Dini McGrath (The Wonki Collective) - Fighting Food Waste, Running Away to the Circus, and Closing the Funding Gap

Speaker A: Welcome to A Little Bit Radical, a, ah, business podcast from Standing on Giants. I'm Rob, your host. Join me as I meet people and organizations who are doing things differently, challenging the status quo and yes, might just be a little bit radical. 40% of the food that is produced never makes it to a supermarket shelf. I'm meeting a founder today who is determined to Change that. Dini McGrath is a CO founder of the Wonky Collective. Leveraging cutting edge technology. They're building a circular economy in the food supply chain. Some of the largest food manufacturers in the UK are already on board. A topic close to my heart and always a popular one with our, uh, listeners. Dini, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Thanks so much, Rob. It's very great to be here on A Little Bit Radical.

Speaker A: So Dini, if you are a little bit radical and you're on our podcast, so we know that you are, what in your early life set you up for that?

Speaker B: It's a good question. I've been thinking about this a little bit. I had a traditional, in some senses, upbringing and in others very, very weird and wonderful and beautiful. So I grew up in London. I grew up in Tooting for the first six years of my life. And my mum and dad both worked and they flipped houses every year just to try and sort of earn a little bit of extra money on the side. So they would buy absolute wrecks and we would move into the next house and um, it would literally be a building site that someone had started doing and had left for some reason over a year. They would do it while we all lived there, move on to the next one. We actually have ended up moving out to Hertfordshire, uh, when I was about 6 years old. And that was where I really did a lot of my growing up. We lived in the most magical setting. My family all from around that area. My father wasn't really working, so it was basically my mum commuting to London. My parents got divorced soon after. But we had the most magical time growing up in the middle of nowhere in Hertfordshire. We had this sort of big park around us. We were in a little cottage called the Lake Cottage, right next to this massive lake. And we just had adventures. It was me and my two sisters and mum was in London every day. We had a flurry of au pairs who looked after us and we were wild children. There was no tv, no nothing, no technology. We were just outside the whole time running wild. And I think from that age it was such a safe environment. We were allowed to speak to anyone. My best friend was my great Granny who lived up the road from me. And that I think is just the coolest thing in the world. I've had a daughter recently and she knew, huh, her great grandparents for a, uh, year or two. And I just felt so lucky to have known my great granny and for her to be literally one of my best friends until I was 13. She died when she was 100. But anyway, we grew up in this amazing, safe, wild environment and I met this incredible lady who lived in the, in the village who was Swedish. This is when I was 10 and I was big into my gymnastics. I literally, I wouldn't walk anywhere. I would cartwheel and backflip and whatever to get anywhere. And that was my passion. I wanted to go and be an Olympic gymnast. And I fell short when I got trained by a Russian Olympic gymnast who had muscles that popped out of her armpits. And I was like, I never want armpits that look like that. And I literally got put off it when I was 13, 14 and didn't carry on after that. But When I was 10, I met this amazing Swedish lady in our village and became friends with her and she told me about this circus in Sweden and I came home that day and I was like, mum, over our summer holidays, I'm going to spend a few months in Sweden and I'm going to join the Swedish circus. And she was like, okay, uh, like, sure, this is, this is quite.

Speaker A: How old were you at this point?

