On 12 November 2025, Maths Angel's An-Nam Pham and Lexie Li spoke at the NatWest Accelerator about how a lean team builds and runs a high-performance technical function, and how an EdTech company still ships fast.
The talk
The NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator is a free programme that supports UK founders as they grow. An-Nam and Lexie were asked to share how Maths Angel builds and runs its technical team as it grows, when every hire and every week counts.
What we shared
The core argument was that AI has changed the economics of building software, and that this changes who you actually need on the team.
AI has cut the cost and the time it takes to ship. A smaller team can now do what used to take a larger one, and it can move faster while doing it. Deep technical expertise counts for less than it did a few years ago, and what matters more is knowing what to build, what to leave out, and what “good” feels like for the person using it.
Once building gets cheaper, the scarce skill moves, and product judgement counts for more.
Small team, no small decisions
The practical takeaway for an early team is that technical decisions matter more, not less, when fewer people are making them. At Maths Angel, the choices behind ChatCat are made deliberately: which models we build on, how a student's data is handled and kept safe, and how each lesson is structured so the AI stays aligned with the curriculum and exam methods.
These are not details we leave for later, because a shortcut taken to ship this week can quietly become the ceiling that slows every release after it. For a lean team, building carefully and shipping fast are not opposites; one depends on the other.
Why we build in-house
For Maths Angel, the answer is to keep that expertise in-house. Rather than outsourcing the hard technical work, we build with a small, full-time team of top engineering talent in London, the people who design ChatCat, own the architecture, and ship our lessons week to week. When the people making the decisions are the ones who live with the results, a lean team can move fast without trading next year's scaling for this week's speed.
A warm and honest evening
Founder events are only worth the evening when people are honest about what is working and what is not, so that is what we tried to be. It was a friendly, generous room, and we came away with about as many questions to think about as we answered, which is usually the sign of an evening well spent.
Read more about Maths Angel.