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Posted: Mon 24th Aug 2026
15 min read
Shimron Walters started experimenting with entrepreneurship when he was just 15 or 16, making mobile games, running YouTube channels and trying different side hustles.
Today, he runs an AI consultancy, BitesizedGenius, helping organisations understand and adopt artificial intelligence, while also working to create opportunities for young people and care-experienced communities.
For Shimron, entrepreneurship started long before he had a business plan.
“I must have been about 15 or 16 years old,” he says. “I started dabbling in game design, programming, arts and whatnot at that age and started making some mobile games and other types of projects because I wanted to start my own business.”
Growing up in a single-parent household without a family background in business, Shimron says he was motivated by a desire to create opportunities for himself and his family.
He says:
“I wanted to be the one to break the cycle and create that wealth and those opportunities for the family."
He also quickly discovered that he enjoyed being self-employed:
“I just didn’t really like working in a nine-to-five. I like being self-employed more.
"Being able to build up the skills for the future, where I can be employable no matter what, and having the opportunity to earn more money and create jobs and opportunities, was attractive to me.”
At 16, however, he was still figuring out what entrepreneurship actually involved.
“I was a bit too young to figure out how to make it into an actual business,” he admits.
Instead, he kept experimenting – making mobile games, creating YouTube channels and trying different side hustles. Those early attempts gave him something just as valuable as immediate success: experience.
Shimron’s current business, BitesizedGenius, also started in a different form.
Originally, it was a YouTube channel where he explored how to use AI tools. The channel grew to around 12,000 subscribers, but the income wasn’t enough to make it a sustainable business.
“I realised sitting here doing YouTube videos for the rest of my life probably wasn’t going to help me grow in any sort of meaningful way,” he says.
Instead, he saw an opportunity to take what he was learning about AI and help other organisations understand the technology.
“People were trying to get their heads around it, but because I’ve got a tech background, I can understand that a bit more easily,” he says.
“So I figured, why not help people understand how to utilise it, how to adopt it, how to get benefits from it, but also build solutions for businesses?”
Shimron has now been running the consultancy full-time for around a year, after taking a year out of work to focus on building the business.
That meant learning not just about AI, but about entrepreneurship itself – including sales, public speaking, finding clients and putting himself in front of potential customers.
The biggest challenge has been something many new founders will recognise: getting those first customers.
“The hardest part is actually getting customers,” Shimron says. “When you’re unproven, no one gives you a chance. You’re just one of many.”
He found that moving from employment into self-employment required a different mindset.
“When you’re self-employed, it’s harder to convince people to give you gigs. You’ve got to sell yourself, convince them. There’s no management to ask, ‘How do I do this?’ You’ve got to figure it out yourself.”
Building credibility made a difference. Once he had his first clients, testimonials and examples of his work, conversations became easier.
But getting to that point meant being willing to put himself out there.
“That first year was just me putting myself out there and networking, trying, taking risks. It’s a very uncomfortable thing to do, but once you get out of the way, it’s going to be easier.”
His advice is to avoid looking for a perfect formula.
“A lot of people sell courses on how to become an overnight millionaire or content creator,” he says. “But it’s not as easy as following a playbook because if it was, we would all be doing it.
“You’ve got to make your own playbook. You’ve got to get out there and see what works in the field.”
Shimron prepared financially before leaving his job, making sure he had savings that would allow him to spend a year trying to make the business work.
Even so, the reality of becoming a full-time entrepreneur hit him when he handed back his work laptop.
“I finished my job on Independence Day – 4 July was my last day at my job in the civil service,” he says.
“I remember handing in my laptop to reception and walking outside and being like, ‘What the hell do I do now?’”
Suddenly, there was no boss providing the next task or the next pay cheque. Shimron had to create those opportunities himself.
He started networking, sending emails and reaching out to people. Many approaches went nowhere, but some opened doors.
“The more you do, the more surface area you create for things to happen, as opposed to thinking about it constantly,” he says.
That experience is one reason Shimron became an Enterprise Nation Next Generation Ambassador.
Enterprise Nation’s Next Generation Founders Hub provides free support for young founders aged 18 to 24, including practical advice, events, resources and a peer community.
For Shimron, creating that sense of community is particularly important because he often found himself as the youngest person in the room at networking events.
