Breakthrough Social Enterprise

Marketing Lead

3T Collective CIC

Founding Community Member

Quick Fox Labs

Digital Marketing Account Executive

Freelance Copywriter

Flickto

Senior Marketing Associate

Marketing Associate

Prison To Purpose | I Help Brands Rise Above The Noise

It's not easy to keep your mission alive.

You have to balance impact and revenue. You try and get donations but only a few people know who you are and what you do. Your mission is admirable but you don't know how to spread it with the world. 

I can imagine how frustrating this gets.

But trust me when I say this, there's still hope.

I've been telling my story for the last 9 months and have seen how powerful it can be. 
Business opportunities, speaking engagements and podcasts. All from sharing my journey.

Guess what. You can do the same and get even better results.

I know you want your mission to be soaked up from all corners of the world.
But that won't happen without telling an effective story.

Let me give you a hand. And together we'll bring your mission to the masses.

Drop me a dm. Let's see if we fit.

Kaidon Adams

Prison to Purpose | Justice Partnerships @ Beam

I went from medical school to prison. And from prison to leading a global social enterprise where I help empower overlooked communities with the skills to thrive in a tech-first world.

I care about human-first leadership, compassion without saviourism, and building things that last.

My journey shaped how I see the world and why I run Breakthrough. We deliver AI and digital skills to people on the margins: those written off by systems not built for them. Since taking over in late 2023, we’ve grown from a struggling social enterprise into a global initiative, partnering with the UN, IBM, and justice systems to train over 700 people across 40+ countries.

My focus is on AI diffusion — getting emerging tech into the hands of those who need it most. I’ve helped crypto startups raise millions, advised policymakers, and developed a curriculum delivered everywhere from UK prisons to East Africa.

If anything here resonates, feel free to reach out.

Sobanan N.

2017: In prison, trying to make sense of what my life would look like when I got out.

2026: I’m the CEO of an almost 7-figure education company building AI capability for people the system usually overlooks.

In prison, I had a lot of time to think about one question: What skills would still matter when I got out?

I didn’t know where it would take me, but learning gave me direction when everything else felt static.

That decision reshaped how I think about opportunity, education, and access to the future.

Today, that journey lives inside WeAreBreakthrough.AI

We’re building it for people who don’t have perfect starting points, clean CVs, or linear paths, only the willingness to learn and do the work.

If you don’t have a polished past to point to, and you’re looking for a real second chance, our doors are open.

Sobanan Narenthiran

CEO of Breakthrough | From prison to global impact, I help everyone thrive and become AI-ready for the future economy

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I’d not be running a 6-figure company today if it hadn’t been for the 360 days I spent in prison.

That year taught me almost everything I know about leadership today. 

Even if I didn’t know it at the time…

Here are the top 3 lessons that transformed me inside out as a leader:

(1) Lead without ego

If you never fail, you become arrogant and too attached to your sense of importance. 

Prison taught me that leadership is about making mistakes early, taking responsibility for them, and not letting ego dictate decisions that carry consequences for others. 

(2) Treat failure as a probability

Before prison, failure felt like a personal verdict. 

It said something permanent about me.

After prison, I started seeing it for what it is: a likely outcome in any real decision-making. 

(3) Build like you’ll have to rebuild

Losing everything teaches you to stop designing for best-case scenarios. 

You start building with the assumption that things will break, people will leave, plans will change, and you’ll have to adapt without drama. 

If those 12 months hadn’t happened, I’d probably still be leading the old way.

I wouldn’t wish prison on anyone, but without it, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

If you run a business in Norfolk/Suffolk or Hampshire, here is some good news for you.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be matching local businesses with best-of-best talent, carefully selected from our AI bootcamps.

Bonus: They’re job-ready.

Meaning: they’ve been trained to use AI inside real workflows, communicate clearly, and actually ship work without needing to be babysat.

If you’re a founder, MD, or hiring manager looking for talent that helps you stay competitive in the AI race, send me a message and I’ll forward the short form.

P.S. Even if you're not currently hiring but you know someone local who is, I’d appreciate the intro.

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Armeena A.

I deleted ChatGPT and it’s made me 10x more productive

For months, I was using AI the way most people do:

Open ChatGPT → ask a question → remind it who/what/why → get a paragraph I still had to work around.

Repeat 20 times a day.

It looked productive, but I still had to:

– Explain the same context over and over
– Copy-paste between tools and tabs
– Fix formatting, build lists, fill forms, reply to DMs myself

Switching to Claude Cowork changed that completely. 

