Jordan Richards joined Google as an apprentice at 18 and became a design lead before founding &above, a London AI product design and build studio whose clients include Google, Tesco and Revolut. The studio says the Gemini Sales Sidekick agent it built for Google Cloud has 5,000 monthly active users and saves sellers 64 per cent of the time the work took manually. Based in Borough, &above says it is a certified Anthropic and Google Cloud partner. He tells Business Matters why having AI is only the starting point and why there are no failures, only learnings.
What do you currently do at &above?
I am the founder and CEO of &above, an AI product design and build studio.
We help businesses take AI from experimentation into something that actually works in the real world. That might mean designing and building an AI workflow, developing an AI-powered product, or helping a business work out where AI can genuinely create value.
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My role is a combination of building the business, working with clients and helping shape what we build. I am very close to the creative and product side of the work.
I started my career at Google as an apprentice at 18 and went on to become a design lead. That experience had a huge influence on how I think about technology. Working with a company operating at that scale taught me a lot about craft, systems and the importance of solving the right problem.
Today, I am interested in applying those lessons to a very different technology moment. AI has created an enormous amount of opportunity, but also an enormous amount of experimentation. Businesses have access to incredibly powerful models, but having the technology is only the starting point. The interesting question is what you build around it and how it changes the way a business actually operates.
That is where I think &above has a role to play.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
I have always been a builder, and creativity and entrepreneurship have always been intertwined for me. My time at Google showed me what was possible when technology, creativity and really talented people come together. But it also made me realise that there was an opportunity to work differently.
When I started my own businesses, I wanted to create environments where people could move quickly, experiment and build things without having to navigate huge amounts of bureaucracy. That thinking eventually led to &above.
The arrival of AI made the opportunity even more interesting. We suddenly had technology that could fundamentally change how products and businesses are built, but there was a big gap between having access to an AI model and actually putting it to work. I did not want to build another business that simply talked about AI; I wanted us to be the people who actually build with it.
For me that is still the exciting part: taking something that feels quite abstract and turning it into something useful.
Who do you admire?
Someone I admire a lot is Toto Wolff, partly because of my passion for motorsport but mostly because of what he has built at Mercedes. What interests me is not just winning; it is the ability to build a high-performing team and create an environment where people continually push themselves to improve. I admire that relentless pursuit of excellence. Even when you are not leading, you do not stop pushing. You look at what is not working, learn from it and keep moving forward.
There are a lot of parallels between elite sport and entrepreneurship. At the highest level, performance is not just about talent or working harder. It is about building the right team, being disciplined, looking after your mind and body, recovering properly and being able to perform consistently over a long period of time.
Entrepreneurship can be relentless, and you cannot expect yourself or your team to perform at your best indefinitely without investing in the people behind the performance.
For me, high performance is not about constantly being at 100 per cent. It is about creating the conditions that allow you to reach 100 per cent when it matters, and having the resilience to keep going when things do not go your way.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
There are obviously things I would change, but I try not to think about them as failures. One of the phrases I have always lived by is: “There are no failures, only learnings.” The hardest periods have often taught me the most. What has changed as we have grown is how deliberately we capture those learnings.
We now run what we call “washups” when something has not gone as well as we wanted it to. We take the time to understand what happened, where we could have turned it around, what we missed and what we can do differently next time.
That is much more useful than looking at an outcome and simply saying it did not work.
If anything, I would have developed that mindset earlier: being less concerned about getting everything right first time and more focused on creating a culture where we can identify what is not working, learn quickly and improve.
I have also learned that building a business is a long game. In technology especially, it is tempting to put speed above everything else. Speed matters, but quality matters too. A decision that saves you a week today but creates a problem for the business two years from now is not necessarily a fast decision. It is just a decision that moved the problem somewhere else. I have become much more interested in building things that can last and scale, and a team that gets better every time we do something.
What defines your way of doing business?
Curiosity, creativity and a willingness to get stuck in.
A big part of my apprenticeship at Google was learning on the job. I had to get involved, ask questions, make mistakes, learn quickly and figure things out as I went.
Some of the best learning happens when you get stuck in and work things out in practice. That does not mean rushing. One of the things I have learned is that moving quickly and thinking carefully are not opposites.
I like getting close to a problem, understanding it properly, making something, putting it in front of people and learning from what happens. That mindset is particularly important in AI because the technology is changing so quickly. You cannot build a five-year plan around assumptions that might be obsolete in six months.
I also care a lot about the people I work with. The best businesses I have been involved in have been built by people with different skills and perspectives working together. Design, technology, strategy and commercial thinking should not exist in separate silos.
And I believe strongly in ownership. If we build something for a client, I want it to become a useful part of their business. A successful project is not just something that looks good in a presentation. It is something that people actually use and that creates a meaningful outcome.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Start building. You do not need to have everything figured out before you begin; in fact, you probably never will. When I look back to being 13 and selling phone case designs, I had no business plan and knew nothing about entrepreneurship. I just saw something I could create and wondered if someone would pay for it. That instinct is still useful. Find something you care about, find a real problem and start experimenting.
Learn how things work rather than depending on other people to make everything for you. You do not have to become an expert in every discipline, but understanding how technology, design, marketing and business fit together gives you a huge advantage.
Look after yourself, too. Entrepreneurship can easily become all-consuming. I have learned to think about myself like an athlete: you need periods of intense performance, but you also need training, recovery and time away from the game. You do not need to be working every hour to be ambitious.
Finally, stay curious. The people who will create the most interesting businesses in the age of AI will not necessarily be the ones who know everything today. They will be the ones who are willing to keep learning, keep experimenting and keep building. That is certainly the approach I am trying to take with &above.
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