Matt Jonns

The Lightning Group

The Lightning Group builds digital ventures with startups, investors, and SMEs - combining product, capital, talent, and AI to drive growth.

Over the past decade, we’ve launched 100+ digital products, backed 40+ startups, raised millions in funding, and built high-performing teams that take ideas from zero to scale.

What began as Founder + Lightning - a product and capital partner for early-stage startups - has evolved into a wider platform of connected services:

🔹 The Lightning Group, a digital studio built for ambitious SMEs 
🔹 Founder + Lightning - our early-stage studio, investment, and fundraising arm

What The Lightning Group Offers

1. Digital Strategy & Product Execution
The Lightning Group works with founders and leadership teams to shape digital product roadmaps, validate ideas quickly, and launch AI-powered platforms built for growth.

2. Fundraising & Capital Advisory
Through Founder + Lightning Capital, we raise and syndicate rounds - connecting startups with angels, family offices, and VCs, as well as investing via our own fund. 

3. Flexible Talent & Offshore Delivery
We scale engineering and product capability through embedded specialists and offshore teams - fully aligned to internal tools, processes, and culture.

4. AI Discovery & Implementation
From automation to AI-first product design, we define and build AI use cases that drive efficiency, unlock margin, and set companies apart.

5. Venture Studio Design
We advise investors, corporates, and family offices on how to structure, launch, and operate high-impact venture studios - with real-world operating experience behind every recommendation.

Who We Work With

* Startups preparing to launch or raise


* Scaleups looking to modernise or move faster


* Investors and family offices building new ventures


* SMEs rethinking digital and AI strategy



If you’re building something bold - or investing in those who are - let’s talk.

Founder & CEO

Umbrella Music Academy

Founder

Umbrella Music

Founder 

Investing in, and building, tech companies with non-technical founders | Founder and CEO @ Founder + Lightning

I build and back ambitious ventures - with product, capital, and talent.

It started with helping to digitise my family’s business 15 years ago. Since then, I’ve worked with 40+ startups to turn ideas into scalable companies - raising millions and launching dozens of products along the way.

That journey led to Founder + Lightning and now The Lightning Group - a group of connected services that help startups, scale-ups, and corporates move faster and smarter.

What we do: 

• Strategy and product development that gets you to launch and beyond 
• Access to capital and investor networks
• High-performing, flexible talent (onshore + offshore)
• Designing and building venture studios 

If you’re looking to raise, launch, or scale - or you’re just figuring out where to start - feel free to reach out.

https://www.founderandlightning.com


(Formerly ucreate.it)

We partner with ambitious, Non-tech Founders and equip them with the team, tools, expertise and scale to build highly successful technology companies

100+ team - 25 portfolio companies - £100 million + valuation - £30 million + raised 

Our offices are in London, Cardiff, Chandigarh and Kraków

A big shoutout to two of our portfolio companies– Fresh Car and Naurt.

They’ve  achieved some huge successes recently:

Fresh Car: 

- Launched their mobile mechanics service in Manchester.
- Had a record Q3 with £1.24m customer bookings.
- They recently launched their new operator APP, which transforms the way that their network of ~150 mobile car care businesses operates. 
- Their SMART repair business is growing about 100% YoY and now makes up over 35% of revenue, having only launched less than 3 years ago it hit £160K in October. 

And one of our 2023 investments, Naurt: 

- Launched in 10 new countries over the last 10 weeks, with another 20 planned before February.
- Partnered with HERE Technologies.
- Continues to support Blue Light Maps with data that helps emergency services reach the right entrance faster, saving precious seconds.
- Plus, they’re hiring as they continue to grow into 2026.

Well done Sam Brennan (Fresh Car), Jack Maddalena 📍 (Naurt) on your recent success. 

It’s a joy to watch businesses grow with wonderful founders at the top.

#portfolioupdates #investment #founderspotlight

Venture Studio Founder & Startup Investor.

The quickest way to kill a recently funded startup? 

Hire too fast. 

I see it constantly. Founders close a funding round and immediately go on a hiring spree. 

Six months later, they're looking around the office thinking "who are all these people?"

I was speaking with Jack Hopkins from one of our portfolio companies, Tradeaze LTD, about this recently and they plan to do the opposite. 

In total, they’ve raised £3m. Their natural reaction might have been to hire as quickly and as many as possible. Their demand is high enough. 

