Nick Falkowski

What is your current role and what does a typical day look like?

I’m the co-founder and CEO of Meaningful Planet, a business mobile provider and intelligent telecoms platform built to make business telecoms simpler, smarter and fairer.

One of the things I enjoy most about my role is its variety. No two days are quite the same, because building a business means constantly moving between the big picture and the practical details.

A significant part of my time is spent shaping our product: understanding what customers need, questioning how business telecoms has traditionally worked, and deciding how technology can remove complexity rather than add to it. That involves balancing customer needs, technical possibilities, and commercial realities to build something genuinely useful.

On another day, I may be working with our customer success team to improve how we support customers, developing partnerships, speaking to prospective clients and investors, or thinking about the long-term direction of the business. I also like to spend time on ensuring sustainable thinking is embedded in our strategy, operations, and culture.

Occasionally, that becomes much more hands-on tasks. A particular recent highlight was spending a day collecting seagrass seeds in the Solent with Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. Those seeds are being used to help restore local seagrass meadows, strengthening biodiversity and the wider marine ecosystem.

That combination reflects what I find most rewarding about the role: being able to move from ideas and strategy to building products, supporting customers, and contributing to tangible change.

What was your journey to getting a job after graduating from Birmingham?

My route into work was relatively conventional at first. I searched job boards, submitted applications online and tried to work out where the skills I’d developed through philosophy might be useful.

I found a graduate editor role at Packt, a technology publisher based in Birmingham. I applied shortly after finishing university and was fortunate to be offered the position.

From there, my career developed in a direction I’d never anticipated. I moved into product management and helped launch a subscription-based tech learning library. Although I had not studied computer science or planned to work in technology, I discovered that many of the skills I had developed through philosophy, such as understanding complex ideas, asking good questions and creating structure from ambiguity, all translated naturally into product work.

That first opportunity eventually led to a career in technology, digital product leadership, and finally entrepreneurship. Looking back, it’s a good example of why your first job doesn’t have to define your entire career. It simply needs to give you somewhere to begin, learn, and discover what you’re capable of.

How did the University's support services help to prepare you for your career?

Philosophy has been far more practically useful in my career than I anticipated. Much of my work in product management, tech development, and now as a CEO involves entering complicated situations and trying to understand what’s really happening. You need to learn how an industry works, what customers actually need, which assumptions are shaping decisions and need to be challenged, and where the underlying problems or opportunities lie.

Studying Philosophy trained me not to accept a system or rationale for a way of doing things simply because it already exists. It taught me to question why things are done in a particular way, distinguish evidence from assumption, and break complex problems down into their essential parts.

That approach is closely related to first principles thinking. Many established processes began for a sensible reason, but the world changes while the process remains. Customer expectations move on, technology improves, and old constraints disappear. Unless someone is willing to keep asking why, outdated assumptions can become embedded in an organisation or an entire industry.

My studies in philosophical logic have been particularly valuable. I didn’t have a computer science background, but philosophy taught me how to think carefully about structures, systems and the relationship between different ideas. That helped me become comfortable working with technology and communicating with technical teams.

Today, I use those skills constantly. Leading a business involves balancing technical, commercial, ethical and human considerations, usually without a perfectly clear answer. Philosophy didn’t teach me what decision to make, but it gave me a disciplined way to think, question and navigate uncertainty.

What are your top tips for students graduating today?

My main advice is to back yourself, remain curious and be willing to begin before you feel completely ready.

It can seem as though everyone further ahead in their career knows exactly what they’re doing. In reality, almost everybody is dealing with uncertainty. Even the most experienced people regularly face situations they’ve never encountered before and decisions for which there’s no obvious answer.

I struggled with impostor syndrome earlier in my career. Over time, I realised that experience doesn’t mean knowing everything. It means becoming more comfortable with not knowing, learning how to ask the right questions and trusting that you can work things out.

There’s a line from Marcus Aurelius that has always stayed with me: “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

I think that’s particularly relevant when you’re graduating. You don’t need to know exactly where your career will take you or feel perfectly prepared for everything ahead. You’ve already developed many of the qualities you’ll need to meet it.

Don’t underestimate what completing a degree has required of you. You’ve spent years learning, meeting deadlines, developing ideas, responding to criticism and persisting when things were difficult. Those qualities aren’t separate from professional success; they’re its foundations.

Apply for the role that seems slightly beyond you. Put yourself forward for the unfamiliar project. Take opportunities that might lead somewhere unexpected. Your career probably won’t follow a perfectly straight line, and that’s often where the most interesting possibilities emerge.

Above all, keep learning. Nobody ever reaches a point where they have everything mastered. The people who progress are often those who remain open, adaptable, and prepared to take the next step despite uncertainty. You’re probably capable of more than you currently realise but discovering that often requires taking that first big leap into the unknown.

What were the best things about your course?

One of the greatest privileges of the course was having the time and space to immerse myself in ideas that genuinely mattered to me. University gives you a rare opportunity to spend sustained periods reading, thinking, discussing, and changing your mind. Once working life begins, it becomes much harder to protect that kind of intellectual space, so I appreciate it even more now.

I was fortunate to learn from lecturers who brought the subject to life. Just as importantly, I studied alongside people who were equally curious and passionate. We came from different backgrounds and often disagreed, which made the conversations richer. Some of those people became close friends and remain among my best friends today.

The best part of the course was therefore not one single module or result. It was the combination of intellectual freedom, inspiring teaching, and the friendships formed through exploring difficult questions together.

What was your biggest achievement during your course?

My proudest academic achievement was completing my master’s dissertation. It required me to take a broad area of interest, develop a precise question and then sustain a coherent argument over a substantial piece of work. That meant months of research, writing, revising and repeatedly discovering that ideas which seemed clear in my head weren’t yet clear on paper.

The process taught me patience and intellectual discipline. It also taught me that producing something worthwhile rarely happens through a single moment of inspiration. It comes from continuing to examine, challenge and improve your thinking over time.

Finishing with a piece of work that I believed in and could stand behind felt like a genuine achievement. I was proud of the dissertation itself, but also of having seen a difficult, long-term project through from an initial idea to a completed whole.

That experience has stayed with me. Building products and companies is very different from writing a philosophy dissertation, but both require you to tolerate uncertainty, keep refining your ideas and remain committed long enough for something coherent to emerge.