Fail fast and stay human: Pete Cheyne at TechNExt 2026

Not your usual founder story

Most founder fireside chats are the success story of someone who got lucky, with the failures edited out. Pete Cheyne’s was better, because he spent it on what went wrong. He’s been building companies in the North East for twenty years: Performance Horizon (now Partnerize), Bottlepay, which got acquired, and now Rightbrain AI. I’m building a couple of things of my own at the minute, EmilyUI and another I’ll talk about when it’s ready, so this was the kind of talk I came for.

Two things worth keeping

Two things stuck. The first was control: you can’t control what happens around you, only how you react, so don’t make decisions when you’re wound up. The second was about the work itself, that a startup is just a constant list of problems, so you treat the problems as normal and stop taking them personally. Swap “startup” for “any job” and both still hold.

Judged on what you make

The bit I keep coming back to was authenticity. Pete reckons most people can tell when someone’s being themselves and when they’re performing, and if you work remotely you’re mostly judged on what you produce, not your accent, your background, or how well you work a room. He called that a beautiful thing, and he’s right. Make something real and let it speak. Tech gets plenty wrong, but on this it does better than the world around it.

Pete Cheyne joined a founder fireside at TechNExt 2026, the North East tech festival, on 15 June 2026.