Louise Broni-Mensah

Louise Broni-Mensah is the Founder and CEO of Shoobs, an online event booking platform. She is also an award-winning entrepreneur and speaker with over a decade of experience at the intersection of technology, entertainment and culture. Drawing on her first-hand knowledge of building and leading a business over the long term, Louise brings candid commercial insight to entrepreneurship, raising capital, resilience, innovation and identifying opportunities others overlook. Her talks combine real-world entrepreneurial insight with practical lessons and strategies that audiences can apply to their own businesses, careers, and ambitions.

Louise studied Mathematical Sciences at the University of Birmingham, but her passion for music and live events was already shaping her ambitions. While at university, she presented on Burn FM and worked as a Sony Music Campus Representative. After graduating, she completed internships at several record labels before embarking on a career in finance, joining UBS Investment Bank and later becoming Head of Investment Services at the Wellcome Trust. These experiences gave her a distinctive perspective on navigating established organisations and understanding commercial and investment landscapes. Alongside her corporate career, Louise continued to pursue her passion for music, managing an independent hip-hop artist. It was this experience that sparked the idea for Shoobs and prompted her transition into entrepreneurship.

Founded in 2010 and launched in 2013, Shoobs was the UK's first Black-owned entertainment ticketing site, offering a dedicated space for audiences to discover and book events celebrating music and culture. Under Louise's leadership, Shoobs has grown to reach millions of consumers across the UK. In 2014, she became the first Black female founder to secure funding from Y Combinator, a renowned Silicon Valley start-up accelerator behind companies such as Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox. Her achievements gained further recognition in 2018 when she was selected for the Morgan Stanley Multicultural Innovation Lab and the Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women programme. In 2019, the Financial Times also named her among the UK's 100 most influential Black, Asian and minority ethnic leaders in technology.

An experienced speaker across business, technology, entrepreneurship, music and culture, Louise has spoken at leading industry conferences, including MIDEM, the International Live Music Conference, The Europas and the National Association of College and University Entrepreneurs’ Student Enterprise Conference. She has also spoken for organisations including Warner Music, JPMorgan Chase and General Assembly. Her media appearances include BBC One, E4, BBC Radio and NME, and she has featured on the Evening Standard’s Women Tech Charge podcast, sharing insights on entrepreneurship, finding the right idea, raising capital and building a technology company.

A sought-after speaker, Louise delivers talks on entrepreneurship, resilience, the realities of building a business, raising capital, becoming investment-ready, standing out and securing a place at the world’s leading start-up accelerators. She also explores how to identify underserved markets and turn cultural insight into commercial opportunity, alongside the challenges of gender, race and access to capital. Drawing on more than a decade of first-hand entrepreneurial experience, Louise offers audiences an honest, engaging perspective on what it really takes to build a company, combining hard-won lessons with practical insights and actionable advice to help turn ambition into action.