’s largest residential architectural practice, with over 10,000 home projects delivered. Stepped down as CEO in December 2025 and moved to the board.
• Co-founder and former CEO of Hassle.com, sold to Helpling in 2015 after Accel Partners-led funding.
• MBE for services to the Sharing Economy, 2016.
• Named in Computer Weekly’s 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech and Debrett’s 500 Most Influential People; FT 30 Female Founders to Watch.

Biography

Most established companies want to behave more like start-ups and very few succeed. The reason is rarely a shortage of ambition. It is that the operating habits, the speed of decision and the comfort with risk that actually produce scale-up growth get filtered out by the systems large organisations use to govern themselves. Alex Depledge has lived on both sides of that gap and now advises across it.

She co-founded Hassle.com in 2012 with Jules Coleman, took Accel Partners funding, expanded across Europe and exited to Helpling in 2015. The next year the same partnership launched Resi.co.uk, now the UK’s largest residential architectural practice with more than ten thousand projects delivered. She led Resi as CEO for nearly a decade before stepping back to the board in late 2025.

Her current portfolio is what makes her unusual on a stage. She is the first Entrepreneurship Advisor to HM Treasury, appointed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in June 2025 to work directly on the barriers UK companies hit when they try to scale. At the same time she sits as an independent non-executive director of Persimmon PLC, the FTSE-100 housebuilder, and joined Goodlord’s board in December 2025.

That mix gives her audiences a rare combination of inputs: a founder who has banked an exit, a board member inside a UK plc, and a named voice in active conversation with the Treasury about why British scale-ups stall. She was awarded an MBE in 2016 for services to the sharing economy and writes and broadcasts regularly on entrepreneurship, technology policy and the gender funding gap.

Key speaking topics

• Scale-up leadership and the founder operating mindset
• What large organisations can and cannot learn from start-ups
• UK entrepreneurship policy and barriers to scale
• Women, funding and structural bias in venture capital
• Innovation inside regulated and traditional sectors
• The future of work and platform-economy business models
• Proptech and the digitisation of legacy industries

Ideal for

• CEOs, COOs and strategy leaders in incumbent businesses trying to behave more entrepreneurially
• Boards and Chairs commissioning sessions on innovation governance and growth
• CHROs and inclusion leads addressing gender, funding and pipeline questions in tech
• Industry conferences in property, financial services, professional services and government

Audience outcomes

• A clearer read on which start-up behaviours scale into a corporate environment and which do not
• A current operator’s view of UK entrepreneurship policy and the live Treasury debate on scale-up barriers
• An honest framing of the gender funding gap that names structural causes rather than rehearsing the symptoms
• A board-level perspective on innovation as a governance discipline, drawn from FTSE-100 practice
• A real example of building, scaling and exiting a venture-backed UK consumer marketplace