Tycoons of Tomorrow: Jan Sramek

Following my 4 article series about entrepreneurship for The Gateway newspaper earlier this year, I have been asked to do another series this autumn. It will consist of 4 interviews with student / recently graduated entrepreneurs in the UK. I’ll be meeting up with them over coffee, understanding what makes them tick and finding out how they got to where they are today.

My first interviewee is Jan Sramek, a 3rd year Mathematics & Economics student at LSE. After completing his 1st year reading Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he moved to London in order to “leverage his interests in financial markets and entrepreneurship”.

Jan is currently running 3 businesses, has done 6 internships, got 10 A’s at A-level and started his first business aged 13. His LinkedIn profile makes a very impressive read.

3 businesses is a lot to be working on alongside a degree. How do you divide your time up during term?

I tend to find lectures too slowly paced and not a very efficient way of learning, same applies for classes – so I don’t attend too many. 2-3 weeks before the exams, I sit down, focus and learn everything properly. I got a First, so it seems to work.

With school out of the way, it’s a very fluid and flexible allocation between the rest – really varies day by day. Living on 5 hours of sleep also helps.

Which of your businesses is your main focus at the moment? Tell me a bit about it.

Definitely CrewDates. It’s a funded start-up that’s recently launched at Oxford and Cambridge, planning to ‘make friends easy’. We are hoping to make organizing crew dates/formal swaps easier, and then spread this popular social activity to other universities and beyond.

Why did you start CrewDates? Who else is working on it with you?

We are two co-founders – Jordan Poulton, a 4th year undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford and myself. The idea came from Jordan – we knew each other from our work between Oxford and Cambridge Investment Clubs, and quickly realized that we made a great team in terms of both complementary skill sets and personality match. We are backed by an angel investor who himself is a successful entrepreneur.

We decided to start CrewDates after experiencing them at Oxbridge and realizing that while they were great fun, they were a nightmare to organize! Secondly, crew dates don’t really happen outside of Oxbridge which just doesn’t make sense. So we came up with a platform that makes organizing them at Oxbridge easier, and which will hopefully work as the key medium of spreading this social activity outside the two universities.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started your first business?

That unless you are a high-tech or pharmaceutical start-up, sales will inevitably be a huge part of your day to day job, so you better make sure you enjoy it or have someone who does on board.

What motivates you?

Racing against myself. Working with people who can always surprise me on the upside, and being able to surprise them on the upside myself.

Do you have any role models?

Peter Thiel. Lateral thinker, hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, intellectual, philantrophist. He seems to combine everything extremely well.

What are your long-term plans? What would you like to be doing in 15 years time?

Ideally work at the intersection of financial markets and entrepreneurship, as each has different attractions. Markets are a fantastic puzzle that keeps changing as you are putting the pieces together, and I really enjoy the intellectual challenge. On the other hand, I like to build stuff, and to make things happen. More and above, both finance and entrepreneurship have their less pleasant parts, and to me it seems that at their intersection, you get the best of both.

The phrase ‘life goals’ gets thrown around many personal development books and workshops today. Do you have any ‘life goals’?

I think the way we teach/are taught, especially as university level, leaves much to be desired, and this applies even to the very best of universities – they rarely produce true independent thinkers, people who change things. I would like to once be in a position where I can do something about it, and do it from a position of power – sadly because that is the only one which could work. The limiting factor is therefore clearly wealth which one could use to get the required leverage or to try and do things differently.

Otherwise, I guess the usual..a woman to love and +- six children.

If you could be the CEO of any company in the world, which would it be and why?

None. Except for hedge funds and start-ups, where you get less of the managerial bother and office politics, I don’t find the CEO position particularly exciting or interesting.

Do you have any favourite books or blogs?

I have 168 subscriptions in my RSS reader, so there’s plenty of favourite blogs – roughly evenly split between entrepreneurship and financial markets in terms of topics. Even here, the boundary is becoming blurred – Roger Ehrenberg’s Information Arbitrage (www.informationarbitrage.com) is a great example.

Don’t think I’ve actually ever read a book on entrepreneurship; have tens of favourites on finance. In terms of fiction – anything by Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, May, Durrell, Tolkien & co.

Which social networking sites can I find you on?

I have profiles on most, but only really use LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It is becoming increasingly difficult to define a social networking site though – in many ways, CrewDates and Nicube are social networking sites as well.

What do you do to keep fit?

I am training for several marathons and high endurance expeditions which should be taking place next year. I tend to go for a 10km+ run in the mornings and eat a fairly healthy, high-energy diet. Don’t smoke and almost never drink alcohol.

What do you do to relax?

In terms of relaxing, sports & exercise are definitely the best. I enjoy interesting people, opinions, experiences, discussions & debates, frequently over a dinner. Movie nights are definitely another favourite activity. And I read. A lot.

It’s a question many people must ask. For the benefit of our readers, how did you get 10 A’s at A-level?

The 10 A-levels thing was a bet. I was sitting down with friends arguing about the difficulty of A-levels and as it turned out, the best way of proving my point was taking 10, as well as 3 S-papers/Advanced Extension Awards. This was in early spring 2006. I ended up taking the exams 2 months later.

To be honest though, the only ‘difficult’ thing was realizing that doing 10 was entirely possible and not that much of a challenge. Sitting the actual papers (except for timetabling issue where my school really helped out) wasn’t that difficult and I ended up getting all A’s/Distinctions by a margin of 15-20% in most subjects.

Frankly, there are plenty of others who could do the same, if equipped with a sensible strategy and an independent mind. The real moral of the story is that very often, the most difficult part is having the courage to get started.

Finally, a question I’m going to ask every entrepreneur in this interview series. If you could give one fortune cookie to every budding student entrepreneur in the country, what would it say?

“See everything in terms of risk-reward, almost like a trade. Determine your entry, exit and stop loss. Know when to get out.”

Coming up next time I’m going to be interviewing Hermione Way, founder of Newspepper.com