Sean Kelly

Founder & Investor. Building companies at the intersection of health, media & founder performance.

Hey there, I’m Sean. I play at the intersection of investing, media and human performance.

I’m a three-time INC 500 founder & entrepreneur with businesses in eCommerce, SaaS, media and B2B services that have collectively generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Right now, I serve as a General Partner at The Family Fund and am the CEO of Significant Publications, a B2B digital media holding company.

I'm particularly passionate about our brand FounderIV in support of today's founder-athletes. We help today's top entrepreneurs achieve breakout performance in their personal and professional lives.

I co-founded and led multiple other companies, including SnackNation, a health-centric foodservice and brand discovery platform that served 20,000 businesses across the US. 

Under my leadership, SnackNation was honored as one of the country’s Best Workplaces by Inc. Magazine, recognized for Top Company Culture by Entrepreneur Magazine, and certified as a Great Workplace by Great Place to Work®.

Forbes listed me as one of the top 30 leaders under 30 and one of America’s most promising CEOs under 35. Comparably also ranked me among the country’s top 50 small-to-medium sized business CEOs multiple years in a row. 

Outside of the business world, I’m a two-time national medalist in freestyle snowboarding, hold an advisory role at the growth capital firm, Meaningful Partners, have a degree in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University and am an avid sports fan of all Michigan sports teams (especially the Wolverines).

I currently live in Venice, CA with my wife and college sweetheart, Shannon, and our goldendoodle, Jameson.

Chairman

Sprouts Farmers Market HQ visit was 🔥

A core tenant of ours at The Family Fund is to create partnerships and collaborations with the most influential people and businesses within the consumer ecosystem.

Those folks who can most move the needle for the founders and companies were fortunate enough to support.

And Sprouts is at the top of this list.

Not sure if any other retailers care as much about helping emerging brands succeed…

And being the first to do so.

When brands partner with Sprouts correctly, king and queen-making can occur.

Thanks to Kim Coffin Scott Romano and Brody Burk for the hospitality, and much more so…

For caring so damn much about the work you do. 

Josh Wand and I loved jamming with you.

No alternative text description for this image

Too may legends too little time.

Such is life at Expo West.

Loved seeing each one of you.

I continue to be inspired by the better-for-you consumer ecosystem.

Most importantly the founders that are battling each and every day to solve problems that they deeply care about.

We are in the golden age of CPG.

AI ain’t removing our need for atoms and physical goods.

And with the OpEx reduction automation will allow us to experience…

Better margins…

Higher enterprise valuations…

And entrepreneurship will continue to explode.

Love where we’re at!

Will Nitze 
Stephen Ellsworth 
Michael Brandt 
Josh Wand 
Morgan Buehler Zanotti 
Jack Savage 
Gulrez Arora 
James Boyd 
Taylor Griffin 
Steve Young 
Colleen Kang

Some guys have all the luck.

Just ran into Livio (Italian for “Living Legend”) at Expo West.

He somehow got his hands on a Founderland golden ticket!!

Tried to buy it off of him but he refused.

An early access, VIP ticket to the top B2B consumer health event in Malibu, CA on October 1st!

“Where founders have fun AND deals get done.”

1,000+ of today’s top founders, retailers, strategics and investors…

A B2B festival where value and serendipity reign and transactional behavior is lame.

If any of you know Livio Bisterzo please advise because I am willing to go to incredible lengths to get my hands on of these.

A Founderland.us golden ticket!!!

Shannon Kelly 
Josh Wand  
Seth Gusow

First Founderland Adventure trip in the books.

Yellowstone Club was 🤯

The founder crew we put together was even better.

I don't believe there is a better way create meaningful relationships then getting off of screens, away from the norm and experiencing 3 days of new challenges & outdoor adventure together.

Thanks to our friends and legendary co-hosts:

- Matthew LaCasse Ethan Greaves and Lizzi Ackerman LaCasse from E+PATROL (and our beautiful hosts at YC)

- Kristofer Reddaway, CEPA® from Citizens 

- Gareth Domingo from AppLovin

And to Stephen Ellsworth from poppi for inspiring me to put this ski trip together when we were hanging at Founderland last year.

Pumped (and already planning) the next one... 
 (Have a feeling these adventure trips will be another key way we bring founders together in a differentiated way at The Family Fund & Founder Community)

And thanks to the phenomenal leaders, founders and friends who made this experience OTT:

Josh Wand
Michael Brandt
Jack Savage
Morgan Buehler Zanotti
Adam Goldberg
Tyler Ricks
Josh Deemer
Jeff Mroz
Giancarlo Maniaci
Curtis Christopherson
Wes Van Dyk
Dave Clark

Let’s roll!

