Pivot Is the Strategy: What Two Oxford Founders Taught Us About Building Things That Last

Neither business ended up where it began. Cici Muldoon's company, Serox, first analysed the chemical signature of wine through the glass, using laser spectroscopy and machine learning, before turning the same physics, photonics, quantum sensing and AI, towards human health. The leap from beverage to biofluid sounds eccentric until the principle is clear: both are complex dilute liquids whose composition can be read from how they scatter light.

Muldoon was candid that she resisted the move, telling her chairman she had no wish to go near biofluids. The literature on detecting cancer in urine changed her mind. Serox pivoted in 2022 and is now preparing a US regulatory submission for a non-invasive, point-of-care bladder-cancer test.

Lukas Feddern's path was equally indirect, and he was refreshingly honest about it. His first company, Seneca Learning, was born less of conviction than of a graduate's generic urge to start something. It nonetheless grew past twelve million users and most UK secondary schools before an eight-figure acquisition by GoStudent, where he went on to co-lead AI. Novabook, his current venture in start-up finance, emerged only afterwards, from a costly accounting error during that very exit.

The lesson: durable companies are seldom the product of an original master plan. They are the residue of intelligent adaptation. The skill that matters is not being right first, but recognising the better idea when the work surfaces it.

Strip away the surface novelty and the core opportunity in each venture is the same: a process that is slow, costly, invasive or error-prone, which everyone has quietly accepted as unavoidable.

Muldoon's case rested on a striking claim, that the large majority of cystoscopies, an uncomfortable camera-based investigation, return negative results. If so, many patients endure weeks of anxiety and a procedure they did not need, while systems absorb the cost and genuine cases wait. A rapid urine test at the point of care would not merely showcase clever physics; it would remove delay, expense and fear from a failing pathway.

Feddern made a quieter version of the same argument about start-up finance, which he characterised as needlessly expensive and error-prone because firms stitch together disconnected tools and outsource specialist work, compounding both cost and mistakes. His answer is integrated software that frees human accountants for the judgement-heavy work that genuinely adds value.

The implication: the most defensible opportunities often hide inside processes so dysfunctional that people have stopped noticing the dysfunction. The technology is the means; the broken system is the market.

The kick-off's quietly radical point concerned where good companies come from. Feddern observed that many graduates want to start a company in the abstract, and so gravitate towards whatever is fashionable, which is why, he noted, so many near-identical edtech ventures appear. His more serious business came later, from a problem that had personally cost him.

This inverts a common assumption. Ambition is treated as the engine of entrepreneurship, yet ambition detached from a specific, felt problem tends to produce derivative companies in crowded markets. Muldoon's arc echoes the point: her driving obsession was never to be a founder but to understand how matter interacts with light, an obsession that eventually found a problem worth solving.

For those of us building programmes and accelerators, this raises an uncomfortable challenge: success should not be measured by how many people are encouraged to start companies, but our job is to expose talented people to real problems that are worth solving, not merely to encourage them to start things.

This insight belongs largely to one voice, and we present it as such, though it happens to match what we see every week. Reflecting on why she co-founded the Oxford Angels Network, Muldoon described an ecosystem rich in ingredients but poor in coordination: a set of silos, with institutions and initiatives replicating one another's work and competing rather than combining.

She contrasted this with an American instinct to collaborate, merge and find synergy, and said her own reflex on hearing of a ‘competitor’ is to call them and explore working together. She also challenged the narrow equation of the “Oxford ecosystem” with university spin-outs alone, pointing to the wider constellation of research campuses and independent start-ups across Oxfordshire that fall outside the usual cap tables, and therefore outside the usual support.

If the diagnosis holds, and we think it largely does, it reframes the problem: the intervention required may be less about more money or more incubators than about connective infrastructure: the networks, norms and introductions that let existing resources flow to where they are most useful.

From opposite sides of the table, both speakers converged on the same conclusion: money alone no longer differentiates. Muldoon's angel network is explicitly designed to recruit venture builders and exited entrepreneurs, people who bring more than capital. Feddern, now an angel as well as a founder, framed value in terms of fit and introductions rather than cheques.

The implication for investors is direct: as capital commoditises, the premium shifts to operational support, distribution and trusted networks. For founders, it argues for choosing money by what travels alongside it.