The fifth lecture of this series took place on 3 November. UCL Classics student Carolina Mostert summarises the talk below.

This week’s entrepreneurship guest lecture was given by Andy Phillipps, whose several achievements filled the first minutes of his introduction. He would be “too modest to say”, the students at the lecture were told, but talking about Andy it is important to know that he won two great awards: he was named Entrepreneur of the Year as well as Best Employer of the Year by the Sunday Times.

The fact that he won not only one, but both at the same time provides in itself a description of Andy Phillipps. He aims for the best and is extremely ambitious, hence the first award; he is humble and well aware of how much the help of others is crucial to one’s business, hence the second award. Their combination is the key quality of Andy’s success.

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UCL Classics Student Carolina Mostert summarises the talk below.

Scott Allison is a busy man. He has just launched Teamly.com, his latest business, he sits on the board of The Entrepreneurial Exchange and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. This guest lecture series started fifteen minutes earlier than usual because straight after UCL Scott Allison was expected at Buckingham Palace for a meeting with the Queen.

About Scott Allison
Scott studied Electrical Engineering at university and went on to an elective course in Marketing Management. This, he recalled, was his “first switch to business”. As he was studying he set up Freedom Phones, his first business, which consisted in an online market for mobile phones. A few years later, Freedom Phones developed into the extremely successful Abica, a telecommunications provider which had as core principles quality and service. Abica won the Glasgow Business Award for excellence in customer service.

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UCL Classics student Carolina Mostert summarises the talk below.

It starts with selling
Lara Morgan was introduced to the full lecture theatre as the “star entrepreneur”. Lara comes across as a determined, strong woman right from the very beginning – her vibe is that of someone who knows how far they’ve got and is still pushing further. Were I asked to describe the one-hour entrepreneurship lecture of Thursday 13 October in one sentence, I’d use Lara’s very first words to the students: “It starts with selling”.

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This season’s Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture Series started off with Charles Armstrong, founder and CEO of Trampoline Systems LTD. UCL Classics student Carolina Mostert summarises the talk below.

Trampoline Systems LTD – Background

After studying Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge, Charles was mentored by one of Britain’s greatest architects, Lord Young of Dartington. At present, he can boast “lots of different hats”: alongside Trampoline Systems LTD, he also directs The Trampery, East London’s premier co-working and events space, and One Click Orgs, an open-source project which in March 2011 launched the world’s first platform for virtual organisations. In his own words, he was an entrepreneur since he was “a little kiddy”: at the age of seven he made his first business by renting out his eraser to his school peers. “That was the first thing I remember doing that smells of entrepreneurship”, he says.

Charles’s very first career had to do with music. He used to run different bands and work with the social entrepreneur Michael Young in the 1940s. Together, they set up a school for social entrepreneurs: “I can’t help myself from setting things up”, Charles explained. Charles’s social entrepreneurship, or “social brain” as he likes to say, was the starting point for his biggest project, Trampoline Systems, created with a friend from Cambridge. After spending time on the island of St Pancreas, whose population numbered about 80 people in total, Charles was convinced of how effective the decision-making system of tiny communities was. He therefore tried to recreate it in the larger community in which he lived. Thus, Trampoline Systems LTD came about: a software developer which specialises in analyzing large-scale social networks. One of the first main goals of Trampoline Systems was to waste as little time as possible. For instance, corporate articles are rewritten in a digital way that is acceptable to the government: by using machines, it cuts on bureaucratic time-consuming actions.

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