At some point, every entrepreneur faces a quiet but urgent question:
Is it for the LinkedIn claps? The investor nods? The version of you that thought success had to come wrapped in burnout, pressure, and pretending?
At Ideas Fest this year, Simon Squibb and Simon Alexander Ong; two founders with wildly different journeys are stepping on stage to challenge the script. Because if there’s one thing they’ve both learned, it’s this: the real breakthroughs don’t come when you hit the metrics. They come when you stop chasing someone else’s version of success and start building your own.
Let’s start with Simon Squibb.
He knows what it means to lose everything and begin again.
When he was 15, just days after his dad passed away, Simon was suddenly homeless, sleeping in stairwells, parks, and empty buildings. He had no backup, no money, just survival.
But even in that chaos, he found a way forward. His first business? A one-man gardening service that helped him get off the streets. And from there, he never stopped building.
Simon went on to start 19 companies, invest in more than 70 startups, and eventually sell his agency, Fluid, to PwC. For a long time, that was the goal: build, sell, win.
But eventually, something shifted. He no longer wanted to just build businesses. He wanted to build access.