The New Rules of Building a Career and a Company
June Angelides explains why careers and companies are becoming increasingly non-linear.
Kiran Gidda and Me + Em
June Angelides, founder of MyPholyo and Levare Ventures
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From Lagos to London, from venture capital to her latest fintech venture, June Angelides has spent her career questioning the rules of work, money and entrepreneurship. Now she believes the next generation will build careers – and companies – very differently. For most of the 20th century, the recipe for a successful working life was reassuringly simple: do well at school, go to university, get a job, work hard and, if things went well, stay there. Angelides thinks that model is changing. Not because people have stopped wanting careers, but because the world of work has evolved. A job can disappear. An industry can be transformed almost overnight. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already redrawing the boundaries of what people do for a living. And increasingly, the people best equipped to weather those changes may not be those with one immaculate career ladder, but those who have built a portfolio of skills, relationships and income streams. Angelides has a name for them: the ‘multi-income earner.’ It is also the thinking behind MyPholyo, the company she is building after years as an investor and entrepreneur. Its purpose is straightforward: to help people understand what their skills are worth, where their income is coming from, what they should be charging and, crucially, which opportunities are actually worth their time. As she puts it, “the labour market has changed faster than the infrastructure that exists to support it.”
In 2026, a mortgage application still asks for one income. A CV tells the story of one career. Yet more people are now working across jobs, projects and businesses. Angelides has met people juggling seven things at once, often undercharging or taking on work simply because it looks good on paper. One woman had taken a role with BAFTA. “The logo sounds amazing,” she said. But it wasn’t paying enough for the time involved. The answer isn’t to work harder, but to understand what that time was worth. That thinking sits behind MyPholyo, which is building data around portfolio careers to help people benchmark their rates and spot where they may be leaving money on the table.
So far, 65% of MyPholyo users didn’t know their effective hourly rate. More than 300 have used the Mapper, with 59% targeting over £100,000 in revenue this year. This isn’t a side-hustle crowd. It reflects a wider shift in global entrepreneurship: people are building careers around their skills, rather than a single job. “We don’t talk about money enough,” Angelides says. MyPholyo aims to give people better information about what their time is worth – from speaking fees to board roles and fractional work. “I’m not saying go and do 10 jobs,” she says, “but do the actual jobs that compound and make sense for you.” Angelides’ career reflects her belief in learning and access. She began in banking, working with early-stage technology businesses, and in 2015 decided to learn to code while on maternity leave from Silicon Valley Bank. With a toddler and baby at home, she attended the General Assembly while her sister waited outside with the baby. “She cried the entire time,” Angelides recalls. Realising there had to be a better way, she approached Code First Girls about creating a programme for mothers. They introduced her to ThoughtWorks, which offered her space to run the programme. Angelides then approached contacts across the technology industry to see if they would teach, and they agreed.
What began as a maternity-leave project became Mums in Tech, teaching women to turn ideas into products through coding. Angelides ran 12 cohorts and taught 250 women before leaving Silicon Valley Bank to build it full time. Raising investment revealed another problem: women and underrepresented founders struggled to access funding. “There just wasn’t a playbook.” Angelides began asking how many promising businesses never got started because the right investor was never found. Her answer was to move to the other side of the table. Today, Angelides invests in early-stage businesses through Levare Ventures, with a focus on opportunities beyond the main markets. Africa is one. Having grown up in Nigeria in an entrepreneurial family, she has long admired the resourcefulness of founders there. “There are a lot of problems and a lot of talent. All that’s missing is capital.” She has invested across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Senegal, but stresses that Africa is not one market. Each country has different customers, regulations, payment systems and cultural expectations. “You can’t just assume that you win in one market and you’re going to win in the other.” For Angelides, it is a lesson in global entrepreneurship: a business that succeeds in one country cannot simply be copied elsewhere.
Angelides points to Airbnb and Uber as examples of companies that expanded market by market, learning how each worked rather than assuming the same formula would apply everywhere. “Every expansion is a start-up starting all over again,” she says. She believes global founders need humility, recognising that the rules change with geography. The same applies to investors, who must be willing to back businesses before success is obvious. “You are taking a bet on something you believe will have an outsized return.” She cites fintech company Raenest which she backed early and says has since delivered more than an eightfold return. For Angelides, the point is to spot opportunities before everyone else does.