Speaker B: I was 10. And she was like, okay, if it's what you really want, then, um, then perfect. We, we can, we can see whether we can make it happen. A couple of months later I flew out to Sweden on my own and I spent a few months in, in the Swedish Circus as the main trapeze artist. There were loads of kids that were involved in the circus and I lived in this tiny one up, one down bedroom and the upstairs was literally two mattresses next to each other and four of us girls, three Swedish girls and me sleeping up there, none of them spoke a word of English and we communicated through body language. And you know, I don't remember it being a massive issue that I didn't speak the same language as anyone else there. I, I had the most amazing time sharing this tiny little cottage. There was no running water. Every morning we'd be picked up in a sort of tractor with a big cast on the end and we would be taken down to the local river close by and we'd all just go wash ourselves in the river, be taken back and then we would Start our day of practicing. I got trained up to be this trapeze artist and did all these performances in the circus. And I would say that's probably set me up for, uh, quite a lot of, I guess, adventure. And just the way that I am now, I feel so lucky to have been able to grow up in that free space where anything was a possibility and nothing was too scary or like far to stretch. If you set your mind to it, you could do it. And I guess my mum and my family environment just sort of opened my world to that and allowed me to sort of experience things that I feel like most 10 year olds probably wouldn't be brave enough to. So I quite often think back to that, like, what would 10 year old me do in this situation when I'm like, oh, society tells me I can't do this or I feel like there are too many barriers in place. And so that definitely is something that I think is probably a little bit radical.

Speaker A: I'll say it's a little bit radical. It just occurred to me, Deanie, that listeners might be imagining you, the way you described, that no technology, no running water, uh, running away to join the circus, that you might be about 86 years old. You're actually in your kind of early 30s.

Speaker B: Early 30s, yeah. I'm 30.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So that is a little bit radical, I think. Yeah, for sure. First of all, thank you for giving me ptsd because my parents were also kind of fixer upper, uh, DIY people. So I remember living in the wrecks very well.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then literally running away to join the circus at 10. But you came back.

Speaker B: You know, I came back. The one rule is I have to go to school when school starts again in September. I was allowed freedom for the summer, but pulled back to reality.

Speaker A: What do you think about that decision from your mum now that you are a mum and you've got your little daughter and you're thinking about when she's 10, are you going to be looking forward to her asking something so crazy and do you want to make it happen or are you like, what the hell was going on?

Speaker B: I genuinely feel like I will have done my job properly as a mother if she has the confidence to go out and do something like that. 100% would love her to ask to do crazy things like that and not feel like there are barriers in place to doing that. And I think, yeah, I think it's totally amazing that my mom let me do something like that. It is actually pretty scary. Like the thought of it is Pretty scary. But I don't think as a parent you're nerves should ever be I guess put put on a young child who just doesn't have that, you know, complexity of thought. They should be able to run free as long as you know that they're in a safe environment. And I think through this lady in the village she had connections who were out in Sweden so it wasn't like I was com. I was completely on my own. But there were people out there who sort of knew what was going on and one lady in the village who knew about it so there was something tangible which made it a little bit safer I think for my mum to allow me to, to go. So I think as a parent I defin definitely would want those rough checks just to make sure that you're not sending someone off to something unbelievably dangerous and scary. But at the same time they need to live their lives and have these experiences because from such a young age and you'll know as a dad as well like it shapes who they are as people and I think it has been part of what shaped me.

Speaker A: It's a fantastic story and I think we can definitely trace the fearlessness that's required to be a founder uh, of a startup that moment. But as an adult do you think you've become more radical or less radical and what's been behind that?

Speaker B: Well, I haven't joined any circuses lately so.

Speaker A: So less I guess.

Speaker B: Less, yeah, think it must be less.

Speaker A: You live in a house that doesn't look like a wreck to me as well I can see.

