When the new series of Dragons' Den hit our screens in January, it featured a new face in the form of Steven Bartlett, replacing Tej Lalvani, who had been in place since 2017.

Bartlett has proved a breath of fresh air to a show that still retains its original format after 17 years, and which has defied conventional wisdom around its longevity. Many dragons have been there for years, with Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden in particular offering a sense of familiarity and stability, but also bringing the risk of the show becoming stale.

The addition of Bartlett then, as both the youngest dragon ever to have appeared on the show - he's just 29 - and the first black investor of African heritage, is a shrewd move from the BBC. He also represents - having made his money from setting up and then floating social media business Social Chain - a new generation of dragon, built around digital channels and a younger audience.

"I have watched the show for a long time, since it started when I was 12 years old," he says. "It was a massive honour, and a big responsibility as well. It's my opportunity to put my world view across, coming from the background I come from and looking how I look. Hopefully it will inspire some other young people that they can also reach the heights in business."

To date, Bartlett has made a number of investments that have been aired, with more to follow. These include artisan cheese retailer cheesegeek, real-grass toilet manufacturer Piddle Patch and subscription-based children's clothing firm Little Loop.

Competition in the Den is fierce and real, he says, but away from the cameras the other dragons have been happy to help him settle in. "They were unbelievably welcoming, and keen to give me advice and feedback even though we're fierce competitors when it comes to winning the businesses," he says. "It is what you see, and we're trying to win. Sometimes we have to explain why we are a better investor than our fellow dragons but it's all done with good humour." Filming for the current series took place last summer, but he's under contract for another year and is open to extending his stint beyond that if he continues to enjoy it.

Social calling

Bartlett's current status is a far cry from his early days. Born in Botswana to a Nigerian mother and a British father, he moved to Plymouth as a child and struggled at school, both academically and with his own insecurity. He headed off to university but soon realised it wasn't for him, dropping out of a business management course at Manchester Metropolitan University after just one lecture.

Instead, he channelled his efforts into building the fledgling Social Chain from his bedroom in Manchester, working with Dominic McGregor, who had built up his own student page on Twitter and bought into Barlett's vision. The concept was to weave in brands' messages into other content that would resonate with their target audience. On the back of investment from German media firm Glow Media, it grew quickly and internationally, and floated in 2019.

Bartlett left the business entirely in 2020, to concentrate on other ventures. He invested in and joined the board of Huel, the UK's fastest growing ecommerce company internationally, and has also backed biotech firm Atai Life sciences, which works to cure mental health disorders.

His main focus these days, though, are the two businesses he set up during the pandemic. thirdweb is a platform that makes it easy to build Web3 applications, the next-generation of internet technologies based around blockchain, which incorporate concepts including decentralisation and token-based economics. "It's about nine months old, and it's a collection of the Web3 industries," he says. "So if you want to build non-fungible token projects or anything Web3-related, then you can do that on our platform in a couple of clicks." Other offerings include social tokens and currencies, marketplaces for buying and selling tokens, and NFT loot boxes and drops.

The business is based out of San Francisco, although operates remotely, and recently completed a fundraising round with a valuation of around £50 million. "We'll go for another funding round at some point," he says. "But it could be acquired or go public. It has a lot of big-name investors now as well, including Mark Cuban and Gary Vaynerchuk, so that's a very high-potential, high-growth business."

Flight Story, meanwhile, is based out of an office in London, the city where Bartlett now lives, and is essentially a communications business for public companies using social media. "It helps public companies build really resilient retail investor communities," he says. Like thirdweb, the business currently has around 20 employees, he adds, with the current focus very much around growth with a view to a flotation in the not-too-distant future.

Brand Bartlett

Alongside his various business ventures, Bartlett has done a pretty impressive job of building his own brand. His video podcast - The Diary of a CEO - is one of the leading ones in the UK, regularly featuring in top spot for listeners. Recent guests have included Rio Ferdinand, Jimmy Carr and Love Island star Molly-Mae Hague, as well as a particularly feisty encounter with Matt Hancock in February.

"The original inspiration was to try and shed a bit of a light on the things that businesspeople and entrepreneurs should talk about, like all the hardships, and to unglamourise it," he says. "It's grown from there to become the number one UK podcast in terms of downloads. It's been absolute crazy. It's a great networking platform and great for building an audience, but it's also very profitable." In the last year it's made around $4 million, he adds; not a bad return for something that takes up around four hours a week.

"It grew 100% last month, and we're just going to keep making it better and doing it more often, and then broadening it so it appeals to the US audience more," he says. "We spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to make it better." He's also just agreed a deal with British Airways whereby the podcast will be played on all the airline's flights from March, on its in-flight entertainment systems.

His soaring, if you'll excuse the pun, profile as a result of the podcast has also led him to launch The Diary of a CEO Live, a live show which he brands as his "intimate confession". After an initial performance in Manchester's Albert Hall in July 2021, this is now touring across different UK cities, where Steven hopes to take people on a journey around how self-belief can triumph over adversity, complemented by the House Gospel Choir.

