Steven Bartlett has built a digital empire—but for the entrepreneur and ‘The Diary of a CEO’ host, his next big bet is offline

There are other daily habits and rituals too. Bartlett walks in the sunshine every morning, goes to the gym daily, takes electrolytes, Omega-3s and creatine, and is trying to meditate but “struggling with it”. Mental and physical well-being are part of his “first foundation”—the core elements that support everything else in life—as he wrote in his 2023 bestselling book, The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business & Life.

Bartlett is full of anecdotal learnings that have influenced his life too, from the likes of Virgin founder Richard Branson, who taught him to always think through the lens of delegation; Google X’s former chief business officer Mo Gawdat, who reframed happiness as meeting your expectations; and Canadian entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary, who observed that the people who are most successful in a particular pursuit are eclectic people, or as Bartlett has observed, those with a broad “skill stack”, citing Steve Jobs’s range of interests from typography and design to meditation. 

Branson, Gawdat and O’Leary are just a few of the many influential people Bartlett has interviewed for The Diary of a CEO, which he expected to achieve around 50 million downloads and gain half a million followers in the month of July alone—when we speak—making it the fastest growing podcast in the world.

Bartlett is a leader in the creator economy, where individuals produce and distribute content, products or services directly to audiences via digital and social media platforms, generating revenue, primarily through advertising, sponsorships or product sales. He was recently named on Time magazine’s inaugural 100 Creators list featuring the most influential digital voices in the world. 

Bartlett began as an entrepreneur. Born in 1992 in Botswana to a Nigerian mother and English father, he moved to the UK soon after and settled in the coastal city of Plymouth. “One of the hallmarks of my childhood was just being different. Plymouth in 1994 was pretty much all white and we moved into a middle-class area, but then we had financial challenges. The background hum of my life was a little bit of shame, a little bit of insecurity and constantly feeling like our family was different,” he says. 

Instead of hindering him, that shame and embarrassment became a motivational force. He began his earliest ventures while at school, driven by an abundance of independence that was the result of having two busy, working parents, and a need to make money. “If you give a kid a lot of independence, they’re gonna do something with it. And what I started doing with it was trying to solve this other problem I had, which was money,” recalls Bartlett.

His mother proved to be an important influence. “I’d vicariously learnt from my mother that you could have an idea and then it could turn into a business. I’d watch her say to my dad, I’m gonna sell furniture out of that garage. And then I’d watch her go and do it. For a lot of people, there’s debate and consideration; there’s strategy and planning. In my mother’s head, it was just: idea, then do it. That idea of just doing things was super formative for me, because that’s exactly what I did with all my independence: I just started doing things.” 

Bartlett wanted to keep doing things—and it felt like school and university weren’t conducive. Expelled from the former for poor attendance, when he did get to university he dropped out after just one lecture—a decision that would prove pivotal. “I thought [university] would be profoundly different [to school]. But on that first day, as I sat in that room, I realised that it was more of school, and I realised that I was going to struggle all the same,” says Bartlett. “And I looked around and I remember thinking, if I want to become an entrepreneur, who am I going to show this piece of paper that I get at the end of this process to?”

So, instead of university, Bartlett opted to continue executing on his ideas. In 2013, he launched Wallpark, an online student noticeboard. While trying to drive traffic to it, he realised the potential of social media, which became the more attractive business and led to Social Chain, a social media marketing company he founded in 2014 at the age of 21. When it went public as part of a merged company in 2019, it was valued at more than US$200 million.

In 2020, Bartlett stepped down from Social Chain. It gave him pause to ask himself what he should do now money wasn’t a concern—and what he enjoyed most. He had launched his podcast The Diary of a CEO in 2017, but had been inconsistent with recording. It was something he enjoyed—but in which he also saw opportunity. 

“I started thinking about what was going on in the world of social media and I could see everything getting shorter and more ephemeral and more forgettable. It’s always proven to be the case to me that when you go the other way, you can create huge value.” He started focusing on the podcast, and found that even though he was achieving just 1,000 downloads per episode at the start, he was receiving more positive feedback in real life about these episodes than he ever had for the viral videos he had been producing at Social Chain, which achieved millions of views.

