Piers Linney
Entrepreneur and Investor
Serial entrepreneur Piers Linney joins Oz Alashe, CEO of CybSafe, and Sam Oliver, Product Marketing Manager at CybSafe. Together they discuss the importance of trust in business and the effects of digital transformation on careers.
Discussion points:
- Piers’s interest in technology.
- The impact of digital transformation on entrepreneurs aiming to solve problems.
- The idea of trust as a commodity.
- How Piers feels about today’s ever-increasing digitisation – and why.
- Advice from Piers for entrepreneurs starting a business.
[tweetshareinline tweet=”Technology is really creating opportunity for all of us to do something else with our lives and make more of it. – Piers Linney, Bath Sheba Capital“]
About Piers
Piers Linney is an entrepreneur and investor with a background in the City. He is best known as a former Dragon on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den and as a Channel 4 Secret Millionaire.
Piers qualified as a lawyer specialised in corporate finance and venture capital in the City before joining the investment banking team at Credit Suisse. He left the city to start a dotcom business. Piers became the CEO of a corporate finance business raising funds for technology start-ups and SMEs before becoming a partner at a hedge fund.
Piers has founded or invested in a number of technology, media and telecoms businesses and his businesses have won numerous awards, including Microsoft’s Global Hosting Partner of the Year. He has personally won a range of entrepreneurship awards, including Entrepreneur of the Year at the inaugural EY sponsored Black British Business Awards.
He recently co-founded Atherton Bikes, which uses 3D titanium additive manufacturing technology to create customised mountain bike designs. Piers sat on the Cabinet Office SME Panel and the Board of TechUK, and was a trustee of Nesta, the UK’s leading innovation foundation with a £450m endowment.
Piers is a Non-Executive Director of the government-owned British Business Bank, which aims to unlock capital for UK SMEs. The Bank has worked closely with the government to launch a range of support schemes for UK businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) and the Future Fund.
Piers has been recognised as one of the top 100 most influential Black Britons and as a leading ethnic minority executive by The Financial Times. He is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the workplace and on company boards.
Piers provides practical advice to entrepreneurs and business owners through his #ScaleUp initiative, and recently launched the #Startup with Piers Linney online course.