I ask the questions I actually want answered.

I’m Siya, and I make a podcast where I ask women who’ve built companies how they actually did it.

I open every episode the same way: the grit, the setbacks and the breakthroughs it takes to build something real, told in a way that makes you think, I could do that too. That’s the whole brief, really.

Why I started

We get shown the finished version of success. The exit, the profile, the number at the end. Almost never the four years before the first client, or the bit where it nearly didn’t work.

And entrepreneurship barely comes up at school before sixth form, so it’s not like I could go and learn it. So I started asking instead.

Sixteen conversations later I’m still asking, mostly because the answers turned out to be far more useful than I expected and it felt a bit selfish to keep them.

Why anyone answers me

Every guest has done something I haven’t. That’s the whole engine of it, really. I get to ask the obvious thing, the one you’d be too embarrassed to ask if you already worked in the industry, and people tell me things I don’t think they’d say to a journalist.

How often I’m wrong

Constantly, it turns out.

I went into the finance episode with a pretty stereotyped idea of what finance was (men in quarter-zips, yields, a lot of words I didn’t understand). Helen Thomas called it the beating heart of the global economy, explained what she meant, and I changed my mind about an entire industry in about four minutes.

One of my favourite things about doing these is that the line you remember is rarely the one you expected.

The last question, every time

I ask every founder what success means to them. Sixteen have answered it now and not one of them has said money. The only person who even mentioned it said it wasn’t a measure.

It’s still the answer I look forward to most. What would you say?

Doing it live

I close every episode with what I took from it. Live, while the guest is still sitting there, which means there’s no editing my way out of a bad one.

Some land better than others!

Agreeably disagreeable

Helen Thomas gave me that phrase and I’ve been practising it since. Hold your position, push past the answer someone’s obviously given a hundred times before, and still be someone they want to keep talking to.

It’s the difference between an interview and a conversation. I’m not brilliant at it yet.

Rooms this got me into

In June I moderated a panel at SXSW London with Baroness Martha Lane Fox and Lucy Liu of Airwallex, in front of a full room. I’d prepared cards. Most of them didn’t survive.

I was also listed in the Invest in Women Taskforce Top 10, which I found out about from somebody else.

I didn’t pitch for either of them. They came out of the work, which I think is the actual lesson somewhere in here.