CEO at SAS | Creating Moonshots

I help founders and organisations navigate moonshot-scale ambitions using a methodology derived from NASA mission design.Most strategies fail because they confuse ambition with readiness. 

Leaders commit time, money, and reputation before they have learned what actually needs to be true. I help them work out what must be learned, so they don't spend years executing the wrong thing.

I spent 25 years building and scaling businesses, mentoring 100+ university spinouts (pre-spinout and many post-spinout) across Oxford, England, and Scotland, and working as commercial lead inside the complexity of deep-tech ventures. I am not just an advisor who parachutes in. I am an entrepreneur who's built the thing.

I am currently leading the Oxford Moonshot Programme, which launched in January 2026 with 18 deep-tech founders. I am also writing a book on how big ideas become reality, using case studies from Deeptech, the Eden Project to SpaceX.

When I work with schools or boardrooms, I bring authentic Apollo mission artifacts, including a lunar module contact light and an SCE to AUX switch, as proof that this methodology is not borrowed. It is rebuilt from the best framework humanity has for achieving the impossible under extreme uncertainty.

This is for Deep-tech founders, academic leaders, CEOs, and institutions with serious capability but foggy direction.

This is not for early-stage founders looking for tips, people shopping for "support," or those wanting validation rather than challenge. If you want navigation clarity, let’s talk.

Scotland does not lack talent.
It lacks tolerance for uncertainty.

I just spent a few days in Scotland meeting some great people, attending the Venture Café Edinburgh. It was good to see some familiar faces and hear about the many good things happening.

There is also, in these conversations, a recognition of the uncertainty issue. Scotland tries hard to regulate innovation. There are some brilliant support schemes and organisations. Scottish Enterprise has the High Growth Spinout Programme, which remains one of the best there is.  

Yet, much of the support available needs to follow the premise that failure can’t happen. If it does, the support wasn’t right. 

The latest Hunter foundation manifesto largely makes the same mistake. It includes an elite group for AI, a passport to be part of the scale up club, ROI and KPI for success. It’s missing the point.

Innovation policy should be judged not by how many winners it backs, but by how many serious attempts it enables.

Not by success rates. Not by strategic fit. Not by elite credentials.

But by raw number of serious experiments made possible.

We cannot predict which will matter.
We must create the conditions for these experiments to happen. Trust the founders. Support and learn.

Scotland is awesome. Really is. If the ecosystem became comfortable with uncertainty , it would change the prospects of the country. That’s how high the stakes are.

Mark Zwinderman

I architect Moonshot programmes for leaders, enterprises, and regions

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The Venture cafe in Edinburgh was a good place to finally meet these folks in real life. 

The next step will be a Bruce Springsteen based accelerator for founders able to recite the lyrics of Wild Billy’s Circus Story for the judging panel.

Seriously. Two excellent men, Springsteen fans, and a pleasure to meet Stephen Gibbens and Dave Hughes.

Great to see Claudia Cavalluzzo doing her thing. Bringing people together to find solutions. 

And finally, an opportunity to say thank you to Ruairidh Henderson from the Higgs Centre for Innovation. Not only a constant support for the founders there, he gave the Moonshot Factory a shot. And together we did some great work at Higgs.

Equity As Fuel.
 
When a university spins out a company, equity is the fuel that determines whether the 7-10 year journey is completed, or gets stuck halfway to the destination (in orbit, rather than the Moon).
 
There is often talk about using equity for growth. The why (Simon Sinek would approve) is usually not discussed and understood very well.
 
Equity is regularly seen as the value. The Gold. However, how equity is seen and managed is the difference between loading up your Moon rocket with a heavy cargo, or with fuel to reach the Moon.
 
Why?
 
The experienced CXO you need is calculating "Is the potential (1% probability or so) upside worth 7 years of my life?" They see 50% equity allocated before the real work begins. They do the math on dilution, early stage salaries, and exit scenarios, and combine this with the low % likelihood of a major exit.
 
