How my first failure led to me creating a flourishing tech firm
12-year-old Helena Zengel more than holds her own opposite Hollywood royalty in Netflix western News Of The World. Laura Harding meets her
Ifirst met former Standard Life chief executive Sir Sandy Crombie some years back when I was struggling to keep alive an interior decorating firm I had started with an idea hatched at university studying entrepreneurship.
We were contracted by a company that was renovating Sandy's home in Edinburgh – I initially met him with a van full of dust sheets, paint-splattered overalls and all our equipment.
I explained to him that I was intending to start another business, and one day would need a chairman – would he be available? He said it sounded “interesting” and that I should get back in touch with him when I’d done that.
The original firm, Fresh Interior Solutions, ultimately – and indirectly – led me to create software firm Amiqus. The company provides remote staff and client onboarding for organisations such as the Scottish Government, NHS, and estate agent and solicitor Simpson & Marwick, helping them manage their compliance securely and digitally.
The interiors firm had been developed with backing from The Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust, and we moved from initially managing smallerresidential-typeworkto serving larger companies and bars, restaurants, hotels as a subcontractor.
We weren't being paid, had costs to meet, and it seemed our only options were court or arbitration clauses in complex contracts. We were forced to close the business. Everyone was made redundant.
I quickly and painfully realised that engaging with formal legal processes was time-consuming, complicated, and expensive .
It seemed there was a real opportunity to use technology to improve the processes. That was the genesis of Amiqus, to look at how to help businesses make informed decisions and engage easily with the legal profession.
This then led us to look at how companies taking on new staff members have to verify them.
It is about six years since I founded Amiqus – and our platform is now used by hundreds of companies. Last year we made our debut in the public sector, securing contracts with the Scottish Government and the NHS, helping to quickly vet returning staff to help with the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
But the journey of being an entrepreneur isn’t easy – it can be hard to be told your idea’s terrible, will never work and so on – something I've heard often.
Entrepreneurs have to be resilient and of the mindset that yes, things will be hard and take longer than expected. When it feels like you're making little progress, you remind yourself that you are nevertheless inching your way forward.
My initial failure with my interior firm certainly spurred me on. I’d sacrificed what I had to try and build a business and it was all taken away. But rather than complain, all I could really do was pick myself back up with a clear purpose.
As for Sandy, it was a key moment in 2017 when I was able to go back to him, just as he was nearing the end of his role as board member at Royal Bank of Scotland and ask him if he’d like to join us as chairman.
He did, and for me he's been that invaluable person that every entrepreneur needs – someone you respect who can steer you from danger, push you when you are stuck, and use decades of experience and wisdom to help you find the route to success.
As told to Emma Newlands
Helena Zengel was just 11 years old when she first met Tom Hanks, and she didn’t really understand what a big deal he is.
The German actress plays opposite the Hollywood megastar in the western News Of The World, set on the Texan frontier in 1870.
She has already landed Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award nominations for her role as a girl who speaks no English and who has been living with Native Americans before being taken from them, and is now in the race for an Oscar nomination.
Hanks plays a Civil War veteran who travels from town to town reading out the news and who reluctantly agrees to return the youngster to her distant settler family, travelling hundreds of miles across dangerous terrain.
“If you had said ‘Tom Hanks is in another movie’, I would have known he’s an actor and I knew he was a bigger deal than some other actors, but I didn’t quite know that he’s a real big deal,” Zengel, now 12, admits as she chats on Zoom from her home in Germany.
“So, when I knew I was going to play the role, I knew he’s an actor, but then later on I learned he’s such a big actor and it was such an honour to work with him.
“He’s just great, he’s very nice and I was really impressed by him, he’s a gentleman.”
Zengel casts her mind back to their first meeting, before the film’s shoot in New Mexico.
“At the beginning I was a little bit in awe, not quite as self-confident as I am usually because he’s tall, he can be loud, he’s American and he’s such a big actor.