It plugs directly into my workflow, so I don’t have to:

– Babysit it through every tiny task
– Stop what I’m doing to hunt for data or fill in yet another form
– Manually clear my inbox or DMs of simple, repeatable replies

Instead, I can point it at the outcome I want and it does the legwork: research, list-building, form-filling, first-draft comms.

I never really planned to walk away from ChatGPT.

But Jasmine (our Head of Marketing) had been pushing me to try Claude Cowork for weeks…so I thought “Fine, what could go wrong?”

7 days later, I can say I have switched sides completely (for good)

What side are you on: Team ChatGPT or Team Claude?

Today, AI is being wired into every classroom, clinic and city hall while only a few teams in Silicon Valley decide how it works.

That gap is where things quietly go wrong.

Because right now, the people building AI are not the people who need it most.

– The access isn't equal.
– The training isn't reaching everyone.
– The design decisions aren't being made with everyone in mind.

And the people who never had a seat at the table are the ones who end up living with the consequences when it goes wrong.

This is the part that keeps me up at night.

Tomorrow I’m sitting down with Laman Ibrahimova, who leads the ASAN AI Hub in Azerbaijan, for a live session called “Building AI Futures That Work For Everyone, Everywhere: Inclusive AI Development in Action” to talk about how we close that gap in practice and build AI that genuinely serves the public.

If you work in tech, policy, or civic innovation and believe AI should include everyone, I’d love for you to join us.
–
Register here: https://luma.com/97e6i55x

I once discovered a colleague was paid £16,000 more than me.

It was in one of my earlier roles, where I was building the function and operating at a far more senior level than the person in question. 

On paper, the difference made no sense.

But the explanation was simple.

He knew how to play the game better than me.

Think battle royale, where everyone drops into the arena, scrambles for advantage, and whoever plays it best walks out with the win.

That's what it was.

That experience burned itself into my memory. 

Later, when I started running my own company, I made a deliberate decision to design a different kind of game.

More co-op than battle royale.

Where people understand the rules, see the whole board, and know that progress isn’t zero-sum. 

And where success came from building together, not outmanoeuvring each other.

Someone called me an “uncle” on TikTok.

I was mindlessly scrolling when I came across a video discussing AI and work. I added a short, thoughtful reply, and almost immediately someone responded

“Uncle, you’re not wrong.”

I laughed. 

Partly because it was funny. 

Partly because it confirmed what I already suspected: I’m not exactly the target demographic on that app.

But I kept reading the thread.

And what I saw surprised me more than the comment did.

19- and 20-year-olds were debating about AI, the job market, and what skills are actually worth learning in the comment section.

It forced me to update my view of what TikTok is for a lot of young people.

This also creates a problem for institutions and governments.

We keep talking about “upskilling the next generation” while designing everything around the same classrooms, certificates, and linear pathways.

Meanwhile, a huge amount of real learning is already happening elsewhere, in environments we don’t take seriously.

This is the most unconventional skill I look for before hiring, and it has a 100% success rate 

(source: me).

How someone thinks.

To understand that, I look out for these two signals in pre-hiring interviews.

1) How someone processes unfamiliar ideas

I’ll introduce a thought like, “A tree is worth more dead than alive.” 

I’m not interested in whether they agree or not; I simply want to observe how they pause, what questions they ask, and whether they try to understand the incentives behind it. 

2) Whether they take action without permission

I ask a simple question: “what do you actually do with your days?” 

And then listen for signs of self-directed effort. 

Building something. 

Learning a new skill. 

Exploring an idea. 

Testing a theory. 

People who do this tend to adapt faster when conditions change, because they’re already used to moving without a playbook.

CVs tell you what someone has done in a controlled environment. They say very little about how someone will behave when the environment shifts.

And in 2026, environments will keep shifting.

The people who do well are those who think clearly under uncertainty, act without waiting for permission, and continue learning as the rules evolve.

Leaders: When was the last time you learned something that genuinely challenged your thinking?

For most, it’s often years ago, back when the role was new, the ground was unfamiliar, and failure still felt possible.

To avoid falling into the “I'm too senior to learn anymore” trap, I deliberately block time to learn new concepts and create situations where my thinking can still be challenged.

These are the three things that have helped me do that, first in prison, and now as a CEO.

(1) Naïvety

When you’ve spent years in a professional role, you tend to inherit fixed ways of doing things. What works, what doesn’t, what’s “realistic,” but that’s also how thinking slowly narrows, and keeping that openness alive is how you continue to learn rather than repeat.

(2) Authority

Hierarchy changes behaviour. Once superiority and inferiority enter the room, learning slows down… people defer, copy, and stop asking basic questions. 

(3) Responsibility

The strongest learners don’t wait for permission/ideal conditions before acting. They act, observe the result, and adjust. 