I Build Companies That Sell For Millions And Teach Founders How to Do the Same

Billion Dollar Exits is the first programme designed to help you sell your company for the highest possible price.

You'll be joining a network of founders who've sold over $3.6 billion worth of businesses between them, all of whom are invested in helping you do the same. We work together to figure out what's holding back your growth and then actually fix it.

This could mean building a leadership team, making your sales engine more predictable, or getting your pricing where it should be.

And when you're ready to go to market, we introduce you directly to buyers and help you get the deal done.

Message me to join the waiting list.

Timothy Armoo

How do you network when you're a nobody?

This is a tactical masterclass from Daniel Priestley that got viewed 220k times on Instagram with 4,549 shares - incredible stuff!!

He breaks down exactly how he built a network before anyone knew him.

This is the stuff I swear by - I even dedicated an entire cheatcode to networking in my book - What's Stopping You?

You can certainly magic a network from thin air... as long as you have a strategy! 

Watch the below reel to steal how Dan built his with just 2 weeks in the UK:

Business Builder | Global Speaker | #1 Sunday Times Bestselling Author

Getting customers isn't hard if you know what you're doing.

Most founders think they have a sales problem when they actually have an attention problem, and they're trying to close people who don't even know they exist.

The businesses that win don't just market better, they get eyeballs first and then turn those eyeballs into buyers with a system that actually works.

In this video I break down how I'd get customers for different businesses:

- Barber
- Plumber
- Gardener
- Marketing Agency

Each one needs a different approach, but the principle stays the same...

Grab attention, then convert it into sales.

undefined undefined

What is the best way to get customers? 

With Daniel Priestley

This is the story of how I met Richard Branson!

It was amazing to speak to a room of hungry founders at Virgin HQ.

Some advice I always like to give people who are starting a new business or venture is to always find the 'third door' and make opportunities happen for yourself.

You can manufacture your own luck.

What do you think?

Happy Mother's Day to the greatest mum ❤️

Thanks for the spelling tests at the kitchen table and bribing strangers at the airport to smuggle books back for me as a kid.

Thanks for the excessive Bible scriptures and the long sermons on how to avoid gold diggers (still relevant, by the way).

Thanks for showing unconditional love even when it was something you had to actively learn yourself. That kind of love takes courage.

Thanks for the quotes you'd drop so casually that I'd carry them with me for years without even realising it.

You didn't just raise me. You equipped me.

Thank you ❤️

7 Profound Things My Mum Told Me

One of my biggest regrets is not working for someone else first before starting a business!

I know that sounds wild coming from me 😂

But honestly, so many of the mistakes I made in the early days of Fanbytes were completely avoidable...

If I'd spent even a year shadowing someone who'd already built and sold a business, I would have seen the pitfalls coming from a mile away.

Instead I learned everything the hard way.

Wasted money on the wrong hires. Took deals that looked good on paper but drained us. Spent months figuring out things someone experienced could have told me in an afternoon.

Working for someone else isn't giving up on your dream - it's borrowing their mistakes so you don't have to make them yourself. 

You get to copy what works, skip what doesn't, and show up to your own business with a serious head start.

I say this a lot when I speak to Gen Z founders especially.

You have time!! You're young!!

The urgency you feel to start right now is real, but it's not always right. 

A year or two learning inside someone else's business could save you five years of painful trial and error.

The best founders I know didn't just have ideas. They had context. 

Go get some 💪🏿

My first YouTube video is live!!

I grew up on a fourth floor council estate in South London, raised by Ghanaian parents in one of the poorest parts of the city, with a dad who worked every hour he could.

But by 27, I had sold a company to Brainlabs in a multi eight figure all cash deal.

However, the part people rarely talk about is everything that happened in between.

It began with a £500 bet at 14 that turned into my first business, and by 17 I had built and sold an online magazine for £110k. 

What followed was far less tidy. I spent years building seven businesses in a row that completely failed, and during that time I also lost my dad at 21.

Eventually I built Fanbytes to a team of 80 people, working with brands like Nike and McDonald’s.

Along the way I landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, wrote a book that reached number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and reached a £30M net worth before turning 30.

None of it came in a straight line, and the straight line version of the story is not the useful one anyway.

I made this video because I wanted people to see the real version, not the highlight reel. The doubt, the losses, and the moments where it genuinely could have gone the other way.

If someone who grew up where I grew up can build something like this, then far more is possible than most people realise.

Link to watch is here: https://lnkd.in/eUa5_Fh8

You don't need to be the best, you just need to be early!

