Euan Blair didn’t have a typical upbringing.
To say nothing of the everyday anxieties that come with being a teenager, a 13-year-old Euan found himself thrust into the global spotlight after his father Sir Tony was elected UK prime minister in 1997.
Throughout his adolescence, Blair was surrounded by security guards at home and dodged journalists in the street. When Al Qaeda crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, police officers were scrambled to pull him out of school for fear terrorists might target the PM’s children.
It was a “crazy situation” to grow up in, says the now 41-year-old Blair, sitting across from me amid the leafy decor of Bondi Green, the canal-side flagship restaurant of the Australia-themed Daisy Green chain.
Sir Tony retired from frontline politics in 2007, after a decisive — and divisive — decade in office. Fast-forward to the present day and the eldest of Blair’s four children is steadily becoming one of Britain’s best-known tech entrepreneurs.
Since founding corporate upskilling startup Multiverse in 2016, the company has raised more than $400m from big-name investors like Index Ventures, Lightspeed and General Catalyst, hitting a $1.7bn valuation in 2022.
Now, having regrouped after a botched US expansion in 2023, the startup is once again on a growth trajectory and eyeing big moves in Europe over the next 12 months as it looks to capitalise on the AI boom.
Over the course of an hour-long brunch on a sunny Friday morning, we talk mistakes, the problem with Europe’s VC ecosystem and what it’s like growing up in 10 Downing Street.
‘A reasonable amount of OCD’
The conversation starts on more trivial matters as Blair arrives at Bondi, a five-minute walk across from Multiverse’s Paddington office and a regular team hangout.
He’s disarmingly friendly, asking me about my background with statesman-like charm. I’ve been told when Blair’s not working or spending time with his family he’s likely watching football and within minutes he’s asking which team I support (Celtic). He’s a diehard fan of Liverpool, where his mum grew up.
It’s a few minutes before I manage to wrestle the conversation back to Blair (he asks me how I got into journalism before I can ask him how he became a founder) and, before long, he’s selling the big vision, telling me how he hopes to “build a generational $50bn company”.
Multiverse started out with a mission to get young people into apprenticeships at tech companies but more recently pivoted to upskilling corporate employees.
A charismatic and upbeat presence, Blair also looks the part. Clad in an off-white Multiverse branded sweater, jeans and trainers and sporting an Oura ring in a bid to “optimise” his sleep. “I love it,” he tells me, before quickly adding: “People become so boring when talking about it, because nobody apart from you cares about the data”.
“It’s very popular among founders,” Blair says. ”When there are a limited number of variables you can actually control, the more you can control the better.”
Sleep’s not the only variable the Multiverse founder is tightening his grip on. He wears a different-coloured Multiverse sweater every day because “it’s one less thing to think about”. He can don the same pair of trainers for weeks, he adds. “I’ve got a reasonable amount of OCD. I’m very particular about how things are arranged on my desk.”
Before we’ve even glanced over the menu, a waiter appears. I turn to Blair, the regular among us, for a recommendation. “If you want to do it right, you’ve got to go for the bacon roll, it’s famous,” he says, to affirmations from the waiter.
It looks good — bacon, crispy onions, poached eggs on a paratha roti — but I resolve to go with something greener, ordering the aptly named “healthy start”: a plate of broccoli, spinach and poached eggs on thin strips of celeriac.
Blair’s not impressed by my choice. He tells me he’d normally get the bacon roll, but he’s trying to be “more healthy” this week so opts for the granola.
Growing up in No. 10
Breakfast ordered, I get the most obvious question out of the way: What’s it like growing up as the son of a prime minister. It’s not a wildly original line of questioning, and one Blair has had to deal with throughout his career. “My favourite subject,” Blair replies with mock severity.
“The thing I always take from it — and it’s a crazy background, moving into Downing Street aged 13,” he says, energetically darting off into side tangents as he talks. “Behind the door, it was a super normal family home and that was to the great credit of my parents. It felt like we’d just moved into a different house.”
Clearly, growing up behind the most famous front door in the country did nothing to dampen Blair’s ambition. “The thing that I really took from it, and y’know, it was massively privileged and fortunate, is it’s so easy to think anything is possible when this guy who’s just a regular guy, your dad, is running the country,” he tells me.
“If he can do that, I can go and do whatever I want, what’s to stop me. This was probably part of the genesis of becoming a founder.”
Blair graciously attempts to steer the conversation back to business, but before he does I have to ask, is it difficult growing up as the son of a prime minister? There’s a long pause. “Not really, and I give my parents massive credit. When you read stuff in the media about your family, that’s tough. But after a while, you don’t really think about it.”
Sir Tony won three general elections as the centrist leader of a reenergised Labour Party, overseeing reforms in everything from education to healthcare. But his decision to follow America into Iraq overshadowed much of his legacy, prompting backlash from the media and general public in the final years of his administration.
That intense scrutiny created a tight family bond among the Blairs. The whole family still holidays together each year. “We’re really close knit, and I think that’s partly because you grow up in an environment where you feel like it’s us against the world.”
Motivations
Our food arrives and the waiter is disappointed with me. “Where’s the bacon roll, what’s going on? It’s Friday, you know it’s the weekend right?” Blair joins in. “Now you’re really guilty. I tried to get him to have the bacon roll.” I feel suitably scolded. “He’s right to give you a hard time about that,” Blair jokes when the waiter’s left.
