Sean Attwood

Unshakeable Leadership

Sean Attwood
The Antifragile Founder: Building Businesses That Gain From Disruption

Sean Attwood is a resilience strategist who teaches founders and leaders how to not just survive chaos, but to be strengthened by it. His expertise is forged in the fire of building and losing a multi-million-pound company.

In 2004, with £1,000 and a borrowed kitchen table, he and his wife bootstrapped Yumchaa into a beloved London tea brand with £1.6M revenue, 80 employees, and 7 shops. In 2014, seeking growth, they brought in investors—a decision that, through a brutal series of betrayals, diluted their ownership to 8.6%, led to a wrongful firing, and culminated in a successful but pyrrhic court victory. The shares they fought for became worthless, and they walked away with nothing but a hard-won education in shareholder agreements, human psychology, and the anatomy of a business breakup.

This crucible became his curriculum. He rebuilt his life around a core value: autonomy. He became a business mentor for a UK government scheme at Bayes Business School, teaching strategy to over 150 micro-businesses. He joined The MindGym, where he has since designed and delivered over 2,500 sessions on change, agility, and leadership for 40,000+ corporate participants worldwide. He is a trusted guide for the next generation of founders, currently running workshops on antifragility for the Oxford University STEM Founders Society.

His talks are a masterclass in entrepreneurial antifragility. He dismantles the myth of the linear success story, replacing it with a practical, battle-tested playbook. He speaks with the gripping narrative of a founder who has been in the trenches—negotiating with lawyers, selling tea in a field at Glastonbury, and staring down investors—and the analytical clarity of a strategist who has taught the subject at a top business school.

On stage, he answers the questions every founder secretly asks:

How do you build a team and strategy that gets stronger under pressure?
What are the unseen investor red flags, and how do you protect your life’s work?
When everything is taken from you, how do you rebuild with purpose and power?
Sean Attwood doesn’t just inspire; he equips. He provides the mental models and actionable frameworks to design a business—and a life—that can withstand any shock and emerge not merely intact, but ahead.