“But then, later on, we really had fun because he’s funny, he’s so nice, he is totally not like a superstar you would expect.
“Maybe you think he’s coming with his Mercedes or whatever, coming to set, driving in with his sunglasses like you see in the movies, but no!
“He’s coming in very loose jeans and very loose shoes, as if he was just chilling out, and I was like ‘OK, he’s not as superstar as you would think of him.
“He made it really easy and we became close friends pretty fast because he’s just amazing, and I think he likes me too.
“At the beginning I was like ‘OK, he is obviously older than me, he did so many movies and we are going to be acting partners but it is never going to be like a friendship or anything’, but it did, it just happened, and I think it’s great to get a relationship with an actor because it makes it so much easier to play with each other.”
News Of The World is Zengel’s first Hollywood film, after starring roles in German films including System Crasher and Dark Blue Girls.
She first met the movie’s director, British filmmaker Paul Greengrass (whose previous projects include The Bourne Ultimatum, Captain Phillips and United 93) in a London hotel, when she was still working on English.
“In the beginning I was quite confident with the English, I pretty much understood everything he said, I understood what he meant. But then my brain got tired and then I was like mum ‘What did he just say?’
“So when he actually said I got the role I was totally confused and I was just talking and I think he was wondering if I didn’t get it or if I didn’t want it, because I wasn’t reacting.
“At the end I said ‘When are we going to know if I got the role or not?’ and he was like ‘If you want to make this movie, you’ve got the role, I want to work with you!’
“Then I was just jumping around, I could have screamed.”
Zengel is great company, naturally ebullient and enthusiastic about everything, from the desert background she has set up on Zoom, to the colour of her bright sweater and her love of London.
But News Of The World forced her to tap into a very different side of herself, her character Johanna barely speaks and her relationship with Hanks’ character Captain Kidd is close to wordless.
“In my last movie my character was very loud and selfconfident, she speaks a lot but she still has her quiet moments where she has that look in her face where she could start to cry and you can’t tell why, it’s just her face looking at you.
“And I think that is what the director saw in me, Johanna is not speaking and is such an asshole to Tom, she is ignoring him, not thanking him for anything and making him feel like’s he’s nothing, but actually she really likes him.
“I think it was very interesting to see how Johanna and him get closer even when they cant talk with each other.
“You have to show everything you can with just your eyes, and it’s the hardest things you can do when you play a role but I wanted to take a chance and just try and do it.”
Much easier for Zengel were the films action scenes, in which the keen rider (she owns a horse with her mother) got to show off her skills in the saddle.
Particularly exciting was the film’s centrepiece shootout, with a trio of unpleasant men who are trying to buy the young girl from Hanks’ character.
“We started very low (in the desert) and then we got higher and higher and higher and later and it was getting slippery.
“We were between the rocks and we had to hike up there and the camera team, the lights, the sounds, all the things you have to get up there, it was very tough, but it was just so fun.
“It was crazy running around between the rocks with the guns and it was very adventurous, I really liked it.
“We had everything, we had rain, we had dust, we had sun, we had the desert, we were swimming together, which unfortunately is not in the film but we did, and we were on horses.
“We found snakes and spiders, it was such a crazy shoot but it was amazing and one of the greatest times of my life and I think I will never forget it, my first Hollywood movie and it was with Tom Hanks.”
● News Of The World is streaming on Netflix now
Apple TV+ was an ambitious project from the outset. Home to a growing number of original titles, the streaming service has seen a range of shows including Dickinson and Servant recommissioned as part of multi-series deals.
For All Mankind is but the latest out of this world addition to join that very list, with series two set to land on the platform this week.
Depicting an alternate history in which the space race never came to an end, the first series saw the United States and the Soviet Union compete for outer space supremacy.
Created by Ronald D. Moore (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica), Ben Nedivi (Fargo) and Matt Wolpert (American Crime Story), For All Mankind stars The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman as astronaut Edward Baldwin, Patriot actor Michael Dorman as fellow astronaut Gordo Stevens and One Tree Hill star Shantel Vansanten as Edward’s partner Karen Baldwin.