He briefly considered politics as a career as a teenager “because I was a huge admirer of what my dad had done and could see politics could be a force for good” — but it was never more than a passing idea.
“It would have been much more of an issue if I’d gone into politics, because then you’re constantly walking in that shadow, so I probably was conscious I wanted to do something in a different area.”
His first job after studying at the University of Bristol and Yale University was as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, where he spent nearly five years before departing to the UK office of Australia-based Sarina Russo Job Access — a company which helps jobseekers find work. There he climbed from business development director to CEO in under four years and developed the idea for Multiverse.
“I’d experienced this friction between work and the education system and these very material skills,” Blair says. “And so the idea was, can you resurrect this historic concept of apprenticeships that was once the way everyone got a job and deploy it at the jobs of the future.”
It’s a noble pursuit, and Blair spins a good line on his motivations. “I’ve always been instilled with a pretty strong belief, if you’re born in a position where you have a platform and the ability to do something, you have a responsibility to make the world a better place than the one you came into.”
Pivot
While Multiverse paired more than 18k apprentices with businesses in 2024, per its company accounts, that portion of the business is now dwarfed by its corporate upskilling segment, which contributes around 90% of the startup’s revenue today (a figure that sat at £58m in 2024).
Was it difficult shifting from the mission-driven focus of apprenticeships to a more commercial one, I ask? “Look, it’s still completely alive,” Blair says. “Our mission is to provide equitable access to economic opportunity for everyone, right?”
Blair sounds reasonable when he talks, in a polished kind of way that you might expect from the son of a man both in sincerity and mocking was nicknamed by some “the great persuader”.
He adds that Multiverse works with the public sector in the UK to upskill local councils, the NHS and a small amount of central government, which makes up around 20% of revenue. But there has been a shift in focus away from apprenticeships and into upskilling, he says, which has been led by “what employers want”.
Figuring out Multiverse’s sales strategy is his proudest achievement as founder, Blair says. “I think the education field has suffered deeply from not nailing go-to-market,” he tells me. “We established a discipline around selling and customer centricity. I do 10-15 customer meetings a week.”
Getting to that point hasn’t all been smooth sailing. In 2023, the startup laid off nearly a third of US employees after falling short of regional revenue targets.
“We waited too long to bring clear structure to Multiverse, how we run the business and establish highly organised functions,” he says. “I’m a big believer the nearly every case when a business fails, it’s suicide not murder, right? Self-inflicted wounds are the ones you’ve got to be most aware of.”
Multiverse also waited too long to bring people with experience scaling into the business, Blair adds. “The group of people who get you from nought to £10m revenue are unlikely to be the exact same as the ones who get you from £10m to £100m to £1bn.”
The problem with European VC
What Multiverse hasn’t struggled with is raising big bucks from some of the biggest names in VC, riding high on the post-Covid funding boom.
The company most recently picked up $130m in 2021, then another $220m in 2022, which made it the UK’s first unicorn edtech. Index led both rounds, with Lightspeed and General Catalyst also participating.
Blair acknowledges his surname didn’t hurt his chances: “You attract a level of attention that you might not otherwise attract because of that name recognition.”
But there is a problem with the mindset among growth stage VCs in Europe, he tells me — it’s no coincidence that the majority of Multiverse’s biggest shareholders are US investors.
“The first question Mary Meeker [general partner at US VC Bond] asked me was how do you make this a $500bn business? I love that, but that’s a very different conversation to ‘how do you get us 3x our money in the next five years’. I do think particularly at the growth stage, we need more ambition [in Europe].”
Those criticisms echo calls from across Europe’s tech sector to bolster growth stage funding in the region, amid a push for less reliance on overseas digital infrastructure and tech sovereignty in the face of rising geopolitical tensions.
“It’s not enough for us to build companies that get to two, three, four billion dollar valuations and then get acquired by a big US tech company,” Blair says.
Embracing the media
Towards the end of our meeting I ask Blair why he chose to speak to me now (we’re meeting late April 2025, but I’d first pitched an interview to his PR team in the summer of 2023).
“Look, we’re always hiring people, we’re continuing to grow, still investing in people and the more we get our story out there, the better.”
While Blair is coy about growth plans over the next 12 months, he says that European expansion is on the cards — because of the demand of AI adoption in established industries in countries like Germany — as well as in the UK. He’s not thinking about an IPO, he says, though the company hired a CFO with IPO experience late last year.
Throughout our chat, Blair makes a habit of turning the question back onto me. It’s oddly exposing and gives me a humbling sense of what it’s often like to be sat opposite a prying reporter. He asks why I wanted to interview him.
I list off Multiverse being the UK’s first edtech unicorn and being backed by notable investors, not to mention some obvious curiosity around his upbringing.
“I’m always more comfortable talking about my business than about me and that’s probably a consequence of how I grew up,” he tells me. “I spent almost my entire formative years trying desperately to avoid the media.”
But the media has a role to play in helping businesses build out their profiles, Blair says. “CEOs of companies who might want to work with us read these things, as does brilliant talent. If you want that platform you have to embrace it, so I’ve learned to get over it.”
Once the bill’s been paid, we walk back across the bridge towards Multiverse’s WeWork office.
I can’t help but wonder if engaging with the media isn’t the only thing Blair might change his tune on in the future and ask if he could see himself going into politics down the line.
It’s very unlikely, he says several times. “I love what I do and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” It’s a politician’s answer, but I believe him.
The top image accompanying this article was created using ChatGPT.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/euan-blair-brunch/
