Benjamin Fellowes | The People Behind Tech for Good 👐

Benjamin Fellowes is a tech entrepreneur who has spent the last 15 years of his career building tech startups that also deliver a positive impact to society. He is driven by innovation and the belief that influencing large commercial organisations is a compelling way to deliver ‘good at scale’ for society.

He is most recently known for his work as co-founder and Director of Product at social value reporting platform Thrive, and as a board member of the social value measurement framework, the Impact Evaluation Standard. Throughout his career, he has created products that are used daily by millions of people across the world. He is also an avid mentor for tech startups, as he is energised by the early, tumultuous days of building businesses from scratch.

We spoke with Benjamin about his journey, inspirations, and vision for tech as a force for good.

🟣 Benjamin, introduce yourself. What makes you, uniquely you?

I grew up in New Zealand but have spent nearly half my life living or doing business around the globe, mostly in Asia and the Pacific but more recently in the UK. I’ve now settled with my wife and two boys in the seaside town of Holywood in Northern Ireland. Pronounced like the big American counterpart, but perhaps not as glamorous!

Holywood is the perfect town for someone like me who loves the sea and everything related to it, sailing being my biggest passion. I could give up coffee without having withdrawals, but I could not say the same for the ocean. Like many entrepreneurs, my mind is filled with ideas and lists of actions. Sailing is the perfect antidote to that. The ocean reminds you that you are part of something so much larger. And of course there is the focus and concentration needed to prevent yourself from falling in it! I would live on a boat if I could, although I’m not sure my family would follow, so for now I have to keep my feet on terra firma.

After leaving university, I spent the first half of my career helping run big data-driven marketing projects across the globe. Specifically, I helped large retailers understand customers’ buying behaviour in a way they weren’t previously considering and – by using offers and discounts – change that behaviour over time: think Tesco Clubcard on steroids.

The whole process was part tech, part marketing, with plenty of consumer psychology thrown in. It was fascinating work, as 20 years ago this was pioneering, and I have a smile when I see many of the programmes I worked on still in place. But over time I burnt myself out. While the work was really interesting, spending my life using data-driven marketing to convince consumers to ‘buy more’ was not the impact I wanted to create. However, it was an incredible lesson in the ability of large organisations to influence people’s behaviour (more on that later!).

After that, I moved more into work that I felt improved people’s lives through tech. I launched several tech startups; the most interesting to talk about is probably Fundzi, a debit card platform for teenagers – to help them spend money safely but also to learn about financial literacy. That was a world first and is an area that has really taken off since. That was my first foray into proper tech for good and opened my eyes to what I really wanted to do.

In 2015 I met my entrepreneurial match in Neil Macdonald , and together we started Thrive - Social Impact Software . Our joint goal was to enable large organisations to better quantify – and see a return on investment from – the social impact they were creating. We’d both seen firsthand how much large organisations can influence behaviour and make a difference in society. We know that when they can see the social and financial return from their activities, they are driven to do more. So this is a win-win for business and society. This venture ticked all my boxes: fast growth, innovation and being able to do something with a ‘purpose’... I couldn't be happier.

🟣What can you tell us about your early years?

I was born and grew up in Auckland, New Zealand and my parents are big travellers. I was fortunate to see a lot of the world while quite young. It opened my eyes to the diversity and excitement of the world, which is sometimes hard to grasp when you live on a reasonably small island in the middle of the Pacific.

Ultimately, I always wanted to be an inventor. Even from 5 years old I would spend hours a day with a sketch pad, toiling away with new ideas, drawing whatever I hoped would be the next big thing. My teachers were probably less enamoured with my doodling, but who doesn’t need blueprints for a toaster attached to a flying bicycle?

While I came to love technology (it’s underpinned my whole career), it wasn’t always front and centre in our house. For example, when I was very young, our home only had a TV in the living room in winter. It was a masterstroke from my parents… during those long New Zealand summers, why would you want to be sitting around inside?! This probably spurred on that inventive side of me even more.

Originally my creativity came out through art and design, and I was fortunate in my teens to be a runner-up in the New Zealand Young Designer Awards for my 3D graphics work. Around 15, I decided the future was in computer games, and so I pulled together a ragtag bunch of enthusiasts from all over the world to build a game. We never finished it, though. We had gained so much publicity doing it that many of the team got hired by professional game development houses – something I’m still proud of being a part of!

When it comes to business, I think my most important influence was that I grew up in a very entrepreneurial household. I think my parents had three different and successful businesses all before I was ten. So, I was heavily influenced by their drive and by seeing that happening day in, day out at home. I loved being around it and got caught up in the excitement of it all. I knew from a young age that I wanted to run a business that involved inventing and innovating of some sort.

Finally, I’m not risk-averse, so I spent a lot of my 20s chasing automotive thrills, including a rather impressive crash, with me at the wheel, at a race track in New Zealand – a good reminder that your talent is only as good as the very last decision you make! This trait has certainly helped me feel comfortable when things are largely uncertain, like when you are building a new business from scratch.

🟣Tell us more about the work you are currently doing...

I’m the Director of Product at Thrive - Social Impact Software , a social value reporting and measurement platform used in over 30 countries. Social value has really moved up the agenda since Thrive began nearly 10 years ago. It has gone from being a nice-to-have to a commercial necessity – influenced by legislative requirements but also consumer and investor demands for businesses to be transparent about their positive and negative impacts on society.

