Neil Cocker

A national voice on early-stage startup validation and growth, Neil has worked with 500+ founders worldwide and his mantra is simple: kill 99 ideas fast so the 100th can actually thrive.

He argues that much of today’s startup support is little more than a safety net for weak ideas: pitch days full of theatre, not evidence.

Neil shows how AI has blown up the old rules of entrepreneurship. One founder plus a laptop can now outpace the entire timeline of a traditional accelerator. If support programmes, governments, and investors don’t adapt, they risk becoming irrelevant - funding “zombie startups” that look polished but will never scale.

A former music industry entrepreneur with a UK Top 10 hit, Neil now designs frameworks that track founder behaviour and predict success. His talks are provocative, practical, and uncompromising, challenging audiences to replace nice-to-have workshops and vanity metrics with the only thing that matters: proof of demand.