A simple example is one of my favourite films: 

Forrest Gump.

An underestimated, unsophisticated character on paper, yet able to do extraordinary things because he kept moving forward.

These principles shape how I learn today, as a founder, despite the pressure to be decisive, confident, and certain, and they’re the only reason my thinking continues to move instead of settling.

In 2011, James Verone, a 59-year-old man in North Carolina, robbed a bank for exactly one dollar as a desperate act to access free medical care.

It exposes the harsh reality in our society where something meant to be universally accessible, like healthcare, becomes reachable only through an extreme measure, in this case, robbing a bank.

The discomfort here goes beyond policy failure. 

It reflects a broader pattern of collective acceptance. 

We live within systems where suffering has gradually been normalised. 

We vote for the same people who cause them, live alongside them, and over time learn to rationalise the other side as unfortunate but inevitable.

So the responsibility for such cases doesn’t sit in one place.

It is shared by all of us.

We are all, in different ways, accountable for these consequences.

“The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders” is a restaurant in Japan where people living with dementia work as servers, and getting the wrong order is part of the experience.

It reflects a deeper cultural commitment to empathy and care in Japan, where people with dementia are not shamed for making mistakes, but encouraged to continue finding meaning through work and participation.

It made me reflect on how much of our modern life is organised around narrow ideas of competence, productivity, and control…

When those begin to slip, people are often pushed to the margins. 

This restaurant has designed the environment around a marginalised group of individuals, rather than demanding that people perform flawlessly in order to belong.

It is beautiful and heartwarming because we will all age one day, and we will all need patience and grace in return.

If a society can make room for that, the future is not as dark as it seems.

I was 21 when I was put in a cell surrounded by people convicted of serious crimes.

I remember the first morning like it was yesterday.

Sweaty palms, a pounding chest, a stomach twisted in on itself.

I was terrified.

But falling apart wasn’t an option.

So I built a toolkit. 

A few habits that helped me stay calm when everything around me felt unstable.

Years later, I still use the same toolkit as a founder when stress won’t let my mind switch off.

(1) Breathe before you think. 

When you’re panicking, your mind becomes a wild horse. Focusing on the breath slows it down and brings you back into your body before you react.

(2) Move the stress out of your body. 

Running, walking, press-ups. 

Even dancing when no one’s watching. 

Anything that reminds your body that it isn’t trapped forever in the same state.

(3) Narrow the horizon to the next hour. 

When everything feels heavy, stop trying to solve your whole future. Focus on what needs to happen in the next sixty minutes.

Those three practices helped a scared 21-year-old survive a place he had no business being in.

And they still help me now, as a founder, when the problems are different, but the pressure is familiar.

“Humans are living a lie.”

That’s what NASA astronaut Ron Garan said after spending 178 days in space.

Looking down at Earth, he described a moment where the stories we tell ourselves stopped making sense. 

From space, there is no “us versus them.”

There is one shared planet, one interconnected system, and everyone depends on it.

But back on Earth, we lose that perspective.

We start making decisions around abstract concepts like borders, ideology, religion, and policies. 

These structures are meant to help us manage complexity, but they often do the opposite. 

They create distance, and we stop asking “who is affected by this decision, and in what way?”

The way back is first principles.

The truths that remain true no matter what flag you fly or what side you’re on.

No baby is born bad.

Half the world lives on less than $7 a day.

Every human wants good health, safety, and a life filled with love.

Behind every statistic is someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s family.

When leaders, institutions, and systems hold these truths close, decisions don’t just become more rational…

…they stop being made at the expense of human suffering.

In 2018, when I walked out of prison and spoke openly about running my own business, I was told, over and over, “That’s not possible.”

Today, I not only run a business but also help other people start their own.

I remember reading ‘It Couldn’t Be Done’ by Edgar Albert Guest after leaving prison and coming back to it whenever I was told something couldn’t be done.

Yesterday, I shared it with my team.

It felt like a full-circle moment.

P.S. What’s something you’ve achieved that others once told you wasn’t possible?

If you check your screen time, feel a bit guilty, and delete all the social media apps…

You’re fighting the wrong enemy.

We’re living in an attention economy:

– Platforms compete for focus.
– Notifications interrupt constantly.
– Feeds are engineered to keep you engaged.

But the problem is that your attention is being directed.
Synchronised.
And trained at scale.

That’s why deleting apps rarely works for long.

You remove one outlet, and the behaviour reappears somewhere else.

Different app.
Different habit.

Same underlying pattern.

This is why time-based solutions keep failing.

You can’t optimise “time” in an environment demanding your attention left and right.

What you can influence is where your attention goes once it’s engaged.

