Founders Everywhere: Alfie Pearce-Higgins
Alfie Pearce-Higgins is co-founder of Rodeo, an AI-powered careers platform helping young people plan their careers, build skills and land their next job.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
The UK has a growing youth employment problem. Around one in seven 16–24 year olds is not in an education, employment or training program and the careers support that does exist is overstretched and often struggles to keep up. The labour market has also become harder to read. AI is reshaping entry-level work, traditional career ladders are fraying, and the gap between what young people are told about work and what work actually looks like has widened. Never has there been a greater need for career support. Rodeo provides young people with their own AI-powered Personal Career Agent to help them work out what they want to do, find roles that fit, and get the support they need to actually land them.
Co-founders Alfie Pearce-Higgins and William Day have spent time working across gig economy platforms, from venture-funded delivery startups in East Africa to rapid grocery delivery in the UK, giving them a firsthand view of how precarious and opaque entry-level work has become. They built Rodeo because they believe every young person deserves real, personalised career support, regardless of their background or connections.
What’s the end goal?
The end vision is that every young person in the UK has access to the support and advice needed to move through the labour market with confidence. Today, good career advice is too often a privilege: if you have the right network, the right school, or the means to pay for a coach, you get it. If you don’t, you’re largely on your own. We want to flip that. A career agent should understand your skills, interests and constraints, surface the right opportunities, help you apply well, and prepare you for interviews. We also think this is the natural infrastructure for government to plug into as it rebuilds the Jobs and Careers Service.
Why is Rodeo going to win?
Most products in this space are built around the employer or the platform: job boards optimising for clicks, ATS systems optimising for filtering people out. Very little is built around the candidate. We start from the other end: what does a young person actually need to make a good career decision? That means voice-based onboarding that feels like a real conversation, a structured understanding of skills built on a standardised taxonomy, and an agent that can plan, match, and act on your behalf. We think understanding the user better than anyone else, and being unambiguously on their side, is the only way to build something they’ll trust with their career.
Who does Rodeo work with?
Our standalone product is built for 18–30 year olds across the UK but we believe the best approach to career support is hybrid, combining the best bits of AI responsibility with human support. AI can onboard customers, understand local labour market and map potential career paths freeing up limited human resources to oversee, safeguard and provide additional support to those who need it most. We’re engaging closely with the DWP’s Jobs and Careers Service procurement and partnering with players across the youth employment ecosystem. It’s still early, but we’re already seeing strong engagement from beta users and a clear signal that young people want a tool that’s genuinely on their side.
How does Rodeo inspire “customer love”?
Planning your career or looking for a job can be intimidating, confusing and uncomfortable. We built our entire product around understanding the user’s needs and helping them to find the right pathway. Everyone is different and this means giving users as much choice as possible about how and when they want to interact with their Career Agent. AI can be a very powerful tool for careers support but it must also be transparent. We reflect this by providing explanations for all recommendations. Most of all we are obsessed with user feedback so we can improve the product and help as many people as possible.
Do you have any advice for other founders?
It would be presumptive to offer any advice at this early stage but I will say that the right dynamic in a founding team is vital; I feel very fortunate here. Will is an old friend and we are able to recognise each other strengths and weaknesses, provide honest, direct advice and support and (occasionally) disagree constructively.
Listen to Alfie Pearce-Higgins on our podcast episode: Not My First Rodeo.