Set in June 1969, the first series joins NASA at a time when Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov has just become the first man to land on the moon.
Beating Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface, this alternate timeline blends fact and fiction, as the Soviets rename the location the “Red Moon” and history as we know it is rewritten.
“One of the main reasons I jumped on this was ’cause the grander vision of this show is just so spectacular,” says Kinnaman, 41, of the project.
“It’s really fun to be part of something that in one way feels like sort of a historic project – we’re going back in time, but then, historically, we have the writers still having complete creative freedom.
“In the first season, it feels a little bit more contained than what the show actually is.
“It starts a little smaller, a little like Mad Men in NASA, and it reaches out into space and we have the US and the Soviets having bases on the moon.
“But now, in the second season, we really start to see the inklings of the grander vision of the show, so, that’s really exciting.”
A storyline that can only be described as the Cold War in space, season two sees audiences thrown forward a decade into the early 80s, entering an alternate reality in which President Ronald Reagan remains in power.
We find Kinnaman’s character, who commanded the failed landing of Apollo 10, working to recruit the next generation of NASA astronauts – all while helping to avoid nuclear war.
“You take a character and you get to know him and I feel like I’ve got him pretty much down,” says Kinnaman.
“And then you jump ten years – and also ten years after a tremendous loss, a life altering loss, so where do
those ten years take you?
“Of course, the writers have some great ideas, but define how a person changes over ten years. Their physicality? Their outlook on life in relationship to other people?
“It’s a challenge, but it’s also what’s so rewarding and fun to explore.”
Away from the perils and adrenaline of the space race, audiences can expect their fair share of emotion following on from the loss of Edward and Karen’s son during season one.
“Our show uses space as the backdrop and the metaphor for each individual character and what they’re going through,” says Vansanten, 35.
“There’s so much tension and uncertainty in between the relationships on the show and within each character, so, that as a backdrop, compounded on top of what each partnership is going through, I’d definitely say it’s a cold war amongst many of us characters within and externally.”
It’s a partnership that brought with it its own set of unique emotional hurdles according to Kinnaman.
“There were some particular challenges for me and I think for Shantel as well,” notes the actor.
“We were portraying a family going through a horrible loss – and I think that’s always very difficult.
“I don’t think I’ve ever really had to dig as deep emotionally as some of these scenes demanded, but I was fortunate to have an incredible scene partner in Shantel that really helped us to descend into those depths.”
In many ways, the aspect that posed the greatest challenge for Vansanten was accepting her character, flaws and all.
“I want to grow, I want to be fearful and not know how I’m going to play scenes or characters and kind of discover it,” she says.
“It lives in your bones and it becomes a part of you that you never could have anticipated and now you can’t live without – and that was Karen for me.
“I didn’t necessarily like her when I first met her.
“When I first read her on the page, and through a lot of empathy and trying to understand where her reactions and thoughts and feelings came from, realising that it was based in fear, I understood her better and realised I was a lot more like her than I wanted to admit.”
Between NASA’S female-led diversity push that continues into series two and the show of strength from members of the “astronaut wives club” as it’s so often referred to, For All Mankind is a show that in many respects hands the power back to its female characters.
“I think it really pushed us females to the forefront,” says Vansanten.
“Ron Moore’s known for writing very strong female driven characters.
“While doing press for season one, I was very much ‘So, I’m Karen Baldwin, I’m the housewife’ and there’s such a strong stigma to that – the astronaut wives club or the housewife.
“Because us, as modern feminist women, don’t understand the pride that there was in that role; in leading the household, in wearing the pants behind the scenes and making sure everything runs and having children.
“And I really leaned into it and looked up to my grandmother – she was that woman and I think of what an inspiration she was for me.”
● For All Mankind season two is available to stream from today, exclusively on Apple TV+