Attention shapes what you notice.
What you practice.
What you become sensitive to.

Over time, it shapes your body.

Your relationships.

Your sense of meaning.

When attention is fragmented, life feels noisy and shallow, even when the calendar is full.

So the more useful question isn’t:

“How do I spend less time on my phone?”

It’s:

“Where do I spend my attention?”

Yesterday I spoke at “The State of the Sector: Money, Justice & Repair” alongside leaders like Gayle Edwards and Sayce Holmes-Lewis to dig into the hard link between funding decisions and real-world justice outcomes.

You can’t talk about justice without talking about money.

Because money decides what or who gets funded and what gets ignored.

But too often those decisions are made far from the people they land on…

…shaped by a handful of stakeholders in closed rooms, while the communities outside live with the consequences for years.

In this session, we dug into 3 questions underneath everything:

– How does money actually flow through the justice system?
– Where is justice falling short in practice?
– What could the system look like when communities most affected are centred from the start?

Watch the stream back here: https://lnkd.in/eJc3evvn

The State of Money...

Most founders I meet believe their company exists for one purpose: making profit.

That belief is wrong, and in the age of AI, it’s becoming dangerous.

For years, this has been the default way companies are built.

Optimise revenue. 
Scale fast. 
Deal with consequences later, if at all.

That approach used to feel manageable because the impact was limited. 

Today, it isn’t.

AI is now shaping outcomes at scale by design. 

Tools built by a small number of people are deployed across hiring systems, education platforms, financial decisions, and content distribution, affecting millions of lives at once. 

Small and medium-sized businesses are already part of this reality. 

They decide how profits are used, which trade-offs are acceptable, and which harms are tolerated as the cost of growth…

AI removes the illusion that those choices are neutral.

When the systems you build can reshape lives at scale, being unclear about purpose isn’t passive. 

It’s a choice you make.

There is a new trend of “youth retirement homes” emerging for burnt-out Gen Z.

Malaysia recently opened one in Gopeng, and within a few weeks, it was fully booked.

I personally like the idea, but it also points to a harder reality: young workers in their early 20s are exhausted far earlier than they were ever meant to be.

Today, through technology, automation, and AI, one person can produce the output of two or three people within traditional full-time hours.

As these tools have arrived, the bar for productivity hasn’t dropped. It’s risen.

As a result, young people are working harder than any generation before them, not necessarily in hours, but in intensity.

Add to that a world where we’re constantly stimulated, constantly switched on, and constantly expected to be available just to participate in the digital economy.

That level of sustained intensity comes at a cost.

The BBC, the UK's most trusted public broadcaster, just mass-enrolled the entire country into an AI school.

They ran Panorama specials, bite-sized guides for teenagers, deep dives into robotics across TV, radio, and online, all in one week.

Which means doing nothing is no longer a neutral position. 

It’s a choice with a cost.

That’s exactly why we’re running a short employer briefing next week: “AI-Ready Talent: What Employers Need to Know in 2026.”

It’s a 30-minute session for employers who know they need AI capability in their teams but are wary of the cost, compliance risk, and uncertainty that comes with hiring in a fast-moving market.

In the session, we’ll break down:

– What “AI-ready” actually means in real roles today
– Why traditional hiring signals are becoming unreliable
– The AI skills gap affecting SMEs right now
– Low-risk ways to bring proven AI capability into your organisation

The goal is simple:

To help employers understand how to bring AI capability into their teams without overhauling their workforce or taking on unnecessary risk.

Because one thing is becoming clear.

AI literacy isn’t staying inside the tech department anymore.

The question is whether organisations will build that capability deliberately…

or get dragged into it reactively.

If you're an employer thinking about this right now, feel free to join us.

Register here: https://luma.com/h11a4u4y

A degree is no longer the safety net it once was.

For most of our lives, we were sold a simple formula:

Get a degree → get a “good” job → climb the ladder → buy the house → you’ll be safe.

It worked well enough for a while.

But with AI in the picture, everything is changing.

The old promise of “do the right things and you’ll be stable” is no longer viable.

So today, instead of thinking the answer is another qualification, another master’s, another title… the better move is to build leverage.

– Skills you can deploy fast.
– Proof you can build things.
– Income that isn’t tied to one gatekeeper.

To help people start building that leverage, I’m hosting “Abandon the System, Build Your Own: How to Build a Business in 2026.”

We’ll cover what comes before the business plan: how you think about work, risk, money, and yourself.

Because those foundations keep you steady even as the tools change and the job market shifts. 

And that’s what everyone should be working on first.

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The Battle

Kaidon Adams

Sobanan N.

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The Battle

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Sobanan N.

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Sobanan N.'s LinkedIn Performance

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