Steven Bartlett is welling up. He’s recounting why he agreed to be on Dragons’ Den.
“I wish when I was 12 years old there had been someone looking like me, but there wasn’t.” A tear appears. “There was only Jamal [Edwards],” he says. “I was crazy about him because he was a young black man. I stalked him on the internet and knew I could learn so much from him.”
Edwards, the hugely inspirational London music entrepreneur, DJ and owner of SB.TV died in 2022, aged 31. By then, says Bartlett: “We’d become friends. I speak to his mother, Brenda, a lot. When he passed away, I went to their house, we talked about his legacy and how it could continue.”
His memory is one of the motivators of Bartlett, now 33. “There are so few young black men entrepreneurs in the UK. It is so hard for them to raise venture capital. It’s especially difficult for young black women.” He adds: “There is no black billionaire born in the UK right now.”
Today he’s the youngest ever Dragon (he used to watch as a child, pretending to be on the show), founder of the social media marketing company Social Chain and podcaster extraordinaire, with his The Diary of a CEO occupying the No 1 spot in Britain and second in the world only behind Joe Rogan. Now his new creator holding firm Steven.com has just closed on a $425 million valuation.
He is also the launch guest of the new season of Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev’s Brave New World podcast in which he talks to thought-leaders, scientists and intellectuals shaping the future of society and transforming our culture. The series begins with Bartlett’s episode on Tuesday (November 25) and also stars de-extinction entrepreneur Ben Lamm, nutrition pioneers, doctors Tim Spector and Federica Amati, and world-leading bio-hacker Gary Brecka.
The rise of Bartlett, from lower middle-class Plymouth to having the world at his feet, and earning a fortune, has been nothing short of phenomenal. He was born in Botswana, the youngest of four children to a Nigerian entrepreneurial mother who could not read or write and a British civil engineer father. They moved to Plymouth when Bartlett was two. He was difficult, could never settle — he has since been diagnosed with ADHD. They lived in a smart suburb but stood out as the poorest and only black family. He was expelled from his secondary school in the sixth form. He did make it to university, Manchester Met, but left after attending just one lecture.
His two books, Happy Sexy Millionaire and The Diary of a CEO, are seemingly permanent fixtures in the bestseller charts. There’s more, much more, across a range of investments in different fields.
He’s a black icon but a white one too and global — in Forbes’ 2025 top 50 creators (11th), hailed as a “leader” in the inaugural TIME100 “most influential digital voices in the world”. His appeal cuts across boundaries. He’s involved with “big initiatives” coming up, aimed at encouraging young black men to go into business and to take up the STEM subjects and another regarding safety and AI. They’re under wraps for now, but it does not seem an idle boast.
I think the narrative about ‘what it takes to be a good man’ is often absent
Nothing is. Bartlett may appear relaxed, dressed in plain white T-shirt, black trousers and chunky boots, but there is no doubting his seriousness or intent. When we meet in a sprawling suite at The Emory hotel in Belgravia, from the off he lets me know he’s done his research about me, in a charming, sincere way — referencing the book I’ve written about Manchester United and The Glazers.
He’s a United fan, but that did not stop him from having Jürgen Klopp on his show recently. The ex-Liverpool manager was his choice and he added a million extra listeners right there. “It’s me following my passion,” he says. “I pick all the guests, nobody is paid. They’re people I’m interested in. That’s it.”
It’s what he calls a “winning strategy — be yourself”. He adds: “It’s true I could have big A-list stars with huge followings and they would perform well, but I only want people I’m interested in.”
That’s been a sustaining guide ever since he started out doing podcasts. “It’s me following my passions.” So, yes, he occasionally talks about football, but also about being in business, management, education, mental health, AI — all subjects that relate to a lot of young men but others too. “It’s self-reinforcing. I want to become a dad [with his long-term girlfriend, yogi and fellow influencer Melanie Vaz Lopez] and parenting and babies will feature.”
He takes his cue in part from his close social circle. “We’re a group, blokes, best friends for 10 to 15 years,” he says. “We’re very open with each other, we chat about the challenges we face, half of them have had babies so they talk about that.”
