Hi, I'm David Langer. Welcome to my blog Freed from The Matrix, a collection of insights, interviews, hacks and other stuff that's relevant to young entrepreneurs. I'm the co-founder & CEO of GroupSpaces, Entrepreneurship Columnist for The Gateway newspaper and an aspiring triathlete. Thanks for reading!
I would like to thank Anjool’s parents Bharat and Naina, friend Irra K and Richard Powell of Presswire for their assistance in writing and distributing this press release. I will write a more personal tribute to Anjool, one of my closest friends and mentors, once all the media hype has died down.
Anjool Malde
On Wednesday, it was announced that 24-year old stockbroker, nightclub entrepreneur and former BBC journalist Anjool “Jools” Malde died after leaping off the eighth floor of up-market London restaurant Coq d’Argent near the Bank of England at 12:10 on Sunday 5th July.
Two days previously, on Friday 3rd July, it is alleged that Anjool was suspended from Deutsche Bank while an investigation was made into a matter allegedly related to comments made on a financial website. He was expected by colleagues to be promoted to Vice President at the firm in 2010 which would have made him one of the youngest in the industry. At the age of 25, this would have been a significant achievement. Less than a month ago, Anjool was ranked 7th out of 239 salespeople in his sector (Pan-European Small & Mid Caps) across all Investment Banks in Europe.
Last Thursday, I was invited by Tim Lambertstock to pitch GroupSpaces at an event entitled What’s Hot? held by Oxford’s branch of the British Computing Society at Oxford’s e-Research Centre that was looking for “A selection of Hot Technology ideas to change the world”. Along with GoNumber.com and a concept-stage idea for a communications gadget for tour groups, I had to talk for 5 minutes summarising GroupSpaces and then answer 5 minutes of questions from a panel including:
Having had a few months off being grilled since we were raising the angel investment I found it useful to polish my pitch and answer the usual questions about user acquisition, monetisation, team etc.
At the end of the evening, the audience had to vote on which idea they liked the most and I won by a small margin. This meant that I received the prize of £100 and duly purchased the first round of beers for everyone at the Lamb & Flag (St. Giles, Oxford) afterwards!
The other nice thing that came out of the evening was the opportunity to speak to lots of members of local groups around Oxford; it was very reassuring to hear that they all shared similar pain points to those I named in the pitch and they’ll hopefully start Beta testing our product once we extend the Beta outside the student market.
In preparation for the upcoming Idea Idol final, I was (apprehensively) drafted in to star in one of those viral videos. Now the ‘virality’ of a piece of content or application on the Web is measured by its viral coefficient. That is how many users (or viewers) get added virally for each additional user. If this number is above 1, then you’re likely to see exponential growth. I wonder what the viral coefficient of the Idea Idol 2008 Promo will be:
Idea Idol 2008 Promo starring David Langer, Jitin Dhanani, Alasdair Bell and Jenny Tsim. Produced and directed by Joe Kennard and Nigel Steer from Purple Media.
On a chilly evening the week before Christmas, I had the pleasure of dining at The Oxford Retreat with Mawuli Ladzekpo, Editor of The Gateway. Mawuli (currently a 3rd year PPEist from Exeter College) and I had bumped into each other at the Oxford freshers’ fair a couple of times in the past. However, the incredibly hectic environment hadn’t afforded us the opportunity to get to know one another properly. Now, months later, we were sitting in GroupSpaces’ local at a very exciting time for both of our young companies.
Onto The Gateway. Not only is it the UK’s first national student newspaper, but it’s also the first student paper in the UK to solely focus on business and finance. Together with Mawuli, it was set up by fellow Oxford students Max Lewis and Chris Wilkinson last summer. With an initial motivation to help students get jobs in investment banking, the concept has evolved and broadened to now cover consulting, law and (hopefully) a good level of information about other careers.
From left to right: Joe DiNucci, Bob Goodson, Paul Graham, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston
After the morning Garage session, masterclasses and tutorial sessions filled up the rest of the day. Paul and Jessica gave a masterclass focusing on the trends surrounding the current growth in Web start-ups.
Paul started off by naming 7 key drivers:
Moore’s Law ( => hardware is becoming cheaper and cheaper)
The Internet itself ( => easy distribution – Facebook, TechCrunch etc.)
At 9am on a chilly Monday morning, I strolled down to the Said Business School with my housemate Alasdair Bell, the current President of OE (Oxford Entrepreneurs). Over the weekend, Alasdair and I had been discussing the topic for the morning Garage session – dedicated to OE. The “Garage” at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford is a workshop where dozens of people get divided up into small groups; the groups are then guided through a multi-stage creative process and subsequently come up with ideas related to the topic in question.
I suggested:
“How can start-ups compete with Goldman Sachs to hire Oxbridge graduates?”
- a question to which many young British founders would like to have an answer. Given that the majority of the participants in the session would be current students, they settled on:
“How can we make it more appealing for graduates to go and work on a start-up rather than a large corporate?”
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.
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.
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’.”
Hi, I'm David Langer. Welcome to my blog Freed from The Matrix, a collection of insights, interviews, hacks and other stuff that's relevant to young entrepreneurs. I'm the co-founder & CEO of 
Last Thursday, I was invited by Tim Lambertstock to pitch 
Charlie Osmond (30) has just been crowned Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 
Follow David on Twitter
