Manchester | Fast Growth Icons

The Edwardian Manchester
Wednesday 26th November 2025

The invitation-only network for founders & CEOs of the most successful fast growth scaleups

“What an event!! Inspiring, pragmatic, insightful and also great fun! Many practical ideas to implement immediately.”

Andrea Reynolds
CEO & Founder, Swoop

What makes the ‘Icons experience’ unique?

It’s exclusively for founders and CEOs– means you’ll be surrounded by people performing the same role at a similar sized company, so discussion is at the right level.

All the speakers are founders or CEOs of accomplished scaleups themselves, the majority have valuations > $1b, and share their experiences openly and honestly.

There is no catch – with a strict ‘zero sales’ policy, you will only get practical insights about what worked, what didn’t and how they successfully scaled.

“Wonderful to meet fellow entrepreneurs who were very generous with their learnings and are all just amazingly smart people!”

Bobby Thandi
Founder & CEO, XR Games XR Games

Creating the 100m+ revenue stars of the future

Fast Growth Icons provides the three pivotal things you need to deliver a breakout success

Motivation – Inspirational founders share their success and failure stories and prepare you for the realities of being a founder of a business valued over $1b

Knowledge – Open dialogue amongst peers about the issues that matter, our guests consistently feedback being blown away by the quality of discussion and energy in the room

Connections – everyone is the founder of CEO of an impressive scaleup because a strong network and knowing who to get help from is key to fast-tracking growth

THE ICONS EXPERIENCE

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Previous Speakers

Speakers to be announced September 2025

Joel Perlman
Co-founder, OakNorth

Bio

Zandra Moore
CEO, Panintelligence

Bio

Dave Stevinson
Group CEO, QBS Software

Bio

Ben Fletcher
CEO, The Mothership

Bio

Testimonials

“The practical advice I got from just two founders was genuinely transformative to both my business and effectiveness as a leader.”

Zandra Moore
CEO, Panintelligence

Mike Bristow
CEO, CrowdProperty

Fast Growth Icons 2023 achieved a Net Promoter Score of 100

100% of the delegates from last year’s event rated the experience “Very Good” or “Excellent”.

If you have received an invitation and code, please RSVP here

RSVP

If you have not received an RSVP code and would like to apply to attend

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Joel Perlman

Co-founder, OakNorth

Joel Perlman is the Co-founder of OakNorth, the neobank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. OakNorth has lent over £10bn since its launch in September 2015 and has reached profits of over £150m in 2022 (2023 results are yet to be published). Previously, Joel founded Copal Partners, a financial research company, in 2002 with just $60k. Over 12 years, he and his Co-founder, Rishi Khosla, scaled it to a 3,000-employee organization across 12 markets, before selling it to Moody’s Corporation (NYSE: MCO) and returning over 200x to seed investors. Joel grew up in Bogota, Colombia. He began his career as a Consultant at McKinsey & Company and has degrees from the London School of Economics and Georgetown University.

Zandra Moore

CEO, Panintelligence

Zandra Moore is the Co-founder and CEO of Panintelligence, an Embedded Analytics and AI software company. Passionate about gender equality in tech, Zandra founded LeanIn Leeds, The No Code Lab, and the Yorkshire Growth Tech Group to support women in the industry.

In 2022, she joined the UK Government’s Taskforce for diversity in fast-growth companies, which led her to launch The Lifted Project. This initiative aims to increase investment in female-founded, high-growth businesses in line with the UK’s Levelling Up agenda.

Zandra’s contributions have earned her numerous awards, including the Emerging Entrepreneur Award at the Enterprise Awards 2023, Outstanding Entrepreneur from Northern Power Women 2023, and CEO of the Year at the Tekpon SaaS Awards 2024. She was also named one of Computer Weekly’s Top 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech 2024.

Dave Stevinson

Group CEO, QBS Software

Dave Stevinson is the founder of QBS Technology Group, a company which he founded in Alderley Edge (Cheshire) back in May 2017 and has grown to re-occurring revenues in excess of $330Million. He has made 15 acquisitions to date and operates Europe’s largest software delivery platform . QBS has almost 250 staff across EMEA delivering software to the world’s largest companies through their partner of choice on behalf of 11400 independent software publishers. Dave has a lifetime in technology having held management positions for a number of large publicly listed companies before starting several businesses around data analytics, consultancy and software services. Finally after years of mediocrity - QBS came good and he has built a team to take the business global and reach recurring revenues exceeding USD1 billion by 2030.

Ben Fletcher

Founder, The Mothership

Ben is the founder and CEO of The Mothership, an acquirer of e-commerce businesses, he's also the host of the Velocity² community and the creator of the Fast Growth Icons events series.

Over the last 10 years, since he left his first business, he has been dedicated to helping other founders grow their companies through mentoring, investing, his events, and the community. He's now taking e-commerce businesses to the next level with The Mothership.

Creating a scalable people infrastructure

Presentation

Ed Thompson

CTO & Co-founder, Matillion

Ed Thompson is CTO and co-founder of Matillion. He started his career as an IBM software consultant, and spent 11 years consulting for some of the premier blue-chip companies in the UK. Along with CEO Matthew Scullion, he launched Matillion in 2011 and set about building a crack team of data integration experts and software engineers. He and his team launched Matillion’s flagship ETL product in 2014, which has driven the company’s growth ever since. Ed’s strength is his ability to bring together best-in-class technologies from across the software ecosystem and apply them to solving the deep and complex requirements of modern businesses in new and disruptive ways. Ed is a graduate of the University of Salford with a degree in Computer Science.

The Edwardian Manchester
Wednesday 26th November 2025

The invitation-only network for founders & CEOs of the most successful fast growth scaleups

“What an event!! Inspiring, pragmatic, insightful and also great fun! Many practical ideas to implement immediately.”

What makes the ‘Icons experience’ unique?

“Wonderful to meet fellow entrepreneurs who were very generous with their learnings and are all just amazingly smart people!”

Creating the 100m+ revenue stars of the future