Founders track jobs in Manchester

An evening on the operational side of getting from seed to Series A: building a repeatable growth engine, picking a go-to-market motion, and the hiring calls that either compound or cost you a year. Cooper Parry hosts with Exchange Accelerator. The panel is Anish Kapoor (founder and chairman, AccessPay), Harry Panter (co-founder and CEO, Housr), Laura Wiggins (YFM Equity Partners), Ted Tavendale (Puma Growth Partners) and Tom Watts (Cooper Parry), followed by a showcase of Exchange cohort businesses. Doors 17:00, panel from 17:30, finishing around 20:30 with food, drinks and networking at Campfield Studios on Liverpool Road. Free, approval-gated on Luma; the organiser says a few places remain.

GM Business Growth Hub and Innovaud, the innovation agency for the Canton of Vaud, bring Swiss market-entry routes to DiSH Manchester for a morning on the Greater Manchester to Lausanne corridor. The focus is practical: soft-landing and market-entry programmes, university and research collaborations with institutions including EPFL, investor and scale-up networks, and trade and export support. Partner organisations from both sides are in the room, and attendees can request 1-1 meetings with selected partners afterwards through the registration form, with introductions following by email. It runs 09:00 to 12:30 and is free. Eligible businesses need a registered trading address in Greater Manchester; investors and business support organisations are also welcome. No individual speakers are named.

Sixth and last workshop in the NatWest Accelerator's 12-week Sales Accelerator, at the Manchester hub at 1 Spinningfields Square, 09:45 to 12:00. Founders pull the earlier sessions together into one sales playbook using the programme's DEAL framework: customer insight, funnel, metrics and pitch in a single structure. The session also has real founder stories and a Growth Lab on sales resilience. Individual workshops are open to people who haven't done the full programme.

Two hours of founder-to-founder conversation at the DoubleTree by Hilton Piccadilly, run by Techcelerate, the community of first-time and exited tech founders that has been going since 2006. The format is peer discussion with no panels and no pitches. Topics on the table: validating ideas in an AI-saturated market, building products people pay for, acquiring and retaining users, and scaling without burning time or capital. It's pitched at early-stage to scaling tech founders, angels and senior operators. Host is Manoj Ranaweera. Free, with about 20 places left at the time of writing.

Mindstone's Manchester AI meetup, run with UKAI and Barclays at Heron House, DiSH, 47 Lloyd Street. The evening is two live demos of AI tools, no slides, plus three talks: What I Learned Building With LLMs, How To Be More Productive Using AI, and What Does The Future Look Like With AI. Christopher Kenna is confirmed to speak on practical AI workflows. Pizza and drinks to finish. Free, capped at 200 places.