'My currency is the people I get to know not the money I make'

Yahoo

19-07-2025

Shalini Khemka puts her people person skills down to moving schools every six months in her early years, with her father's locum work as an orthopaedic consultant. 'I enjoy being with people because I had to keep mixing with new people,' says Khemka.
Her 30-year career has taken in a raft of business and advisory roles, from co-founding the world's first online "bank to bank" trade finance company to launching E2E, an entrepreneurs networking platform.
E2E was founded by Khemka in 2011 largely due, she freely admits, to the mistakes she encountered in her first co-venture and the need to share with other entrepreneurs. Networking and people skills to the fore.
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It was also never intended to be the business it is today, with over 24,000 members and 80% based in the UK, it holds around 50 events annually.
'It's been a massive privilege,' she says. 'My currency is the people I get to know, currency isn't the money I make. It's actually the life experiences.'
'I've got some people I can phone, but I also wonder when people are not part of this kind of community, who do they phone? How do they solve it? That's the problem we're trying to solve for our members.'
The premise is for the community of entrepreneurs, investors and non-execs to make connections for founders, raising capital and securing talent. It is geared towards founders with a £1m plus turnover with its sweet spot in the '10m to £100m range'.
'If they're looking to fundraise, they're a decent founder and we believe in their credibility of the business and where they're trying to take it, we will support them,' adds Khemka.
Born in India, Khemka graduated with an economics degree from University of Essex and worked for Coopers & Lybrand before writing a business plan for the world's first trade finance platform while at Deutsche Bank (DBK.DE).
When its global head of trade finance left and started a company, in 1999, with three other co-founders, Khemka became the fourth using the business plan that she had concocted to trade letters of credit online.
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It was only when she joined the private equity arm at Lloyds (LLOY.L) TSB five years later that she realised shortcomings with her first company and the first seeds were sown at E2E.
Her learnings were three-fold — raise money on time, don't exit too early and have the right advisors around you.
'I had met some amazing entrepreneurs and I realised that I wasn't so amazing and that I'd done some really poor things,' she says. 'So I thought, why don't I help other people not make the mistakes I had?'
Initially, Khemka had sought to help other founders through her employment with Lloyds Development Capital (LDC), who were then backing Richard Branson and the Virgin Racing team. This is where luck plays an important part in life, she adds.
'I got an opportunity to ask Richard to be the president, initially he said no three times, but on the fourth attempt he said yes, and that helped me open the doors to the business it is today.'
With membership starting from £750, E2E's current community consists of 24,000 SMEs who contribute £230bn in turnover to the UK economy and employ over 1m people.
Its tech platform links founders with entrepreneurs based on profile and interests, with expertise ranging from tax issues, boardroom challenges and mental health issues.
'It's very common for entrepreneurs to go through so much stress and they can't talk to their immediate family," says Khemka. 'It's actually better sometimes to talk to a CEO equivalent and how they have coped with it.'
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In 2023, Khemka launched the E2E 100, which showcases the top British companies that are excelling and recognise scale-up entrepreneurship.
'We have to celebrate entrepreneurship a lot more in the UK,' she adds. 'And this is one way of celebrating the people who have made the biggest impact.
"But I'm also doing it to understand what's working well for them, what's not working well, to share with the broader community and be able to then go to government. One of the things that we need to do is make access to funding a lot easier here.
Khemka said last autumn's budget revealed Labour as "not the government for business" following the tax adjustments which would affect both small and large businesses and stymie investment.
'The big thing I'd like to try and achieve is to keep building this ecosystem, keep making the UK the place to start and scale rather than to start and then go elsewhere," she says.
'I want to be solutions-based rather than problem-based and the solution for that is to open the doors for institutional investors to find the UK more attractive through the VC funds.'
It is little wonder that the people person come passionate campaigner for entrepreneurs is venturing towards 25,000 members.
'My dream is that this business becomes the go-to organisation if you're a founder,' she adds.
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