Back in 2017, I started Fanbytes when people were still writing articles wondering why kids like KSI were shouting into webcams in their bedrooms.

We saw what others didn't - these kids had massive influence over Gen Z!

We weren't the greatest agency on earth, we were just in an emerging market at the exact right time.

When you pick an industry in its infancy, you naturally rise as the entire industry rises.

Every market goes through three phases:

Infancy: A small group geeks out, the world doesn't get it yet
Maturity: Competitors flood in, market gets established
Consolidation: M&A activity explodes, businesses get bought up

Get in during infancy and stay in the game long enough for consolidation to happen.

When Fanbytes sold, about eight other influencer marketing companies sold within 12 months. We all picked the right industry, and the rising tide lifted us all.

It comes down to the "Expertise Gap."

Whenever a new industry emerges, there are people who know how to do the thing, people who desperately need that thing done, and sitting right in the middle is a mountain of money.

So what's the "influencer marketing of 2017" today?

AI Automation.

We're currently in the exact same infancy stage. Start an AI automation agency today, bridge the expertise gap for wealthy clients like dentists, lawyers, or PE funds, and wait for the market to consolidate.

So, stop building businesses in saturated markets and fighting for scraps. Pick an emerging industry, get in early, and let the market do the heavy lifting.

Last week I flew to Milan with Visa and Revolut Business for the Olympic Winter Games!

They handed me their new Visa Titan card and set me a challenge: use it the way I'd genuinely use a card day to day and see if it actually holds up.

I told them I would only share about it if it earned its place in my wallet.

It did.

Here’s some of my favourite bits of the card.

1. Free subscriptions to WeWork, Perplexity & The Economist

An absolute game changer. I have not seen any other card doing this!

2.10GB eSIM every month

So if you’re travelling somewhere rather than getting hit with roaming charges or having to faff with random apps that may or may not work, you get 10GB included automatically.

3. Access to over 1400 lounges

If you travel a lot, the worst bit is needing to crack on with work and having nowhere decent to sit and focus.

With the Visa Titan card you get access to 1400 plus lounges worldwide, so you can land, get set up, and get the final bits done properly.

Business cards have suffered from a crazy lack of innovation for years and it’s refreshing to see Revolut Business actually bringing something different to the table.

If you’re an entrepreneur building a company, the Visa Titan card can definitely make your life that little bit easier (and more fun).

Thanks again to Visa and Revolut Business for the weekend… I now love figure skating.

Learn more about the Visa Titan card and sign up for one yourself here: https://lnkd.in/gu5qpFbV

#PaidPartnership

Your calendar is costing you more than you think!

The biggest ops risk at Fanbytes wasn’t revenue. It was my memory…

When we were scaling, my calendar was stupid.

I had back-to-back calls with brands, creators, investors, team members and half the time I was typing while someone was speaking… Trying to listen and summarise at the same time.

A week later someone would ask me:
“What did they say about the budget? Did we agree to change scope?”

And I’d scroll through my notes trying to decode what I wrote.

I’d read it and ask myself what was I even talking about… but the scary part is I didn’t think it was a problem - we all just accepted it back then 🤦

If a client referenced something from three months ago, we’d dig through Slack hoping it was there.

When you are small you can get away with it, but as you grow it becomes messy.

Until we switched to using Otter AI.

Every call was being recorded, every conversation was searchable and If someone asks what was said 4 months prior, we’d pull it up word for word using their AI interface. Sounds boring until the day you need it. Now, I don’t live without it.

Check it out and see how Otter for Enterprise can keep your team connected to every conversation: https://hubs.ly/Q042Xb5m0

I've sold 3 businesses over the last 5  years.

The best deals (all cash, minimal earnouts) had these 3 things in common.

1. They started preparing before they felt ready.

Most founders think they'll wake up one morning and just know it's time. Then they scramble to get everything in order while a buyer is already at the table.
 
Selling your business is the biggest financial decision you'll ever make, and it deserves more thinking and more planning than anything else you've done as a founder.

The ones who win start 2 to 3 years early.

(If you actually want to build sellable biz, check the bottom of the post)

2. They dated their buyers.

Two of the businesses I sold ended up going to people who were already in the founder's network.
 
Customers, partners, even competitors they'd built a relationship with over the years. 

If you're serious about selling at some point, you should be building those relationships now, long before you ever send a teaser document.

3. They knew exactly what buyers in their space were paying for.

Every industry values different things. Some buyers care about recurring revenue, others care about your team, others care about IP. 

The founders who got crazy multiples understood what similar companies were being valued on and reverse engineered their business to match. 

