I’m Hugo Douglass – commercial strategist, partnership builder and founder. I’ve spent 15 years helping ambitious companies grow, and the last several years doing it specifically at the intersection of AI, SaaS and strategic partnerships.
I started Minerva Partners because I kept seeing the same problem from the inside. Founders with genuinely strong products – real technology and real differentiation who were struggling to turn that into structured, predicable revenue. Not because they lacked ambition or effort, but because a commercial engine is a completely different skill set from building a product.
At this same time, hiring a full-time Chief Commercial Officer before you’re ready is expensive, slow and risky. The gap I kept seeing was this: founders needed a senior commercial thinking – the kind that only comes from years of actually doing it in complex, high-stakes environments – but they needed flexility, without the full-time overhead.
My background is deliberately broad – and that’s the point
Before founding Minerva Partners, I spent twenty years operating across industries and business types: building partner ecosystems for FinTech scale-ups, designing GTM strategy for AI spin-outs, leading enterprise partnerships at award-winning SaaS companies and founding businesses of my own.
That includes building a multi-award-winning luxury brand from scratch – with no prior industry experience, that attracted endorsements from Jo Malone MBE, Sir James Dyson, The Princess of Wales and Sir Paul Smith as well as growing a customer base of over 11,000. I’ve been a first partnerships hire, a sales director, a fractional CCO and a founder. I’ve made commercial decisions with real money at stake and imperfect information.
Which means when I sit with your leadership team, I’m not working from theory. I’m working from pattern recognition built across dozens of commercial environments.
I also hold an MBA from Newcastle University Business School – one of only seven triple-accredited business schools in the UK – where I won management consultancy and investment competitions and achieved a First for my dissertation on technology and workplace health.
- 450% MRR growth in 3 months – FinTech SaaS
- 700% revenue growth in 4 months – EdTech SaaS
- 70+ qualified referrals per month – Wellbeing SaaS
- £2.2m ACV enterprise partnerships generated
- Cambridge University AI spin-out – first commercial hire
- MBA – Newcastle University, triple accredited. Sports Scholar.
How I work
My approach is calm, structured and direct – in that order.
I start by listening carefully and creating space fro the real pictured to emerge – the constraints that aren’t in the deck, the tensions the team hasn’t spoken out aloud and the commercial assumptions that haven’t been tested yet. Most growth problems look complicated on the surface and straightforward once you get underneath them.
From there, I work alongside teams, not above them. I don’t deliver a strategy and disappear. I stay in the work, in the meetings, in the decisions and in the execution unit the commercial infrastructure is in place and the team can run it without me. And when something isn’t working, I’ll tell you directly, not aggressively, but honestly. That’s the only way I know how to be useful.
Who I work with
Minerva Partners works best with founders and leadership teams who:
- Have product-market fit and are ready to build structured commercial momentum
- Are navigating a specific growth challenge – inconsistent pipeline, underperforming partnerships, or a commercial decision that carries real risk
- Value honest, experienced thinking over safe, generic advice
- Want a partner who gets into the detail, not a firm that manages from a distance
- I work with a small number of clients at any one time to make sure every engagement gets my full attention and focus.
If you think there could be a fit, the most useful first step is a short conversation.
Book a Strategic Intro Call – 30 minutes, no pitch, no pressure