The Diary of a CEO

The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life

Picture a twenty-two-year-old kid sitting in a lecture hall at Manchester Metropolitan University. It is his very first day. He looks around the room at hundreds of hungover students slumped over their desks and thinks: "This is not going to take me where I need to go." He stands up. He walks out. He never goes back.

That kid was Steven Bartlett. Born in Botswana to a Nigerian mother and an English father, raised in Plymouth with no money, no birthday presents, no Christmas celebrations. "My parents had no money," he has said. "I'd be lucky to get a card. I came to realise fairly quickly that if I was going to have stuff in my life, it was going to be down to me." By the time he dropped out of that lecture hall, he had already figured out a truth most people take decades to learn: nobody was coming to save him. If he wanted a different life, he would have to build it himself.

Within two years, he cofounded Social Chain from his bedroom in Manchester with his friend Dominic McGregor. Both of them had dropped out of university. They were sharing a cramped flat, barely able to afford food -- Bartlett has openly admitted to stealing food during this period because he had no money. By twenty-seven, the company was publicly listed in Germany at a valuation north of two hundred million dollars. At twenty-eight, he became the youngest ever Dragon on BBC's Dragons' Den. And somewhere in between, he launched a podcast called The Diary of a CEO that would grow into one of the most listened-to shows on the planet, ranked second globally by Spotify Wrapped.