Then they take the role elsewhere with a proper cap table, or they keep/take the well paying role in a larger and established business. The spinout has to settle for less experienced management. You're already behind.
 
Investors don’t fund IP. They like IP, but they're funding the team that turns IP into revenue. Insufficient equity room for that team? They either pass, or offer terms adjusted to reflect the risks of future cap table fixing.
 
It makes fund raising harder. It reduces the pool of interested VC and Angel investors ("Spinout? No, we don't deal with those"). It also reduces valuation.
 
All of this makes it harder to attract the best people early on, or at scale up stage. Because the best people assess funding needs, and the cap table when they decide to dedicate the next 5-7 years to the business. They wonder... Can this business raise the money it needs, and keep the people it will need along the way?
 
Somewhere between years 2-4, things get really hard. Product & regulatory delays. Customer pilots that ghost you. Competitors launching great products. It is inevitable.

Your stressed CTO is getting approached weekly with £200K salaries, clean cap tables, meaningful equity, or a role in an established competitor. Less stress, more cash. Without sufficient upside, they leave exactly when you need them most.
 
Good people have ten brilliant ideas. Every day. You can only develop and bring to market one, maybe two. They're bored, frustrated.

Your CEO took you from zero to £5M. Now facing the grind to £50M while getting offers for other early-stage opportunities with better equity, or larger competitors offering good salaries and benefits.
Competition tries to poach your best people. Without equity making them (potentially) wealthy, they're available to offers.

Equity as gold weighs down the rocket and leaves you stuck in orbit. Equity as fuel, that gets you to the Moon.

#Spinout #Moonshot #DeepTech

Last night we launched the Oxford Moonshot with the first cohort.

As designed it was a challenging and thought provoking evening. "What are we doing and building, and what assumptions are we using?"

Uncovering assumptions, and stress testing these, is often uncomfortable. However, understanding the gaps in your knowledge is key to learning your way forward with your business.

A great contribution by Oxford University Innovation's Brendan Ludden on the support and guidance OUI provides instantly uncovered an IP question for one of the founders in the cohort. The kind of question that probably needs an answer before setting out as a business. 

The Moonshot approach, based on NASA's path to landing on the Moon in the 60s, is about learning your way to a (seemingly) distant goal. It has worked for TESLA and it has worked for SpaceX. 

In Deeptech especially the cost of heading down the wrong path can be 2-3 years of work and Millions in funds used.

As part of this programme the founders get access to a group of world class mentors available to the University of Oxford. Uniquely the cohort will have support from Executive Coach Dr Ben Schubert.

Once you know what you need to do over the next 3 or 6 months, whether it is making a decision on hiring, pitching, attending an event, taking the call, doing market research, all of it, can be answered by asking one question:

Does this help me learn what I need to know?

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I use #Pipeliner for the main business because it is a clear and visual view of the stages of the Pipeline. My new love is likely to be #Parma for its simplicity

Sign up to be the first to know when we launch our "Mastering the Boardroom" course: https://zcl-139851557.hubspotpagebuilder.eu/sign-up-to-be-notified-of-mastering-the-boardroom-course-launch

Grab our Board Paper Templates: the-moonshot-factory.teachable.com/p/my-downloadable-544666

the-moonshot-factory

sas-environmental-services-ltd

sas-production-services

surface-active-solutions

I'm starting 2026 optimistic about UK innovation.
 
We have 4 of the world's top 10 universities. Our scientists and researchers are solving problems that matter. These cover rapid disease detection, clean energy breakthroughs, AI to transform healthcare & other industries, materials that may decarbonise industry.
 
The innovation coming from UK universities is world-class. Always has been. I have done business globally, and the UK has a strong innovation brand.
 
Our spinouts are tackling food security, pandemic preparedness, climate change. The potential is sitting in labs right now, ready to become products, to develop into companies that create jobs, export technology, and solve global challenges.
 
