Pablo, serial entrepreneur and musician
Pablo Ettinger is an entrepreneur, investor, and mentor who's spent four decades building businesses across industries that have nothing in common except that he somehow ended up involved in all of them.
The Journey
Early Years
Born to refugee parents who fled to Britain with nothing, Pablo grew up understanding that being an outsider wasn't a disadvantage—it was an opportunity to see things differently. This perspective would prove invaluable throughout his entrepreneurial career.
His business education began not in a classroom but in a Sahara Desert explosives depot, where he worked in seismograph services mapping oil reserves across Libya. It was an unconventional start that taught him more about confidence, adaptability, and making decisions under pressure than any textbook could.
After completing an MBA at INSEAD (achieved through sheer bloody-minded determination and a decent GMAT score), Pablo worked for 13 years in corporate life at Courtaulds. He lasted long enough to learn that large organisations moved far too slowly for his taste, and that the best way to learn from others' expensive mistakes was to watch them make acquisitions they shouldn't have made.
Coffee Years
In 1998, Pablo’s INSEAD friend, Gerry Ford (founder of Caffè Nero), who had just acquired five London retail premises, asked Pablo to help sort out the food and beverage offer. What was supposed to be a twelve-week consulting project working with Gerry turned into something much bigger. Twenty-eight-year later, those five shops have become one of the UK's largest coffee chains.
As Commercial Director, Pablo helped build Caffè Nero from a start up into a highly professional business which now has over 1,200 stores across twelve countries. The journey involved:
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Opening stores at a rate of one per week during peak growth
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Surviving the brutal reality of cash flow that would have killed most businesses
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Competing against Starbucks, Costa, and better-funded rivals
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Seeing the company taken public on the London Stock Exchange (and learning to dislike the City in the process)
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Seeing the business taken private in order to regain control
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Working on food and beverage to see the business go into Turkey, Poland, the UAE, the United States, and eight other countries
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Integrating music into the brand (120 baristas running a coffee bar and stage at music festivals)
He nearly burned out at 290 stores before rediscovering his entrepreneurial spark through helping with international expansion.
Today, Caffè Nero remains a significant part of Pablo's life, though he's stepped back from day-to-day operations to focus on what he actually enjoys: music, building new ventures and mentoring emerging entrepreneurs.
Investment Years
Since 2009, Pablo has been an active angel investor, backing thirty-six early-stage businesses across food, technology, music, and various other sectors. His investment philosophy is brutally simple: back people, not ideas. Teachability beats knowledge. And if the entrepreneur can't articulate their business model clearly, run away.
His track record is instructive precisely because it's honest. Some investments returned 10x. Many returned nothing. Overall, he's roughly broken even, which he considers a success given that the real value has been the education and the relationships, not the financial returns.
Through his involvement with the E100 angel network at London Business School and the INSEAD angel network, Pablo has learned more about what kills businesses than what makes them succeed. Turns out failure is an excellent teacher, especially when it's expensive.
Key lessons from angel investing:
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Great founders aren't necessarily great CEOs
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Business models either work or they don't (and most don't)
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Family boards are death traps.
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Getting emotionally invested destroys judgment.
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The entrepreneur is everything.
Music Ventures
In 2017, Pablo attended a fundraising event at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he was invited to play piano with Jamie Cullum. One spontaneous boogie-woogie performance in front of 400 wealthy attendees sparked a conversation with Lord Mervyn Davies, which led to the co-founding of TALENTBANQ—a live music agency and record label supporting emerging artists.
TALENTBANQ reflects Pablo's long-standing passion for music and his belief that talent emerges from unexpected places. The business now books 20-30 performances weekly across London and has built a genuine community of artists and venues.
Through TALENTBANQ, Pablo has learned that building something meaningful often matters more than building something maximally profitable. Not every venture needs to be a billion-pound exit. Sometimes the point is the impact, the community, and the joy of the work itself.
Pablo also plays in a jazz quartet, Ivory Pablo & the Blue Notes, which performs occasionally.
