Episode overview

This is a return visit. When Jessica Baird Walsh first appeared on Give It A Nudge, she had just come out of the Antler program with her company Remote Social. Three years later she is at KPMG Futures, has co-founded Capital X, and has not missed a single day of running since making a commitment she made partly to stay anchored through a difficult transition. Steve Grace uses the return to explore what the founder-to-corporate pivot actually looks like from the inside, what made a three-person founding team fracture, and what happens to your identity when the startup you built is no longer yours.

What KPMG Futures actually does

KPMG Futures is the innovation arm of the firm. Its mandate is to imagine the future of consulting as technology shifts change every industry, including KPMG’s own. Jessica leads venture partnering, which in practice means building deep commercial relationships between early-stage startups and KPMG’s enterprise client network. She describes it as far less corporate than she expected. She has three young children and works with significant flexibility, often online in the evenings after being present for her kids in the afternoons. The role is not a traditional big four career path.

Why she left Remote Social

Remote Social had a three-person founding team. Jessica is candid that the original idea had been Mariam’s, and ultimately the team developed a significant divergence of opinion on what they were building. With three founders and a split on vision, execution became difficult. Jessica made the call to leave, which she frames as the best thing for the business and the investors even though she did not want to go. She had raised money, believed in the mission, and had strong relationships with the team. The decision was still hard.

760 consecutive days of running

Coming out of Remote Social, Jessica needed something to hold on to. She set a 30-day challenge, running at least 5km every day. She hit 30 days and kept going. When someone asked her publicly how long she would go for, she answered without planning to: a full year, no days off. She hit a year. She hit 760 days as of the time of this episode. In all 760 days, she says only 7 felt genuinely hard. She runs with a group at 4:30am on some mornings, typically does between 40 minutes and an hour, and acknowledges she will eventually need to take rest days to train for longer distances.

Capital X and the female founder funding gap

While at KPMG Futures, Jessica co-founded Capital X, a platform designed to help female founders find investors. She describes it as a passion project that grew out of the structural problem she kept observing from both sides of the table: founders with strong ideas who lacked the network to access capital, and investors who said they wanted to back more women but were not connecting with them. Capital X is live and operating.