Cambridge and Oxford's deep tech ecosystems are thriving. Imperial, UCL, Edinburgh, Strathclyde, Manchester; these are innovation powerhouses. Britain has always punched above its weight in technology. From Turing to Tim Berners-Lee to DeepMind.
 
We do this.
 
Yes, we have some structural barriers. Cap table issues. Protracted negotiations. Incentive misalignments.
 
But I'm seeing and hearing that people WANT to fix them. University leaders who know the current system wastes potential of their science and spinouts. People working at funding bodies who are willing to measure outcomes (jobs!), not just outputs (spinouts).
 
Investors are ready to back British deep tech if the foundations are right. Founders with technologies that could change the world.
 
The UK Innovation Architecture has cracks, or in some cases is lacking the right structure. But this can be fixed.
 
2026 is the year we do it. Not through more talk. Through systematic reform that builds on past efforts. These are the five structural changes that will enable the creation of scaling innovative companies.
 
1. Funding bodies & Universities measuring real impact

2. Policies from Universities that enable faster spinout setup with clarity for all

3. Post-docs empowered to commercialise

4. Integrated pathways from research to scale

5. Improved ability for academic founders to move between Academia and spinouts, and return to Academia
 
The innovation is here. The talent is here. The ambition is here. It is time to architect the right infrastructure. If we create the right environment, the scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs will take their opportunities. 

Britain should not aim to become Silicon Valley. We need to become the best version of ourselves. Turning world-class research into world-changing companies.
 
Happy New Year.
 
#Innovation #UKTech #DeepTech #NewYear #Scotland #Oxford #UK #Spinouts

The B4 - Moonshot Factory partnership

Moonshot CEO Breakfasts at Rhodes House - What's your Moonshot?

Space for 6-8 CEOs. Six breakfasts over 2026. 

Led by myself with 25 years building and scaling SAS Environmental Services, and working with deep tech founders across Europe, Scotland and Oxford to think bigger.

The format: Two hours. Rhodes House. Breakfast & Coffee, and straight talk about the gap between where your business is and where it could be in 5 - 10 years.  

No presentations. No theory. Just frameworks based on the Moonshot methodology that got Americans to the Moon, Teslas on the road, and that work. All with peers who get it.

What you will leave with: Your moonshot goal defined. The 3-5 moves that matter. Peer accountability to actually do them across 2026.

Limited to max of 8 Oxfordshire CEOs their businesses.

First breakfast: 26 February 2026, Rhodes House, 8:00am - 10:30.

Contact me to see if this is a good fit for you.

#Oxford #B4 Richard Rosser Tina Rosser #Oxfordshire #Business

Moonshot launch at Reube College Oxford. What a place.

The next decade will test every assumption your business was built on.

Most Oxfordshire CEOs & Leaders know this. Few have the space to think rigorously about what it means for their specific business.

The Moonshot Factory creates that space.

Six breakfast sessions over 2026 at Oxford's historical Rhodes House. Eight senior leaders. Deep strategic exploration of cybersecurity, AI, workforce transformation, climate risk, geopolitics, and market evolution. Not as abstract trends, but as forces reshaping your business.

Two places remain in Cohort 1.

Ready to think strategically about 2030 instead of reactively about Q1?
DM me.

B4 Richard Rosser #Oxford #Oxfordshire #Business #Strategy #Moonshot

"Being a physicist is hard, but it's better than having to work for a living" - Aurelio Grillo.

I just finished In a Flight of Starlings by Italian Nobel Laureate Giorgio Parisi. A beautiful book/essay on complex systems, the nature of ideas, and doing things because they enrich our world.

At the Oxford Moonshot launch this past week we played a simple game. How much money would you accept to sell your business for? The conditions keep changing, the timing keeps changing, etc. 

One comment from a founder 'Yeah, but you can't do this for the money'.

True words indeed. Being an entrepreneur is hard, but it's better than having to work for a living. You have to love the puzzle.

Have a good weekend. Go read In a Flight of Starlings. Gorgeous book.