Turnaround Years
Since 2022, Pablo has been deeply involved in one of his most challenging ventures: saving Presto Coffee from insolvency and transforming it into a genuine disruptor in the instant coffee market.
When Pablo met James, the founder, Presto was a mess: James owned only 9% of his own company, toxic shareholders controlled 60%, the business had never made a penny of profit, accounts hadn't been produced in months, and hidden debts kept appearing like unwelcome guests at a dinner party.
What followed was a masterclass in crisis management, creative problem-solving, and the importance of balance sheets:
Buying out toxic shareholders for the price of a single latte (after properly terrifying them first)
Raising investment despite a balance sheet that looked like a crime scene
Developing revolutionary cardboard tube packaging (over a year of R&D)
Creating genuinely premium instant coffee that won awards and impressed industry experts
Securing listings with major retailers (Tesco Ireland, Aldi Ireland, Waitrose)
Growing from insolvency to 220 Waitrose stores in eighteen months
Presto demonstrates everything Pablo believes about entrepreneurship: the entrepreneur matters more than the idea, cash flow kills more businesses than bad products, innovation takes forever, and boring markets hide the best opportunities.
Mentoring Years
Perhaps Pablo's most satisfying work in recent years has been mentoring first-time entrepreneurs who demonstrate teachability, persistence, and honest self-assessment.
His most notable success is Saskia, a musician who approached him in 2024 about turning her music competition into "a proper business." At their first meeting over breakfast at the Grosvenor House, Saskia couldn't define a profit and loss statement, had no idea what shareholders were, and was running a sophisticated international operation entirely for free.
Eighteen months later, she'd raised £250,000 from sophisticated investors at London Business School, was running professional board meetings, and had built Talent is Timeless into a genuinely valuable business—all whilst retaining the soul and purpose that made it special.
For Pablo, Saskia's transformation proves his core thesis: entrepreneurs aren't born, they're made. What matters isn't pre-existing knowledge or perfect preparation. It's teachability, persistence, and the willingness to admit what you don't know and then learn it fast.
Current Activities
Today, Pablo remains actively involved in:
Caffè Nero: Part-time involvement focusing on the music programme; primarily managing the in store playlist and the annual music festival!
Ettinger of London: Luxury leather goods, a family business
Presto Coffee: Active board member supporting growth into major retailers
Talent is Timeless: Mentor and board member supporting Saskia's leadership.
: Co-founder and active participant in London's music scene
Sams Restaurants: Fabulous West London brasseries
Maison la Cerisaie: In the French Alps, hosting songwriting, yoga, scale-up and leadership retreats
Angel investing: Selective investments in early-stage businesses, preferring active involvement over passive capital.
: Working with entrepreneurs who demonstrate teachability and persistence
He's also seriously considering another opportunity in the music industry that's either brilliant or completely mad. His wife suspects the latter, but that's never stopped him before.
Philosophy
Pablo's approach to entrepreneurship can be summarised in a few key principles:
On Success: "You don't need to be special. You need to be teachable, persistent, and honest about what you don't know."
On Failure: "I've failed publicly and expensively. Locallife lost investors' money. Angel investments went nowhere. These failures taught me more than the successes ever did."
On Scale: "There's an optimal size for every entrepreneur. Know yours and stay there. I'm a 10-to-100 person company guy. Put me in charge of 1,000 people, and I'll make everyone miserable."
On Innovation: "The best opportunities hide in boring markets. While everyone chases sexy, well-funded, over-hyped opportunities, the real money hides in markets that seem stale or too difficult."
On Cash Flow: "You can have the best product in the world. If you run out of cash, you're dead. Balance sheets aren't optional."
On Partners: "Who you build with matters as much as what you build. Be ruthlessly selective. And if you're already stuck with the wrong partners, face the confrontation now. It only gets worse with time."
On Advice: "Take the principles, ignore the specifics, trust your judgment. What worked for me in coffee won't work for you in software."