Brent Hoberman
Boards want the upside of founder-led growth without the chaos that usually comes with it. Most corporates cannot tell the difference between a genuine scaling business and one that simply spends fast. The gap between how operators build and how incumbents invest is where value is lost.
Brent Hoberman is a serial technology founder and seed investor who helps boards and corporates think like the entrepreneurs they are competing with.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Brent Hoberman
- He has built and exited two unicorns, lastminute.com and Made.com, and can speak to scaling and to failure with equal credit.
- Through Founders Factory and firstminute capital, he has first-hand visibility of more than 400 early-stage companies and 12 seed-stage unicorns, giving corporate audiences a live read on where technology is moving.
- His corporate partner list at Founders Factory, including The Guardian, L’Oreal, easyJet, Aviva and Reckitt Benckiser, means he speaks the language of incumbent strategy as well as founder strategy.
- As Co-Chair of Enterprise Britain and an adviser to successive UK Prime Ministers, he frames growth inside the real policy and capital conditions leaders operate under.
- He is candid about what went wrong at Made.com, which gives senior audiences a working case study in IPO timing, governance and post-pandemic demand rather than a highlight reel.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder and former CEO of lastminute.com; sold to Sabre for approximately $1.1bn in 2005.
- Co-founder of Made.com; founding chairman until shortly before its 2021 IPO.
- Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Founders Factory, Founders Forum and firstminute capital.
- Appointed CBE in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to entrepreneurship.
- Co-Chair of Enterprise Britain; has advised multiple UK Prime Ministers on entrepreneurship policy.
- Non-executive director roles have included Guardian Media Group, TalkTalk, Shazam, Time Out and The Economist.
Biography
Lastminute.com went public in March 2000, weeks before the dot-com market broke. The IPO was 43 times oversubscribed and remains one of the fastest company listings in European history. Brent Hoberman was its co-founder and CEO, and he ran the business through the crash and on to a $1.1bn sale to Sabre in 2005. That arc, from frenzy to survival to exit, sits under almost everything he says on stage.
Since then he has built three platforms that back other founders. Founders Factory runs corporate-backed accelerators with partners including The Guardian, L’Oreal, easyJet, Aviva, Marks and Spencer and Reckitt Benckiser. firstminute capital is a global seed fund backed by more than 130 unicorn founders. Founders Forum is the community that connects the two. The combined portfolio gives him a working view across several hundred early-stage technology companies at once.
He also co-founded Made.com in 2010 and was its founding chairman. He stepped down before the 2021 IPO, having questioned its timing, and the company later entered administration. He uses that outcome directly in corporate sessions on governance, category demand and IPO readiness, which is rare among founders at his level.
Outside operating roles, he co-chairs Enterprise Britain with Stephen Fitzpatrick and has advised successive UK Prime Ministers on small business, scale-up and entrepreneurship policy. He was appointed CBE in 2015 for services to entrepreneurship. The policy work matters on the platform because it lets him connect founder behaviour, capital markets and government posture in a way most technology speakers cannot.
Key speaking topics
- Entrepreneurship and founder psychology
- Scaling consumer internet and marketplace businesses
- Venture investing and early-stage capital
- Corporate innovation and startup partnerships
- AI and consumer technology trends
- UK and European tech policy
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees reviewing innovation strategy
- Corporate venture and M and A teams working with startups
- CEO and founder gatherings inside private equity and VC portfolios
- Senior leadership offsites at consumer, retail, media and financial services firms
Audience outcomes
- A clear read on which early-stage technology categories are attracting serious capital and why
- A practical view of how corporates get useful work out of startup partnerships, from someone who structures them
- Frank lessons from a founder who has been through a record-breaking IPO, a billion-dollar exit and a public company collapse
- A sharper sense of how UK and European policy, capital and talent conditions shape what boards can realistically plan for