#Beauty #Starlings #Science #Entrepreneurship #Physics #Oxford #Moonshot

Once upon a time the UK had great universities but almost no spinouts.

Now we have great universities and many spinouts. Some of these spinouts become great companies. Some of them don’t. 

A lot of hard work has improved things. Now we need to evolve the system and address the issue of volume over quality.

We need better spinouts because innovation is key to growth and a prosperous life for all.

Clearing the tower is no longer the success to measure. Time for the next steps. They won’t be easy but they’ll be worth it.

https://lnkd.in/ethQraFM

Seriously, if you are a founder looking to raise cash from angel investors you need to buy this book.

It’s the best book by a mile. No fake stories, no high level musings. Clear, useful, and a guide to getting Angels to invest.

I’d hug Phil as well to be fair.

I make startups GROW! Growth Mentor/Coach /Advisory /Tech Angel. Creating exceptional companies with exceptional founders.

To say I'm chuffed would be an understatement. 

I've just been advising someone in the Valley!

I've had lots of gigs advising founders around the world, but the Valley! My first gig there - and it was so helpful to spend a few hours getting a pitchdeck right armed with the wealth of knowledge I've gained and shared in AngelThink. 

Direct quote - "Phil - this is the one slide that if I were there I'd hug you!" Phew! Escaped that one 😊 . 

As an aside it's been really interesting to understand some similarities and differences between UK and US healthcare systems. Another time maybe.

To help founders - for the month of January only - my publisher has put AngelThink into their January sale.

You can get this highly-acclaimed book now (until Jan 31st only) at a discount (£10 instead of £15) from publisher browndogbooks dot uk with the discount code JanuarySale2026 while they have stocks. It’s in the Category - Academic, Business & Reference. 

Now is the year to find your edge - like many others have done. You can read all the really positive reviews on Amazon – almost all 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. 

Enjoy.

What are you particularly good at? And, are you going to do something with it?

I just finished The Precipice (by Toby Ord)and it has that quiet, unsettling quality of a book that keeps rearranging how you see the world in your head.

Every single page has something that made me see things in a new light and perhaps it resonated with me as well because of the long term view built in to the narrative.

We are but a tiny minority in the history of humanity. With so many more to come after us. We have a responsibility to those who will follow.

The 80,000 hours concept turns a career from a CV into a moral object. Not a ladder, not a sequence of roles, but a single, finite resource. A block of time you will burn through whether you choose carefully or not.

80000 hours is roughly:
• 40 years
• 48 weeks a year
• 40 hours a week

Ord’s point isn’t “optimise your happiness” or “find your passion”. This book plays for stakes much higher than that. If the future of humanity is fragile, then what you point those hours at actually matters. Some uses of those hours reduce risk, build resilience, create options. Others are distractions.

Where this gets really interesting for me and my Moonshot Method is that is reframes career choice as mission design, not job choice.

A few ways this idea becomes powerful in practice:

First, a career as a long-range mission, not a series of gigs

Ord is saying; you are already on a deep-space mission. (If he were a Moonshot graduate 🙂) The only real question is whether you bothered to set a destination.

This aligns beautifully with my Moonshot framing. Navigation first. If you don’t choose what matters, the world will choose for you, usually in very small, noisy increments.

Secondly, 80,000 hours makes trade-offs unavoidable

The uncomfortable implication is that saying yes to something decent is often saying no to something important.

Ord’s book forces a brutal but clarifying question:

“Where am I unusually useful?

Third, it reframes ambition as responsibility

There’s a subtle moral upgrade here.

Ambition isn’t ego or status seeking. It’s not about being impressive. It’s about recognising that if you have rare skills, pattern recognition, credibility, or access, then playing small is not neutral. It’s a choice with external consequences.

That’s a hard idea, but a grown-up one.

Finally, it’s a powerful way to talk about careers without sounding preachy

Not:
“You should save the world.”

But
“You already have this asset. What are you going to do with it?”