If you don't know what your buyer cares about, you're building blind.

On March 4th, I'm running a live workshop on “how to build a sellable business”. 

I'll walk you through how to do all three of these properly so you can start building a business that sells on your terms.

Join me here >> https://lnkd.in/evepyXhD

"I'm not ready to sell my business yet."

I hear this all the time, and I get it - you've got a business to run, and thinking about an exit that's three years away feels like a luxury you can't afford.

I know this because I almost got it wrong myself. 

Three years before I sold Fanbytes, I had someone do a mock valuation of my business because I wanted to know what a buyer would actually see if they looked under the hood.

What I discovered surprised me. I had been obsessing over the wrong things entirely.

One example: there's this concept called "quality of earnings." It's basically how "real" your profits are and whether a new owner could replicate them. Most founders have never heard of it, but buyers care about it enormously.

When I understood that, I changed how I priced our services, restructured certain deals, and made decisions that seemed small at the time but ended up adding significant value to the final number.

None of that would have happened if I'd waited until I was "ready to sell."

You can't fix these issues in six months! They take years to engineer properly.
Thinking about an exit is something you start doing while you still have runway.
By the time you're ready to go to market, the work should already be done.

I'm running a free workshop on what to know before selling your business. It's for founders who are smart enough to start designing for that outcome now, while they still have time to do it right.

Here's the link: https://lnkd.in/evepyXhD

P.S. The founders who get premium multiples all say the same thing: "I started preparing way earlier than I thought I needed to." The ones who got disappointing offers wish they had that time back.

This screenshot is the reason why I spent 2 years writing my book What's Stopping You?

Because no one wrote it for me.

Growing up on a council estate, I had no one who looked like me, came from where I came from, and had actually made it.

So I spent 2 years in my bedroom writing the book I wish someone had handed 18-year-old me.

The one that says: here's what's actually possible, here's what's actually in the way, and here's how to move through it.

Two years is a long time to sit with your own story and wonder if anyone will care.

But then the messages started coming in.

People saying the book cracked something open for them. That they finally felt seen. That they're now taking the leap they'd been putting off for years.

That's the whole point!!!

Not the Sunday Times bestseller list (though I'm not going to pretend that didn't feel incredible).

It's the kid on a council estate somewhere who picks it up and thinks: if he did it, why can't I?

I speak to hundreds of founders every year who want to exit their business.

The most common complaint I get is that they’re still stuck in their business.

So I tell them to do a Disappearance Test.

Literally, once a month be completely unreachable. 

Then when you come back, go through every single message and every request that landed while you were gone and write them all down. 

You'll start to see a pattern pretty quickly - some of those things genuinely needed you and most of them could have been handled by someone else entirely.

Do this once a month for 90 days and you start to see exactly where you're the bottleneck and where your team is perfectly capable of running things without you. 

The questions that keep coming back are the ones worth building a process around, and the ones that got answered without you are proof that you were never needed there in the first place.

After 90 days, most founders I work with have already pulled themselves out of half the things that were keeping them stuck.

Also business starts looking a lot more like something a buyer would actually want because it runs without you being in the middle of everything.

I'm running a workshop on March 4th where I walk through the full process of making your business less dependent on you.

I’ll also leave some time at the end for questions.

Here’s a link to register >> https://lnkd.in/evepyXhD

You self-sabotage more than you realise.

And I only clocked this looking back at my first paid speaking gig. It was at a marketing conference in Belfast where they'd cover travel and accommodation, and I just needed to quote my fee.

I felt a knot in my stomach thinking about what to charge, because I'd spoken publicly before, but getting paid felt completely different 😩

I mustered the courage to ask for £800 and to my surprise they agreed immediately. 

The day arrived and I was terrified, so I faffed and hesitated and delayed until by the time I reached check-in, my flight had left. 

That missed flight wasn't an accident because a tiny part of my brain offered me an escape route, and if I missed the flight, I could tell a story that excused me from the anxiety-inducing commitment.

Self-sabotage is sneaky because it happens beneath the surface!

Sometimes it looks like procrastination, where you tell yourself you're not quite ready or that delaying has some strategic benefit when the real reason is fear.

Sometimes it looks like perfectionism, where you hold yourself to an unrealistic standard not because excellence is the goal, but because the standard becomes a reason to avoid starting at all.

Watch for self-sabotage whenever you feel fear around a specific task and slow down to examine your true motives.

Rachel came to pitch me her new business Thrift!

An online market place available as an app/website where you can sell pre loved outfits.

It's a solid idea, but it's a massively competitive industry which is extremely hard to break into. 

So... did I invest or did I hit next?

What would you have done?