Their mistake could have been: 

Raise £3M and hire 5-10 people across multiple functions. Marketing coordinator, sales development rep, operations manager, customer success specialist, another engineer, maybe a designer.

But instead, Jack told me this: "Every hire needs to move the needle. Are they absolutely crucial? Right person, right role, right time."

Their approach: 

Instead of hiring 4-5 recruiters, they hired engineers to build internal recruitment tools. One high-salary engineer eliminates the need for multiple medium-salary roles.

That's systems thinking. One strategic hire that creates leverage across the entire organisation.

I love it because they're even staggering hires. Not just because of cash flow, but because they want to see the impact of each addition before making the next decision.

Every hire changes your company culture. Every hire increases complexity. Every hire needs to 10x their cost in value creation.

The founders who survive the next 18 months will be the ones who hired strategically, not rapidly.

The question every post-funding founder should ask: "If I could only make one hire this quarter, what would move us forward the most?"

Tradeaze is asking that question, and it shows. 

What's your hiring philosophy after raising funding?

#hiring #startup #funding #tradeaze #strategy

LPs don’t need VCs anymore. And that changes everything.

Here's the structure that's existed for decades:

LPs provide the capital. VCs source the deals, do diligence, pick winners. VCs take 2% management fee + 20% of profits.

LPs don't have time or expertise to find and evaluate startups. VCs do. Worth the fee.

But what happens when AI can screen deals, analyse financials, predict outcomes, and surface the best opportunities faster than any analyst?

The analytical work that justifies a big chunk of VC fees becomes automated. Deal sourcing becomes easier. Pattern recognition becomes software.

But who has leverage in that world?

If an LP has access to the same tools, the same data, the same predictive models - why do they need the VC firm?

They could source directly. Invest directly and keep the full upside.

We're already seeing:

Rolling funds that look more like platforms than partnerships. Syndicates replacing traditional funds. LPs doing more direct deals. AI tools analysing thousands of companies in seconds.

The role of the VC starts to compress down to what AI can't do: 

Actually helping portfolio companies win and adding value. 

Everything else becomes a commodity.

#venturecapital #limitedpartner #traditionalfunds #funding

Netflix is purposely making us dumb. 

Because they know you're not watching. It’s both horrifying and fascinating.

More and more, Netflix has been telling screenwriters to have characters "announce what they're doing" so viewers who have the show on in the background can still follow along.

They call it "second screen" content. TV designed for people scrolling their phones while Netflix plays.

Here's what that actually looks like. Real dialogue from a Lindsay Lohan film:

"Tomorrow, I'm marrying Paul Kennedy."

"Fine. After this job is over, I'm off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard."

Horrible dialogue that wouldn’t make a single person look up from their phone.

On purpose. 

Directors have even told producers that a scene isn’t “second screen enough” and to dumb it down. 

The metric they care about? 

Completion rates. Keep the show running. Doesn't matter if you're fully engaged. Just don't turn it off.

Of course, they still make shows you cannot take your eyes off– Baby Reindeer, Squid Games, Black Doves.

But more and more of it is becoming dumb. 

Because they know you’re more likely to pick dumb content if you also want to scroll. 

I really do think we need to be careful we aren’t all being dumbed down. It’s much easier to ignore what’s really important when our minds are filled with brain rot !

#netflix #attentioneconomy #consciousconsumption

I've worked with hundreds of companies over 10 years. 

I was wrong about what makes them succeed.

I used to preach execution above everything else. "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything." Classic founder wisdom.

But after watching some founders grind for seven years on mediocre ideas while others stumble into something that just flies, I've changed my mind.

Execution still matters massively of course it does. It's still the number one trait in successful founders I see. But some ideas are just better than others, and that difference is also enormous.

The painful pattern I see: first-time founders rarely have the maturity to kill their idea fast enough. They dig in with determination, work on something for five, seven years that never quite works.

Meanwhile, someone else trips over a great idea early and nails it.

I've known founders who failed twice, then made it big, then failed again. If it was purely about execution ability, that pattern wouldn't exist. Sometimes it really is just the idea.

Here's what makes this harder now: AI can execute ideas faster than ever. AI can write your early code, design your brand, draft your copy. The execution advantage is compressing.

Which means the quality of the idea becomes the primary differentiator.

