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Strategy lives or dies in the alchemy.
Plans are easy. The meeting cadence, the metric ownership, the way decisions actually get made. That is where strategy becomes real or becomes theatre.
I’m Huw. Fifteen years inside high-growth ventures and the corporates that fund them, six of them at Uber, before becoming an operator and founder in my own right. Sanara is what I do now: a small consulting practice for founders and CEOs building companies that compound.
After spells in investment banking and energy strategy & M&A, I joined Uber in 2015 as a city launcher: literal boots-on-the-ground work, opening new markets across the UK and Ireland. Over the next six years I moved through marketplace, central operations, and the UK leadership team.
In 2017 Transport for London refused to renew Uber’s licence. I built the UK Safety team from scratch in the months that followed, rebuilding relationships with TfL and the Metropolitan Police, engaging MPs, NGOs and public officials, and helping secure the licence renewal that kept 80,000 drivers in work. It is still the hardest, most clarifying work of my career.
I then ran the Rider business across UKI, launched new modalities, and led COVID response and recovery. I left in 2020 to become COO and later CEO of Gyre, a psychology-AI startup applying behavioural science to team performance, and to co-found Koyo Healthtech, a primary care platform live in Nigeria, where I am now an advisor.
Plans are easy. The meeting cadence, the metric ownership, the way decisions actually get made. That is where strategy becomes real or becomes theatre.
The companies that win with AI treat it as a way of working: chained, evaluated, supervised, not as a product spec. I build that discipline.
The most valuable hour of my week with most clients is the unstructured one. The work that follows is downstream of clarity.
If decisions only happen when the founder is in the room, the company has a ceiling. The work is to push real authority outward without losing coherence.
Most operating systems collapse under their own ceremony. The good ones are quiet, repeated, and barely noticed by the people inside them.
I work best with founder or CEO-led organisations between £1m and £50m revenue. Equally at home with early-stage ventures finding their operating shape and later-stage businesses preparing for transformation, transition or exit. The common thread is a leadership team that wants to think well together, not just decide quickly.
Most of the work I do, in any of the engagement shapes, comes back to the same belief. Decision rights sit as close to the information as the work allows. Team-level autonomy is earned through clarity of intent, not handed out by the org chart. The executive team designs the operating system the company runs on, then resists the urge to override it when things get uncomfortable.
A high-performing team isn’t one that works hardest. It’s a team that knows how to disagree well, that updates its model of the world faster than the market moves, and that knows where it’s going clearly enough to say no to the things that aren’t it. The work I do alongside founders and leadership teams is, in the end, about building that capacity.
45 minutes, free, no obligation. We talk about what’s actually weighing on you, and whether I’m the right person to help. If I’m not, I’ll point you somewhere better.
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