Josh Akapo comes back singing

archtype co-founder discusses his return to work, saying the quiet part out loud, and the importance of ‘people’

There are people who, for as long as they can remember, have wanted to be founders. Others simply had an idea, and entrepreneurship was the path presented to them. Now, let me tell you the story of an entrepreneur, then aged 16 or 17, who wanted nothing more than to leave the “sundown town” in which he was born and grew up. His two best friends, of similar ages, were about to start a clothing brand, and he only offered his services as a way out of town. “I was like, nah, fam, don’t cut me out. Well, sure you guys need a social media guy, right?” Josh Akapo, now Head of Marketing at Rise Climbing, told me about his route into entrepreneurship.

The co-founders had their first major success after launching the ARCHSAMURAI t-shirt in January 2016. “Our collaboration with Lovebox came later that year. I was just scrolling on Twitter when I stumbled upon a flyer looking for young people aged 16-24 in Tower Hamlets to do a festival merchandise campaign. We lived in Kent at the time, but we managed to blag our way in by saying we were from Tower Hamlets. It worked! We were very young and very ballsy.” Josh said in an interview with the learning platform, hundo. In time, the clothing company transitioned into ‘a creative house made up of young creators and thinkers’, working with some of the most renowned companies: Prime Video, KFC, BBC Sounds, and the NHS. archtype officially closed for business in 2025.

It was almost ten years of firefighting, every day, from the moment he woke up to the minute he closed his eyes at night, he said to me, almost confessional. For almost ten years, without a real holiday, he wrestled with the fast-paced cruelty of the industry, his ADHD, unpaid business pitches, and being responsible for the livelihoods of a dozen people. It all took a toll, and Josh paid for it with his mental health. “I mean, [I] greatly recommend it [rest]. [I] don’t recommend being forced off work due to a mental health crisis. But if you get to take some time, I recommend it because, especially in professional services and creative industries in general, we are so overworked. So overworked.” Although this advice now comes in hindsight, he rested from the work he had done and from posting on social media, including LinkedIn, where I first became aware of him.

LinkedIn posts often follow a familiar pattern—someone is either thrilled or excited to announce something, much to the disdain of the common civilian. Well, it feels like Josh is the penance for all that merrymaking; his posts rarely thrill or excite; they appear on your feed with the message of fire and brimstone. “I don’t know why I put myself through this,” he confessed. “It’s not necessarily about me, because usually I’m not in the situations I’m talking about. For example, I just made a post last week, where I was like, you know what, people are being underpaid. So someone should probably say where the pay grade should be, since no one’s saying how much people should actually be paid. Lo and behold, almost every worker in the creative industries felt like they resonated just because someone was saying the quiet part out loud.” Another of his recent posts read:

“i jUst wAnT tO seE iF aNy fr3eLAncERz hAvE jAnuArY avAiLabiLiTy 🤓” i think everyone does, because we all got ghosted / made redundant / budgets slashed / paid late for the entire duration of 2025 😁🤞🏿🙏🏿 here’s to better treatment and better fortunes for all us freelancers out there in 2026 ✨”

Josh is no longer fully freelance. He found Rise Climbing while searching for a hobby, in a bid, I assume, to grant some respite from the madness of his former day job. “Little did I know that that independent business would form part of my mental health plan to this day,” he said. “It’s one of the best communities I’ve ever been in.” He spoke about Rise like a man newly in love. He describes it as “a place that you want to wake up and do your best for”. He has also thrown himself back into music, his first ever love, under the name ‘Jalé’. “Some might say the only [love],” he joked. His latest single, Water & Air, has the tonal cadence of a 2010 Ne-Yo track, underlaid by production more in tune with the ‘alternative’ genre. Jalé is musical heritage. “My granddad later ended up bringing one of the first West African churches ever to the West in the form of CAC [The Christ Apostolic Church]. So, all the choirs and music that came out of that church…hey, I’m just using what I was supposed to in terms of the keys playing and the singing and all of the songwriting and the musicianship”.

Although he threatens to, it’s hard to believe that Josh could simply release music and be unbothered by the creative industry; you can tell he’s waiting—like a father does his prodigal son—for the industry to find its way back. “I feel like we have forgotten our usefulness and are instead just chasing the bag. And sometimes chasing the bag is not useful. If we’re going to remain relevant, if AI is not going to come and take our whole bag, you know, like people keep saying, I think being useful means remembering who we’re doing this for and it’s people. We’ve got a sense of people again. That is my hope. That is my ambition. That is all, literally, for as long as I’m in this part of the creative industries, that is all I am going to be doing”.

So it shall be. When I chatted with the man in question, it was a Friday afternoon in May. We were both thankful for the rare sunshine—a nod to the increasing prospects of summer. Josh seems to be revelling in his work, and only wants to talk about ‘people’, not “this whole KPIs, ROI, AI, BS, that doesn’t really make sense”. Of course, he’s back to posting on LinkedIn like he never left. The critic is dead, long live the critic!