“So, I went for depth and I went for enjoyment and the thing that I liked the most,” says Bartlett. “And I really believe that’s a wonderful framework for anybody—thinking about impact and enjoyment as an essential part of your decision framework. Because to do anything well, consistency is the holy grail, and consistency is a byproduct of enjoying the thing.”

Bartlett’s entrepreneurial and business endeavours continued alongside The Diary of a CEO, which now sits under his media and investment company FlightStory. In 2020, he joined psychedelics company Atai Life Sciences and helped take it public on the Nasdaq the following year with a US$3 billion market cap, while at the same time he became the youngest ever Dragon on reality television show Dragons’ Den.

Bartlett then leapt on the blockchain and Web3 wave with the launch of Thirdweb, a blockchain infrastructure business. This move was an example of another of the business laws from his book: lean into bizarre behaviour. “I saw people buying these monkey pictures on the internet for a quarter of a million dollars and I bought one myself, and that really led me to start the company,” says Bartlett, referring to the craze for Bored Ape NFTs. 

The next wave he’s betting on is AI. “Never in our lives have we seen the disruption of intelligence. The industrial revolution disrupted our muscles—we had robots and machines that could do things, but we still had our intelligence. And now AI disrupts our intelligence, which is really the thing that we had left,” says Bartlett. “What are you going to do about it? Are you going to pretend it’s not happening? Or are you going to lean in? All the opportunity and value is captured from leaning in.”

From adoption of AI in his own companies, including experimenting with AI-generated podcast content, to investing in AI businesses such as AI inference platform Groq, Bartlett is also learning from the experts, with AI a frequent topic of discussion on The Diary of a CEO.

“One of the remarkable things that I found from interviewing some of these AI billionaires is that their other investments were often in things that were community-centric and in real life. They realise that poles rise together and that in a world of automation, we’re going to have a lot of free time to spend on other things. They call it the age of abundance. And I didn’t believe that at the start, but I do believe that humans are going to find a way to be happier and better.”

Like those AI billionaires, Bartlett is investing in community-centric and in-person gatherings too. “I think the next great opportunity as a creator is to bring people together in the real world around your IP [intellectual property], whether that's a human IP or brand IP, and create environments where people get value from each other and from being part of that group.” Bartlett has plans to put on “thousands” of events for small groups of people all over the world. “I’m going to be spending lots of money—probably millions—on these small community [Diary of a] CEO events in every corner of the world to bring the community together, to meet each other, to network, to do whatever happens when you bring like-minded people together in a room for a couple of hours.”

As well as these small-scale events, larger The Diary of a CEO communities will soon be gathering, as Bartlett brings his live speaking tour to Asia for the first time.

He’s excited for the expansion of horizons that accompanies travel. “I get to learn about the people that live in these regions, the opportunity in these regions, how culture impacts those opportunities and how culture is interacting with technology and change. I can imagine myself starting businesses in Asia one day, so I’m hoping to meet lots of entrepreneurs, and maybe invest in some as well.”

Our allotted hour is almost up, and with time for one final question, in the style of The Diary of a CEO, I ask if Bartlett would leave a question for our next Tatler cover star. He thinks for a moment before saying that the interviewer should ask what they could have done differently that would have made the experience better for the subject. It’s something that Bartlett asks all his The Diary of a CEO guests once recording stops. “It feeds into a wider philosophy that a good piece of criticism is worth its weight in gold and if we’re truly in pursuit of being better and doing things better, we should seek that out. Most people won’t [give it to you], but you have to press them.”

So, what feedback would he give about today’s interview? He quips, “If it had been at 11am, it would have been better for me!” And before I can press him further, our time is up, leaving him free to return to the high-stakes, million-dollar decisions that he is proving every day to be so adept at making. 

Steven Bartlett presents The Business & Life Speaking Tour takes place across Asia in September 2025; for more details and tickets visit: https://www.forthecurious.asia/

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