The UK has great talent, entrepreneurs and universities, but Angelides believes it lacks enough long-term capital. UK companies can reach the point where they need serious funding and find deeper pools of investment in the US, potentially moving their headquarters with it. How do we keep entrepreneurs in the UK and UK-owned? She believes the UK should become a stronger customer for its own technology, particularly AI, using it to improve productivity and keep more economic value at home. “We’ve got great talent,” she says, “but who’s relying on the UK?” Angelides sees AI as making entrepreneurship more accessible. She used AI-assisted software to build the first version of MyPholyo, testing the idea before investing heavily. However, she is wary of businesses built on little more than someone else’s AI model. “There is a lot of AI slop on there,” she warns.
For investors, Angelides believes the strongest businesses need more than technology. Proprietary data, distribution and trust can create lasting advantages in global markets. For MyPholyo, data is central to understanding what professionals charge, what different roles are worth and how people build multiple income streams. Angelides sees this as part of a wider shift in entrepreneurship and careers. The traditional model of one employer and one income is no longer the only path. She describes her own approach as a “career stack”, combining investing, public speaking, fractional work and building companies. “If one falls away, I will be okay,” she says. But it’s not just about financial security. It gives her the freedom to take on new opportunities.
Angelides is less interested in turning everyone into an entrepreneur than giving people agency. That idea runs through her career: when she couldn’t find a way to learn that worked for her, she built Mums in Tech; when she saw women struggling to access funding, she became an investor; and when professionals struggled to understand the value of their work, she began building a platform around it. Her approach is simple: find what isn’t working and build something better. She is also comfortable admitting she doesn’t have all the answers. “I wouldn’t be serving anyone if I sat here and said I know it all,” she says.
Angelides’ career has been about spotting opportunities before she has all the answers. Mums in Tech, investing and MyPholyo all grew from seeing a problem and doing something about it. The same thinking applies to global business. Careers are becoming less linear, while companies are being built across markets, borders and cultures. Success no longer comes from simply copying what works elsewhere. It comes from knowing when to adapt. The opportunity, she believes, is in seeing the change early.
From Lagos to London, from venture capital to her latest fintech venture, June Angelides has spent her career questioning the rules of work, money and entrepreneurship. Now she believes the next generation will build careers – and companies – very differently. For most of the 20th century, the recipe for a successful working life was reassuringly simple: do well at school, go to university, get a job, work hard and, if things went well, stay there. Angelides thinks that model is changing. Not because people have stopped wanting careers, but because the world of work has evolved. A job can disappear. An industry can be transformed almost overnight. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already redrawing the boundaries of what people do for a living. And increasingly, the people best equipped to weather those changes may not be those with one immaculate career ladder, but those who have built a portfolio of skills, relationships and income streams. Angelides has a name for them: the ‘multi-income earner.’ It is also the thinking behind MyPholyo, the company she is building after years as an investor and entrepreneur. Its purpose is straightforward: to help people understand what their skills are worth, where their income is coming from, what they should be charging and, crucially, which opportunities are actually worth their time. As she puts it, “the labour market has changed faster than the infrastructure that exists to support it.”
In 2026, a mortgage application still asks for one income. A CV tells the story of one career. Yet more people are now working across jobs, projects and businesses. Angelides has met people juggling seven things at once, often undercharging or taking on work simply because it looks good on paper. One woman had taken a role with BAFTA. “The logo sounds amazing,” she said. But it wasn’t paying enough for the time involved. The answer isn’t to work harder, but to understand what that time was worth. That thinking sits behind MyPholyo, which is building data around portfolio careers to help people benchmark their rates and spot where they may be leaving money on the table.
So far, 65% of MyPholyo users didn’t know their effective hourly rate. More than 300 have used the Mapper, with 59% targeting over £100,000 in revenue this year. This isn’t a side-hustle crowd. It reflects a wider shift in global entrepreneurship: people are building careers around their skills, rather than a single job. “We don’t talk about money enough,” Angelides says. MyPholyo aims to give people better information about what their time is worth – from speaking fees to board roles and fractional work. “I’m not saying go and do 10 jobs,” she says, “but do the actual jobs that compound and make sense for you.” Angelides’ career reflects her belief in learning and access. She began in banking, working with early-stage technology businesses, and in 2015 decided to learn to code while on maternity leave from Silicon Valley Bank. With a toddler and baby at home, she attended the General Assembly while her sister waited outside with the baby. “She cried the entire time,” Angelides recalls. Realising there had to be a better way, she approached Code First Girls about creating a programme for mothers. They introduced her to ThoughtWorks, which offered her space to run the programme. Angelides then approached contacts across the technology industry to see if they would teach, and they agreed.
Patricia Cullen • Features Writer
Entrepreneur Staff
