He found his way out of a hostel on page six of Google

Carlo Weaver was 15 when he and his mother lost their home. They spent eight months moving between hostels and temporary accommodation around Ilford in East London.

He had been diagnosed with autism at 11. He missed school during the instability and left with no GCSEs.

He started again at college on a Level 1 ICT course, alongside basic English and maths qualifications. He worked several jobs to help support the household.

Then his grandmother had a serious heart attack and a fall, and he became her carer, taking her to appointments and running the house while studying.

Level 1 became Level 2, then Level 3. He was named Student of the Year and was offered a place to read computer science at King's College London.

He turned it down. He did not want tens of thousands of pounds of student debt, so he went looking for a route that paid.

He found it six pages into a Google search: degree apprenticeships. The employer was NatWest Markets, and the job came with a salary.

He applied and got in. In 2021 he moved from college into a role paying £30,000 a year, and by around 20 he was helping manage an investment portfolio worth £83 million. He later worked in software engineering on trading desks.

What bothered him was the search. Nothing about his ability had changed between the hostel and the trading floor. The only thing that changed was that he found the opportunity, and he almost did not.

He posted a 45-second TikTok about life as an autistic investment-banking apprentice. It reached tens of thousands of people, and messages started arriving asking where to find apprenticeships and how to apply.

He kept posting. Hundreds of videos have since generated tens of millions of views, on his own account of the numbers.

Videos were not a system, though. Teenagers spend hours on TikTok and almost none on corporate careers pages, so the vacancies and the applicants never met.

In 2024 he left NatWest to build Apprentago full time. For someone who had been homeless, giving up a salaried banking career was not a lifestyle choice.

The pitch is a single place for apprenticeships, in the way UCAS is a single place for degrees. Students can find apprenticeships and work experience, track applications, build CVs and prepare for interviews; schools and colleges can see who is progressing; employers get in front of people who would otherwise never find them.

Weaver says more than 650,000 young people have used the platform. The company has worked with employers and public bodies and moved into schools and colleges.

He has spoken at the London School of Economics, been invited to the House of Lords and taken part in discussions at Windsor Castle. He has appeared on the BBC and Channel 4, and is a finalist for Lloyds Bank Entrepreneur of the Year.

The useful part for other founders is not the recognition. It is that Weaver is not optimising a process he watched from outside; he is rebuilding one that nearly lost him, and he can describe the customer because he was the customer.

That is an advantage no amount of research buys. If your own product story starts with a problem you have only read about, it is worth asking who on your team has actually lived it.