Most founders spend 20% of their time thinking about whether they're solving the right problem, and 80% executing on whatever they decided in week one.

Should it be the opposite ?

Ideas are currency again. Not because execution doesn't matter, but because everyone can in theory execute now.

Are you executing brilliantly on the wrong idea?

#founders #startups #ideas #execution #strategy

The Yellow Pages could have built Google.

Blockbuster could have built Netflix.

Why didn’t they?

Because incumbents rarely invent the next wave - even when they already have all the pieces.

👉  The Yellow Pages had the listings, the advertisers, the data.

👉  Blockbuster had the customers, the brand, and the distribution network.

What they lacked wasn’t vision or capital - it was incentive.

When you’re making billions from the current model, every new idea gets filtered through one question:

→ “Will this protect or threaten our existing revenue?”

Startups ask different ones:

→ “Will this work?” “Do people want this?” “Can we survive long enough to find out?”

No quarterly earnings calls. No internal politics. No fear.

That’s the innovator’s dilemma in action, and it’s why true disruption almost always starts on the edges.

We’ve learned this first-hand.

We still love early-stage companies - they move fast, test ideas, and take risks.

But we’re equally excited by more established businesses that already have brand, data, customers and profit - and can now supercharge all of it with technology and AI.

Those are the companies that can win big in the next decade:

The ones bold enough to disrupt themselves before someone else does.
The tools are there. The opportunity is huge.

All that’s missing is the willingness to use them.

#innovation #strategy #ai #startups #business

Future for incumbents...

Jesse Itzler sold a company to Warren Buffett. Sold another to Coca-Cola for $200M+. Owns part of the Atlanta Hawks. Runs 100-mile ultramarathons.

Safe to say he knows something about pushing limits.

I watched his talk on '5 Mindset Shifts to Reach Your Full Potential' and the advice is deceptively simple - the kind we know but forget when it actually matters.

He's very American in his approach. Bold. Absurdly ambitious. We Brits would call it arrogant. I think we should aspire to more of it.

The 5 shifts:

1) Expect the Pain - Stop being surprised when things get hard
2) How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything - Small decisions create what you're becoming
3) Your Limits Are Self-Imposed - When your brain tells you to stop, you're only at 40%
4) Aim High - Look five feet above your target
5) Never Give Your Pain a Voice - Your mouth is your rudder

Link to the full talk: https://lnkd.in/egyYbg_6 

Really worth your time. His content is a gold mine. 

#businessadvice #mindsethacks #lifehacks

Jesse Itzler Mindset Hacks

Most of us founders are blind. 

We think we can see... but we can’t. 

We're in the middle of the biggest shift ever in building companies. 

We know that, but because we're inside it, most of us founders are treating it like a normal Tuesday.

It's not a normal Tuesday.

The business model you're perfecting right now ? 
Might be obsolete in 18 months. 

The industry you've spent 10 years mastering ? 
Being rewritten by people who've been in it for 10 minutes.

And the insane part is most of us can actually see it happening. We know this is massive. But knowing and acting quickly, whilst maintaining business as usual, are two completely different things. 

It’s hard. 

And understanding the gravity of the situation is a task in and of itself too. 

I'm watching founders optimise their current playbook while the game itself is changing. It's like perfecting your serve while someone's building a tennis robot that never misses.

So here's my uncomfortable question: 
What are you building that still matters in 3 years ?

Not "what are you building that works today." What are you building that survives the shift ?

Because if our answers are "I'll adapt when I need to," I think we’re already too late. 

#businesspivot #adaptordie #futureofbusiness #businessadvice

Revolut

Turned into a permanent role - managed Group Financial Control processes and acted as a Senior Point of Contact for Finance at Revolut

• Directed Payroll Accounting across the Group (50+ entities, 10,000+ staff), overseeing a team of 5 to manage the process
• Delivered successful Audit deliverables to strict timelines for publishing 2023 accounts
• Advised internal NetSuite team on roadmap and features to build as primary Financial Control contact

Senior Financial Controller

Brought in as a contractor in Group Financial Control to support with BAU and support for 2022 audit and accounts

• Coordinated month-end close for the Group across 5+ functional teams comprising over 100 people
• Delivered high volume of items successfully for continuing 2022 financial audit alongside BAU work
• Redesigned IFRS 16 Calculation process by unifying over 10 separate processes into 1 single process

Lloyds Banking Group

Spearheaded Finance workstream of Project to integrate newly acquired SME into the wider Insurance business.

