A Week of Conferences (Part 1)

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford on Monday, Essential Mediatech at the BFI IMAX Theatre, London on Tuesday and the Oxford Private Equity Conference on Friday. The week contained too much free coffee and not enough sleep, but I’ve listened to and met some pretty inspirational people. In the next couple of posts, I’ll share my experiences and thoughts from the more tech- & entrepreneurship-oriented conferences of Monday and Tuesday.

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FreshMinds’ Charlie Osmond is “Man at the Top”

Charlie Osmond (30) has just been crowned Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Esquire magazine’s “Man at the Top” business awards. Other notable finalists include Michael Birch (Bebo) and Richard Branson (Virgin) in the Most Influential Business Thinker category and Simon Woodroffe (Yotel) who just pipped Artemi Krymski (Extate) to win Best New Idea.

In June 2000, Charlie graduated from Worcester College, Oxford with a degree in Engineering, Economics and Management. Subsequently he co-founded FreshMinds with Caroline Plumb, a St. John’s College graduate. They started up with £500 of their own money and worked out of a spare room at Charlie’s parents’ house. The money allowed them to buy a Web address, a telephone line in the spare room and some business cards. This saw them through to January 2001 at which point they received £100,000 angel funding.

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Silicon Where? (Part 3)

What the chance encounter with Eddie Codel and the subsequent LunchMeet interview interview really highlights is the way that things “just happen” in Silicon Valley. Due to the higher density of people working in start-ups, the probability of randomly bumping into someone useful is higher than anywhere else in the world. Whether it’s funding, a new employee, press coverage or just good, solid advice that one is looking for, it might well be waiting just around the corner. This is not to say one can’t start companies elsewhere, it just means that it’s often easier in the Valley.

Accelerating the start-up process is early-stage investment fund Y Combinator, set up in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris. The concept is that around 8 founder teams are selected to work in Cambridge, MA each summer and Mountain View, CA each winter. They then embark on a 3-month process involving a “Demo Day” in week 6 and an “Investor Day” in week 10. During the 3 months, the participants are networked in with many of the top Internet entrepreneurs through master classes, dinners and various other events involving product, marketing and legal experts. Invariably, this results in all the teams receiving substantial funding and going on to form successful companies.

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Facebook Co-Founder Andrew McCollum speaks in Oxford

Andrew McCollum

At 6.15pm on Monday this week, Andrew McCollum, Co-Founder of Facebook spoke at the Said Business School in Oxford. Afterwards, I had the honour of meeting him along with Andy Young and some other Oxford students.

Andrew first introduced the genesis of Facebook referring to 3 founding members: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum. In Andrew’s words:

“Mark was the high-level thinker, Dustin did operations – stuff like looking after the servers and communicating with the users, while I did all the graphics for the first version of the site, lots of backend development and also built up a reputation as ‘the solver of hard problems’.”

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