From Podcast to Platform: Peter Wood’s Mission to Help Graduates Break Into Startups

Peter Wood Article

This week on Profit Meets Purpose, I sat down with Peter Wood to talk about breaking away from conventional career paths after university, a sentiment we both share. Through The Graduate Guide, Peter has shown just how far an idea can go. At only 24, he’s a founder, speaking in Westminster, and driven by a clear mission, to democratise access to meaningful work. Confident and ambitious, eager to run before he walks, Peter is challenging the notion that success must come after ten rounds of corporate interviews. He’s proving there are many new ways for young people to find fulfilling careers and offering them the opportunity he wishes he had.

Listen to the full episode here.

"You don’t ask, you don’t get." That was the mindset that launched what would become The Graduate Guide, a platform bridging graduates with startup opportunities. The company has emerged from a simple podcast started in a university dorm room and become a recruitment and employer branding business working with early-stage talent and visionary founders.

Peter recalls a time when his career options felt narrowly defined. “I found myself in my final year of university doing a history [degree], looking at the options around me and they felt very restricted to roles such as consulting, banking, law.” Instead, he gravitated toward the energy of startups, drawn by a simple curiosity, “There’s this company that I’ve never heard of that’s got four floors of an office in this central location. Who works there?”. Peter recalls following this intuition that there was more out there than he initially realised. 

A Podcast Before There Was a Podcast

The Graduate Guide started with what Peter calls “a bit of Dutch courage.” He approached his old head boy in a pub and pitched a podcast that didn’t yet exist. The first episode was recorded soon after, followed by a bold outreach move, whereby he asked Craig Fenton, ex Managing Director at Google, in front of a large crowd to be a guest on the podcast.

“It’s probably quite hard to say no if I’m in a crowd of people.”

Those early interviews also served as in depth career research. “Some of these founders that I was interviewing actually needed to hire early talent,” Peter explained. That insight became the foundation for his business: “There’s one thing inspiring people to go work in the start-up world, and there’s another thing being able to actually facilitate that.”

From Interviews to Impact

What began as storytelling turned into action. It soon became apparent to Peter that the listeners of The Graduate Guide were the perfect talent pool for the founders that he was bringing onto interview. He realised he had made “an employer brand without really knowing it”. 

Rather than traditional recruitment, Peter’s approach relies on community and authenticity. “We never message people. It’s all inbound, sharing roles and attracting top talent in that way.” The result is over 50 placements so far. 

Listen to the full episode here.

Finding the Right Fit

Peter describes himself as an “ambitious generalist” someone with energy, curiosity, and no clearly defined area of interest. He said of working in startups, “With start-ups, it’s more like what skills would you like to develop, and that’s where the term Founder’s Associate was even born from.”

It’s also about understanding where your value lies. 

“Everyone’s got a set of cards to play with in their career. Some are more glaringly obvious than others,” Peter explains.

He encourages young people to take the time to recognise their strengths early on and to start thinking about how to highlight them in ways that connect meaningfully to potential career paths.

LinkedIn

One tool Peter consistently champions is LinkedIn, which he embraced as a student before it was common. “I just understood that it allowed my curiosity to run wild,” he explained.

“You could go into a supermarket, see a brand, and think, ‘Who was behind the actual curation of it?’ And you can actually reach out to every single one of them.”

But Peter is wary of the copy-paste approach to personal branding. He emphasises the importance of being intentional and authentic, rather than mimicking the tone and tactics of others. His strategy is rooted in sincerity, he creates a sense of trust that encourages people to reach out. It’s this authenticity that has helped him build an inbound business, where opportunities come to him organically.

A Final Thought for Graduates

Peter’s message to students and early-career professionals is simple, start before you’re ready.

“Whether that’s podcasting, learning how to code... fundamentally, you listen to anyone that’s achieved any sort of success in their career, they’ve done something for longer than anyone told them to do, and they did it for reasons that were completely provoked by themselves or sheer luck.”

And when it comes to standing out in a noisy, fast-moving job market? “Don’t rely on your degree, don’t rely on anything, just really think, what am I enjoying getting good at?”

Listen to the full episode here.