Andy is one of the founding members and the Managing Director of Virgin StartUp – the not-for-profit organisation, funded by the Branson Family, that exists to empower founders in the UK to start and scale early-stage businesses. Over the past 10+ years, Virgin StartUp has worked with tens of thousands of founders, providing over £1000m to help more than 7,000 founders start and scale the businesses they’re passionate about. Businesses such as Castore, Change Please, Dash Water, Flash Pack, Hurr, Magic AI, Minor Figures, Mous, Nice, Ocean Bottle, Oddbox, OxWash, Stasher and many more. In doing so, Virgin StartUp have built one of the UK’s largest entrepreneurial mentoring networks, with over 650 mentors from some of the biggest businesses and brands.
Prior to helping launch Virgin StartUp in 2013, Andy trained as a Chartered Accountant working at both PwC and Deloitte, specialising in Venture Capital and Private Equity. This experience brought a professional perspective to his passion for entrepreneurship, having had a number of ventures himself – from ‘Impact Artworks’ an online service turning photos into original hand-painted canvases, through to ‘My Club Mail’ – an email service for football fans.
Andy is a passionate believer in the power of entrepreneurship and in helping to level the playing field for those wanting to embark on their own start up journey. This comes through in some of Virgin StartUp’s advocacy work, from being signatories to the Better Business Act, through to the 50:50 Pledge (a commitment to support and fund an equal number of men and women – the first such pledge in the UK), and more recently Empower100 (an accelerator programme designed to unlock growth and investment potential in underrepresented founders) and Momentum (the Uks first neuroinclusive accelerator designed for dyslexic founders to harness their Dyslexic Thinking skills).