Told by a Teen / Female Founder Stories
Disappointing GCSE Results to Health Tech Pioneer
The conversation
Amanda Philpott was head girl and predicted top grades. She got five Bs and Cs. Thirty years later she left the NHS to build a company that trains your hearing.
Results day
When it came to results day she ended up with just five Bs and Cs. Passes, but not very good grades, and not the ones anyone was expecting. She said she remembers thinking she had ended any chance of a good future.
She had not. That is the entire reason for telling it.
Thirty years, and then a company
Amanda spent three decades in the NHS before founding eargym. Her biggest piece of learning going into entrepreneurship was that you have to be solving somebody’s problem, which sounds obvious until you notice how many businesses are solving their founder’s boredom.
Only one in twenty of us will check our hearing. That is the problem she picked.
Other people, on the hard days
Her advice was to build your networks, because it is always other people who help you through the difficult stretches. She has been at it long enough to know that is not a nice thing to say rather than a real one.
What I took from it
Exams don’t define who you become.
Exams don’t define who you become.
I know that’s the thing adults say, and I know how little it helps in August when you’re holding the envelope. But Amanda actually lived it. Head girl, predicted nines, got Bs and Cs, and it turned out to be the push rather than the ending.
She’s saving people’s hearing now.