"It's all sold out and I'm really excited about that," he says. "It's like a musical inspirational evening about life, pain and struggle, with music and a big choir. "I love music and I love theatre. I wanted to do something a bit different, and I just thought: ‘why can't I do a live musical version of my podcast?' We did the live show in Manchester as a test and it went really well, so we decided to tour. It's an amazing thing to do and gets an amazing reaction. It's a blend of all my inspirations and interests."

This journey of self-discovery is something he also picks up on in his book, Happy Sexy Millionaire, published in March 2021, which can be seen as a cautionary tale around what society perceives will make people happy. "I was very insecure earlier in my life," he says. "When I was 18, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be a happy, sexy millionaire. I wanted a million pounds. I wanted the Range Rover Sport, and a girlfriend and a six-pack.

"This was at a time when I was penniless and didn't have a driving licence, but I said I wanted these things before I was 25. And I went off into the world trying to get them and thinking they would make me happy, and I was wrong. I wrote the book about how, if you want to be a happy, sexy millionaire, you'll probably fall into the same mistakes that I made. It's warning people that there are better things to aim for in life."

Fame game

Bartlett's different businesses and activities mean he's inevitably becoming more recognisable, although this still tends to be more from the podcast, which attracts around four million downloads a month. "The podcast is all on YouTube and before that I'd record videos every day for three years on YouTube," he says. "I got stopped three times in the gym last night and none of them mentioned Dragons' Den. They mention the podcast. But if I go to another place that has maybe a little bit of an older demographic, then I'll get people stopping me for Dragons' Den. That has definitely increased my profile.

"But it's a huge compliment for me," he says. "I see it as a reflection of people appreciating the work I've done. I will never get to a point where I don't view that as a massive honour. I think it's important to always treat people in the way you would want to be treated if you were in their shoes."

He also hit the headlines recently when he donated £10,000 to Kwajo Tweneboa, a young man who was campaigning for better social housing conditions after witnessing his father die in terrible conditions. The cause was highlighted by LBC presenter Camilla Tominey, who tagged in all the dragons in a Twitter post. "He seemed like a really genuine, sincere guy that just needed support," says Bartlett. "I said I would give him £10,000 to carry on doing what he's doing because I know he lives in social housing and he hasn't got the resources to carry on doing it. I didn't really think much of it, but it really blew up into a massive thing." He's also pledged to provide camera equipment to help him produce his own content, and mentor him in any way he can.

Giving something back is an important part of being successful, and indeed of being a decent human being, says Bartlett, who is planning to do something more official in the philanthropy space. "I want to do more, and I'll be launching a brand in this space soon," he says. "That will organise my giving efforts, but also help me to decide on the causes and issues that I want to focus on."

I put it to him that he must be pleased with how things have worked out since the shy 18-year-old wrote in the diary just over a decade ago. "I'm grateful about how it's all gone and how it's going, and yet, at the same time, it doesn't feel like anything's really changed," he says. "Everything that happens outside doesn't really impact what happens on the inside. It's all happening around me, but it's not had an impact on me. I've always been happy, and I've always been pretty solid and calm."

He's also planning his next business venture, once he has built up thirdweb and Flight Story. "I'd like to launch a big media company, maybe in five years, to take on the likes of Disney," he says. "The idea is to make people feel and think better, using modern platforms like Telegram or Discord, so a decentralised media company. I'm laying the foundations for that at the moment, but I'm so busy that I will need to focus on it later."

Outside of business, Bartlett describes himself as "not particularly interesting". "I go to the gym pretty much every day: 27 days in January, 28 days in December," he says. "And I have a girlfriend who lives overseas. She's in France at the moment, but she usually lives in Indonesia. And I have a dog. My life is pretty simple. I don't really do much. I don't party. I don't drink. I just work and I DJ in my house. I'm quite a simple person."

How Steven Bartlett went from university dropout to internet entrepreneur

  • 1992: Born in Botswana, Africa
  • 1994: Moved to Plymouth
  • 2014: Co-founded social media marketing firm Social Chain after dropping out of university
  • 2017: Created The Diary of a CEO podcast, which regularly tops the UK's download lists
  • 2019: Social Chain merged with German online retailer Lumaland and floated on the stock market, valuing the business at over $200 million and making Bartlett a millionaire
  • 2020: Left the business to pursue other ventures
  • 2021: Joined Dragons' Den as a judge, replacing Tej Lalvani. His first series started airing in early 2022
  • Launches Flight Story, a platform to help public companies capture the power of retail investors, and thirdweb, a platform to help people build, launch and manage a Web3 project
  • Launches The Diary of a CEO Live as a one-off event in Manchester
  • Released his debut book, Happy Sexy Millionaire, which became a Sunday Times bestseller
  • 2022: Starts a UK tour of The Diary of a CEO lIVE