• Led review of existing finance model to investigate deficiencies and control gaps
• Coordinated working group to clean up legacy issues in the ledger and improve process ahead of first-time audit
• Managed integration actions across the wider bank including setting up Finance recharging across different functions

Finance Change Manager

The Adventure Is Real

Virtual hosted games provider and pivoted to B2B monthly virtual-socials-as-a-service product

Originally started life as a side-project in 2018 to create London's first immersive board game experience, and pivoted to a virtual business with the onset of the pandemic back in March 2020 - we decided to create a virtual experience to connect family and friends over Zoom and it all went from there.

Made the decision to shut down in November 2022, virtual experience demand had dropped off, the pains we were solving for remote teams weren't severe enough and the funding market was very challenging. Decided it would be for the best to wind up and to move on to bigger problems that I could solve.

Launched a range of new products in the virtual experience space and led product management for the team
• Agent Venture – Built trilogy of virtual games hosted in Zoom with a live actor: hosted over 12,500 users, achieved 220+ five-star reviews (out of 250), and all 3 games ranked in the Top 25 virtual escape rooms in the world (650+ globally)
• Agent Venture Teambuilding – Identified B2B opportunity and built corporate teambuilding offering
• CURSES! A Mayhemic Mystery – Designed a virtual hosted experience for teams of 12-30, with 3 live actors, real-time CGI overlays and voice modulation, video game integration with alternate reality game elements
• Social-as-a-Service – Launched a B2B monthly service to address pains with virtual socials in fully remote teams

Started The Adventure Is Real as a side-project back in 2018 to create London's first Immersive Board Game Experience. Launched in Hackney Wick end of 2019 and had to close at the start of the pandemic, which is when The Adventure Is Real morphed into the virtual experience provider it became best known for.

• Designed the concept and built an MVP, found a physical location and built out and iterated over three rounds of testing
• Brought to market and partnered with leading events platform and produced video trailer at start of 2020
• Started gaining momentum with average 3 bookings per week (sell-out capacity was 8) within one month of that, when the pandemic hit and had to go on indefinite hiatus

Creator (Side-project)

Nfq Advisory, Solutions, Outsourcing

Brought in as a project manager for NFQ's largest client.

• Led 3 projects for the non-ring-fenced branch of a high-street bank
• Co-ordinated a regulatory cross-functional project across 5 different teams with over 20 key deliverables to deadlines
• Gathered data on property usage, researched opportunities and presented to branch CEO to inform location strategy

Project Manager

Contract role where I was brought into the Governance and Controls team, originally to look after Intercompany Reconciliations and then was promoted to Interim team leader during a 9-month org restructure. Stayed on after that supporting FX partnering.

• Led a team of 5 during a transition period of 9 months during restructuring
• Optimised process workflows to produce 0.5 FTE of cost savings
• Reverse-engineered complex outputs from monthly reports and rebuilt to a simple review

Financial Control Manager

Barclays

Promoted to AVP and then invited to a role in Treasury in the Internal Large Exposure (ILE) Management Team.

• Owned allocation of intra-group funding exposure and worked with stakeholders across functional teams
• Saved 1 FTE costs through efficiency optimisations of workflows and redesigning approval processes
• Delivered successful renewal applications of regulatory waivers for 90 legal entities

AVP (Treasury, Hedge Accounting)

Graduated university and joined the Finance Graduate Scheme at Barclays, after successful completion I was invited back to work permanently at one of my rotations, Hedge Accounting.

• Produced hedge arrangements to protect the bank against £1bn P&L impacts
• Rebuilt daily risk and P&L model through multiple iterations to generate time savings of 6 hours per day
• Won 3 departmental awards for outstanding work

Analyst (Hedge Accounting, Finance Graduate)

Start-ups | Financial Services | Product | Operations | Finance

I am a Chartered Accountant with over 10 years experience in Financial Services, working in a range of roles over Finance and Treasury.

In 2020 I founded and the company, The Adventure Is Real, which ran the award-winning series of virtual games, Agent Venture. I spent 2.5 years working on The Adventure Is Real full-time, up until November 2022 I made the decision to shut down due to reduced demand.

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