Speaker B: And um, I managed to finish doing up our house just before the baby arrived so there was no chaos when the baby came. Although having a baby and the business at the same time is pretty, it's pretty chaotic and I feel like it takes a certain type of person to get on board with that. I have uh, an amazing co founder which makes it all possible. But it's actually our three year uh, company birthday on Saturday. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can't actually believe that I said set it up three years ago. It's crazy. Where does time go? But in those three years myself and my co founder will have had three children um, whilst growing our business. We haven't taken off a lot of time between us to do that just because it's required us to come back to work quite early. But I think that being radical shows up in different ways and it's how you think and how you approach problems rather than necessarily like big Actions. I just can't take a couple of months off and go and join the circus right now. But I can think about things in a very different way. So we set up the Wonky Collective, like trying to create radical change in a very archaic industry. And I'm sure we'll get onto that in a second. But. So I think, yeah, being radical in my life today comes across in just the way that I think and try and make change happen.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, you've teed it, uh, up perfectly. So tell us all about the Wonky Collective and what you're trying to achieve.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. So I set up the Wonky Collective somehow three years ago, and we are on a mission to eradicate supply chain food waste. So I don't know how much Rob, you know about food waste and supply chain. We worked together at sipsmith for a while and had the most amazing few years. And we're very lucky to work in an ambient supply chain. So where everything was produced on site in the most amazing distillery. We had so much fun working there. But at the end of the day, supply chains are very complex. You, as a food or drink producer, you have to buy, um, ingredients, you have to hit minimum water quantities, you have to hit cost break points, you have to order, uh, ingredients up to 18 months before you actually need them in your supply chain to secure them and get the right prices and contracts, et cetera. And you're doing that all based on forecasts, which are a bit more than finger in the air. But no matter how good your data and, um, forecasting tools are, there are always going to be changes you can't predict at the end of the day what you and I are going to buy in the shop every single time. You can't predict. You may have a very good relationship with your buyer at Tesco, your buyer at Sainsbury's, but they also have their own agendas and may, you know, increase the store listing or decrease the store listing. So you always have to have that amount of flexibility in your supply chain. All of that pressure gets pushed back onto the, the actual supplier rather than the retailer. And they have so much power. So there's a whole power imbalance that, um, I'm not going to get into now because otherwise you'll have me talking for hours.

Speaker A: Anyone interested in hearing about that can go back to when we interviewed Guy Singh Johnson from Riverford, who, I think it was fair to say, much less diplomatic than Deanie has to be now about that relationship. Yeah, you can hear all about that from him.

Speaker B: And it's a great episode. It's one of my, one of my faves. He's, uh, a very, very cool and inspirational founder of Just doing things seriously differently. So I can see why he had him on your podcast. But basically all of those reasons cause waste in the supply chain. And there's a really, really horrible statistic that 40% of food that's produced in the UK never even makes it to a supermarket shelf.

Speaker A: That is astonishing, isn't it? It sort of punches you in the gut, that inside.

Speaker B: It really does. For me, that should be illegal. There should be so much regulation coming in, trying to put a stop to it. But as I explained before, this whole supply chain is so complex. And part of the reason why there's so much waste in this sort of production section is because food retailers have got a lot better. They have way less waste. There's actually seven times more food waste that happens at production versus retail. So when you go into your local shop and you see all of the yellow labels and you think how wasteful they are, it is nothing in comparison to what happens the stage before. But because supermarkets have got so much better, they actually aren't solving the problem of food waste in general. They are pushing the problem further up the supply chain because they are having, you know, more just in time. Supply chains, they are, I guess, not holding too much stock, but they still require the same amount. So the supplier still has to overproduce to make sure, just in case they order 10% over what they think they're going to order, they have to have that amount because no retailer wants a gap in their shelf and no supplier wants to be the reason for that gap in the shelf. That's basically the reason why there is so much food waste. I worked at Sitsmith for eight or nine years.

Speaker A: A long time. You were there a long time?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was there a long time. My application, I don't know whether you, you remember the story, but I applied to be a intern. So on a placement year, I was studying business and marketing and I applied to be an intern for a year and I knew they were going to get loads of applicants and so I persuaded my mother to buy a bottle of Szwis Gin because it was way out of my student budget. Her and my stepfather finished her over a couple of months and I ended up leaving my CV in a sips of bottle on their doorstep, um, as a message in a bottle being like, pick me for this marketing internship. I'm way more creative than the next person. But yes. That's how I sort of got my foot in the door. In the door with Cert Smith. And whilst I was there, I learned so much, saw the complexities of the supply chain, ended up seeing the problems that food and drinks manufacturers have. And that's where I left and met my co founder at an accelerator program. Because I really wanted to build a business with someone. I, um, think it's something that I learned. I don't know whether it was growing up with my sisters and we were such a gang the whole time, or the amazing community we had at Sitsmith. And I definitely work better as a team and I knew that if I was going to go on this mega journey of setting up a business, I didn't want to do it solo. I wanted someone to ride the highs and the lows with me. And I very luckily found Alina, um, on this accelerator program called Antler. I don't know whether you've come across it. It basically connects her. If anyone's looking to set up a business, it connects founders. So they put 50 people who want to set up businesses into a room and it's sort of a Apprentice meets Love Island. M. It's a very weird, weird dynamic, but kind of amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah, you're kind of like dating each other. Like, you're, you are.

