What if the biggest mistake founders make when raising capital is assuming investors know better than they do?

In this episode of The Sacred Art of Leadership, Del and Dip sit down with Ari Helgason, co-founder of Transition, the venture capital firm backing founders building the technologies that could reshape energy, AI, industry and the future of the planet.

Ari has lived on both sides of the table. He built companies before becoming an investor, and that experience gives him a blunt view of what really drives success: not hype, not perfect strategy, and not the approval of a venture capitalist—but exceptional people, strong conviction and the resilience to survive when everything starts going wrong.

The conversation tackles some of the biggest questions facing founders and investors today:

Why do brilliant investors still get it wrong?

Is venture capital actually right for your business?

Can AI growth and sustainability coexist?

What happens when founders lose confidence, investors overreach, or billion-pound opportunities slip away?

And why might indecision be more dangerous than making the wrong call?

Ari also opens up about working with his brother, managing ego, learning from failed investments, resisting market hype and backing entrepreneurs who believe they are building their life’s work.

This is a candid conversation about power, money, technology, responsibility and what it really takes to build something that matters.

https://transition.vc/

What does leadership look like when you’ve spent twenty years thinking about art before you ever tried to build something?

Tom Trevatt is a headshot and portrait photographer, a Goldsmiths PhD, a former DJ, and an accidental business leader.

In this episode, Tom talks about the sleepless night that changed his life — and his mum buying him his first camera. About spending twenty years on the outside of something before finally doing it. About building a business from values up, pricing from connection out, and refusing to scale in the way the industry expected. He talks about the panic attack in his mid-thirties that pricked open his self-awareness.

About what happens when a £200k contract arrives and you weren’t quite ready for it. About why he still teaches, why he caps his client list, and why the ROI he cares about is what he calls return on life.

Tom gives us the most original answer we’ve heard on what leadership actually is — drawn from art theory, from the concept of the avant-garde, and from the image of a sailor trusted to take an island nation to safety.

This is a different kind of leadership conversation. Part philosophy seminar, part studio session, part honest account of what it costs to build something that doesn’t compromise who you are.

Topics covered: creativity and leadership — values-based pricing — building a business from nothing — self-awareness and mental health — the relationship between art, commerce and responsibility — what AI can and can’t replace — why leaders are the first people to go first.

Find Tom here: www.tomtrevatt.com

Sam Clark: Leadership Forged in Crisis

When Sam Clark moved to Sri Lanka in 2004 to start a travel company, he didn't expect to spend his first year running a disaster relief operation instead. The Boxing Day tsunami hit weeks after he arrived — and what followed became the unlikely training ground for everything he knows about leadership.

In this conversation, Sam takes us inside the moments that actually shaped him: the motorbike rescue missions, the £150,000 charity that emerged almost by accident, and the years of crisis that followed — the 2019 Easter bombings, a pandemic that made it illegal to sell holidays, and the long, grinding rebuild that came after.

He talks candidly about the Stockdale Paradox, the difference between optimism and denial, and why meditation — found in the strange stillness of lockdown — changed not just how he runs his business, but how he parents. He shares the practical anatomy of a crisis management plan, the mantra that got his team through COVID, and the moment a billionaire's unpaid bar bill saved the company.

This is a conversation about what it really means to be entrusted with leadership — and what holds when everything else doesn't.

In this episode:

• The tsunami that turned a travel startup into a disaster relief charity
• Why "we" mattered more than "I" in Sri Lanka's darkest moment
• The Stockdale Paradox — and the rats-in-a-bucket experiment that proves it
• Building (and using) a real crisis management plan
• How grief and lockdown led Sam to meditation — and to better parenting
• The Brazilian billionaires, the private island, and the $300,000 bar bill
• Churchill vs. Attlee: the wartime leader and the peacetime leader
• What success actually looks like when it isn't about the money
  

  Find out more about The Experience Travel Group here https://www.experiencetravelgroup.com/