Thrive started life as a software platform designed to help organisations manage their engagement and measure the social impact of community-focused initiatives, such as grants or volunteering.

Over time, this expanded. We now enable organisations to understand the social impact from all the activities they undertake – from the jobs they create to the well-being improvements they bring in for staff to the money they spend with SMEs, right through to the carbon emissions they reduce. It’s a full-scale measurement and reporting platform, and as I mentioned before, providing tangible evidence of the benefits of these activities helps organisations see a return on investment on what they are doing.

To enable this to happen accurately, we also developed a proprietary economic measurement framework called the Impact Evaluation Standard. This empowers our users to quantify the impact of their work using rigorously calculated and validated monetary figures, enabling meaningful comparisons between the effects of different initiatives that were previously incomparable.

We are always tinkering with the product capabilities, though, expanding them and evolving them. We rely heavily on the feedback from our customers to understand what they need and how they can best evolve our product in the future.

As the business has grown, I have been able to focus more on product and innovation, which is an absolute joy. Right now, I’m focused on how we can adapt our model for measuring impact to international markets, which are often less mature than the UK but are evolving quickly. The learnings from the UK will enable other countries to make much faster strides in social value and wellbeing improvement, and I am energised and honoured that Thrive is leading that change.

🟣Let’s talk tech for good. What does tech for good mean to you?

Let’s be clear: there is no single definition. Having been in this space for over 15 years, I think the growth and diversification of companies putting themselves forward as tech for good is significant.

For me, it’s about using technology to drive meaningful changes in society and positive changes to people’s lives. A key part of that is being able to measure the good you are doing, because otherwise how do you know it's ‘enough’ or that you are being effective? Otherwise, like greenwashing, I’m worried that ‘good’ washing will become more prevalent in the future.

I’m really interested in how you can use technology to measure and evidence the change in people's wellbeing over time, as that is a wonderful and rigorous way of measuring and improving the ‘good’ we are all doing. However, you could say I’m a little biased, as that is key to what we do at Thrive.

🟣Who or what is currently serving as a source of inspiration for you?

I’m continuously inspired by the companies we work with at Thrive. We support hundreds of large-scale, for-profit organisations—both in the UK and globally—who are not only running commercially successful operations but are also intentionally using their scale and influence to drive positive societal change. They prove, every day, that business success and social impact are not mutually exclusive.

At Thrive, we’re a for-profit business too, but what gets us out of bed each morning is seeing how our platform can be a force multiplier - enabling organisations to achieve far more than a group acting as individuals could. It’s energising to know that when society’s challenges can feel overwhelming, technology gives us the ability to scale our impact significantly, minute by minute, across entire organisations and industries.

The businesses that truly stand out to me are those who have embedded social impact into the very fabric of their strategy. They don’t treat it as a side project or a marketing initiative—they bake it into their operations, culture, and decision-making. These organisations are using technology (ours and others) not just to measure what they’re doing, but to ask smarter questions: Where can we have the greatest impact? How do we prioritise our time and resources to make that happen?

What sets them apart is that they use technology not as the solution in itself, but as a catalyst—an amplifier—for human intent and organisational purpose. These are the rising stars: companies proving that profitability and purpose can reinforce one another, rather than conflict. The old narrative suggested that to make a meaningful social impact, you had to sacrifice growth or competitiveness. The companies that inspire me most are the ones rewriting that story.

So, while I could point to specific names, my true inspiration comes from the collective momentum I see across our customer base—organisations pushing boundaries, thinking long-term, and showing that doing good and doing well can absolutely go hand in hand.

🟣Looking into the future, what aspects worry and excite you the most, and why?

I think there is a lot to be concerned about right now, from the environment, security, global apathy and how we navigate the rocky road of ensuring that AI is a ‘net positive’ for all of society. But overall, I’m a very positive person and what excites me is how quickly barriers to innovation are continuing to fall.

For a long time, innovation has been becoming more accessible, driven primarily by rapidly decreasing costs in technology. This is allowing a wider range of innovators and entrepreneurs to try their hand at cracking more of the key problems we face as a society, with or without access to significant capital. So, while the problems certainly feel like they are stacking up, our ability to embolden hundreds of millions of people to come up with creative ideas - and financial models - for tackling them, gives me great hope for the future.

My advice for budding tech entrepreneurs is to spend the same amount of time, or more, talking to your prospective customers as actually building your product, as ultimately the prospective customer is the most important ‘north star’ for your budding business. I’ve had a range of successes and failures over the years, and the difference to me has always been early customer engagement.

🤝 About our Tech for Good work 🤝

At techUK, our mission is to champion our members and their technologies, preparing and empowering the UK for what comes next. We believe that by doing so, we can deliver a better future for people, society, the economy, and the planet. We are committed to supporting emerging social innovators who are tackling today's most pressing challenges through technology while also demystifying tech for all. "The People Behind Tech for Good" is a series of interviews that aim to spotlight rising social innovators who are addressing today's most pressing challenges through technology.

🔗 Find out more how to get involved with our #TechForGood work - email Tânia Teixeira (tania.teixeira@techuk.org).

🟢🟡🔵🟣 Visit our hub page here!