He’s male but not in the manosphere, Andrew Tate manner. They could not be more apart. He’s called himself a feminist? He nods and smiles. He’s proud to. “I do think the narrative about ‘what it takes to be a good man’ is often absent. The stats are terrifying, there’s so much around body dysmorphia, so much suicide.”
Young men, he says, but you get the feeling he means women as well, “need role models. They matter so much. They need relatable role models who say to them, ‘I can too’. We must let young people know they can too.”
His empire may have grown but he still operates from the same “gothicky house in Shoreditch”. He divides his time between London and LA and is building an office and studio in California, but London is his base. The set used then is the identical one today. “It’s the same silver table.”
There are differences, though: “I applied the principles I’d learned from business to podcasts.” One is detail, ever-so-slight alterations. “I’ve a great obsession with detail. The two phrases most used in our organisation are ‘one per cent’ and ‘failure’.
Steven Bartlett by numbers
1992 - Bartlett was born in Botswana. He moved to Plymouth at the age of two
28 - The age he joined dragons’ den — making him the show’s youngest ever investor
2017 - The year he started his Diary of a CEO podcast
13.6m - Subscribers to his Diary of A CEO YouTube channel
$425m - The amount Steven Bartlett’s new business Steven.com has been valued at
1 billion - Diary of A CEO was the first UK podcast to reach this many views
“The one per cent relates to constantly looking to gain. Over the long term you have your goals, the things that matter most, but in the short term you’re pushing the edge and you do it every day and that is how you get to those goals. It’s detail, detail. Making small, one per cent changes that get you to 250 per cent. It’s the ‘progress principle’. The opposite approach is to try and make a huge step forward, but when that fails everyone feels demoralised and demotivated.”
That brings him to failing. “We have a ‘head of failure’; her job is to increase the rate of failure,” he says, laughing. It’s not really. What they are doing is boosting innovation and experimentation. Some will flop; some won’t. But you won’t succeed unless you try. “Thomas Watson, the genius behind IBM, said if you want to double the rate of success you must double the rate of failure. Same with Jeff Bezos. He said Amazon has to be the best place on Earth at which to fail.”
He shows a picture on his phone of a colleague, beaming, holding the firm’s “failure trophy”. You must incentivise people to try something new. “You don’t know what the output will be, success or failure,” he says “But if you criticise them, there won’t be any input or output.”
We have a ‘head of failure’; her job is to increase the rate of failure
So, last week his “experimentation team” looked at the first second of The Diary of a CEO podcast. “They realised that by improving just that first second, we can increase retention by 20 per cent.”
Take CO2. He read that if the CO2 level is too high, cognitive performance dips. In his studio it’s kept it at the optimum. He’s developed tools to analyse audiences and their behaviours, including one that watches 1,000 of them watching his broadcast. They agree to do it and the camera sees them concentrating or looking away, spotting what holds their attention and what doesn’t. It’s replayed and next time, corrected.
Bartlett hasn’t always been so mindful. Controversially, he’s been accused of having on guests who peddle unproven health cures and misinformation. He’s taken the criticism on board. He’s employing a science PhD to refute the claims and to add context. “The evolution I’ve been on is about allowing people to share ideas,” he says. “That’s important. But I also have a responsibility to drive a happier, healthier world.”
His eye contact is its usual direct, but more so. Hopefully, by imparting that he will put an end to the rows. “I don’t want people not allowed to speak out; I want to strike a happy medium.”
It’s his frankness and willingness to share in person that sets him apart. He doesn’t always get it right. But as he reiterates, that’s how we advance. “The world is fast-changing. We can’t afford to be rigid.” He wants folk to be unafraid of saying they don’t know. “It’s killing guess-work. We apply a culture test, so when we interview people to work for us, we see if they say, ‘I don’t know’.”
Do, own up, and they’ve got a chance. “Fish might be the correct answer but first you need a fishing rod in order to arrive at the correct answer. What is the system you’ve installed that will get you to the correct answer.”
Hearing him, engaging with him, it’s impossible not to be impressed. A lot of what he is saying is common sense but this is the point, it’s rarely said. That is his craft.
We could talk and talk. But someone coughs. He has to go. Melanie is at home on her own. How many fellas would say that? How many corporate titans, because that is what he has become? That is why he is so listened to, read and so successful.
The new season of Evgeny Lebedev’s Brave New World starts on November 25; podcasts.apple.com
