Matthew Simmonds - Speakset, The Meaning of Work, and ENTOCYCLE

I’m starting to lose count of the episodes, so I’ll ditch the tradition of saying it’s such and such number of episodes, and instead I’ll resort to saying it’s n and n+1 episodes. But then I’ll exhaust n and lose track of counting again, so I think I’ll just stop counting altogether ;)

For this episode of One the Come Up, I was honored to be joined by Matthew Simmonds. Simmonds' career began at the University of Oxford, where he graduated with a degree in engineering in 2012. There, he met his co-founders with whom he started Speakset. Speakset developed a device for older people to connect to friends, family, and medical professionals via the TV. Simmonds and his company were one of the very first cohorts to go through Entrepreneur first - Europe’s version of YC. In 2016, Simmonds began a year-long project The Meaning of Work. The thesis: we spend over 80,000 hours of our lives working, so we might as well spend 1,000 of those hours figuring out the meaning behind it all. In 2017, Simmonds joined Entocycle in it's infancy, a Y Combinator-backed business that turns food waste into sustainable protein using insects. Simmonds led the technical team as CTO for the first 5 years before stepping up to the Managing Director role in 2022.