Business Athletes: Georgie Steele

Hello and welcome to Business Athletes everyone 👋 

Each week, we’ll explore the athlete-like habits behind a different business leader and provide you with practical tactics that you can quickly apply in your day-to-day.⚡️

This week in Business Athletes, I sat down with Georgie Steele, co-founder & CTO of Maiven. Georgie and her team are building the go-to product for navigating policy, starting with climate.

Georgie’s background is a fascinating mix of high-performance engineering. Before building Maiven, she was an engineer at Tractable, where she helped scale the AI-driven unicorn, and she trained in pentathlon while holding down a full-time job at McLaren in Formula 1.

What stood out most is her ability to balance intensity with clarity. Whether it's refining her flow state or designing a 9-day sprint cycle, Georgie is a systems thinker with a calm but relentless drive. 

Below, she shares how she structures her days, leads high-velocity engineering teams, and brings lessons from sport and startup life into her daily execution.

Let’s get into it. ⚡️

Pre-Game Preparation

My Performance Routine

I’m an early bird. When I’m working from home, I’ll be up at 6am and in the yoga studio by 6:45. That sets the tone. It gives me time for breakfast, to clear Slack, and enter the day with clarity instead of chaos.

I care a lot about nutrition – my breakfast is quite bougie, I’ll admit it. Oats, nutty granola, hemp seeds, berries, kefir, and almond milk. It’s brain fuel.

From there, I dive into work with a written stand-up on Slack. Even though we also meet live, writing it down helps me reflect and focus.

My calendar is fully blocked out. Pretty much every minute has a slot; not because I’m rigid, but because I need to unload my brain and put my to-do list into the time blocks.

Creating Focus and Flow

Getting into flow isn’t hard for me, but it starts with planning. If I’ve thought through what needs to happen (even just loosely) I’m faster to drop into deep work.

I tend to schedule my longer-focus tasks like designing and implementing AI evaluations for later in the day, after I’ve cleared the noise.

I’m also a big believer in clarity over complexity. That’s something I brought over from sport. If I know what matters, what the weak points are, where the opportunity is, I can channel my effort there.

Lessons From The Field

Lessons From High-Growth Environments

At Tractable, I joined when we were around 120 people, and within a year and a half, we hit unicorn status. I started in the customer engineering team – close to both product and client pressure – and had to move fast and learn faster.

The most valuable lesson? Building for customers means understanding them deeply. We had clients with zero technical background and others who were highly technical. I learned to tailor how I communicated and pitched based on who was in front of me.

Another key lesson was how seriously they took internal learning. That investment in upskilling created retention, loyalty, and output. I’ve taken that with me.

Even now, at an early stage with a tiny engineering team, we take one day every fortnight for learning.

One of our engineers used that day to prototype a chatbot feature using Anthropic and Streamlit. It wasn’t production-ready, but it was real enough to demo, and it’s now a core part of our product vision and we’re building it into the product. That single day produced a feature customers love.

Precision Under Pressure (F1 Lessons)

Before startups, I worked as a Structural Design Engineer at McLaren Formula 1.

It was a deeply performance-driven environment. Everything was designed to be fast, efficient, and exact.

My job was to make the car’s structural components lighter, stronger, and more reliable. I worked closely with aero and design teams to optimise every millimetre.

Alongside these analysis processes, I looked at best practices, streamlining methodologies and automating things. I began building internal tools in VBA and then moved onto Python. That was the kick start of my love affair with building software products.

What stuck with me was the obsession with iteration. You test, you measure, you learn. You can’t afford to guess. You rely on data; from the track, the wind tunnel, or simulations, and you adjust quickly.

That mindset is what I brought into my startup work. You create processes that drive better decisions. You obsess over efficiency. You constantly ask: where’s the friction, and how can we solve it without sacrificing speed?

The key is diving into the data first and leading with that. Whether that’s for improving org structures, product roadmapping, or understanding how to improve the functioning of a team. Of course data alone often isn’t enough but it tells you the beginnings of a story and as a leader you should listen. 

Inner Game

Mindset & Muscle Memory

Before startups, I trained for pentathlon, while working full-time in F1. That taught me how to isolate performance variables, how to plan ruthlessly, enter flow fast, and move with focus.

I’d track which muscle group needed attention, or which sport I was weakest in.

That maps almost perfectly to engineering and product. You focus on the weak point. You test. You iterate. It’s a constant thought process of where to focus your attention and thus what can be sacrificed to do that.

For example, how to build something to just-good-enough that we can demo and get feedback from customers without it affecting the production speed on the rest of the stack.

The Business Athlete Ethos

The Business Athlete Mindset

• What does “winning the day” mean to you? → When we deliver something epic in the app that customers are blown away by. Succeeding as a team is a really awesome feeling.
  

• Process or result? → I focus on processes, but I’m driven by results.
  

• Mind or body? → Body. Action first, always. Then iterate as you go, fast.
  

• Tools? → Claude Code for engineering or when I’m tackling anything new, ChatGPT for content or anything creative. I switch based on the job. Fathom is also amazing at capturing customer insights and sending them straight to the engineering team.
  

• What’s one thing that moves the needle most as a founder? → Finding the tools that help you 10x your output. We work really hard as founders so finding tools that multiply your output make for crazy step changes in speed and performance
  

• Long-term championship? → I want Maiven to be the obvious platform for policy. If you’re dealing with any kind of policy – starting with climate, but growing beyond, we want you to think: I need Maiven. Because we’ll have the infrastructure and insight to help you act in real-time, not wait six weeks for a consultancy deck.

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