From Immigrant Teen to Scale Up Pioneer: The Sahar Hashemi Story

What does it take to build one of the UK’s fastest-growing retail brands, lose it, rebuild yourself, and then reinvent entrepreneurship for an entire generation of women founders? In this episode, I sit down with Sahar Hashemi OBE, co-founder of Coffee Republic and Skinny Candy, and founder of the movement Buy Women Built.

Sahar’s journey is a masterclass in how entrepreneurial culture is born, how it dies, and how to protect it as you scale. She shares moving reflections on immigrating to the UK at age 12, how her parents instilled “evidence-based self-belief,” and why being a frustrated customer has always been her superpower.

From a single London coffee bar to 110 stores, Coffee Republic scaled at breakneck speed — only to lose its soul as “the grown-ups” took over. Sahar describes, with rare honesty, how bureaucracy can slowly extinguish customer focus, what she learned from watching her own company collapse eight years after she left, and why founders must fight to preserve agility, instinct, and scrappiness.

Key Themes
•Evidence-based self-belief: why childhood pushes create adult resilience.
•Scaling culture: how processes, titles, and silos quietly kill innovation.
•Founder relevance: the outdated belief that entrepreneurs have a “sell-by date.”
•Customer intimacy: the founder’s instinct as a strategic asset, not a liability.
•Women entrepreneurs: why empathy, resourcefulness, and personal problem-solving make women natural founders.
•Leaping before you feel ready: Sahar’s enduring motto for starting anything new.

Favorite Quotes
•“Self-belief is evidence-based — you build it by doing difficult things.”
•“A startup culture can quickly put on a corporate mask.”
•“Back then they thought passion was flaky — today every big company wants it.”
•“Women start businesses from personal need — and that’s where many great ideas come from.”
•“Leap and the net will appear.”

🎧 Listen to the full conversation: https://scaleapp.buzzsprout.com

Jorge Rodriguez, founder of Paciv, built a world‑class industrial automation and computer systems validation company from a small warehouse in Puerto Rico to a global player serving Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and other pharma giants. The son of Spanish immigrants who arrived on the island with nothing but work ethic and discipline, Jorge translated family lessons about integrity, paying suppliers first, and “keeping the machine running” into a business that became a trusted partner inside some of the most demanding plants in the world.

Paciv started as Jorge leaving a safe job at Johnson & Johnson with a single client contract and a laptop. Within months he was billing 80–90 hours a week, combining deep technical know‑how in control systems with an insider’s understanding of pharma’s regulatory pain points. The insight was simple but powerful: if you can deliver the same validated process in Puerto Rico, you can clone it in Indiana, Ireland, Singapore, or the UK—exactly what global quality and regulators expect.

Favorite Quotes

• “Don’t let go of something until you have something else secure. I quit Friday and started selling services Monday.”

• “Clients spoon‑fed me growth—‘we have a larger project, but you can’t do it alone… hire a few engineers and we’ll give it to you.’”

• “To drive customer intimacy, first you model it. I was 100% billable for the first 13 years.”

• “If you stop growing, you start dying.”

• “I was riding a Ferrari in second gear. If I could speak to my younger self, I’d say: take more risk and grow faster.”

Key Themes

• From Immigrant Household to Industrial Specialist
• Becoming an Entrepreneur from the Inside
• Customer Intimacy as Competitive Advantage
• Scale Globally Through Clients, Not Campaigns
• Radical Transparency and Trust
• Professionalizing the Business: From Mom‑and‑Pop to Scale‑Up

Eben Upton, co-founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi, turned a Cambridge lab experiment into an intriguing scale-up stories. What began as a mission to create more programmers in the world by empowering kids to program, became a $250 million public company that has shipped over 70 million units worldwide and helped redefine accessible computing.

At its heart, Raspberry Pi is a simple but revolutionary idea: a fully functional computer the size of a cigarette pack, priced under $35, and designed to spark curiosity with extensive hardware interfaces. Eben describes it as a modern-day Lego brick—the glue between software, peripherals, and imagination. The company’s first batch of 100,000 units sold out on launch day.

Favorite Quotes

• “We sold 100,000 Raspberry Pis on the first day—and none to target market, kids. We dropped the product in the market to see where the market was.”
• “Licensing gave us a global footprint from day one—but the unit economics were brutal.”
• “We build our products at Sony in South Wales—40,000 a day, right next to two handmade broadcast cameras.”
• “Never wait—if you can grow capability without risking the organization, do it now.”

Key Themes

1. From Education to Global Scale: Raspberry Pi started as an educational charity project but when hobbyists and engineers discovered it, the product jumped from classrooms to factories and embedded systems across the world.

2. Product-Market Fit by Accident: The team didn’t find a market through focus groups—they discovered it by “accidentally dropping a product into blue ocean demand.” The first-year sales hit one million units.

3. The ARM Model and Beyond: Inspired by Cambridge’s own ARM, Raspberry Pi began as a licensor of technology and brand IP. But to capture more value, the company evolved into direct production, partnering with Sony to manufacture at scale while maintaining the agility of a startup.

4. Culture and Retention: Upton built an engineering-driven organization that balances autonomy with structure—“a startup’s flexibility with a corporation’s resources.” With nearly 100% retention, Raspberry Pi proves that culture can scale when people love what they build.