Speaker B: It's. It's me dating for 10 weeks. It's intense. And I did it just after Covert and no one had really spoken to anyone for a while. And you get shoved in the room with 50 people, 50 of which are super techie introverts. And 50 of people who are wanting to sort of lead run businesses. But. So, yeah, managed to find Alina, who was a lawyer. She spent 15 years working in the corporate litigation space, which is so far away from any of my experience. And actually it's amazing because we have very different skill sets. But she had originally, she's Italian and has. Is super passionate about food. So she wanted to do something within the food sector which blended well with my experience and my problem that I had seen in the market around the food waste. She came over to the UK when she was 17 and studied law, applied to the environment at Cambridge and when she did that, she was seen as a real hippie. And now it's one of the most popular courses to do. But back then it was like, why do you want to do anything with the environment? You're becoming a lawyer, you want to go and do something like you want

Speaker A: to earn millions of pounds over here.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And she was, she was There being like, no, this is what I care about. And she'd done sort of full circuit, ended up working for a massive American law firm, set up two businesses on the side as side hustles and was like, no, I need to set up something full time and I need to do that rather than this corporate grind. So we met at an amazing time, launched the Wonky Collective on a mission to eradicate supply chain food waste. And um, we have been on this amazing journey for the last three years working out what is the most scalable business model to ensure that we can solve, ah, the root problem that we set out to solve as effectively as possible. Um, and I think I've learned so much over the last three years. It's been an absolute roller coaster. But one thing that it has taught me is there are so many good business ideas that need like tweaking or they just need the energy to carry on going. We could have failed or had to stop at any point in our journey. There are so many moments that I can think back to where we were like, what the hell are we doing? Like, this customer just told us we were absolute idiots. Maybe we don't know what we're talking about. And if you don't have that resilience to carry on going, it is just, yeah, that, that is, that is all it comes down to in the early days I really think, and I think that growing up in the way that I did, with less awareness of other people and what like, just in my own world I can sort of apply that thinking to day to day problems that I experience as a founder and I'm like, no, we kept like, we can do this and ignorance is bliss. So let's just, let's just power on. And when someone says no, we can just ask why so many times, irritate them and we'll eventually get to get to a yes, and if we can't get to a yes, we'll try the next person. So that's sort of how we've been going and we have been very lucky to onboard a couple of like pretty big businesses into our vision of eradicating supply chain food waste, which for us has been fundamental for our journey. So I sent a cold LinkedIn message to the supply chain director for Nestle maybe two years ago, two and two and a half years ago now. And actually I was on route to Switzerland to a friend's wedding and I got a message back saying this guy could speak to me the following day. And I was no way. At their wedding, at literally at their wedding, I was sitting in a room with her wedding dress hanging up next to me. I went out a day early to help her and I was sort, um, of sitting in her bedroom with her wedding dress hanging out next to me. I could hear all of the hustle and bustle around me. And I was having this conversation with this top dog at Nestle who was the most inspiring man to speak with. And he totally got what we were doing. And I was like, this is cool. Like, I, I'm, I'm listening to him, I'm listening to his problems and he understands what we're doing. And there was one point in the conversation he was like, we have supply chain food waste like every business does. I don't think we have any issues with ingredients or dry stock. And I was like, cool, if, if I can speak to a couple of people in your team and find that you have problems, will you work with us? And he was like, yeah, I'll give you the name of these two people. Went off, spoke to them. The following week, I came back to him and found a couple of million pounds worth of surplus ingredients in their supply chain. Was like, don't know whether you knew about this, but this is what I found in the last two weeks. And he was like, cool, we'll work with you then. And, um, that was all based off of me listening to his problems, understanding how we could then support his problems, and helping him to see what he couldn't see in his position. Because he. In these large businesses, it's impossible to know what's going on at the ground level. And as a business, we are trying to empower these food manufacturers to be able to take better actions. And you can't do that without visibility. So where we started off on our journey is we originally took a sort of odd box model and we were rescuing finished packaged goods from food manufacturers, sending them direct to consumers. We realized that it just wasn't the right business model for us. We wanted to build something truly sustainable. And the amount of investment you need upfront because of cost of acquisition is unbelievably high. Logistics is super complicated. And whilst we were doing that, all of these food manufacturers were coming to us being like, but we've got 80 tons of flour. Can you help shift that? And we were like, don't think any consumers are going to want to want to buy 80 tons of flour.

