Ronnie Cane, founder of selling company Eighteen, (which he exited inside three years), and founding father of The Neurodiversity Listing, a platform for locating neurodiversity companies globally, to not point out creator of The Neurodiversity Ebook, which got here out final yr, and loud and proud neurodivergent entrepreneur, was unemployable.
“I knew from a really younger age,” he recollects. That age was fourteen, when the aspiring skilled rugby participant was bed-bound with an harm and began a web-based health clothes enterprise.
A college age entrepreneur
The realisation that working for others, and thus being employable, wasn’t for him, got here with the primary Black Friday sale. The following day he awakened for college, checked his cellphone, noticed £700 in his PayPal account, and thus skilled the primary fruits of enterprise success. “I knew that day that I used to be unemployable,” he confirms. “After I’m utilizing the phrase unemployable, I imply I all the time knew that I might not be pleased with it.”
“Not a single day of that point throughout the office was proper for me. There was no match, it was a mismatch. Structurally, personally, all the pieces.”
After finishing his GCSEs, the previous rugby participant left faculty, secured himself a two-year advertising apprenticeship and was firmly on the planet of labor. However one thing didn’t really feel proper. “It was a relentless misfit,” says Cane of his office experiences. That first style of self-employed success lingered.
He remembers, aged eighteen, one employer calling him a “feral ADHD f***.” By twenty-one, he had an autism and ADHD analysis, largely thought of late stage. Three months later, whereas working as a digital advertising nomad together with his associate throughout Europe, he began his advertising agency, Eighteen. A agency with what he calls “a no bull**** search engine marketing” method.
Launching Eighteen – the expansion story
Headcount progress was quick, and Cane constructed a seven-person workforce throughout the first six months. He then grew and sustained its dimension till exit three years down the road, constructing and sustaining an eight-person workforce of solely neurodivergent expertise.
Right here, he brings up a standard mistake folks make with neurodiversity. “I used to name them a neurodiverse group,” he says of his workforce. “However what I meant was an solely neurodivergent group. If it was a mix of neurodivergent and neurotypical, then it will be neurodiverse. It’s a simple mistake to make.”
So, how did he handle to recruit a completely neurodivergent workforce? Effectively, the reality is, he didn’t. They got here to him. “I ended up being a magnet for serving to them work in a approach that they needed to,” he says. “I’m keen on working one of the best ways for me. So it was a pure match for each events. I used to be in a position to assist them and so they had been in a position to assist themselves to do what’s proper for them in a office.”
“I knew that I might exit, so I navigated that and orchestrated it as greatest for me and my household. So it was a brutal transfer, it’s utterly reworked the corporate…”
Headcount wasn’t the one progress indicator at Eighteen. In three years it generated over £1.2m in new enterprise for purchasers, particularly these within the neurodiversity area. Gunning for purchasers on this sector wasn’t, Cane tells me, a aware choice. Probably the agency’s openness round neurodivergence made it a pure match for neurodiversity-aligned companies; name it a type of psychological security for many who sought a advertising associate that understood their world.
Cane additionally credit the speedy progress of his first enterprise to years of preparation. “I used to be greater than prepared,” he states. “Not a single day of that point throughout the office was proper for me. There was no match, it was a mismatch. Structurally, personally, all the pieces.”
Analysis and medicine, he explains, put him in the precise place to exit on his personal. Inside three years of founding Eighteen, Cane efficiently exited and bought his shares. A brand new enterprise concept was being shaped, but it surely wasn’t clean crusing to start with.
Exit and second enterprise tensions
Whereas beginning up his second enterprise, The Neurodiversity Listing, a platform for customers to entry neurodiversity companies globally, his associate received pregnant with their first little one and his mentor, a former boss who was exiting his firm, took his personal life. A difficult and stunning time? Completely, Cane confirms. However he pushed on with the listing as a result of he understood the facility of teaching.
“I benefitted from that have a lot,” he says. “Earlier than, I didn’t know that teaching existed and didn’t know that the federal government will pay for it,” he explains. “Now I’m conscious there’s extra folks getting identified, and extra folks given treatment, which they’re given as gasoline and instructed it’s scaffolding, however not given any construction, or coherence or understanding.”
Cane noticed the listing as linking essential options to neurodivergent folks in want of structured help. However his exit led to stress at Eighteen.
“It precipitated an inside riff throughout the firm on the time,” he admits. “I knew that I might exit, so I navigated that and orchestrated it as greatest for me and my household. So it was a brutal transfer, it’s utterly reworked the corporate. It was very tough for me however I’ve realized quite a bit and I don’t remorse a single factor as a result of it was proper for me in my future.”
The Neurodivetsity Challenge, is extra of a ardour enterprise than a business one, Cane reveals. The exit with Eighteen gave him the monetary freedom to permit the platform to be “free for all without end.”
Inside this busy interval, he additionally managed to put in writing a e-book. The Neurodiversity Ebook. Printed in November 2025, it’s an account of neurodivergence and references Cane’s personal experiences in addition to analysis and findings. It reads like a handbook on what neurodivergence is and means: “What I would like is for when anybody receives a analysis and an data pack they’re additionally given this e-book.”
Now to the non-public, and the way Cane sees himself as a neurodivergent entrepreneur. He’s fast to spotlight the pure benefits of ADHD specifically, and refers to an expertise at a advertising firm the place a 250 shopper audit was wanted.
The workforce, he says, managed round one shopper audit a day, by the point he jumped on, he was averaging between eight and 9. I’d set the usual for myself,” he explains.
Ronnie Cane – the neurodivergent entrepreneur
“I used to be all the time in a position to sit down, put my headphones on and simply do the factor,” he says. “Which is you would possibly suppose, antithetical to the concept of attentional issues. But when there was work to be executed and I revered the work, the way in which for me to do it greatest was simply lock in, however that locking in was me doing what I wanted to be extra snug within the setting that was a structural mismatch for me, an open ground workplace that required you to be there between set hours. It wasn’t a lot a lock in, it was a lock out from everybody and all the pieces else.”
Cane, who’s now medicated for ADHD, and extols its virtues, explains the way it works by rising an individual’s baseline dopamine and neuroadrenaline ranges. Neuroadrenaline, he says, is the messenger of arousal and what makes you alert sufficient, or aroused sufficient, to be keen on one thing.
Dopamine, he provides, is the chemical required to get you someplace, just like the gasoline wanted that can assist you full a activity.
“Earlier than I used to be medicated, a superb day would appear to be me going into the workplace, having a espresso and having the ability to put my headphones in and never leak any of what I didn’t have already got from a deficit,” he explains. “When folks discuss deficit inside this neurodivergent dialog, what they imply is from an method of we’re already working from a deficit in our brains. I by no means had something to offer to others. If I did, I wouldn’t have the ability to do what I wanted to try this day. That may’t foster a really linked life.”
He shares how treatment has improved all sides of his life. “Now personally, I wouldn’t have the ability to be current with my household and to attain and be throughout various things that I’m throughout if I didn’t have this altered baseline. I wouldn’t have the ability to work, learn, be current, to train.”
Clearly, no neurodivergent individual is identical. Some, like Cane, embrace treatment and training, others don’t, and that’s right down to the fantastic thing about private alternative. However on this founder’s case, simply take a look at how a lot he’s executed.
