Here’s a scenario most founders know all too well: You meet someone at a networking event, the conversation clicks, and by the end of the night they want to invest in your company. Great news. Except what follows is anything but: weeks of back-and-forth between lawyers, thousands of pounds in fees, and a pile of documents neither of you fully understands — all for a deal that, at its core, is actually pretty straightforward.

It’s the kind of friction founders learn to tolerate, simply because it’s always been there. Fundraising is supposed to be painful. Legal is supposed to be slow. And so the cycle continues.

That’s exactly the kind of problem Anthony Rose set out to fix — and it’s what we unpack in the latest episode of Flipping the Playbook. Anthony is the co-founder and CEO of SeedLegals, the platform that now closes more funding rounds in the UK than anyone else. But what makes the conversation interesting isn’t just what he’s built — it’s how he thinks about growth, trust, and the mechanics of building something people actually rely on.

Anthony’s track record gives him a rare perspective on that. Before SeedLegals, he led the team that built BBC iPlayer — one of the BBC’s most significant digital products. Before that, he was working in the early internet era on peer-to-peer music and internet video. He’s someone who has built things that matter, more than once, in very different environments.

Building a business by removing friction

The origin of SeedLegals is a good place to start, because it illustrates something Anthony believes deeply: the best businesses are built around removing friction that people have stopped noticing. Founders had simply accepted that fundraising was painful. Lawyers were expensive, slow, and spoke in a language designed to justify their fees rather than serve their clients.

But Anthony saw something others hadn’t fully acted on. The documents themselves were almost identical across thousands of deals — the valuation changes, but the structure doesn’t. If that’s true, why does every round get treated as if it’s being invented from scratch? SeedLegals was his answer to that question.

What struck me most in our conversation wasn’t the product itself — it was how Anthony talks about trust. Building credibility in a high-stakes category like legal is genuinely hard, especially when you’re starting from zero.

His response was disarmingly practical: go after the customers who are most willing to move quickly. Early-stage founders, he explained, are scrappy by nature. They don’t have the luxury of 18-month procurement cycles. They need to close their round and get back to building. That makes them the ideal early adopter — not just because they’ll convert, but because when it works, they’ll tell everyone.

That insight — find the people who make decisions fastest — runs through everything Anthony does. It’s how SeedLegals chose its first customers. It’s how he thinks about go-to-market. And it explains why, as SeedLegals expands into the US, he’s starting in New York rather than trying to be everywhere at once. You find the pocket where momentum is possible, prove it works, and then build from there.

Sales vs marketing: Stop mixing the two

The conversation also touched on something many founders underestimate: the difference between sales and marketing, and why confusing the two is one of the most common and costly mistakes an early-stage company can make.

Anthony’s way of framing it is simple — are you selling ants, or elephants? If you’re selling something small and high-volume, there is no real sales process; it has to be marketing all the way down. If you’re selling something large and complex, marketing alone won’t close the deal. The mistake founders make is applying the wrong motion to the wrong product, and then wondering why nothing converts.

On the topic of hiring, Anthony was equally direct. He’s sceptical of bringing in senior marketing leaders too early — not because experience isn’t valuable, but because someone who is used to building a team often doesn’t want to do the work themselves. In the early days, you need someone who will get their hands dirty. He’d rather have a junior person who loves the brand and grows into the role than someone with a polished CV who costs a fortune and delivers strategy decks instead of results.

Why less choice wins in the end

One moment that stuck with me was when Anthony described something SeedLegals does that feels counterintuitive but is central to its success: they deliberately make some things hard to change. On a traditional legal document, every word is negotiable, which leads to endless back-and-forth over details that don’t really matter.

SeedLegals takes a different approach. It locks in the parts that don’t need to change, so both sides can focus on what actually does. The result is that 98% of rounds on the platform complete without requiring anything outside its standard structure. Less choice, done well, beats infinite flexibility every time.

There’s a lot more in this episode — including Anthony’s take on AI’s impact on startup fundraising, his framework for how founders should think about their time, and what he’d want to see from a new CMO in their first 90 days.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred platform. Search for Flipping the Playbook — and if you enjoy it, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.