Curb appeal

How Word on the Curb co-founders, Hayel Wartemberg and Ndubuisi Uchea, built one of the most influential youth platforms in the UK

L-R: Ndubuisi Uchea and Hayel Wartemberg, co-founders, Word on the Curb

Whenever I see two or more co-founders, I often wonder how they decided who would become ‘CEO’. For many companies, it often comes down to personalities; typically, something like this: Steve Jobs, the visionary, and Steve Wozniak, the brilliant engineer, plugging away. For other companies like Facebook, the story is maybe more complicated. When I spoke with Hayel Wartemberg (MD) and Ndubuisi Uchea (CEO), co-founders of Word on the Curb, a few weeks ago, I just had to ask.

“He’s smarter than me, it’s easy, he’s smarter than me”, Hayel said instantly. We all burst out laughing, but he was being serious. “He’s good, he’s a brilliant face of the business. He deals with stuff that I honestly couldn’t, wouldn’t even dream of dealing with, like the financials, accounting and forecasting, and those are CEO elements…what he might do is say that I’m being too humble, but that is God’s honest truth. He is a brilliant CEO, and it just makes far more sense in terms of our skills as well”. Ndubuisi—or Ndu, as he’s casually called—chipped in after, walking around a filming set, and dialling in from his phone. “When you first meet him [Hayel], you feel his intelligence, but it’s intelligence in a way that is translatable. And I wouldn’t limit it to him as a managing director, because he is a phenomenal talker. It was very easy for him to take the reins of someone who was imparting or meant to impart wisdom on the team.”

The company Word on the Curb was founded in 2015, but the content creation platform existed on YouTube before then. In 2013 and 2014, they released a series of spoken word videos featuring Jaja Soze, Theresa Lola, Samuel King, Hollie McNish, and more. In 2017, their popular blind-dating show, Back2Back, which has produced some of their most popular work, launched.

Some of their early videos were explicitly political. In 2014, then Prime Minister David Cameron named Hayel and Ndu ‘Points of Light’ for their work promoting freedom of speech. In 2015, Hayel spoke to The Guardian about their new film, ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes’—a ‘focus on their generation’s apathy to the realities of global warming’. During our conversation, he described his politics simply as wanting people to be given a fair chance to live the best life possible. This mindset has invariably affected how the company operates; its work sometimes appears to redress specific social imbalances. “Everything we do is innately political”, he said to me. Word on the Curb now describes itself as an ‘audience engagement agency connecting you with young, diverse audiences through consumer insights and creative strategy’. Beneath the marketing lingo, the company’s core doesn’t seem to have changed since inception; you still get the feeling that it’s always been about understanding how people relate to one another.

Hayel described how they’ve stayed relevant and achieved back-to-back wins over the years: a Media For All [MEFA] Awards win, a UKBCN Awards shortlist, and a listing on Campaign UK’s 10 Trailblazers list in 2025 alone. The secret sauce is doing the hard work—spending money and time to create content that reflects the lived experiences of the groups they’re trying to reach. “But what you do get back is engagement. You get people who feel as though you are there for them, you are representing them, you are telling their stories, you are providing meaning and value and things that feel as though they sit within their world,” he said. “And I think that’s the problem that a lot of brands, agencies and organisations have, which is that they expect a relationship with people that is unilateral and not bilateral. They expect that you can dangle a carrot in front of somebody, and they’ll just give. But the most culturally relevant brands, agencies and organisations in the world have done so by being present in people’s lives over a long period of time.”

Earlier in the conversation, Hayel also praised Ndu’s clairvoyance. “He’s been able to predict where the market is headed in our particular space ahead of the curve many times over and make suggestions as to where we need to be playing in the next twelve to eighteen months or two to three years. And invariably, those things have always ended up being the case.” I wanted to know what Ndu could see in his crystal ball about the next eighteen months. “The industry just looks like more of an understanding of how to use AI within it. You’ll have more AI-generated films, AI-generated comms, AI-generated marketing, AI-all of that. I think it would be embedded. But I’m always a believer that wherever one thing goes, look at the opposite. The way AI is dominating the space, the opposite will also dominate, which is ‘human’. And I feel like anybody who has a good grasp on leveraging human thinking, human truths and human storytelling will just win. And to me, that’s us.”

He then said something that I frankly didn’t see coming, maybe because it was a throwaway joke. “So hopefully in eighteen months, I’ll say to you, Mofe, how much do you need to keep doing this [the magazine]? Give us seventy-five per cent, and here’s some money because we’ve just sold our business, because people have understood the importance of human insights. Hopefully, that answers your questions.” Yes, it did, and I had more—but not before I offered to take the money with open arms. I was curious about his comment on exiting. I wanted to know if that was the objective: to sell. “No, it wasn’t. We never built this to sell. We built it out of passion, we built it out of our own interests and seeing a gap in content creation at the time, and we’ve managed to make a big name for ourselves within that industry. So when you get to that point, it becomes obvious to think about how to make it bigger. I think we’d be doing ourselves, our community and the work we do, a little bit of a disservice if we don’t pay attention to what strategic partnerships, acquisition or whatever, looks like with bigger agencies with more spending power to grow and scale and do what we do in multi-markets and with a lot more impact ultimately”.

In the UK, Word on the Curb is one of the few recognisable names in ‘youth engagement’ and even fewer share its specific business model, which has proved successful thus far. It combines insights and strategy with a creative and distribution arm—a common mix—but also owns its audience, and this could be the main selling point come any exit negotiations. If, within the next eighteen months, the communications industry believes in ‘human’ again and Word on the Curb has new owners, then Hayel would’ve been right about his co-founder, and I will be there, still with open arms, reminding Ndu of his ‘promise’. Anyway, until then.