Ed Stapleton
Isometric diorama of Herne Hill today: red-brick estate blocks around a garden walk with a white cupola, a cut-away home studio with two monitors, a projects quarter of a small hotel with sound waves, a glass phone-shaped kiosk with a piggy bank and a maker’s workshop, a five-a-side cage with players in mustard yellow, a blue finish arch in front of a small Colosseum, and a lawn with a bench and a red post box.

Ed Stapleton

Product & Venture Builder · Forward-Deployed · Ships with AI

An entrepreneurial, AI-obsessed product leader with 10 years across FinTech, mobility, energy and FMCG. I create and scale ventures from pre-seed to exit, and ship the code myself.

  • Product management
  • Venture creation
  • Design thinking
  • Growth strategy
  • Operational automation
  • Account management
  • Agile (PSM I)
Isometric diorama of the Zeti world: Albert House with its glass lantern tower and a cut-away atrium, an EV depot with rooftop solar, chargers and battery storage, electric black cabs charging, robotaxis and a red bus on the roads, a fleet of white electric cars, the ZetiOS data centre under a cloud, the funders’ and investors’ offices joined by a pipe of coins, and a demo stage with UK and US flags and a trophy.

2018 — Now London

Zeti

Product & Operations Director

Zeti is an award-winning FinTech backed by HYCAP and Toyota Ventures that is transforming asset finance and management by combining telematics and financial workflows. Through a B2B SaaS model, we help lenders like Paragon Bank and Amber Infrastructure deploy their capital into clean assets and infrastructure more efficiently and more intelligently. Alongside the CEO, I delivered and operated the MVP of the ZetiOS platform during Zeti’s incubation within Octopus Investments from 2018 to 2020. After a period in a fractional role, I returned to Zeti full-time in mid-2025 as Product & Operations Director.

  • Product strategy
  • IoT SaaS
  • User research
  • OKRs and roadmaps
  • AI-assisted delivery
  • Investor demos
Isometric diorama of the Shandy Shack world: the trailer bar, brewery, canning line, pallets of cans, press billboards, supermarkets, a pub, a festival stage, a velodrome, a TV studio, a river boat and the acquisition lorry.

2018 — 2025 London (remote)

Shandy Shack

Co-Founder & CEO

Shandy Shack is one of the UK’s leading mid-strength beer brands, which revolutionised the shandy by combining craft-quality beer with innovative flavours such as elderflower and raspberry. I co-founded the brand with friends in 2018, and as CEO, I grew the idea from a humble pop-up bar to a 2024 exit to SHS Drinks, a nine-figure turnover UK drinks group comprising brands like WKD and Shloer, via two equity fundraises, major supermarket listings and national media attention.

  • Venture creation
  • Key account management
  • Fundraising
  • Brand and PR
  • Growth strategy
  • Automation
Isometric diorama of Accenture client work: the stepped glass Accenture office at the centre, SSE’s Havant office with a giant bill, the twin towers of La Défense and the Grande Arche, the Burj Khalifa and Palace Downtown, the MOTC tower in Doha with a dhow and TASMU sector icons, GSK House with a phone and watch launching, a brand-incubator greenhouse, and a Startup Sessions talk.

2015 — 2018 London · Paris · Dubai · Doha

Accenture

Digital Strategy Consultant

My time moving through Accenture’s prestigious graduate scheme into specialist roles in innovation and venture development gave me a fulfilling and robust foundation for the ventures that followed. Combined with the engineering skills I’ve picked up more recently, three years of international, client-facing projects across energy, hospitality, government, pharma and financial services are the basis of the forward-deployed work I do today.

  • Client-embedded delivery
  • C-suite stakeholder management
  • Innovation strategy
  • Venture development
  • Product roadmaps
  • Go-to-market
  • Design thinking
Isometric diorama of the Zavvi eCommerce world: a giant laptop that is also a shop window, a fulfilment warehouse with a mountain of parcels and a forklift, a conveyor of steelbooks, games, figures and mugs, a converted red-brick mill with a cut-away trading floor of dashboards, a marketing garden of 3D charts, a coin funnel, a cursor billboard and flying envelopes, a giant search bar with a magnifying glass, influencers filming on ring lights, a green scoreboard, and delivery vans with Spanish, French and German flags.

2014 — 2015 Manchester

The Hut Group · Zavvi

International Trading Manager

My first role out of university: running Zavvi.es, a ~£1m eCommerce store for games, collector’s-edition Blu-rays, memorabilia and merch. We beat sales targets by 35%.

  • eCommerce
  • Growth hacking
  • Paid and organic search
  • Google Analytics
  • Affiliates and influencers
Isometric diorama of a year abroad: on the left, Barcelona, with a cut-away modernista sales office, postcards flying out of the window, an Ibiza villa with a pool, a Tuscan farmhouse and vineyard, Sagrada Família spires and a pool villa with sun loungers; on the right, Paris, with a cut-away Haussmann hotel with chat bubbles, Sacré-Cœur, a glass hotel-tech expo hall with a tablet demo, a green newspaper kiosk, a Morris column and a café; a high-speed train links the two.

Sep 2012 — Summer 2013 Paris · Barcelona

LoungeUp & Divino Villas

Product Marketing Intern, LoungeUp · Business Development Intern, Divino Villas

As part of my Modern Languages degree at Durham, I spent my Erasmus year abroad working rather than studying, first in Paris and then in Barcelona. At LoungeUp, a VC-backed hotel-tech startup, I effectively ran the marketing side of the business in French and English, before joining Divino Villas, a luxury villa rental agency, to sell holidays across four languages. It was my first taste of startup life, and of the travel and hospitality sector I’ve since returned to with Emaar and Place.

“In just a few days he was up to speed, and after a couple of months we saw very good progress on most of our marketing KPIs.”

CEO, LoungeUp
Isometric diorama of Durham: the cathedral and castle keep on a wooded peninsula above the River Wear with a stone bridge, a rowing eight and a single scull, Elvet Riverside on the bank, a finance society room with charts, a cricket ground with a white pavilion, Collingwood College with its cut-away study room and brick accommodation block, a graduation lawn with caps in the air, an art-house cinema and a small station with a train.

2010 — 2014 Durham

Durham University

BA Modern Languages: French, Spanish & Catalan

Four years of languages, cricket, Spanish cinema and the Investment & Finance Society, with a year abroad in Paris and Barcelona that became my first two jobs.

Isometric diorama of an open invitation: a small bright studio, cut away to show two empty armchairs facing each other across a coffee table, beside a freshly levelled building plot marked out with pegs and string, a small yellow digger by a mound of soil, and a sign board on two posts.

So, what’s next?

Always happy to talk products, ventures and AI. Want to compare notes, or just say hello?