"A true disruptor" – Sir Richard Branson

Dan Kieran is a writer, entrepreneur, lecturer, speaker and mentor.

He is the author (and editor) of fourteen books including the infamous bestseller Crap Towns, The Idle Traveller (Slow Travel in Germany), The Surfboard and Do Start: How to create and run a business (that doesn’t run you). He has also written for the Times, the Guardian, The Telegraph and the Observer.

He co-founded Unbound.com, the award-winning publishing platform that he led as CEO for over eleven years, taking the business from an idea on a piece of paper to a global, multimillion-pound and profitable company that has published books like Letters of Note, The Good Immigrant, Mary Anne Sate, Imbecile, The Wake and Cain’s Jawbone. Having stepped down as CEO of Unbound in March 2022 to write books again, he remains on the board as a NED and now teaches the entrepreneurial module of the Publishing MA at University College London. In his mentoring practice he helps entrepreneurs on the Second Journey – the journey to the edge of what they think they are capable of and beyond ­– to keep them ahead of the demands running a business places on them. He also runs individual mentoring sessions, to advise on the loneliest and most difficult tasks founders and CEOs face as they come up.
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Dan has given talks about his books and entrepreneurial journey at places including the EU Parliament, Google, The Do Lectures, The Canon Future Book Forum in Munich (pictured), Toronto's Book Summit, the London Book Fair, FutureBook, the Hay on Wye Literary Festival, The Graz Fifteen Seconds Festival, The Good Life Experience, The Glastonbury Festival's University of Ideas and Cambridge University.

A popular interviewee, he has appeared on a range of UK and European TV shows and radio programmes including BBC Breakfast News, Channel Four News, Sky News, ITV News, the Today Programme and You and Yours on BBC Radio 4, BBC’s The One Show, Newsnight, Radio 2 and FiveLive. He also co-presented a documentary on BBC Radio 4 about a month-long journey across England in a 1957 electric milk float called ‘Three Men In A Float’ for a book of the same name. 

WATCH
‍A thirty-minute interview about Do Start and The Second Journey for the Sage Sound Advice podcast. This is a good way to get a feel for who I am and what I’ll be like to work with. 

READ
An overview of the Second Journey that I wrote for SME Today.