Daniel Tenner has experience of growing small and risky businesses
My name is Daniel Tenner, and I’ma serial entrepreneur, writer, blogger, speaker, DJ and investor.
After a degree in physics from Oxford, Ijoined the active world first with four years spent in Accenture, where Iworked in a variety of consulting, client-facing roles in financial services. However, in the end, I wasnot satisfied with the humdrum of day-to-day corporate life, and left to start myfirst business, Vocalix. Around the same time, I also startedmyfirst blog.
Vocalix ended up failing fairly rapidly, and I’started a second business, Woobius, which aimed to be base camp for architects, helping the construction industry to collaborate better than existing tools allowed. I worked on Woobius for three years as its technology co-founder and CTO, until it ran out of money, joining the failed startup pool in 2010.
I then used the lessons from Vocalix and Woobius to start a third business, GrantTree, with Paulina Sygulska, aiming this time to solve a tangible problem for other startups, namely how to access government funding. Over the following years, GrantTree would grow from a couple of cofounders to 25 employees, from a handful of clients to a robust client base of over 450 technology companies, ranging from scrappy startups to established enterprises in fields from software to biotech, cleantech, and mechanical engineering.
GrantTree aims to make a difference to its clients and to the innovative segment of the UK’s business landscape, to help spur faster and better innovation by doing things that have a tangible impact on startups and larger companies alike. One of the primary mechanisms we use to do so is funding, from both tax schemes like R&D tax credits, UK government schemes like InnovateUK’s Smart Grants, and EU schemes like Horizon 2020. We love technology and we want to see more awesome technologies getting developed faster.
GrantTree also aims to push the world forward by pioneering new approaches to organisational culture, starting with total internal transparency (including salary information), respect for and empowerment of individuals, and wholeness of purpose. We recognise that the model by which most organisations operate is not well adapted to the 21st century, and we want to be on the bleeding edge of developing new ways to work together.
