Welcome to the second series of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. To new listeners, my name

is Jimmy McLaughlin, and I used to advise the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on

business, specialising in technology and entrepreneurship. I left 10 Downing Street to start a family.

I figured that I just needed a bit of headspace after a few high-octane years to work out

what to do with my career next. I called that spectacularly wrong, and have utterly failed

to transition careers properly. Now, admittedly, I went to study in California for a few months

and a global pandemic intervened on all of our lives. For me and my young family, it meant

my wife left maternity leave early and returned to the NHS as a hospital doctor. That meant

I became a stay-at-home dad from Downing Street to diapers or from Prime Ministerial briefings

to Peppa Pig as that chapter in my much-trailed autobiography will be born. As for all of

us, it gave me even more time to reflect and think about the world around us. It dawned

on me that if I was finding it so hard to make this career transition, how were people

without the benefit of my contacts going to be able to do this? With unemployment about

to surge, it seemed even more to the point. That is where the idea of this podcast came

from. Sometimes we talk about the lightbulb moment for entrepreneurs, but in reality,

it is more like one of those old fluorescent lights that flickers a few times before properly

turning on. So I thought I'd ask my entrepreneurial friends to come on the show and have a bit

of a chat about where they were creating jobs, and so this podcast was born. The launch and

pilot series went better than I anticipated, and we went into Apple's top 20 business

podcasts just above the Harvard Business Review. Most pleasingly, we have a number of listeners

who've applied to be at the companies that have been on the show, and are now working

at some of the amazing companies like Bulb and Dakota. So the second series will bring

...