Matt Jonns

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 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


Founder & CEO

(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

We don’t talk enough about founder risk.

Both financial and personal risk. 

The kind that creeps in when there’s no safety net.
No guaranteed salary. No fallback option. No HR to call when things go sideways. The fear of being “unemployable” if it all goes wrong. 

In the UK, we’ve built up decent support for employees - and that’s great. 
But we’re still awkward about supporting founders.
The people who create the jobs, that then pay the taxes, and drive most of the innovation.

Over the last 10 years I’ve worked with 100+ early-stage founders.
And I’ve seen the same things, over and over again:

• Founders paying their team before they pay themselves
• Signing personal guarantees just to unlock a small credit line
• Funding payroll from personal savings - or worse, debt
• Making redundancies and taking all that personal pressure on 
• Spending their weekends trying to fix things quietly so their team doesn’t panic
• Going months without knowing if they’ll be able to raise, ship, or even survive

It’s a lonely spot to operate from.
And most people don’t see it - especially once the PR narrative kicks in.

But the truth is: the first 12–24 months of any startup (and often years and years of any business) usually look like this.
Low pay, high stress, total exposure.

We should be doing more to support those people - not just when they raise or exit, but when they’re in the middle of the mess.

If you’re a founder - 
what’s something you’ve done to keep the lights on that no one saw ?

Venture Studio Founder & Startup Investor.

taplio