“I thought there’d be plenty of people who are in their mid-20s, late 20s, early 20s, starting businesses,” he says. “But no – people in there were in their 40s and 50s.”
Being around more experienced business owners had benefits, but Shimron also wanted to connect with people who understood what it was like to be starting out at a young age.
“There was nobody in there who could really relate to me, because everybody in there was sort of older,” he says.
His ambition for the Next Generation community is therefore straightforward: create somewhere young entrepreneurs can share resources, advice, networks, successes and failures.
“I want to create an opportunity for people to come together, share resources and advice and just talk about successes and failures,” he says.
For young people facing a difficult jobs market and rising costs, Shimron believes having people around you matters.
“I feel like people do things in isolation, which is not helpful,” he says. “You’ll be a lot more successful if you’ve got people around you who support you.”
Shimron’s entrepreneurial journey is also shaped by his own experiences growing up.
He went into care at around 11 and has since spoken publicly and advocated for care-experienced people, including lobbying politicians and industry leaders around the issues affecting young people.
His experiences have given him a strong sense of resilience – but also a determination to create the opportunities he didn’t necessarily have access to growing up.
“If you want something, you don’t really have that same support network to depend on to get it,” he says. “You’ve got to be the one who’s out there and get it yourself.”
That philosophy now informs his work with young people.
Through the Equal Works Employability Charter, Shimron has delivered workshops with young people who are at risk of becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training), helping them think about future careers, education and how they can use technology and AI.
He has also taken part in professional roundtables with secondary school students, sharing his experiences of the civil service and entrepreneurship.
One thing that has surprised him is how much uncertainty many young people feel about their futures.
“A lot of them are asking, ‘What do you want to do in the future?’ and a lot of them are like, ‘I don’t really know.’”
Shimron believes that makes adaptability increasingly important.
His own career has already involved several pivots. He originally wanted to work in game design, studied game design and production, moved into the civil service and eventually found his way into entrepreneurship and AI.
“Being able to pivot and manoeuvre yourself around the job market and figure out where the opportunities are, and take risks with businesses and stuff like that, will help you out in the long run,” he says.
For young people considering entrepreneurship, Shimron’s advice is to test an idea rather than spend too long thinking about it.
He says:
“Don’t be afraid of failure.”
“If you’ve got an idea that you really believe in, you’ve done the market research, you’ve got a business plan that you’ll probably never look at again, but you’ve at least thought about it and done the initial legwork, then you’ve got to put it out there.”
For him, the real test is whether somebody is willing to buy:
“How would you know it’s a good idea until you’ve actually had someone either buy it or say, ‘I don’t want it’?”
If nobody has accepted or rejected an idea, he says, it’s still only an idea.
“That’s the litmus test. You don’t want to sit on an idea for a very long time and then find out that it’s not actually worthwhile.”
His own early experiments demonstrate the point.
Not everything worked, and his original ambition of a career in game design didn’t turn out as planned. But each experience gave him another skill or helped him identify a different opportunity.
Shimron believes AI can be particularly valuable for young entrepreneurs because it can help bridge some of the knowledge gaps that come with starting a business.
He uses AI himself for business planning, researching funding opportunities, finding networking events, managing finances and taxes, understanding insurance terminology and carrying out research.
“It’s easier than ever to get information now,” he says. “It’s just how do you use it to make things happen?”
For a young founder without a large team or the budget to pay specialists for every question, he sees AI as a way of becoming more self-sufficient.
“You’ve got all the information in the world, but it’s just like, how do you use it to accomplish your goals?”
His advice is to experiment:
“You’ve got to be entrepreneurial. You’ve got to try things. You’ve got to be very agile in the way you think.”
Shimron’s journey from a teenager experimenting with mobile games to an AI consultant and advocate for young people hasn’t followed a straight line.
That’s precisely the point.
His experience has taught him that careers can change, business ideas can evolve, and setbacks don’t necessarily mean you’ve taken the wrong path.
Now, through his work and his role as an Enterprise Nation Next Generation Ambassador, he wants other young founders to have more opportunities to learn from those experiences – and from each other.
“You’ve got to be the one to build it,” he says.
And for the next generation of entrepreneurs, his message is simple: start testing, keep learning, be prepared to pivot and don’t try to build alone.