Speaker A: I mean, I like bread, I like baking my own bread, but I'm not going to take 80 tons of you.

Speaker B: And we were operating out of My mum's utility room in London. And we were like, I just don't think, don't think she's going to be happy with us starting to like repack flour in her house. So we then were like, cool, let's try and sell it to businesses. So we started calling up a whole load of businesses that we knew would buy flowers at different types of bakeries, etc. And uh, managed to find loads of businesses to buy these surplus ingredients that we had. And so we started selling that. And um, that was when the business started really taking off. So we were working with around 25 food manufacturers, taking that surplus ingredients, selling them to other businesses. We then were like, this is inefficient. Let's build the tech to make it efficient. So we mapped out over 50% of UK food producers what ingredients they buy. And we built this matchmaking algorithm that allowed us to, when someone said they got cocoa powder, we could type it into our, um, our machine and we could find which, uh, food manufacturers in the UK use that specification of cocoa powder. And it created our sales funnel for us. So that then linked to our LinkedIn. It sent a direct message to the stakeholders that we found in the businesses that we thought would be most likely to buy from us. And we started doing that. The issue we then came upon, and this is the whole sort of journey of startups is I was gonna say,

Speaker A: so at this point you've got the business to the point where you're kind of like a broker, uh, for surplus ingredients, aren't you? Which is not, again, not, not the ultimate vision. But yeah. So take us to the next stage.

Speaker B: Exactly. And it helps us have like tangible conversations if we can come into and we can help you and then let's see what else is going on in your business that we can then support you as. So it was a really good in for us and no one was helping any food manufacturer with surplus ingredients. So it was something very unique and tangible that we could support with. But so the next bit of discovery was, okay, you're telling us that you got these surplus ingredients now, but they've only got two months shelf life on how long have you known that they're surplus for? And no business had any idea and they were like, well, we just suddenly did a stock check and uh, we thought we were going to use it, we realized we weren't or we've had a product change and we just didn't know what to do with it. So it's been sitting there and suddenly when it gets to a couple of months shelf life. We panic and then someone tries to do something with it so we don't have to send it to landfill or send it to animal feed. And they were like, that's when we heard about you. Or that's where we got introduced to you and you obviously helped us. And we did this pilot with Nestle using this technology and they um, applied it in one of their factories and in a two week period we managed to um, sell 87% all of their surplus edible ingredients. And it was the most amazing, like cool. Our technology works but the problem is so much bigger than selling ingredients. So we basically went one step back, which is how do we actually do this in a more holistic way and empower these food manufacturers to eradicate always, because surplus ingredients is just one part of it. We basically split food waste into four categories. So you've got surplus ingredients right at the start of a production line. You've then got byproducts. So if you're making a KitKat, you'll have all of the sort of melted chocolate and things like that which aren't used. You've then got work in progress goods which will be stuff that the quality team have uh, deemed not good enough to go in a branded packet at the end. But it's still totally edible. So it might be a KitKat which has a chunk missing from it or something. And then you've got the finished packaged goods at the end which is, it's beautifully packaged, it's absolutely perfect. It could be short on shelf life, it could be a limited edition that hasn't sold as well as predicted. Um, and how do we actually help with all four of those categories? Because it's the combination of that which equals the 40% of food that doesn't make it to a supermarket shelf. And it all comes back to a lack of visibility in the supply chain. Our food systems are prehistoric. And they have uh, they, they have a lot of good technology around. They'll have sort of enterprise resource planning systems, SAP and Oracle and all of those things these large food manufacturers invest heavily into and they're very good at showing you inputs and outputs, but they don't show you what's going on in the supply chain. So what we have been building in partnership with Nestle and a few other people is the technology to help visualize where the surplus is in real time across your supply chain. Using AI to provide actual insights into what can you do, what are the actions you can take to stop that, to prevent it. And if you can't do that. Then how can we then use our algorithms to better redistribute? So we have just announced that we have won a very large Innovate UK grant in partnership with Nestle to build the visualization, tracking and optimization technology. But also we have onboarded Fair Share, who are the largest food redistribution charity in the uk. And we had this radical idea that if we can visualize where all the food is in the uk, the other important thing to do is where is it needed. So we are, uh, working with Fair Share to map out their demand and understand where in the UK they have mouths to feed, where they have capacity to do that. So do they have kitchens? And what sort of food do they want? And as soon as you can get that demand data, you can then m match it with the supply data. So where is food needed? Where is food? And our algorithm then connects it so we can intelligently redistribute food to where it's needed most in the uk, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to do.