A PR agency came to me last year asking for $12m…

When I looked at the numbers it was $1.4m in revenue and $300k in profit, which meant the market would price it closer to $1.2m. 

They were convinced their relationships and culture justified the gap, even though buyers do not pay for stories, they price risk.

So we focused on four levers that actually move multiples in service businesses.

I call this the LOCK framework:

Locked revenue - by moving key clients onto longer term contracts with auto renewals so income was visible.

Owner optional - by removing the founder from day to day client work so the business could run without her.

Category authority - by narrowing positioning to a defensible niche instead of generic PR.

Key people committed - by tying senior team incentives to staying post acquisition.

Fourteen months later they had not hit $12m, but they moved from roughly $1.2m to $7m without changing revenue or profit. 

The risk profile changed, so the multiple followed.

P.s. I interviewed 27 founders on how they secured their exits and put it all into one blueprint: Sellers Secrets.

If you want to build something buyers actually want, it’s all here: https://lnkd.in/eXb4rq4Z

Every week, 100s of founders ask me… “how can I sell my business”

So for first time, I’m going to be sharing LIVE  my “Scale to EXIT strategies

This is for founders who are scaling and want a life changing exit in the next 1-3 years.

Every founder I know who has had a successful exit (7 figs or more) started planning years in advance. 

This workshop will increase your chances of having a successful exit.

Here's what I'll be covering:
How to know when the right time to sell is and the market signals to look for.

What systems you should have in your business now so you get premium value when you go to market. Hint (it’s not the ones you think)

The “magnet sales system” you can start doing today that scale your business and make it more attractive to buyers.

I’ve done $75m in exits by age 30, i kinda know what I’m talking about 🙂

As a bonus, I will stay for Q+A so you can ask me anything directly about your situation.

If you're thinking about selling in the next one to three years, the decisions you make now are what determine what your exit looks like.

Click the link to sign up for tomorrow's workshop (March 4th):
https://lnkd.in/evepyXhD

Fun fact… you can make less money and sell your business for more.

This is a story of how we took a biz from £2.1m in revenue to 1.6m and ended up selling for £14m.

In 2023, I started working with a founder who sold research reports to banks and consultancies.

Problem was revenue was lumpy, sales cycles were long, and income would go quiet for months between launches. Hard biz.

From a buyer's perspective, this is one of the least attractive revenue profiles you can have.

So we repackaged the underlying research into a data feed that banks and consultancies could subscribe to on a rolling basis.

No more big research reports, just simply subscribing for information.

The average order value went down from £80k a report to £20k a year but because the product was simpler and easier to buy, it opened up the mid market.

Mark's team could now sign dozens of smaller firms rather than spending months closing one big deal.

Revenue dropped from £2.1m to about £1.6m during the transition. But it was now recurring (BIG) spread across more customers (less customer concentration) and sticky (YESS!) because once a bank integrates a data feed into their workflow they don't switch it off.

In May 2025, a PE group acquired a portion of the business in a £14m transaction.

Lower revenue, but a business worth multiples more because of what that revenue looked like.

READ THAT AGAIN, WE MADE LESS REVENUE BUT BUILT A MORE VALUABLE BUSINESS!

We didn't really invent anything new. He repackaged what he already had in a way that matched what buyers actually want to pay for.

I'm running a workshop on March 4th where I break down how to turn your business from a profitable to a valuable asset buyers will pay for.

There’s an opportunity to ask questions too, it’ll be fire.

Link here: https://lnkd.in/evepyXhD

Your first business is the most transformational!

The biggest mindset shift I ever had came at 14 years old, and it had nothing to do with selling Fanbytes or hitting my first million.

It happened when a kid handed me £5 for tutoring help.

I'd built a little operation at school where I found the best student in each subject, connected them to the kids who were struggling, and sat in the middle taking a cut. 

It grew to 60 students before it collapsed, because people figured out they didn't need me to make the introduction anymore.

But that failure isn't the point.

The point is that moment when someone paid me for something I'd created, even though I hadn't invented anything or worked a single shift. 

That one moment rewired how I saw the world, because you don't have to be the smartest person in the room or do all the work yourself. You just have to create value, whether that's building something from scratch or connecting people to something they genuinely need.

I've grown companies worth tens of millions since then, but honestly nothing hit different than that first £5, because that's when I knew the game was on.

taplio

The Battle

Sean Kelly

Timothy Armoo

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreSean Kelly's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreTimothy Armoo's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Sean Kelly

Timothy Armoo

Followers

Posts

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);}Sean Kelly's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreTimothy Armoo's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreSean Kelly's LinkedIn Performance