A true Moonshot Factory graduate and a great example of a founder relentlessly working and working to drive it forward.

So cool to see this as a real thing now.

The first bionic hand, solely powered and controlled through body motion. 🦾 

Our latest case study showcases Metacarpal Prosthetics and their development of a bionic hand prototype at the Higgs Centre, supported by access to funding and expertise through the Higgs Business Incubation Centre (Higgs BIC). 

Read the Metacarpal case study on our website ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eSpQgtS4 

STFC Business & Innovation | STFC | Metacarpal Prosthetics | Fergal Mackie | Ruairidh Henderson

A great programme that has benefited many founders and businesses. If this may be right for you I suggest you seriously consider applying.

Enthusiastically educating entrepreneurs 🚀 I empower and equip founders to grow ventures faster through training, coaching and resources. 💡 CleanTech Accelerator Manager. 🔋 TEDx Speaker. 📣 Entrepreneur 🌱

Oh go on then...as a New Year treat, how about a 1 week extension to applications to the TechX Accelerator? 🚀

Instead of closing this evening, applications to the next cohort of our Net Zero Technology Centre Accelerator now close on Sunday 11th January 2026 at 23:59GMT 🚨 

£50K in funding. 💷 3 months of training.💡100+ mentor, partner, industry, investor connections. 🤝 Are you tempted? There is now still time. EnergyTech startups that are TRL 3-6 head to www.netzerotc.com/techx 🌍

If you know any startups in renewables, carbon capture, energy storage, hydrogen, alternative fuels, or industrial decarbonisation - tag them below. 🔋

For anyone who has run a startup accelerator - you'll know the excitement (and stress) the final week of promotion brings. 😅 Let's hope Mariah and I look this happy once the final numbers are in! 

You'll spend hours looking at the same graph - number of applications started and finished day-by-day. 📈 Every year, it's always the same hockey stick - hundreds of applications submitted in the final hours. ⏰ 

Those final hours are now a bit further away, so plenty of time to get your video ready, application form complete and be one step closer to £50K booster for your startup. 🏆

👋 Follow Edward Pollock for content on startups, entrepreneurship and unlocking potential.

#Accelerator #EnergyTech #Funding #Startup #Entrepreneurship

What is a Moonshot? Do you have one?

Quick and simple test for you. The photograph test.

Do you have a mental image of what success looks like and when this picture will be taken?

Apollo Moonshot: astronaut on the moon next to American flag.

Eden project: gorgeous domes in an old quarry in Cornwall.

HS2? Who knows. Not a Moonshot.

What’s your photograph?

Would you pay for your child to sit next to a quiet kid in class? Or near the whiteboard?

My daughter Amanda used Claude AI to create an app for teachers to quickly and easily re-arrange kids in the classroom. They can set scores for chattiness, good at math or reading, exclude kids from sitting next to each other. The AI quickly create a seating plan. Brilliant!

My entrepreneur brain then pushed it into Bonkers territory. If parents pay £30k for a private school, why not Ryanair them?

£50 to sit up front. £100 to have your kid sit next to someone good at math. £20 for a seat near the window. Cash for the school! 

Then! A market place for kids to sell their seats in class to each other. Don't like where you are sitting? Want Leon's seat? Offer him two Twirls and a Twix...

Brilliant or Bonkers the podcast is back for season 2. 

Link to listen on Youtube below. Find us on Apple Podcasts as well.

https://lnkd.in/eamCaANc

Innovation needs Rewilding. Time to convert the plantation into something more exciting.

The jungle has no Chief Jungle Officer deciding which tree gets more rain and nutrients. There's no selection committee picking "the fastest growing species" and starving everything else.

Yet the jungle creates more life, more resilience, more adaptation than any plantation ever will.

The plantation? It needs constant intervention. Fertilisers. Pesticides. Massive resources devoted to killing "weeds" and propping up the single chosen winner.

A mistake often made in innovation is when we act like we can pick winners early. We pour resources into "the best idea" and systematically starve everything else. But breakthrough innovation doesn't work like that.

