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My Story: Get to Know Edwin
My career began in cold desk sales recruitment helping tech companies hire and scale in Europe. It was pretty brutal — I was new to the industry, starting from scratch with an empty book, and operating in a very competitive environment. It was tough but I loved the challenge. After just four years, I was the top three salesperson in the UK across a team of 200 consultants.
Filled with energy and newfound confidence, I stepped away from recruitment at age 24 and attempted to pave my own path. I launched a Salesforce.com services company, built a team of 15, and began to come face to face with the realities of scaling a business. I experienced the growing pains of scaling a services company without having all of the answers at my fingertips. After a few tough years, I started to burn out and decided to sell the business — a mini victory but in no way did it make me millions.
Next came a bit of a random phase where I found myself spinning lots of different odd-shaped plates. I juggled a combination of creating my own products based on my recruitment days (Talentfeed), delivering fractional CRO work for startups (~$3 million ARR), and building sales processes for a handful of clients, but I found I was going through the motions and had stopped learning. I needed to refocus.
This refocus led me to Appirio (ultimately exited to Wipro for $500m) and my first marketing and alliance leadership role.
With the leadership team, we scaled the business into new regions, built a $100+ million pipeline in just four years, and in 2016, Appirio was successfully acquired by Wipro for $500 million.
Soon after, I joined the UK's leading digital venture builder, Blenheim Chalcot, to scale revenue marketing as CMO and CRO within their portfolio company, Hive Learning.
The next big challenge was joining Modulr Finance as CMO in 2018 and raising over $100 million+ in venture funding to make it the UK’s second-fastest-growing company in 2020. Modulr was one of the first embedded payment infrastructure start-ups in the U.K. and we grew rapidly.
Modulr Finance continues to thrive to this day.
This run of hyper-growth helped to identify what really fired me up. I love helping a broad range of portfolio companies to overcome scaling barriers quickly. I like to be deployed into businesses, fix big problems, implement frameworks that work set them in the right direction, and watch them grow.
I enjoy working on the business, not in the business, creating a VC platform that combines GTM strategy, GTM Execution and GTM Enablement, in addition to a proprietary "Strategic Differentiation" framework. Since 2021, I’ve been fortunate to experience what works and what doesn’t by helping 50+ businesses on their scaling journeys, and more recently, working as a Fractional Operating Partner for a top 5 performing UK fund in London, Mercia Ventures (Learn about Mercia Ventures here).