Speaker A: That's incredible. Dini, congratulations. How amazing. You've had to keep that under your hat for a year, have you?

Speaker B: Uh, we have had to keep that since we were told in October last year that we had won it and we hadn't been able to talk about it. So it's been a real, like, we're doing this really cool thing and I'm speaking to investors, I'm speaking to other people. I can't actually talk about it, but we're doing something cool and you've got to follow us. And so it's very nice to finally be able to talk about it.

Speaker A: Well done. Well done. Absolutely amazing. I mean, gosh, uh, you've just sort of blown my mind with the scale of this issue. And it feels like one of those real win win problems to solve. Right. So businesses become more efficient, more profitable, but also increase their social impact by redistributing this waste to people who need it.

Speaker B: Exactly. And that was always really important for both Alina and I when we set up the Wonky Collective. And I think for having children throughout it as well and coming back to work, I genuinely don't think I could run a business that didn't have a bigger purpose other than profit. I feel so empowered by, and also hiring a team. When I meet people who are passionate about food waste and, um, the problem that we're trying to solve, I'm like, yes, how can we fight, like, find a space in our team? How can we bring you on our journey you totally get the mission. And I think yeah, for me and my motivation it's so fundamentally important to have that combination of the what are we doing From a social and environmental perspective it's the impact is massive. And then also from a commercial perspective it's really bloody hard to sell in a product to large food manufacturers if you don't have a commercial angle. You need to be able to save money and improve efficiency. And actually food waste costs food manufacturers up to 10% of their cost of goods. So if you think about paying a pound for something, 10p of that is going to be food waste. So there's another like even bigger social impact piece of if we can actually reduce that, how can we then make food cheaper, uh, for consumers in the long term? That's a long term vision. We've got to, got to pick and choose what we're fighting for at the moment.

Speaker A: Well, we've spoken about the business for a long time and we did have some other topics that wanted to cover uh, with you. So you've spoken passionately about your co founder and you're two women founding a business which as I understand it puts you in a pretty extreme minority in the UK and one of the things that you care passionately about and do a lot of speaking about is the funding gap between male founded businesses and female founded businesses. Tell us about that and how outrageous it is and why we need to all get behind female founded businesses more totally.

