About

Uri Gonda

Uri Gonda is a scaleup coach and institutional innovation architect who has coached over 1,400 startup founders and corporate intrapreneurs in teams creating more than $1.6B in business value.

Innovation & Acceleration

Institutional Innovation for Global Transformation

As senior Entrepreneur in Residence at Citi Ventures, Uri led the coaching curriculum for Citigroup’s D10X incubator, setting up a permanent capability to support 100 startups every year founded by intrapreneurs from Citi‘s +200,000 employees globally, across the consumer bank and institutional clients group, that serve 200M customer accounts in 160 countries and facilitate +$3 trillion in financial flows.

Within D10X he coached Proxymity from concept through launch, which was spun out with $20M of investment from JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, BNY Mellon, Computershare, Clearstream and State Street, followed by $31M Series B in 2021.

Startup Incubation & Acceleration At Scale

As Entrepreneur in Residence at Wayra, TelefónicaO2’s network of startup and scaleup accelerators, Uri has coached companies across the UK portfolio (194 startups valued at +$1.1 billion). Founded in 2011, Wayra is the world’s largest Open Innovation Hub providing access to 350 million Telefónica customers and clients in 15 countries.

As part of regional and domain-specific startup accelerators built in partnership with government and enterprise, Uri has coached companies in programmes including the NCSC Cyber Accelerator (with GCHQ), Health Hub (MSD-Merck, Novartis), Intelligent Mobility (Hyundai, Network Rail, Ferrovial, Stagecoach), Scaleups (Innogy), Edison Accelerator (GE Healthcare) and the AI & Blockchain Accelerator (University of Edinburgh, Cisco).

Coaching & Leadership Development

Startup Coaching to Achieve Scaleup Maturity

Uri coaches startups and scaleups from seed through growth and early scale (2-250 employees), working with founders and their teams to accelerate commercial outcomes (e.g. reducing sales cycles from 18 to 9 months) and growth milestones (e.g. 15X pipeline, +$10M funding, key hires) and support rapid transformation as they double in size every 3-6 months (OKRs, culture, executive development).

Supporting Growth for Founders & Leaders

Uri advises companies on go-to-market and growth strategy, sales acceleration, positioning, product development, key hiring and bar raising, and serves as a sounding board for CEOs and senior executives working through the human and operational challenges of young and maturing organisations, providing real-world playbooks for common and uncommon challenges.

He has mentored and trained startups at more than 20 startup accelerators globally, including Techstars and MassChallenge, and has been a guest lecturer at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School and Oxford University’s Incubator.

Previously, Uri served as VP Marketing for Ceedo, a virtualisation software company (funded by Intel Capital), and as Entrepreneur in Residence at Tzina, an international broadcast media group, where he built and managed consumer and enterprise products that shipped in the millions worldwide, across industries spanning enterprise software, web services, consumer electronics and broadcast television.

If you’d like to learn more or discuss working together to improve, inspire and instruct your teams, please connect directly.