Andy Ayim MBE

Catch Andy on DO Radio, Where To Next with Mike Warwick 08-14 June.

Andy Ayim is one of those people who refuses to let where he came from be the ceiling - and equally refuses to pretend it wasn't the foundation.

Raised in Tottenham, across estates like Broadwater Farm and Northumberland Park, he grew up in what he calls a "multicultural privilege," shaped by Irish, Jamaican, Scottish, and Bangladeshi neighbours and a father who lived by the African philosophy of Ubuntu:

"I am because we are."

As a teenager, he and his brothers would sneak into a local technology centre in the evenings to get online. That small act of curiosity, he says, was the beginning of a lifelong love for technology and a deep conviction that information should not be gated.

His career has taken him from the corridors of Ernst & Young to Silicon Valley venture capital, from co-founding Mixtape Madness to serving as Managing Director at Backstage Capital, where he helped raise over $2m to back underrepresented founders.

As the founder of the Angel Investing School, he has trained over 1,000 aspiring investors, including a cohort of senior Googlers who went on to launch a $70m VC fund. His startup portfolio is now valued at over $1bn. In 2020, he was awarded an MBE for services to diversity in technology.

But the thread running beneath it all is something deeper. Andy speaks of spending much of his early career operating at "forty to sixty percent" of his true self, socialised down, shaped to fit.

It was the death of his father in 2013, and a final message received just before he learned of his passing, that gave him permission to stop. He describes it as being "born again" into his original form: someone whose long game is not accumulation, but what he calls love and light, a commitment to showing up fully human in every room, from the boardroom to the street corner.

His current project, The Intentional Entrepreneur, puts that philosophy into practice. Built around his 1-12-120 model, one vision, twelve people deeply transformed, rippling out to 120 and beyond, it is a deliberate antidote to the extractive, growth-at-all-costs culture he has long resisted. Direction over speed. Roots before fruits.

DO Radio Show Notes

In this episode, Mike walks with Andy through the streets of Tottenham, tracing the places that made him, and the ideas he is still building.