Speaker B: And sadly it's not just in the uk, it's, it's world worldwide. But yeah, there's a massive funding gap between female founders and male founders and there's so many reasons why we probably don't have time to get into the details of it. Uh, but less than 2% of venture capital funding ah actually goes to female founded businesses and yeah, it's horrible, isn't it? Well exactly. And female founded businesses actually is if you have two founders, one is um, it's a 50% female founder team that is considered a female founder business. So even in that situation, so even

Speaker A: just having one woman, you're in that

Speaker B: 2%, you're in that 2%. It's a massive problem and something that I speak about quite a lot. I'm very proud to say that I got awarded the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award for 2025 which gives me an amazing platform to talk about it. And I spend quite uh, a lot of time speaking to younger women at younger girls sort of at school, university levels trying to tell them the different options that are out there and I guess widen their horizons to what can be achieved to make sure that they know names of other female founders and they can be inspired by what other women do. Because the amount of people who are growing up and don't have any, uh, sort of female founder mentors is totally bonkers. And from a, like, government perspective, there is a massive opportunity gap. So if, uh, funding was equalized between male and female businesses in the UK, um, we could basically have another £250 billion contributed to the economy. That's how much we're missing out on because of this funding gap. So it's not just about equality. It's the wrong thing to do. It's exactly. We need to do it as a country, as a society. And it's just, it's. It's crazy that female businesses aren't being scaled and scaled in the same way.

Speaker A: Oh, uh, man. I mean, we could talk about that for longer, but we must move on, sadly. So we have to move on to the world. You founded a business that has the potential to create a huge impact for the world, but what's a little bit of a radical change for the world that you would like people to get behind, not necessarily what you work on every day?

Speaker B: Well, I think it sort of links back into our previous topics. I don't want it to be repetitive, but for me, I want to see a, uh, world where women and men can fund and fund businesses at the same rate and the barriers just don't exist in the same way as they do today. We've been very lucky to get quite a bit of grant funding, but we've raised through angels and a couple of smaller sort of VCs, as well as angel syndicates. And I have tried so, so hard to get female angels on our cap table, on our, um, investment table. Uh, so far we have one and a half, but it's her husband that talks to us. So we basically have one female angel on our cap table. And I cannot tell you the amount of time I put in to trying to find other women to invest in our business. So it's a whole society. It's not just about funding female businesses. It needs to start with empowering women to act as angel investors if they, you know, are happy to take the risk, et cetera, et cetera. But it's the education behind that. It's a whole societal shift in the attitude to risk that women versus men have with money. So for me, I want to see a world where women and men are both empowered to raise money, spend money in the same way. Um, and, yeah, there's just way more equality there.

Speaker A: Fantastic. It feels like it really links back full circle to the start of our interview, was that I want to see a world where both women and men are empowered to run away with the circus. You know, to take that risk, but in this case, to found and fund successful businesses that can create growth and create a positive impact on our society. Wonderful. Dini. We have to stop, sadly. But the last question is always the same, which is that if there's someone listening who has a little bit of a radical idea for a business, or maybe for their personal life, maybe they've been thinking, the Swedish circus really appeals to me, but they don't know where to get started. What advice would you give them?

Speaker B: Wine? The circus? No, I think the main piece of advice I can give is that you never know enough. So if you're being stopped by not thinking you are the right person or it's the right time, or you don't know enough, then stop thinking like that and just give it a go. Because unless you start, you aren't going to know what you can achieve. And there are going to be people around you that tell you your ideas are stupid or, um, try and persuade you not to do things. But if you fundamentally believe in something and you are passionate about it, then just throw everything that you have into it and just try it. And whether that's trying it for a week, a month, a year, just give it a go and don't listen to the non believers. Find your little group of people who support you and get what you're doing and see where that takes you.

Speaker A: Amazing. Dini, thank you very much for giving us your time today and hope to speak to you again soon. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Uh, if you enjoyed it, please follow us on your podcast platform. If you'd like to appear on A Little Bit Radical or have an idea of someone we should speak to, please email podcastandingongiants.com or get in touch with me on LinkedIn. You can search Rob Faulks or search Standing on Giants and you'll find me there. Thank you very much and speak to you next time.