The messy ecosystem matters. It doesn't need "fixing". The "slow growers" matter. The weird edge cases matter. The unexpected connections between completely different species matter.

The uncomfortable truth is that real innovation ecosystems appear to be inefficient, messy, and impossible to control. That's not a bug. It's the entire point.

We need to rewild our innovation ecosystem. Let the jungle grow.

It's messy but way more exciting.

New Year, new and improved network?

Last year I was lucky enough to run into Richard Rosser who runs the B4 Business Network in Oxfordshire. As I moved to this part of the world 2 years ago from Scotland I had no network really.

I was looking for something different and definitely found it in the B4 network. To say it is run with passion is the understatement of the year. 

I can't recommend the B4 community enough, and the tireless work by Richard (literally, as he is doing a a million pushups or so in January) sets it apart.

Check out the B4 info and events. It's not your standard networking. Good people, good food, good locations. A real effort to connect the elements that make up the business ecosystem in Oxfordshire. Charities, businesses, universities, and government.

Of course we also partnered on the Moonshot Sessions Rhodes House starting in February.

If you are in #Oxfordshire, B4 may be for you.

Open article: B4 Membership Organisation by b4membership.com

NASA’s Apollo programme ran on three core systems.
Every Kennedy-standard moonshot I’ve studied uses the same pattern. Navigation, Propulsion and life support.

1. NAVIGATION asks “Where exactly are we going?”
Navigation is not about vision statements or slogans. 
Navigation failure looks like apparent momentum, lots of activity, and progress, but no clear arrival point.

2. PROPULSION asks “What resources drive us there?”
Propulsion is not just money or talent, but how resources are configured, constrained, and converted into thrust.
Propulsion failure looks like big ambition, but insufficient acceleration. In other words, lots of effort, little lift.

3. LIFE SUPPORT or “How do we sustain the journey?”
Moonshots fail not at launch, but over time. Life support is the cultural, psychological, and 
Life-support failure looks like early success (Cleared the tower!), which is followed by burnout, politics, drift, or cultural collapse.

When moonshots stall, it is almost never because of ideas.
Normally one of the three buckets is empty, overloaded, or ignored.

Navigation tells you where you are going.
Propulsion determines whether you can move there.
Life support decides whether you last the journey after you clear the tower.

This is a brilliant tool by Dave on working through investor rounds and cap tables. I have used Excel for this but with limited Excel skills the errors creep in. I have tried using AI tools, with limited success. ChatGPT struggled with the idea that shareholding should not 110%...

This is great. If you want to go through scenarios, this is an easy to use and really clear tool.

Founder | Deep Tech & Healthcare | Board Advisor | Wearables, Digital Health, Energy

It started with sketches in my notebook about burn curves and equity, then it was an excel spreadsheet, and now it’s a web app that anyone can use.
 
This is a tool that I have built to directly support my day to day conversations with #founders, helping to think through #investment round structures, trade offs, and timing. 

And whilst eating my own dogfood, I have also been using it for my own planning work with Halya.

There are tools in this space already. They are good at what they do, but they did not cover what I was looking for at the very early stage. In particular, I wanted somewhere to sketch scenarios while also capturing notes on milestones and use of #funds alongside the numbers.

It started as a wee #sideproject to scratch a personal itch, and it has been enjoyable to build something practical that I can reach for when I’m in a meeting with the next big Scottish #spinout or delivering Different Circle Consulting  investment roadmap workshops.

Over the next few months to the end of the tax year, capital may be easily deployed, but dilution will not be cheap. For early stage founders, being able to reason clearly about structure matters more than ever. If this helps founders arm themselves with better judgement before decisions harden, then it is doing its job.

#Equity is a rocket fuel as well as gold, use it wisely. 

Stephen Gibbens Mark Zwinderman Founders Meetup - Glasgow Strathclyde Inspire  Anne Roberts Daniel Sawko

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