He’s an investor on Dragon’s Den and huge names are desperate to be on his podcast, but the entrepreneur wasn’t always in such a good place
Rishi Sunak’s people have been calling Steven Bartlett’s people. “I’d have him on the podcast. I suspect that’s going to happen,” Bartlett says from the velvet chair of his Shoreditch, east London, recording studio – a direct replica of his apartment two floors above.
He’s wearing his trademark black top and trousers, minus shoes, and drinking a disconcertingly dark juice as we unpick how Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast lands so many exclusives, most memorably Matt Hancock in his first interview after the bottom-grabbing incident that ended his Cabinet tenure.
More than 10 million listeners now tune in every month to hear Bartlett’s interviews with the likes of Hancock, Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams (who spoke for the first time about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father), or Chris Kamara, who opened up about life with apraxia, the condition that has fractured the football pundit’s speech.
So successful has the podcast become that big names now clamour to be interviewed by the entrepreneur, who was a millionaire by the age of 23 and became the youngest-ever “Dragon” on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den earlier this year.