Riding Unicorns opens the room

The interesting number in a conversation about an electric toothbrush is £100. In his Riding Unicorns interview, SURI co-founder Gyve Safavi described a four-question pricing survey, run with SurveyMonkey, that helped the company choose a price before launch. Here was a founder discussing something a listener could plausibly attempt before lunch. No invitation to an investor dinner required.

• The product: founder and investor interviews, available as audio and video.
• The audience: people building, backing or working inside startups.
• The useful habit: listen for the decision, its cost and the conditions around it.

This is the attraction of Riding Unicorns, a startup media business hosted by investors James Pringle and Hector Mason. The name promises the rare animal of venture capital: a privately held company worth a billion dollars. The conversations become useful at a smaller scale. How do you negotiate with a manufacturer? What happens when your co-founder irritates you? Which customer should you listen to?

Those questions travel further than a valuation announcement. A founder who has never heard of SURI might still send its interview to a colleague wrestling with price. The guest supplies the experience; the listener decides whether it belongs in their own business.

Two investors, one open door

Pringle launched the show in 2020 with Sir Martin Sorrell as its first guest. That is an unusually connected beginning for a young podcast. It also helps explain the product. Riding Unicorns makes conversations with people inside the startup economy available to people outside their immediate networks.

Mason arrived as the new co-host in the season-two trailer in May 2021. He is now a general partner at Episode 1, whose website places the podcast within its wider founder ecosystem. The hosts’ investment backgrounds give them a reason to ask about fundraising and growth. Their guest list lets them ask those questions from both sides of the table.

Episode 1 describes a particular interest in founder psychology. Its examples include Alex Chesterman of Cazoo, Zoopla and Lovefilm; Bloom & Wild’s Aron Gelbard; and Sequoia investor George Robson. The range matters. An investor explains how a company looks from the outside. A founder explains what it feels like when the decisions are yours.

In a crowded category, that creates a clear position. Shows such as 20VC and How I Built This also compete for entrepreneurial attention. Riding Unicorns sits close to the UK and European venture community, with operating questions threaded through personal histories. It suits the listener who wants to understand the machinery behind a company’s public story.

A toothbrush and a £100 question

The Safavi episode is a useful demonstration. Published in August 2026, it covers pricing, manufacturing margins, customer acquisition and the relationship between SURI’s founders. A toothbrush is physical. Someone has to make it, ship it and leave enough money in the selling price to keep the business functioning.

Safavi’s account includes renegotiating with suppliers as production grows and cultivating relationships with manufacturing partners. It also includes recurring Friday conversations to address co-founder friction. These are specific behaviours a listener can examine: test willingness to pay; revisit costs; give a difficult relationship a regular place on the calendar.

The distinction is important: £100 was a guest company’s research expense. It was not the cost of producing Riding Unicorns. And a survey is useful only if the people answering resemble the people expected to buy. A cheap experiment can still answer the wrong question.

Another episode supplies a different constraint. Duffel founder Steve Domin discussed the collapse of travel during COVID. The show’s account describes layoffs, lost revenue and a period spent deepening airline integrations. A founder selling software into travel could recognise that problem. A toothbrush founder would need to translate it carefully.

This is where an interview earns its time. It can expose the order of events: a product launches, demand disappears, priorities change. The lesson becomes a question about your own exposure to a market, rather than an instruction to copy another company’s response.

The audience is also a market

Riding Unicorns has a second set of customers: companies that want to reach the people listening. Capsule confirmed its sponsorship as the show entered season five, noting that previous guests included its own clients. An insurer serving growing startups had a straightforward reason to support interviews about growing startups.

Pringle’s five-year anniversary post also named Cooley, re:cap and Tide among the sponsors. The commercial logic is easy to follow. A specialised audience is valuable to businesses addressing its specialised problems. Legal work, financial administration and insurance tend to arrive on a founder’s desk whether or not that founder enjoys them.

The brand has also stepped outside the feed. Its first live event brought Indeed co-founder Paul Forster to The Oval in Vauxhall in 2022. Crowdcube, Scede and Portfolio Ventures sponsored the gathering. A podcast can circulate a conversation; an event can put its participants and listeners in the same room.

Take the question home

At the five-year milestone, Pringle reported more than 215 episodes and thousands of subscribers. By 2026, he was describing an archive of more than 250 episodes. The achievement is partly editorial and partly logistical. Every conversation needs another guest, another recording and another publication.

“It’s been a battle of consistency”James Pringle, on five years of Riding Unicorns

There is a sensible way to use that archive. Start with the problem you have, choose a relevant guest, and write down the action they took. Then note what made it possible: their customers, cash, timing or relationships. Finally, design a smaller test that fits your circumstances.

A podcast cannot establish that the same action will produce the same result elsewhere. Successful guests speak with hindsight, and a listener rarely sees every abandoned experiment. But a good account can sharpen the next decision. For Riding Unicorns, that is the useful promise: a room full of experience, with the door open.