Most founders talk about values. Simon Biltcliffe built them into systems.

In Part One of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Simon Biltcliffe, founder of Webmart, one of the most unconventional and quietly radical businesses in Britain.

Simon grew up in Staincross outside Barnsley, shaped by community, the miners’ strike, and the hard lessons of deindustrialisation. He was thrown out of university twice, rode his motorbike south with no plan and no money, and stumbled into a job running a million-pound hologram machine in Corby. From there he discovered sales, built a team, and then had the kind of week that breaks people. A company collapsed, a mortgage tripled, and interest rates jumped to 15 per cent.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

A trip to Japan in 1993 where Simon saw what the world would later call a Kindle. He came home convinced print would be disrupted. His bosses told him to stick with the knitting. So he built it himself.

This episode follows the birth of Webmart and the culture decisions that made it famous. Open salaries. Radical transparency. One version of the truth. A profit-sharing model that hands the upside to employees. Simon calls it Marxist capitalism. Not politics, but a deliberate rejection of extractive business.

Part One ends as the story turns. Barnsley to Bicester and back again. The two Bs. And the question of why a man who built a successful company in the South came home to Yorkshire with a bigger mission.

Part Two is coming.

If you want a founder story with grit, humour, and a serious challenge to how British business is run, start here.

Most founders never talk about the moments that nearly ended them. Ashley Tate does.

In Part Two of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE returns with Ashley to trace the comeback story. After two brutal lessons in the energy world, Ashley explains how those disasters became the foundation for his biggest success.This episode is the truth about rebuilding.Ashley tells the story of how Mina began as a consumer idea, then pivoted hard into fleets when he spotted a pain nobody had solved. Drivers were not charging at home because it hit their personal electricity bills. Fleet managers were stuck. Mina became the missing link, and product-market fit arrived in a single meeting.From there, Ashley breaks down what actually drives a breakthrough. Partnerships. Pricing. Focus. Timing. The discipline to build foundations before scaling. He also lifts the lid on what it is really like to be acquired, how he survived two years inside a major corporate, and why he treated it like an MBA.The episode ends with the next chapter. Ashley is now Co-Chair of Sheffield Angels, backing early-stage founders in the region, building an investment culture Sheffield has lacked for too long, and proving that experience earned the hard way is worth more than theory.If Part One was the fall, Part Two is the recovery. And the blueprint.Subscribe to The Digital Forge on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss what comes next.

Ashley Tate built his first business before most people finish school.

In Part One of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Ashley to unpack the early years of a career shaped by instinct, experimentation and hard lessons learned the long way round.

Growing up in Dronfield and Sheffield, Ashley always knew he wanted to work for himself. At sixteen he was importing mini motorbikes, processing card payments from his bedroom and shipping hundreds of units across the UK. By nineteen he was running a student property business that grew into a serious operation. From there came Split the Bills, a business that scaled fast, generated huge cash flow, and nearly collapsed under the weight of its own complexity.

Ashley speaks with rare honesty about what went wrong. Losing control of finances. Operating on hope rather than data. Facing winding-up petitions. Buying his own business back out of administration with borrowed money and credit cards. Then doing it all again in energy, just as wholesale markets imploded.

This is not a story about overnight success. It is a story about learning in public, surviving failure, and understanding that grit without discipline eventually catches up with you.

Part One ends at the moment where most founders would walk away. In Part Two, we explore how Ashley rebuilt, what those failures taught him, and how they shaped the investor and founder he is today at Sheffield Angels and beyond.

If you have ever built something, broken something, or wondered whether you could come back from the edge, this episode will stay with you.